Entanglement: Individual and Participatory Art Practice in Indonesia

Abstract

This PhD addresses approaches to art practice that are simultaneously individual and participatory. It comprises a research-based dissertation that sets out to understand why combined practices are so prevalent among contemporary Indonesian artists (66.66 ̇%), and a practice-led body of work that investigates the nexus between individual and participatory modes in my own art practice, accompanied by an exegesis (33.33 ̇%) .

The arguments set out in the dissertation are the result of research into primary and secondary written resources, translations, field observations, interviews with artists and with other experts in Indonesia. This is the first body of research to address combined individual and participatory art in Indonesia. Sanento Yuliman described the “artistic ideology” of Indonesian modernism as simultaneously autonomous and independent, and heteronomously tied to tradition and society’s needs. This formed the foundations from which modern art discourse in Indonesia involved artists in the lives of the people (rakyat) while also defending artists’ individual expression: a binding knot of the kind that Jacques Rancière describes as the “aesthetic regime”. I draw attention to the way participation consistently features alongside individuality in discourses from those early artists; during art’s instrumentalisation in development discourses; and when contemporary artists begin involving the rakyat in participatory art. Case studies addressing the work of five contemporary artists (Arahmaiani Feisal, Made “Bayak” Muliana, I Wayan “Suklu” Sujana, Tisna Sanjaya, and Elia Nurvista) show how contemporary artists have extended this continuum to involve people in the making of art, while still maintaining significant individual practices. I demonstrate how particular contexts and networks of production have continued to engage with the early modernist concepts of autonomy and heteronomy, as well as exogenous and originary endogenous discourses, to create conditions which mandate the practice of both participatory and individual art for many artists. In responding to these conditions, the work by contemporary artists presented in this research consciously engages with and reconstructs discourses from Indonesian and global art histories. The body of work experiments with variations on participatory and individual art within community, institutional, educational and public spaces. I became interested in these spaces in between the one and the many while observing art and cultural practices in Indonesia, and working in museum education in Australia. Consequently, both fields – contemporary art in Indonesia and my own art practice – are inextricably linked. The mediums used are responsive to the contexts of those sites and diverse conversations I seek to generate through the works. They include fabric remnants, diverse printmaking techniques, wax resist on paper and a two-channel video installation. The exegesis addresses the conceptual background, intentions, research methodologies and results of this practice-led research into the nexus between individual and participatory modes of practice. In responding to the different sites (referred to above) and artistic modes, I examine both links and points of difference, and demonstrate the continuing role of art as a liminal space of expression and criticality.