SIGIarts » As the Face No Longer Bespeaks the Soul

exhibition info

As the Face No Longer Bespeaks the Soul

Gede-Mahendra-Yasa-Gold-Acrylic-Paint-on-Face-1-2009-150x120cm-Oil-on-canvas

PAINTINGS, SELF-PORTRAITS AND “INVISIBLE SOUL”

Enin Supriyanto

Mahendra Yasa’s practice is an exploration into the issues of philosophy of art, which is in line with Arthur C. Danto’s discussion about the end of art in a series of essays, stating that contemporary artwork has reached the endpoint of its aesthetic journey.

Mahendra Yasa’s recent work provides visual proof that the last vestiges of Modern Painting’s strength is still present and has allowed the tradition of painting to continue evolving, searching for feasible developments that can be achieved conceptually. This is a crucial issue to keep in view, seeing that the acceptance and practice of painting—especially in Indonesia—has been taken too lightly and often frivolously (even if it may be labeled as ‘contemporary painting’ ).

Sometime in 1995, Ugo Untoro had a solo exhibition at Bentara Budaya Yogyakarta. In the exhibition catalogue he wrote a kind of aesthetic “credo”. Thus, he wrote: “I don’t have to strive for shapes and forms. Because there have been David, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Cezanne and Basoeki Abdullah. I don’t have to trouble myself about colors, since there have been Delacroix, Manet, Monet and Seurat. I don’t have to fuss around lines, because there have been Durer, Matisse, Miro and Oesman Effendi. I don’t have to bother about content, since there have been Van Gogh, Gauguin, Dali, Rusli and Amang Rahman.”[1]

So, what way out did Ugo take to keep on painting, which eventually led to what he called his collection of doodles (corat-coret)? In the same text, we find the following extension of Ugo’s thoughts: “After that, I started to know how good it feels to paint … Without paying any attention to shapes, lines, colors, composition, techniques and –isms in the history of art. I paint anything in any way, and about whatever I find in me when facing the canvas. I’m sure that, whenever I’m hungry, everything I paint would show hunger. When I’m all by myself, lonely, in the dark, besieged by anxieties, can’t breathe, and cry out, my painting will honestly carry all those elements.”[2]

Apparently, for Ugo, painting along the traditional lines of modern painting provided no space for the contemporary painter to engage in invention or renewal. And, at the end of the long road of tradition, Ugo decided to go back “within himself”. And, with that, although separated in time by decades, it was as if he were echoing S. Sudjojono’s conviction about the artist’s “honesty” in channeling “himself” into each of his works, presenting his “soul” in every painting.

With particular regard to the issue that the arena of the practice of painting and paintings has been exhaustively explored by all the painters of past periods, Ugo is clearly not alone. All the painters in the US and Western Europe, who thoroughly developed the art of painting in the post-World War II period, eventually came to the same journey’s end in the 1960s. In his latest book, Painting Today, Tony Godfrey touches on this issue. He quotes Joseph Kosuth, who apparently got frustrated and broke with the tradition of modern painting and paintings: “Painting has become a naïve art form because it can no longer include self-consciousness (theoretically as well as that of historical location) in its program.”

Then, moving on from Kosuth’s statement, Godfrey describes the general problem faced by painters at the end of the golden age of Abstract Expressionism: “In other words, painting could no longer criticize the nature of art, because it had accepted its limitations as a type or genre of art, nor, by inference, could it criticize the world at large. Painting, Kosuth conceded, would continue because the market demanded it, but it had no significant role in the world of ideas.”[3]

It is precisely there, in the last part of the sentence—that painting no longer had a significant role in the world of ideas—that we shall encounter Mahendra Yasa and his paintings.

Mahendra Yasa is a painter. This we know for sure, as he has indeed been working for years as an artist who continues to pursue this very thing: the making of paintings. However, it should also at the same time be proposed that Mahendra Yasa is an artist who seems keen on treating his own paintings, or his own artistic practice in general, as a work of philosophy—the critical thinking endeavor of an artist, to continually test or examine his own art practice, within the limits of the history and philosophy of aesthetics that encompass it.

I hope that this brief introductory essay can explain the matter adequately enough. Because, so far, I have not discovered any other way to understand or explain how much the paintings of Mahendra Yasa deserve proper attention from the art public in Indonesia. And even more important, how the art practice of Mahendra Yasa can provide food for thought for the artists of Indonesia—especially those who still continue to pursue the work of creating paintings—that more than mere technical skill or an interesting theme are required to give birth to a painting that can reaffirm its own existence as a relevant practice in the contemporary fine art context.

*****

The paintings of Mahendra Yasa in the current exhibition can quickly attract anyone’s attention because, visually, all of their elements are so easily recognizable: faces, or self-portraits of the artist, smeared with colorful paint, or integrated with masks and stacked images of the self-portrait itself. Further, all of the paintings are made—or created—by hand, by the artist or some of his assistants, working as a whole to bring forth every detail on every existing millimeter of the canvas, working hard to rival the detail and precision of the mechanical reproduction of photographic imagery, which is the main reference for each painting. All the paintings are made using techniques of painstaking photographic realism—a contradictory term, which indicates the surrender of the practice of painting to the greatness of photography, and at the same time, an effort to reclaim the greatness and technical capacity of painting to rival the capacity of photography.

They are like visual appearances; this is all that we find in each canvas in the current exhibition. No more, no less. The titles of each painting—instead of helping us to enter the domain of narrative, symbolic, or poetic interpretation, as commonly happens when we come face to face with a work of art—just stop at the affirmation of whatever exists and is tangibly present on each canvas plane. The title simply stops there, as an index of the initial reality—the main object—now presented in the painting. Mahendra Yasa is presenting a set of paintings that he has designed and has executed in such a way as to emphasize the main idea of his painting up to now: that the painting is present and lives of and for (the painting) itself. In other words, it can be said that each canvas in this exhibition refuses any reading effort whatsoever by those of us observing it. The paintings—in this context meaning Mahendra Yasa as well—only say: What you see is what you get. Or: It is what it is; they are what they are.

This definitely sounds like an echo on the rebound from a statement of Susan Sontag’s, several decades ago, when she said: “The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is, what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”[4]

It is as if Mahendra Yasa, through his current paintings, were providing some concrete examples of how this might be done. Not through the epistemological disciplining of methods of interpretation, but by positioning the object of interpretation itself—the painting—so that it can stand on its own and refuse to be revivified by means of hermeneutic interpretation. And, simultaneously, it is spared from becoming the mere bearer of a sensuous visual experience. What is present before us is only the visual appearance of the painting—utterly physical and chemical: dye, oil paint, spread and stuck onto the surface of the canvas. What we see is the surface. None of these paintings show us any signs of a trail or process for channeling the thinking or emotions of the artist, as it would be appropriate for us get as a function of the general process involved in paintings created in the tradition of gestural painting (compare this to Ugo’s statement at the beginning of this article). Rather, what appear to us are procedures: the paintings are made based on certain considerations, along with following certain stages of work to bring forth paintings entirely constructed using certain techniques, while the painter himself maintains emotional and conceptual distance so that the paintings are clean of any traces of the artist’s selfhood. The procedures are carefully calculated, so that technically and physically, we can eventually be brought face to face with a set of paintings that are preoccupied with looking at and questioning themselves. The paintings rely entirely on their physical materiality, while at the same time leaning strongly on the tradition, history, and philosophy of modern painting itself. I shall gradually expand on this in the following paragraphs.

Just look, for example, at the no less than eight paintings that display Mahendra Yasa’s paint-covered face: black, white, gold, silver, and multi-colored. These paintings were actually born of the following working procedures: First, Mahendra Yasa daubs acrylic paint on his face. This objective reality, the paint-covered face, is then recorded by a photographic camera, to later be printed on photographic paper. Based on these two procedures, we have already got two visual facts, manifested in two different physical realities. The first: there really are layers of gold or silver paint pigment, for example, which really adhere to the surface of the skin of the face. Second: on the photograph, what we see is an index of the former fact, which now features entirely as a photographic duplicate, printed, by the mixing of paint pigments modulated by a printer, on a sheet of paper.

Visually, we still accept the “fact” of the spreading of paint on the surface of the skin of the face, but physically, what we are facing is a totally different paint pigment. The gold or silver colors in the photograph are completely illusory; a set of informational data and visual signs of gold or silver, received by our visual perceptions.

At the next stage, all of the visual aspects of the photo are imitated and copied as closely as possible by Mahendra Yasa onto his canvases using oil paints. It is the outcome of this final stage of the work that we see in the paintings. Now, we are face to face with yet another visual fact: a painting the presents a paint-covered face, created with techniques of painstaking photographic realism. Does this not, in the end, lead us to the question: What was this painting made for, if it is entirely a copy of a photographic image that is precisely the same? Is the photo itself not enough to present the image of the paint-covered face? Why is it that the photograph to which it refers, featuring precisely the same image, does not become “art”, while the painting that imitates the photo is entitled to carry the title, “art”?

It is the answers to these questions that can lead us into the issues of painting, in the context of the philosophical ideas and history of art in general—the concerns that have underpinned Mahendra Yasa’s work in creating paintings over the past few years.

Believing that art (painting) today has already reached the endpoint of its journey—on the assumption that modern painting, which up to now has operated and thrived in a groove of its own, had the flow of a progression—is something that makes Mahendra, Yasa as a painter truly nervous and upset. The reason is simple. Because, in the course of that progression, the art of painting and paintings have actually reached an impasse—or stage of completion—as described by Ugo, or Kosuth above: the art of painting has come to the end of its story. As a painter, Mahendra Yasa endeavors not to stop, even once he fully agrees with and knows about the end of the journey of the art of painting today. Exactly there, at the end of the road, Mahendra Yasa is faced with a clear opportunity: the art of painting and paintings can now be done and be present only by grappling with various aspects of tradition, history, philosophy, even all the aspects of their materiality itself.

The easiest aspect for us to examine, of course, is the last. Let us take Mahendra Yasa’s work from the series he made before this exhibition, and showcased in two of his previous solo exhibitions: White Series: Allegory of Painting (Richard Koh Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2008) and The Painter’s Palette (The Aryaseni Art Gallery, Singapore, 2008)—his “white” paintings in particular.[5]

Of course, as many of us know, the matter of color in the tradition of modern painting has actually seized the attention and creativity of many artists. Yves Klein went to the point of making a special blue color, conclusively following his conviction that color is an adequate and sufficient element as an aesthetic reality in itself. International Kline Blue—whose main ingredient was a fixative resin called Rhodopas M60A, which he later patented—resulted from his experiments with Édouard Adam, a chemist and seller of painting supplies in Paris in 1955.[6] Then there was also Barnett Newman, who, as if to extend Klein’s idea, filled his canvases only with color fields. In the next period, Robert Ryman too occupied himself with “colorless” situations—or, one might say, the absence of color—in his all-white paintings, simply relying on different kinds of white pigment for his canvases.

Mahendra Yasa began his practice of the art of painting precisely at the point where the paintings of Ryman left off.

If, with Ryman’s all-white paintings, we are physically confronted by canvases whose surfaces have been smeared with white paint, Mahendra questions whether what we receive visually—or more precisely, optically—can be separated from the physical reality of completely white paint pigment. This, he put to the test in a straightforward manner: by taking Ryman’s white paintings, or palettes smeared with white paint only, as the objects of his paintings. He captured and recorded all the visual-optic facts of these all-white objects, to later be turned into paintings using conventional and realist painting techniques, by applying layers of oil paint onto canvas. And, indeed—as we will soon see in Mahendra Yasa’s paintings—to replicate even the whitest of objects in a painting takes more than just white paint, does it not? Yet, in the end, we still accept it as a painting that is “all white”.

The same procedure recurs in the current paintings of Mahendra Yasa, featuring his paint-smeared face. It takes more than just the same paint to re-present that paint—in our visual-optic perception—in the painting. If photography could fully record the reality of Mahendra Yasa’s paint-covered face as an image that is an analogue of the reality recorded, then Mahendra’s painting would indeed not wish to be a mere analogue of that reality. Mahendra Yasa’s paintings actually only render the materiality of painting—oil paint as the chemical vehicle that conveys the color of the optical reality of color as pigment—which he then presents as the main aesthetic issue in his paintings. Thus, Mahendra Yasa’s problem is not merely a matter of how to present his paint-smeared self-image. A task and goal of this sort could very easily be accomplished by photography. Painting—with all of its traditions and aesthetic issues—indeed provides him with an opportunity to conduct a re-investigation of the aesthetic issues—which may still remain—in the contemporary practice of the art of painting.[7]

Expressed in another way, it could be asserted that what Mahendra Yasa is doing this time really falls within the trajectory of issues of the philosophy of art, as once described in a set of essays by Arthur C. Danto on the end of art. For Danto—when he was reviewing Duchamp’s Urinal as well as Andy Warhol’s Brillo—contemporary works of art have reached the endpoint of the aesthetic journey when the artwork: “… raises the question of the philosophical nature of art from within art, implying that art already is philosophy in a vivid form, and has now discharged its spiritual mission by revealing the philosophical essence at its heart.”[8] And, for this reason, he added, the time has come to surrender the practice of art to philosophy. To the point that in the end: “… [what] art finally will have achieved as its fulfillment and fruition is the philosophy of art.”[9]

This certainly does not mean that Danto thought that all contemporary art practice has shifted to become, or is unvaryingly the same as, the practice of philosophy. What he meant, I think, is that art can no longer rely solely on itself alone to redefine itself as art.[10] Mahendra Yasa’s practice of painting—ironically—is an affirmation of exactly the contrary. Almost the opposite of Joseph Kosuth, who considered painting no longer capable of being “self-conscious, of its own history and theory”, Mahendra Yasa plunges himself into the practice of an art of painting of exactly this sort.

*****

This sequence of aesthetic procedures he tries out with a number of different visual-optic effects, the results of which we can also see in the current exhibition. There are a number of “self portraits” that he has made based on the visual reality of the self portrait resulting from the stacking of two visual realities: his real self in addition to his self portrait illuminated by the lens of a projector. In another, the self-portrait overlaps with and hides behind a mask that features his own face. Still more complex, he also tries to present color as waves of (projected) light later turned back again into paint pigment on canvas (Projection: Paint, 2009).

The paintings occupy themselves with aspects of the materiality of painting, attempting to transfer and mimic various visual-optic aspects of form and color in the reality of painting, relying completely on the mixing of paint pigments to arrive—or stop—at a visual-optic reality that is the same as, and congruent with, the main object of reference at the level of our visual perception. This is what I mean by paintings, which, at the end of their aesthetic journey, take themselves as their own subject matter, look at themselves in all aspects of their own materiality as paintings. This is most clearly and vividly evident in the works, Watercolor on Paper (2009) and Pointillism (2009).

Finally, one question may remain to tempt us: What is the use of presenting all of that in the form of self-portrait paintings? Is it not true that in these paintings there is a clear subject matter: the self-portrait?

As in the case of paintings/the art of painting, the self-portrait—in the course of modern and contemporary painting—is a line of tradition, or genre, which has been thoroughly and exhaustively worked through by a great many artists. From Albrecht Durer to Rembrandt, all the way to Affandi, S. Sudjojono, and Agus Suwage; from Chuck Close to Ronald Manullang, to Ariadhitya J. Pramuhendra; there is a long list of names of artists, from the Renaissance period in Italy up to today in Indonesia, who have dealt with the self-portrait genre in painting in myriad ways.[11]

I think that—as with the general issues I have described regarding paintings and the modern art of painting—the self-portrait, as a genre, as a tradition, has also reached the endpoint of its aesthetic journey.[12] Of course we can accept the self-portrait works of Chuck Close or Agus Suwage, for example, as the results of creative endeavors to revitalize this genre of painting. However, they are not endeavoring to test and then negate this tradition and genre. Whereas Mahendra Yasa actually enters this very territory: of the self portrait as a continuation, or completion, of his efforts to place painting, or his own particular practice of the art, into an internal struggle over issues related to the main traditions, ideas, practices and materials of the art of painting.

In general, it seems that the painting of portraits, self portraits in particular, in the final stages of its development in the present period, like it or not, must face itself as well, along with all the traditions and aesthetic principles that have supported and made it thrive up to now. In that way, as in the case of what has happened to the traditions of the art of painting in general, this practice still reserves its own internal dynamic. I think this is something that Chuck Close clearly realized, for example, when he declared that his painted portraits—and self-portraits—were no longer about issues of the self, or of the body. He said: “I reject humanist issues in my work.” And with that, Close—I again quote Godfrey—actually wanted to affirm that in confronting his portrait paintings, what was there was only: You see what you see.[13] So, we could say that rather than being concerned with problems of the “self”, Chuck Close is mainly questioning the “portrait” and painting, in the context of a contemporary society inundated by technology and media that wreak an explosion of visual imagery and turn everything into spectacle.

This issue was clearly described by David Campany, when reviewing a work of portrait painting by Chuck Close, Phil (1969), and focusing attention on areas ranging from the procedure of making the painting to a comparison of the differences between painting and photography in Close’s practice of painting. Thus, what he wrote about the issue was: “Close’s photorealism is both an expansion and a collapse of painting. The artist’s hand is subordinated to a laborious system for translating visual data, which echoes the mechanism of the photographic source. Close initially grids his canvas and works from an inverted image. He can then relate to it with indifference. In some respects this corresponds to the mechanical indifference of the optical camera lens which inverts the image it casts.”[14]

Following this line of thought, we can understand how the painting of portraits, or self portraits, may be treated as an object for raising technical and aesthetic questions around paintings/the art of painting, and have nothing to do with questions of a personal, humanistic, or poetic nature.

Thus, we can see the self-portrait paintings of Mahendra Yasa as the antithesis of the self portrait, for example, in the work of Affandi, who strongly and clearly intended to display the “emotions” or “inner experience” of the artist at different times and in different situations. Further, there are no real traces of the gestural from the artist on the surfaces of his canvases. What we see are illusions or simulacra, almost mechanical, clinical, precise, of what is visually-optically perceived.[15]

If we have ever concurred with the thinking of S. Sudjojono, who once proposed the importance of the “visible soul” in painting as a measure of its achievement of “artistic quality”,[16] then Mahendra Yasa considers these issues as an entirely technical and optical matter. And that, for that reason, a contemporary painter can imitate the “visible soul” in every which way, then re-present it as painting, in a most simple and terminal objective reality: a painting, layers of paint on canvas. We can see, for example, his self-portrait painting, titled Face Paint #2 (2010)—the largest painting in the current exhibition. Although it displays “facial expression”, we know precisely that the expression in the painting is only a form of the strokes of colored paint that at one point washed the face of the artist, who then reproduced a record of that fact—from a photograph—to later be re-presented as a painting; the result of the manipulation of various colors of paint in attempt to reproduce the original pigment colors.In other words, it could be said that Mahendra Yasa is presenting a type of self-portrait that negates the tradition of self-portraiture in general; and in a contradictory way, actually revitalizes it.And that is why Mahendra Yasa’s current paintings have the internal power to keep moving, in search of various possibilities of change and difference that can be conceptually achieved by the contemporary art of painting, after the practice of painting has been accepted for so long and has continued to keep going until today.

This last issue is the most interesting challenge of all, for anyone who still believes in his or her profession as a painter, and still has faith in the “power” of painting.

Enin Supriyanto

Curator

_____________________

Footnotes:

[1] Ugo Untoro (1995). Prakata pameran “Corat-Coret ‘91-‘95”, Bentara Budaya: Yogyakarta, as quoted in Omi Intan Naomi (2008). The Sound of Silence and Colors of The Wind Between the Tip of a Cigarette and Fire of the Lighter, Museum dan Tanah Liat:Yogyakarta, English version, p. 26.

[2] Ibid., p. 27.

[3] Tony Godfrey (2009). Painting Today. Phaidon: London, p. 12.

[4] Susan Sontag (1990). Against Interpretation. Anchor Books, Doubleday: NY, p. 14.

[5] An interesting interview with Mahendra Yasa by Wang Zineng was featured in the catalogue for the exhibition, “The Painters Palette” at the The Arya Seni Gallery, Singapore (2008), pp. 4-8. Based on Mahendra Yasa’s explanation in the interview, and also, on rechecking a number of his paintings from that period, I believe that there are no allegorical qualities at all in Mahendra Yasa’s paintings, as suggested in the title of his exhibition in Kuala Lumpur. The only elements that might lead people toward an allegorical understanding are the “poetic” messages that Mahendra Yasa still leaves in some of the titles of his paintings. On a visit to Mahendra Yasa at his studio in Denpasar, Bali, in early March 2010, we discussed this issue. It was not until a month later that Mahendra Yasa sent complete data on his works with the titles changed, into ones like those in the current exhibition.

[6] Philip Baal (2001). Bright Earth and The Invention of Color. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, p. 248.

[7] To emphasize the intersection and differences between Mahendra Yasa’s self-portraits and the paintings he creates based on the photographs, we can imagine the following situation: A self-portrait in a photograph obviously has the value and function of documentation. The photo asserts that: at a certain time and place, it truly happened that Mahendra (his face) was stained with colored paints. When this picture was replicated and transferred as closely as possible onto the canvas, it became a painting; it embarked on the path of fate and a history of its own, a history and concept of painting/the art of painting. The painting, however similar it may be to the photo it refers to, is never, or would be difficult to accept as, factual documentation, as in a journalistic report, for example.

[8] Arthur C. Danto (2005). The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. Columbia University Press: NY, p. 16.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Jonathan Gilmore, in his introduction to the book by Arthur C. Danto, ibid, p. xiv.

[11] Shearer West (2004). Oxford History of Art Series: Portraiture. Oxford University Press: NY; Chapter 7: Self Portraiture, pp. 163-185, in particular.

[12] Recalling the late 1960s period in the US, Chuck Close—who continues various portrait paintings today—once explained the fate and curse of the self-portrait (not to mention paintings in the photo-realist style) in that period: “If you think about the late 1960s, painting was dead, sculpture ruled. Painting seemed like a senseless activity. If you were dumb enough to make a painting, it had better be abstract. It was even dumber to make a representational image. Then the dumbest, most moribund, out-of-date, and shopworn of all possible things you could do was make a portrait. I remember Clement Greenberg said to [Willem] de Kooning that the only thing you can’t do in art anymore is make a portrait.” See the complete interview at: http://visualarts.walkerart.org/detail.wac?id=2036&title=Articles

[13] Tony Godfrey (2009), p. 96.

[14] David Campany 92003). Art and Photography. Phaidon: London, p. 150.

[15] What he would do is to fully imitate—in as full detail and as precisely as possible—all the visual-optical data he could perceive in the Affandi painting—either using aids in the form of photographic records, or by viewing it directly with the naked eye. The result: a painting which is similar (but not the same), complete with all the scratches, slashes and twists of Affandi’s signature blobs of thick paint. However, this time, all we would see in Mahendra’s painting would be the result of the application of paint layers that are completely flat and smooth on the surface of the canvas. By this stage, Mahendra’s painting would not be a “fake” Affandi, but a painting that presents itself as the result of a work involving the alteration—or, conceptual manipulation—of a “loophole” in techniques and practices of painting made feasible and sanctioned by the traditions and history of the art of painting itself.

[16] In 1946, S. Sudjojono—taking the example of “a painter who wants to paint a bird”—wrote his view of this: “ … And it is here that the design and style of the picture takes place. So the picture is the fruit of the workings of a process of our soul, and not just a picture of a photographic optical work for our eyes alone.” S. Sudjojono, Menuju Corak Seni Lukis Persatuan Indonesia Baru, quoted in Aminudin TH Siregar & Enin Supriyanto, eds. (2006). Seni Rupa Modern Indonesia, Esai-Esai Pilihan (Indonesian Modern Art, Selected Essays) Nalar: Jakarta, p. 8.

Isn’t the painting work process that Mahendra Yasa engages really aimed at a full reliance on, and presentation of, that “optical work”?

_____________________

Gede-Mahendra-Yasa-Projection-Eyes-2009-150x200cm-Oil-on-canvas

MAHENDRA YASA’S HYPER SIMULACRA

Bambang Sugiharto

The claim of the “death of painting” first overshadowed the fine arts of the West the 1970s, and reverberated in Indonesia around 2000. In the post-Pop-art situation of that time, the visual technical display of painting was really no longer very important. The labor of painting, it seemed, had expired. Painting was dead.

What was essential in creating a work of art, then, was no longer representation or illusion, but rather the core image, the single monochrome field, geometric abstraction, or pure form, said the Minimalists of the ilk of Judd or Ryman. And whether it was art or not art depended upon the reaction of the appreciator, minimally stimulated by the artwork. The principle was a kind of reversal, in the manner of the philosopher of phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty: space, for example, was not the setting that enabled objects to be arranged, but rather the result of the arrangement of the objects. Works of art were not the cause of the emergence of appreciation, but rather the result of appreciation; it was its appreciation that made it a work of art.

Meanwhile, Conceptual art, referencing the philosopher Wittgenstein, brought different consequences. If for Wittgenstein, “language is a picture of reality”, for conceptualists like Joseph Kosuth or Lawrence Weiner, “the reality of the picture is the language”; and whether a work was art or not, depended on the conceptual-verbal intention or propositional statement of the artist. Works of art then, were indeed only tautological propositions: the artist himself defined his work as art.[1] But with that, finally, the outward form of the work of art was no longer important, what mattered was only the documentation of the flow of concepts and verbal statements of the artist.

A different point of view emerged among the Italian artists, pioneered by Germano Celant. They wanted to bridge the opposing poles of artist and appreciator, art and life, nature and culture, reality and action, or even history and material reality. This school, which called itself Arte Povera, linked these polarities in just such a way as to reconcile the contrasts and clashes through the use of discarded materials. But in the end what they deemed important in creating works of art was really not the configuration of the artwork itself, but rather the process that the artist went through. What determined whether the work was art or not, was not its actual visual appearance, but rather the process of struggle that had given birth to it.[2]

The post-Pop-art situation, with these tendencies toward breaking free of the material constructs of painting, then gave rise to a kind of dilemma for artists. Some of them, not caring about such currents of dematerialization, insisted on reviving all the “isms” of the past, although the “isms” that mutated also came through an excessive awareness of their own history. The situation was like this: painters could no longer simply naively “express” themselves without quoting the language of “Expressionism”, for example. At this point, art became the mere recycling of the collective memory formed by reproduction banks or museum displays. “Isms” emerged as a function of the breeding of their own simulacra.[3] The new term at that time for the trend of quotation and breeding was “appropriation”. So, works by Sigmar Polke were appropriated by Picabia, and works by David Salle were appropriated by Polke, for example—links in a continually extendible chain of mutual quotation.

Other artists were stuck between a passion for revival and boredom with the déjà-vu. But their reactions differed: instead of extending the disengagement from the confines of painting in a more radical way, they indeed threw themselves into, even drowned themselves in, painting; it was the painting as a material surface plane that was inert and simply cold (indifferent), without a narrative framework, without subject matter, without a pretense of expressing anything at all. Painting was the manifestation of the critical struggles of artists with the idea and materiality of the elements of painting (canvas, brush, pigment, etc.); the manifestation of tough efforts to capture the most direct, impersonal, and concrete realities, free of affectation. It is this tendency that has been much cultivated by later day Photo-realist and Superrealist artists: painting with disaffection.

Beyond all that there were also the more radical artists, who totally broke away from the conventional framework of the fine arts, avoiding the artistic lifestyle of the “dandy”, then entering social-ethnographic problems with commitment and a strategy of “engagement”, that is, an attitude of involvement in social issues, without concern for what kind of formal turn the manifestion of their art took.[4]

*****

In the context of reading the artworks of Mahendra Yasa, it is the tendency of painting with disaffection that, to me, is important to analyze further. However cold and impersonal it is, the strategy of disaffection still leads to a variety of possible tendencies of representation. As pointed out by Hal Foster, there are at the very least three possible patterns of representation that can be read there: 1. Referential, 2. Simulacral, and 3. Traumatic.[5]

The first, referential, means that the images that appear on canvas actually point to a tangible reality; they constitute an iconographic theme aiming to portray a real fact or reality. The views of commodity fetishes or glamorous-looking celebrity faces in the works of Warhol—as read by Thomas Crow, for example—are said to actually be closely related to his other works, featuring images of tragic deaths. Thus, even though, at a glance, the image in a Warhol work may seem only to take the form of an object that is the product of a machine, flat and cold with no emotion, in truth it correlates with the brutal reality of death (Marylin, Liz Taylor, Jackie, etc.) as an irony of the satisfaction of the consumer lifestyle.

Second, is the simulacral. There, images do not refer to a tangible reality but rather to other images, which in turn also refer to other images, and so on. In the studies of Barthes, for example, works of Pop-art generally play only with the surface associations among symbols alone, a game of signifiers without conceptual substance. The objects are often, indeed, alienated from their deep meanings. What is played with are the associations of the effects of the surface images. Truly a game of association among signifiers alone. There is no depth, there is no meaning or purpose, aside from intensifying sensations of the imagery. A most clear example of this simulacral tendency is advertising in the media. The promotion of the “low tar” content of certain cigarettes gave birth to the motto, “how low can you go”, which in turn brought forth the slogan “bukan basa-basi” (not just empty politeness or chit-chat), which spawned a diversity of other slogans, and has now turned into the twitter of “Go Ahead”. What its precise meaning is, is insignificant. One need not bother with the connection to the original meaning. That is the simalucral chain, which breeds imagery of any sort solely for the sake of attracting attention.

Third, is the traumatic. The tendency toward disaffection may also indicate trauma. The trauma resulting from being besieged, shaped, and dictated to by the world of things, commodity items, the products of industrial machines in particular; in the language of Jacques Lacan, trauma due to our “being stared at” by the world of products or controlled by the various machines that surround us (the gaze).[6] Our powerlessness before them causes us to identify ourselves with them, as Warhol did (“I want to be a machine,” he said). From a Lacanian perspective, a fixation on commodity objects, or an excessive obsession with technique, in the arts—which even goes to the point of overriding the spiritual dimension of the artist’s subject—is supposed to be a symptom of regression to the level of inorganic material; deathly jouissance, a kind of joy at the death of the self. Under such “dead” conditions, the body is experienced as if it were separate from the mind; the subject is feared to have vanished, swallowed up by empty space. Under this kind of anxiety the subjects usually like to look at themselves from different points in space, or even to metamorphose into the space itself.

Another possibility is for someone to intensify the treatment of crazy illusions on canvas to the point that the real facts seem to be obscured by the charm and gleam of the surface. As if the surface appearance of the painting acts as a screen or mask intended to cover up or defuse the “gaze” of the nature of things; as if the “realness” of the real facts is meant to be eclipsed by the sophistication of the simulacral optical illusion.

In this atmosphere of hyper-real performance without spirit, in fact, the artist is overshadowed by layers of dilemmas: whether to be a “dandy” artist or an artist who is engaged?; to aim to experience total-affect, or indeed, eliminate affect altogether? (a paradox of the sort: “It hurts, I can’t feel anything”); is the individual subject to be elevated or indeed completely eliminated?; being hungry for renewal or saturated with all the deconstruction? etc., etc.

The post-Pop-art situation described above actually brings further problems. First, initially, commodity products snatch the uniqueness of the aura of artworks, but in the end it is reversed: it is precisely the artwork that appears to be wearing the false aura of commodities. The danger is that even if there are still pretensions that in this way, the art world wishes to resist the world of the spectacle of commodities, the difference between resistance and identification becomes unclear. Second, if works of art are to truly free themselves of thoughts and feelings—put in terms of the slogan, “the medium is the message” in the style of McLuhan, for example—then the art would merely occupy itself with its external technical manipulations alone. And people would then be entitled to ask: If that’s really how it is, why should we consider this artwork worthy of being exhibited or being bought? Or, is it rather the expectations of the art world that would have to be changed? Art would no longer be conceived as an arena for free reflection and the exploration of the most intense feelings, for example. Perhaps it would suffice for it to be envisioned only as an arena for free-form games. After all, that would not be without value. Third, the paradox of post-Pop-art art is that on the one hand, art can exist without objects, without form, as a purely philosophical idea alone; on the other hand, art can also be just a purely material work —of “plain forms,” as Lichtenstein said—without ideas or without any philosophy. If this is the case, then the artwork is no different from the reality of everyday life. Or does it not really have to be any different? This is the point at which it seems Mahendra Yasa’s artworks should probably be positioned and valuable.

****

Mahendra Yasa inherited the post-Pop-art problematic described above, at least at the end of its long journey today. He saw that painting as a paradigm had been continuously undermined: painting had been castrated by Formalism, sterilized by Pop-art, impoverished by Minimalism, manipulated by Social-Realism, cast aside by Arte Povera, and finally, denied by Conceptualism. Whereas the main paradigm and primadonna of Modern Art was painting.

Meanwhile, Mahendra and his friends established a studio and community named “Taksu” around 2001. From the start, the group tended toward Social-Realism. Their Social-Realism was pursued in the framework of counterbalancing the Abstract-Expressionism that dominated the arts in Bali at the time. Since then, for Mahendra, painting has been the only major activity on which he has based his living. It is not possible for him to rely on his background studies in Engineering, for only one year, and in Architecture, for only two years, as a base. In fact, he did not complete his degree in fine arts at ISI Denpasar either, but his motivation and intelligence in learning by himself, autodidactically, along with the depression that tormented him for ten years, turned the activity of painting into a base, both as a means of livelihood as well as therapy. That is also why, in a time when the trend toward installation art, video or performance is quite tempting, and indeed, a time when, theoretically, painting is constantly being dwarfed and finally, pronounced “dead”, Mahendra has remained adamantly faithful to the tradition of painting, without a care.

What is interesting is Mahendra’s attitude in the face of the “post-painting” art world. Although intellectually, he has dived, with sophistication, into all the philosophical-conceptual debates of the West, and is even interested in the philosopher, Wittgenstein too, ultimately, he has not fallen into the path of conceptualism. Nor has he been tempted to abandon the fine arts framework to become “engagé”, or involve himself in social issues. He has adamantly remained to wallow in the domain of painting, albeit with other tactics and awareness. He really is enamored of the strategy of disaffection in painting, but disaffection neither in the sense of merely painting a cold, purely material objectivity, without spirit, nor in the sense that “the medium is the message.”[7] For him, the latter slogan is outmoded. He considers the content important, not just the medium. And content, the main strength or charge of a painting, for him lies in the visual-optic illusion that it causes. In groping for the secrets of the creation of illusions along with his aesthetic quest, he explored various styles and studied various masters, from Pollock, Matisse, Ryman, de Kooning, and Magritte to Frank Stella and Chuck Close. From them he learned about the difference between emotions that are expressed and those that are abstracted; the relationships between words as verbal concepts, images and real objects; the interactions of colors as materials and their visual effects; the effects of paint squeezed directly from the tube, brushstrokes, and splashes, etc. All of that he delved into for the sake of creating strong illusory effects in his paintings. So even if there is a tendency toward disaffection in Mahendra, it seems that it is only in order to place more stress on the visual configuration of the painting; in order to shift the center of gravity, from Mahendra’s subject itself to the exploration of visual illusion in painting. In Mahendra’s painting, forms, then, are not just “plain forms” in the manner of Lichtenstein. Nor is his painting a kind of mask to restrain or tame the “gaze” of the world of commodities and machines as Pop-art generally is in the Lacanian interpretation (although it could be interpreted that way). And even if there are a lot of self-photos of the artist in Mahendra’s paintings, these figures are only just elements or objects of the visual illusion, should not be seen as a quest for self reflection or whatever.

But what is even more interesting and unique about Mehendra is that the illusions, he eventually reduplicates to the point of layering them, both at the conceptual level and at the level of their visual configuration. He does not stop at the game of simulacra, but rather reduplicates them to the point that they become hyper-simulacra: quotations of quotations of quotations; imitations of imitations of imitations; illusions of illusions of illusions, etc. So it should come as no surprise, at the conceptual level, if the title of a painting by Mahendra is “painting as mask as painting”, for example—as if to echo the words of Kosuth, “art as idea as idea”, which also appropriated Reinhardt’s idea of “art is art-as-art”—which in itself already constitutes a simulacrum on its own. At the visual level, Mahendra’s paintings are paintings about paintings, paintings of he who is painting images of images. Meaning that basically, he does not paint a particular object. Rather, painting itself, along with all of its traditions, is the main object of his paintings: painting as possibility, as process and as a formal domain, with all of its physical elements, including the stretcher, easel, cloth, metal, brush, composition, photo, etc. All of these he plays with, to create new layers upon layers of illusion, to broaden the possibility of painting, and finally, to give birth again to the power of painting. And in that way, in Mahendra, painting is truly never dead; on the contrary, it rediscovers its vitality again.

Bambang Sugiharto

Professor of Philosophy and Art Observer

____________________

Footnotes:

[1] The term “tautological” refers to statements that seem to say something meaningful and new, whereas they do not. For example, the sentences, “There are only two possibilities: tomorrow wll be rainy or dry,” or “The ocean is water.”

[2] Thus, if we look at the three elements in the art appreciation process, namely: artist, work, and appreciator, then Conceptualism emphasizes the subject of the artist, Minimalism emphasizes the appreciator, and Pop art focuses on the form of the work, Arte Povera on the process behind it all.

[3] “Simulacra” are artificial or second-hand images that do not refer to tangible reality, but to other links in the symbol/image chain.

[4] Hal Foster sees this ethnographic tendency as a sign of the return of “the real” in the art world. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (London: MIT Press, 1999).

[5] Ibid. pp. 130-131.

[6] The“gaze” is understood by Lacan to precede the existence of the subject. Mankind has always been besieged by the “gaze” of the realm of objects and the universe beyond. This unusual concept Lacan got from the philosopher, Merleau-Ponty’s book, The Phenomenology of Perception (1945).

[7] By“the medium is the message” McLuhan meant that it is the machines of the media that ultimately form and determine the contents of messages in communication.

____________________

Gede-Mahendra-Yasa-Acrylic-Color-on-Face-3-2009-150x120cm-Oil-on-canvas

MY FACE IS A (PAINTING) BATTLEGROUND

Asmudjo Jono Irianto

Look at the paintings of Hendra, his face full of paint, whether in the form of blobs, brush strokes, or drips. Some paintings show a face covered with streaks of still-wet paint, while others are almost dry, splitting and peeling, revealing a variety of dramatic nuances of the artist’s face. This is not the first time that Hendra has painted his own paint-smeared face, but this exhibition is a massive display of dozens of paintings of the artist’s face streaked with paint. Of course, there are meanings and readings that we can extract from these paintings.

I have quite often pointed out that Hendra is one of the few contemporary Indonesian painters who burden themselves with the discourse and issues of the art of painting. That is why he often melts into various sources from the history and discourse of Western painting. Ironically, Hendra is exploring issues of painting at a time when painting has been freed of the burden of history and theory. Has contemporary painting not turned back into a domain of representation? Contemporary painting is occupied with the noisy celebration of imagery. All possible representations of the business of contemporary life and culture can be narrated through painting. Likewise, there is almost no imagery that has not been appropriated by the art of painting. So preoccupied has painting become with the multifarious problems beyond itself, that it has almost forgotten itself: as an art entity referred to as “painting.”

From the first time I met Hendra, I knew he would never simply accept the defeat of painting—as a mere domain of representation. Even if it were, he is determined to represent the identity crisis of painting. Hendra also understands the dangers in his way: becoming trapped in essentialist terrain; the quest for the essence of painting—as manifest in modern painting. Hendra is aware that he is in a situation that is difficult in every way, but also challenging. All along the way, Hendra’s painting has struggled with complicated matters, looking for breakthroughs and the possibilities that can still be extracted from painting, to talk about its own identity. These would involve aspects of the materiality of painting (paint, canvas, stretcher, and frame), techniques/ways of painting, visual structure, and how configurations of these components have been discoursed to form the history and theory of painting—culminating in the impasse (or peak?) of painting in the final round of modernism.

In short, all the matters of painting are Present in Hendra’s paintings, not in terms of the application of techniques, methods, or purposes, but as the “subject matter” of his painting. It could be said that Hendra analyzes painting through painting, or painting qua painting. For me, then, the paintings of the face of the artist with paint spread over his face can be no other than a distinct statement: “My face is a painting battleground.” A sort of manifesto by the artist that he still very much cares about the issues of painting.

For an artist like Hendra, who works diligently on the philosophical and epistemological aspects of art, the “meaning” of being a “painter” in the era of contemporary art is something that is important to keep on questioning and testing. This attitude is really incompatible with the paradigm of contemporary painting, which precisely steers clear of such questions and issues. The jargon of the end of art and anything goes sound like a bell of despair regarding the identity of painting. This does not mean that contemporary painting is at a loss for issues; on the contrary, as already mentioned, the art of painting is indeed preoccupied with accommodating all kinds of things on its canvases. So it would not be wrong for one to conclude that contemporary painting now more often than not appears to be simply a practice of producing hand-made images. Similarly, as a domain of representation, painting busily seeks the support of theories that address the matters being questioned through the art of painting. So, it gets hooked on cool theories: of visual culture, culture studies, the postcolonial, feminism, and so on, following the trends of cultural theory.

The problem, or perhaps the reason why, is that it is all too easy today to become a painter. Any style or subject matter is legitimate to display. This accounts for the popularity of painting. Painting is no longer burdened by the mandate of being a paradigm of the fine arts. Painting is no longer bound to look for its essence. Painting is “only” one among many other media of contemporary art. Like it or not, this leads painting into a paradox: painting is very easy, yet also at the same time, very difficult. Without the existence of a grand narrative, how can painting determine a direction for its creation? And how too can the value and quality of painting be determined? It may just be that valuation is to be brought back to the context being proposed, but the question is: which contexts are to be considered valuable, and which not? Is the art of painting important because of the seriousness of its content and subject matter? But how is content to be assessed? Does painting still have singularity? Aside from its mere position as a medium—which refers to purely physical limits? The stigma regarding the impasse of modern painting is so strong that contemporary art—including contemporary painting—does its best not to set limits on its identity. Is it really true that painting is in the end merely a medium to produce images in a hand-made manner? Hendra appreciates these issues, yet he does not pretend to have found the answers, but only, perhaps, to “call to mind” that there are problems with the paradigm and identity of the art of painting in the contemporary art era.

It could not be otherwise; as a platform for making a case of painting, Hendra had to go back to the history and discourse of Western painting. In this regard then, realism, abstraction, and conceptual art, at the very least, became major components in his paintings. These three components are interesting since they are not mutually compatible with each other. Abstract(-expressionist) painting and conceptual art alone are already in opposition. “Conceptual and expressive-painterly practices are traditionally—most recently, during the early 1980s—irreconcilable opponents.[1] This was particularly evident in the field of Western art when conceptual tendencies of a neo avant-garde character proclaimed that painting had ended, and reached an impasse. We know that in the 1970s painting was at its nadir. But this was only to last briefly.

“Painting didn’t die in contemporary art, despite predictions to the contrary made in the 1970s. Indeed painting enjoyed something of a rebirth in the United States in the early 1980s, during the heyday of neo-expressionism.”[2]

The success of neo-expressionist painting in the 1980s showed that painting had come back safe and sound. In fact, in the field of contemporary art—today—the return of the dominance of painting is undeniable. But the popularity of painting today is really also accompanied by its identity crisis. It is hard, isn’t it, for us to answer the question: what is contemporary painting?

It is often said that art can lead to insight and trigger our awareness and understanding of reality in life. In this sense, art is thought to work in a contrary manner to science. However, there is no exact demarcation of how such insight operates in art. The high-art tradition in the Renaissance is perhaps more easily explained. Allegory in that time period was painting’s way of looking deeper into the myth and spirituality that came from religion. Meanwhile, the autonomy of art in modern art indeed was directed at gaining insights into the world of art itself, which we know as art for art’s sake. Whereas contemporary art tends to bring back art as a domain for the representation of all the issues. But the contribution of contemporary art to the issues represented seems difficult to measure and assess. Skeptical of this, in 1996, Jean Baudrillard launched scandalous allegations regarding the condition of contemporary art, through an article entitled, The Conspiracy of Art:

“The majority of contemporary art has attempted to do precisely that by confiscating banality, waste and mediocrity as values and ideologies. These countless installations and performances are merely compromising with the state of things, and with all past form of art history. Raising originality, banality and nullity to the level of values or even to perverse aesthetic pleasure. Of course, all of this mediocrity claims to transcend itself by moving art to a second, ironic level. But it is just as empty and insignificant on the second as the first level. The passage to the aesthetic level salvages nothing: on the contrary, it is mediocrity squared. It claims to be null—’I am null! I am null!’—and it is truly null.”[3]

The end of art mantra often becomes a pleasant haven for the celebration of art in the era of contemporary art. Painting in particular now faces a tough challenge—popular on the one hand, but in a crisis of identity on the other. If the new media arts have the urgency to come to the fore—by utilizing the latest technologies, especially to critique and subvert these technologies—then the art of painting, of course, is not well-suited to these ends. Painting as a domain of representation seems awkward. Painting is incompatible with technological development and progress. As a medium that can represent imagery, of course, painting feels very archaic in the midst of the invasion of images that can be produced using digital devices.

What (art-) values of the practice of painting remain applicable? Is it still possible today to discuss and question the ontology of painting? The egalitarian aspects of contemporary art and the boisterousness of contemporary painting practices often turn painting into a domain of shallow surfaces. Interestingly, it is often this very shallowness and banality that becomes the purpose and justification of contemporary painting. Presumably, Andy Warhol’s attitude has spread throughout the world. So pluralism and anti-essentialism have indeed served as nutrition for contemporary art’s continued survival.

“…generalization about contemporary art has evaded articulation for more than two decades, first because of fears of essentialism; followed by the sheer relief of having shaken exclusive theories, imposed historicism, and grand narratives, and then, recently, delight in the simple-seeming pleasure of the open field.”[4]

The open field has certainly become a challenging terrain. All the same, how is the open field to be translated by the painters? Is it just a celebration of freedom, or the possibility of new breakthroughs—in the form of small contextual narratives? Painting may appear merely as a medium—with its own character—that differs from other media. Painting can even be “done” without any awareness on the part of the painter—as quite often demonstrated by the art of painting in recent times. Painting can “endure” and be legitimate because it is “protected” by the its historical scaffolding—despite being considered obsolete. Painting “seduces” and “attracts” because it can accommodate anything on its canvases.

Of course, pluralism and anything goes do not necessarily drive everything into chaos, with no values. Contemporary art provides an opportunity for various possibilities and contexts for art. Contemporary art does not want to repeat the impasse of modern art, which reached the limit of the search for essence. With self-consciousness and artistic knowledge, it is still highly feasible for an artist to seek ontological aspects and “depth” in his or her works—without having to be essentialist. Hendra, at least, still believe in this possibility. Hendra’s struggle and “battle” in attempting to seek the values of painting again—that is what is represented through his works in this exhibition. That is why the display of his own face is so important. The face smeared with paint, as if to say: “I am still questioning the art of painting.” As on the surface of the canvas in the course of painting—modern painting in particular—all manner of possible ways of applying paint appear on Hendra’s face. That, for Hendra, is also like taking a cruise or following a trail, and it is an adventure he seems to very much enjoy. It also fosters Hendra’s “formal” awareness, regarding color, brush strokes, flatness, illusion, even narrative, in short, all aspects of modern painting.

The cruise, of course, is not aimed at finding an end point. Hendra really does not wish to “settle.” He is seeking insights for himself about the meaning of painting, in the past and the present, and its future possibilities. For me, what Hendra is doing is also an effort to seek an understanding drawn from the historical aspects, theory and discourse of painting. Hendra is preoccupied with philosophical and theoretical questions about painting. Using his knowledge, Hendra “outsmarts” a way for painting to remain feasible for him to do.

For me, Hendra’s painting constitutes a meeting point between the concept of modern painting and the plurality of contemporary painting. Contemporary painting has somehow resurfaced as a domain of representation, as an exoteric domain, liberated from the esoteric tendencies (to look inside) in modern painting. Hendra can reconcile these two things. Because of that, Hendra’s painting is situated within the tensions among abstract, realist and conceptual art tendencies. But these components may also be viewed as layers of meaning. First of all, of course, is the artist’s “concept” of working. This concept will mainly be related to Hendra’s working methodology. The matter of subject matter, is a matter “contained by the method of working.” Hendra draws on the strength of realist visual language to construct a narrative. The whole subject matter (the paint-smeared face) is prearranged using photographs. Of course, in the photograph, the narrative has already arisen, but in accord with the credo of painting qua painting, the narrative must be composed as painting. Yet the “process” of painting indeed is not too important. With the visual language of realism, Hendra can hand over the process of execution to his assistants. This painting by proxy actually confirms that Hendra’s paintings are based on a conceptual approach. It is not the act of painting that is important, but the “thinking” and “concepts” of painting itself. By providing his face as a “canvas” to be daubed with paint, Hendra truly eliminates the ambiguous aspects of his past realist-abstract paintings. Those realist-abstract paintings fooled a lot of viewers into taking Hendra’s realist paintings to be abstract-expressionist paintings.

By shedding these ambiguous aspects, Hendra seems to be affirming the use of realist visual language, with an emphasis on the contemporary reality of painting. With the appearance of the face, the narrative in Hendra’s paintings becomes more powerful, and this is also noticeable in the works with faces that are not smeared with paint.

The face here serves as a kind of invitation to look at the issues of painting, especially the potential of realist painting. However, in Hendra’s abstract-realist paintings, what is foremost is the realist method. In his realist paintings featuring brush strokes and blobs of paint, what surfaces is an ambiguity (= realist painting or abstract painting?). In the works of the face series, what surfaces is the ambiguity between the artist and his work; the artist and his ideas. This involves questions about the existence of the artist and/or painter in the era of contemporary art. With the appearance of the face, then, the clarity of Hendra’s paintings as realist paintings becomes irrefutable. As if to confirm that the “reality” of the artist really cannot escape the question of the “selfhood” of painting, as opposed to relating to matters beyond painting—as is generally true of representational painting.

Realist visual language is also an important and appropriate choice—for Hendra at this time. By displaying brush strokes, drips, splashes, not directly, but using realist techniques to pursue the actual appearance of the brush strokes and drips of paint (from the model Hendra creates), Hendra stressed the representational aspects of the realist painting. As a representation then, the realistic painting of brush strokes meant talking about the “problem” of brush strokes, or the problem of painting. For this reason, once again, the display of the face becomes important, because all the possible ways of applying paint (on the face of the artist) which are re-depicted only refer to one possibility: it is a realistic painting. The painting is intentionally obvious as a realist painting of a paint-smeared face, not a realist painting of a face which was then smeared with paint.

Using realist techniques worked by others, it is as if Hendra is asserting that, as “reality”, painting exhibits an ambivalent relationship between itself (= the painting) and the painter. Once, in 1955, a French philosopher named Etienne Gilson said of the existence of the painter in relation to the execution of his paintings, that:

“The nature of painting is such that the artist who conceives the work is also the one who executes it. This proposition is not necessarily true of the sculptor, but it is assuredly true of the painter. Except for tasks of secondary importance that can easily left to his assistants, it is the painter himself who confers the material and physical existence upon the work he conceives.”[5]

Certainly, Gilson’s view could be refuted by the ways of working demonstrated by world class artists in the contemporary art era, such as Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Damien Hirst, who turn the production of their paintings entirely over to their assistants. In point of fact, the same thing was done by Peter Paul Rubens at the beginning of the 17th century in Europe.[6] So, Hendra’s paintings affirm the “presence” of the painter without having to touch a hand to its execution. For Hendra, the option of being a “white collar painter”—by handing over the execution to others—is a reflection of the artist’s efforts to “elevate” painting to the “concept” level. Many people may perhaps disagree, but this is what Hendra needed, and in my opinion, therein lies Hendra’s originality.

Asmudjo Jono Irianto

Art Writer/Curator

__________________

Footnotes:

[1] Alexander Alberto and Sabeth Buchmann, ed. (2006). Art after Conceptual Art. Cambridge: The MIT Press, p. 121.

[2] Jean Robertson and Craig McDaniel (2010). Themes of Contemporary Art. New York: Oxford University Press, ps.15.

[3] Jean Baudrillard (2005). The Conspiracy of Art, Manifestos, Interviews, Essays. New York: Semiotext, p. 27.

[4] Terry Smith (2009). What is Contemporary Art? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 1.

[5] David W. Galenson (2009). Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 184.

[6] Ibid, p. 186.

__________________

artist(s)