“Is not a man smaller at two hundred yards than at five yards away? …He becomes so if I isolate him from the perceived context and measure his apparent size. Otherwise he is neither smaller nor indeed equal in size: he is anterior to equality and inequality; he is the same man seen from farther away”.

– Maurice Merleau-Ponty.¹

In this exhibition space, we see two sculptures and one painting. One sculpture is in the form of a child’s head, in a gigantic size, made of clay. Another is an aluminum sculpture, much smaller than the first one. Then there is also a painting done in acrylic on canvas, hung on the wall. All three have the same theme: the head of a short-haired little girl. That is the image of the head of sleeping Luz, the daughter of the sculptor.

It seems impossible to have taken the large sculpture from outside the gallery. The size is much larger than any door in the gallery. A sculpture in such a size can only be made where it is to be placed. The head of the sleeping Luz seems to lie on the gallery floor with no pedestal. It was not taken from outside the gallery, unlike other exhibited objects in general. It looks like a magical creature, the guardian of the space.

The clay sculpture has actually been made in a scale of ten times larger than the aluminum sculpture that looks rather glittery from afar. If our sight first falls on the clay sculpture before moving on to the aluminum sculpture, it would seem that the latter is the result of the first one greatly shrunk. In contrast, if we first see the small sculpture of the head, it would seem that the clay one is the enlargement of the aluminum one. The experience about the shrinkage is certainly the opposite of the experience of the enlargement, although in repeated observations the experience of perceiving the respective size of the two different sculptures would constitute a cycle of sorts, rather than polar extremes. It is akin to our daily experience of inhaling and exhaling.

No matter which one of the step we first take, the two sculptures link us to the same depiction of the sleeping head (of Luz). How does the association become possible, without our knowledge of the true face (of Luz)? Apparently, the similarity in the images presented by the two differently-sized sculptures, along with the image in the painting, “presumes” that we (will) “know” about the “truth” of Luz’s true face.

Indeed, as he made the three works, the artist relied on a model in the real world. By means of variations or enrichment of the artworks, it is envisioned that the audience (will) gain a picture about “the truth” presented by the artist. Perhaps it was such “truth” that Heidegger had imagined as he looked at artworks. Heidegger the philosopher tried to determine the essence of the “truth” of art, i.e. the “work” that makes the “art” into “artwork.” He asked, “What are the self-evident thingly elements of the artwork?”

The painting of a pair of worn boots by van Gogh, for example, does not constitute the true boots, neither is it the equipment that has the equipmental being of an equipment. How do we determine the “truth” of a pair of worn boots through artworks? He said, “the essence of art is the truth of Being setting itself into work.” In short, the “truth” is determined “not from the thing to the work, but from the work to the thing.”² Such a Heideggerian metaphysical elucidation about art(work) is certainly not needed here. However, the “truth” about Luz’s face that is (presumed to be previously) unknown to the audience, by means of two sculptures and one painting in this exhibition, can perhaps be traced using such a path, i.e. from “(art)work to the thing.”

Sculpture and marker of site

There is another inherent marker in the two sculptures apart from their size. The aluminum sculpture is a form of sculpture we commonly see. “The world” of the sculpture is separated from the actual world as it sits on a pedestal. It is this pedestal that links our world with that of the sculpture. Our world is actual, real, while the world of the sculpture standing on the pedestal is not. Imagine an alien comes to Earth and sees us lying on the Earth, like sculptures. The creature will view us like we do the sculpture on the pedestal, as our being is bound to the Earth as our base. This is to say that the alien has some sort of “sculptural aesthetics”. The way the alien views us as “the other” might be similar with the way we view a sculpture on its base.

A different feeling is generated as we look at the large clay sculpture in the exhibition today. The sculpture lies on the floor, the same floor on which we are standing. The relatioship between the large sculpture and the audience is more real. Of course, the relationship exists in the domain of existence within the actuality of the space. Nicholas Zurburg once mentioned about such artwork tendency as “existence before essence.”

It is easier for us to view the sculpture on the pedestal as an object, compared to one without it. In contrast, the clay sculpture seems to suggest more strongly its presence as a “subject”, a “being together” in the real world. However, if the “being together” can be constructed simply by discarding the pedestal of the sculpture, what, then, was the sculptor’s intention in making the large sculpture? Especially as the sculpture is put side-by-side with the much smaller sculpture and a painting. Does the “largeness” of the sculpture not strengthen its objective difference from us, from the audience’s existence and actual experience?

Since the beginning of the seventies, the word “sculpture” has become harder to pronounce, wrote Rosalind Krauss. The piles of thread waste, sawed redwood timbers assailed the gallery, alongside tons of earth excavated from the desert. Where did the idea about such “sculpture” originate? From the history of thousands of years ago? From the Stonehenge, the field where certain ancient peoples made merry, the Indian burial mounds?

What Krauss tried to say was that what we call as sculpture, especially the modern sculpture, is actually historically bound by categories and therefore is not universal. It is the logic of monuments that has so far based the logic of (modernist) sculpture. According to this logic, the sculpture is none other than a form of commemorative representation, a mark in a special site for a specific event or objective.

Through the monumental sculptures by Rodin, Gates of Hell (1880) and Balzac (1891), a threshold was generated through which the logic of the monument was crossed. The two monumental sculptures were not entirely monuments. Gates of Hell was commissioned as the door to a museum, and multiple versions of the work can be found in a variety of museums in various countries. Meanwhile, Balzac revealed so much of the sculptor’s subjectivity. Since then, the sculpture took on its arduous journey, especially through its fetishization of the base, the representation of its own materials or the process of its construction.

Thus, Krauss said, the sculpture reaches downward to absorb the pedestal into itself and away from actual place. The base or the pedestal becomes “the morphological generator of the figurative part of the object”, “the marker of the work’s homelessness integrated into the very fiber of the sculpture.” The modernist sculpture is as a kind of black hole in the space of consciousness, something whose positive content was increasingly difficult to define. “Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting,” described Barnet Newman in the fifties.

In the sixties, the sculpture became “pure negativity”, a categorical no-man’s-land, a combination of exclusions. Sculpture had ceased being a positivity, and in practice was the addition of those exclusions, i.e. the “not-landscape” and “not-architecture.” The expanded field of the sculpting practice emerged by questioning a series of oppositions between which the modernist sculpture is suspended.

On the other hand, there is no reason not to envision the oppositional terms: landscape and architecture. The “not-landscape” is architecture, and the “not-architecture” is none other than landscape. It is such schema that is called the complex. The complex is a universe or cultural space in which sculpture was something different. Labyrinths and mazes are both landscape and architecture; Japanese gardens are both landscape and architecture; the ritual playing fields and processionals of ancient civilizations were all a part of the complex. It is from the tension generated from the exclusions and the expansion to the realm of the complex that the practice of site marking, construction, reconstruction, and intervention by the sculptor toward the actual space emerged. Such conditions can no longer be called modernist, but rather postmodernist (or postmodernism).³

The large clay sculpture by Edi Prabandono in the gallery room betrays the tendency of fluid site marking toward the gallery space. The large size of the sculpture seems to shake the audience into the awareness regarding the actuality of the exhibition space. On the other hand, the sculpting practice of the artist and several artisans on the site has also turned the exhibition space into a temporary studio for the artist for days on end. The process has been recorded and re-presented through the medium of video by the artist.

While the sculptor Anusapati stated that for his sculptures “size does not matter,” this time Edi Prabandono precisely shows an issue by means of the size of his sculptures. The size of each sculpture, for him, certainly brings with it a distinct problem. Although size is not an essential issue in sculptures, the decision to use different sizes in sculptures confirms a more profound issue of perceptions within the domain of phenomenology, which one can encounter in Edi Prabandono’s sculptures.

Encouraged by, among others, the practical reason regarding materials for the sculpture that he find a lot around his house, the sculptor chooses clay as the main medium for his large sculpture. To Edi Prabandono, a form of society can even be envisioned or symbolized by the medium. Almost ten tons of clay had been brought into the gallery, transported by two trucks from the artist’s place of residence in Yogyakarta. After the exhibition, the materials can be discarded, and it is believed that they can make the soil more fertile. This is another aspect of the artist’s environmental awareness, which one cannot ignore as Edi Prabandono took up the practice of sculpting using local materials for the last few years.

Luz, illusion, and perception

Three heads of Luz are present in the exhibition room in three different media. The large clay sculpture presumes an extreme actual distance between the audience and the object of the gaze. Psychology has often proven how we only see what we want to see. We can also say that we often only see or project our own hopes onto the object that we are seeing. Our relation with the space is the relation between a being within a space with its natural habitat. It is our human perception that exaggerates our vision of the full moon, making the moon on the horizon look larger than the moon in the zenith, said Malebranche.

A sculpture of the head with the same theme appears on a pedestal. The base is an inextricable part of such sculpture. Even the modern sculptor will make “the sculpture all base”, for example in Brancusi’s Endless Column. Following “the logic of the monument”, Edi’s sculpture certainly wishes to represent a world that is different from the actual world. The painting on the canvas, then, constitutes none other than the idea of the trompe l’oeil, a strategy to trick the eye, an illusion.

The three works by Edi Prabandono seem to want to affirm instinctively what phenomenology has once explained. The idea about a single unified space that is entirely open to the disembodied intellect has been replaced by spaces consisting of different areas and having certain directions. This is related to the specific characteristics of the human body and our situation as being that had been thrown into the world.

Merleau-Ponty said that we then encounter for the first time the idea that, more than simply a mind and body, human being is a commingling of mind with the body. We are beings that can only arrive at the truth of things because we are embodied within the things. We can only gain access to things or objects through our body.

Cezanne had since the very beginning brought us into such a realization. Cezanne wanted to recapture the sense of such a perceptual experience.  The planes on his paintings are viewed from different perspectives. It is as if there are “perspective mistakes” in the paintings. Similarly, in this exhibition space today, it is as if there are “measurement mistakes” in the sculptures and painting by Edi Prabandono.

It is only after a close observation, however, that the audience will apprehend a world in Cezanne’s painting in which no two objects are seen simultaneously. That is a world in which nothing is given, but rather appears through time. The space is no longer the medium for simultaneous objects apprehended by an absolute observer residing in equal proximity with all objects. Such a medium is without perspective, without body, and without spatial position. One can say that it is a medium of pure intellect.⁴

We are seeing three different forms of Luz’s head, in their respective characteristic space and size. Are there truly three manifestations of Luz, or is there only one? We might surmise that there are three manifestations of Luz in the real world, each with a larger or smaller head, only if we isolate them from the deeper perspective contexts. The perception comes before the issue of similarity or dissimilarity of sizes.

Our experience of spatiality is related to our implantation to the world. There, said Merleau-Ponty, “will always be a primary spatiality for each modality of this implantation. When, for example, the world of clear and articulate objects is abolished, our perceptual being, cut off from its world, evolves a spatiality without things. This is what happens in the night. Night has no outlines; it is itself in contact with me.”⁵

The artist believes that there is only one model of Luz for this strategic presentation. One Luz in the real world for the three sleeping Luzes, in three different forms of representation that shake our—the audience’s—perception.

Hendro Wiyanto

Exhibition Curator

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End Notes:

¹ Quoted from Rosalind E. Krauss, “Richard Serra, a Translation”, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myth, pp. 262-264, MIT Press, 1986.

² Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, edited by Donald Preziosi, Oxford University Press, 1998

³ Rosalind E. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, in The Anti-Aesthetic, Essay on Postmodern Culture, edited and with an introduction by Hal Foster, Bay Press, 1993. The essay was also published in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myth, MIT Press, 1986

⁴ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, translated by Oliver Davis, chapter “Exploring the World of Perception: Space”, pp. 49-56, Routledge, reprinted 2005

⁵ Rosalind E. Krauss, “Richard Serra, a Translation”, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myth, p. 264.