Broken Bodies, Absent Selves : Representing The Body In FX Harsono’s Art

My Body Is A Field
In his solo exhibition of 2003, entitled Displaced, FX Harsono included an etching entitled Tubuhku Adalah Lahan (2002). Translated, the title in English reads “My Body Is A Field”.
This work marks a turning point in Harsono’s artistic oeuvre for several reasons. Firstly, it lacks the strident socio-political commentary that characterises much of his earlier work. The horizontally-oriented print depicts the artist with his arms outstretched, almost in supplication, with his head tilted back. Sprouting from the length of his arms are budding plants, as well as a constellation of symbols. Some of these symbols are familiar: there is a downward-pointing arrow, a symbol for infinity, and a symbol resembling a mandala; others are not easily identified. What they all add up to is enigmatic, as is the title of the work. Reinforcing this ambiguity is the fact that the depicted figure seems to be floating in an indeterminate or liminal space, with no details in the background to convey a sense of context.
This is a marked departure from Harsono’s earlier works which feature the use of bodies or figuration. Take for example his series of etchings from 1999, entitled Republik Indochaos (1999). The representation of bodies or figures here, like the title, is easy to ‘read’ – in Republik Indochaos (4), the two central figures of an armed policeman and the prone body of a protestor on the ground are depicted in a relationship and narrative that speaks for itself, so much so that a non-Indonesian speaking viewer of the work can immediately understand the ‘message’ of the work even if s/he cannot read the accompanying caption (kekerasan tidak menyelesaikan masalah – violence does not resolve problems).
What does this portend? Tubuhku Adalah Lahan suggests that the site of signification has shifted to the (personal, individual) body, away from the public and political spheres that previously dominated Harsono’s works. The artist’s body is represented as fertile ground for new significations and multiple, open-ended interpretations. In much of contemporary art discourse, the body is indeed viewed as a field – more specifically, a battlefield – on which contesting narratives and politics of gender, identity and power are played out. It is a site of multiple readings, and of conflict. No longer whole and easily comprehensible, the fractured body of contemporary art is a complex terrain which reflects the anxieties of the age.
This essay takes as its focus the depiction of bodies, or figuration, in FX Harsono’s art, and charts its shifts of representation. The artistic career of FX Harsono is remarkable in that it spans four tumultous decades in Indonesian art and history, beginning with the stirrings of contemporary art and the birth of the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (Indonesian New Art Movement) in the 1970s; to the collapse of the New Order regime in 1998 and the onset of Reformasi; to the new order of the contemporary Indonesian art scene, which has witnessed seismic shifts in the art ecosystem and hence, the role and position of the artist. Through a consideration of the aesthetics employed in Harsono’s portrayal of the body throughout his oeuvre, we may be able to discern the artist’s re-positioning of his role vis-a-vis the evolving political and cultural climate / context of Indonesia.
Anatomies of Pain
Less than a decade separates the two works above, both of which represent the human body or figure, and explore notions of pain and violence. Despite these similarities, a marked shift in strategies of representation can be observed, not to mention the choice of bodies represented. Even their modes of display (and hence intended audience) are worlds apart.
Burned Victims (1998) comprises a row of what appears to be (anonymous) charred human torsos suspended on wire frames. The bodies lack heads and limbs, and are split down the middle.
Beneath each torso is a pair of shoes, charred as well, neatly laid out. The installation resembles a morgue, a line-up of dead bodies. The implication is that they have been victims of such horrific burning and / or violence, with their body parts hacked or burnt off, so much so that their shoes may be the only means of identifying them.
Burned Victims was made in the wake of the May 1998 racial riots that erupted in Jakarta, and which subsequently led to the end of Suharto’s ‘New Order’ regime. The mayhem, which included looting and burning of shops, claimed over a thousand lives, and resulted in the destruction of thousands of vehicles and buildings. The Chinese community were the targets of this violence, with many Chinese women raped and / or murdered. Other victims were burnt to death in their shops or houses while trying to escape or hide from the mob. In part, Burned Victims is Harsono’s response to the brutalities he himself had reason to fear, being Indonesian-Chinese himself1. In an almost photo-journalistic fashion, the artist presents to his audience the scorching image of the victims’ bodies, to elicit horror and condemnation of civil violence. The use of the charred torsos in this work is particularly effective in its visceral impact, because the human body is a universal, physical reality that everyone can identify with and relate to. This in turn allows viewers of the work to empathise with the pain and brutality wreaked on the victims of May 1998.Titik Nyeri (Point Of Pain, 2007) on the other hand, is a relatively more abstract work. It employs a visual idiom reminiscent of Surrealism, in particular the vaguely disquieting works of Rene Magritte. A self-portrait of the artist, Titik Nyeri represents a more specific and individual body compared to the generic torsos of Burned Victims. The first panel depicts the artist’s head and shoulders, recalling the heroic classical bust as well as traditional conventions of portraiture. However, unlike most conventional portraits, the artist has chosen to obscure his face in this painting. White and yellow butterflies veil his face, pinned onto his skin with long, slim needles. The portrait is set against a background of blue sky and white clouds. The second panel is identical to the first, except that the artist has removed himself from the picture and all that remains is an empty white space vacated by his self-portrait. The butterflies remain pinned onto this emptiness.
The ‘message’ of this work is not as immediately comprehensible as that of Burned Victims. On the one hand, the theme of pain or suffering is continued in this work, as implied by the butterflies pinned onto the artist’s visage. However the pain here is distinctly different from the kind of pain and violence conveyed in Burned Victims. Instead of outright brutality and suffering, pain and violence in Titik Nyeri seems much more aestheticised. The motif of the butterfly immediately evokes associations with beauty and delicacy. The needles too, are much more ambiguous implements or objects of pain and violence. More commonly associated with women’s work, craft and domesticity, the pain from the prick of a needle is sharp but fleeting; a momentary ‘point of pain’ that is inconsequential compared to burning or hacking.
There appears to be another theme explored in Titik Nyeri as well – that of self-erasure, or the absence of the self / physical body. For one, the obscuring of the face in this self-portrait suggests a desire to confound expectations of portraiture and its aims, by representing a subject that is difficult to ‘pin down’, hence conveying that identities are more fluid and shifting than assumed. The second panel of this work makes evident the disappearance of the artist (or the body) from the frame, perhaps – as suggested by the narrative of the 2 panels – a result of being unable to bear the multiple points of pain. This notion of self-erasure is further reinforced by the almost clinical execution of the painting – smooth brushstrokes, flawless surfaces. The two panels look more like digital prints than canvases bearing traces of the artist’s ‘hand’, which is what paintings are traditionally valued for – the artist’s ‘soul made visible2. This was achieved through Harsono’s process of creating these paintings, which serves to ‘distance’ the artist from the final artwork even further. As he explained3, he begins with composing the image in a photography studio. Harsono enacts a pose, and is photographed. Back in his own studio, he edits and manipulates this photograph digitally. When he is satisfied with the final composition, he prints out the image, and proceeds to paint it onto canvas mechanistically, aiming to replicate the flat surfaces and smooth finish of his digital print.
What this comparison of Burned Victims and Titik Nyeri makes evident is the shift in subject matter and strategies of representation in FX Harsono’s art over the decades. While Burned Victims may be the artist’s response to a specific incident, it sums up much of the artist’s approach to and treatment of the subject matter of the body in his earlier, 1990s works. Similarly, Titik Nyeri encapsulates the concerns and aesthetics adopted by Harsono in his more recent body of works dating from 2000 onwards.
Characteristic of Harsono’s representation of the body in his 1990s work is the fracturing of the body, or dismemberment. Whole bodies are rarely depicted in his work; more often than not, Harsono’s works feature body parts severed from their surrounding anatomy, and hence unable to perform their designated function. Violence or oppression is also implied with this impairment.
One such work is Harsono’s installation, The Voices Are Controlled By The Powers (1994). The work comprises a piece of square black cloth, set on the ground, on which is arranged a group of masks. Masks are an abstraction of the human face or head, and the masks that the artist has chosen to use for this work are Javanese topeng, associated with traditional dance, performances and rituals. The bottom halves of the mask ‘faces’, the section comprising the mouth and jaw, have been severed from the top halves, and lie in a heap at the centre of the square. The top halves of the masks – the heads and the eyes – remain standing watchfully, arranged in a strict configuration, surrounding the pile of ‘mouths’ at the centre.
The mask, or symbolically, the ‘head’, has been split. It can no longer speak. As the title puts it, The Voices Are Controlled By The Powers, the latter represented by the rows of watchful ‘eyes’, which seem to close in on the mute ‘mouths’. The sense of oppression is palpable, reinforced by the use of black cloth against which this tableau is set. Black is a colour commonly associated with death; its use in this installation, together with the title of the work, mourn the banning of Tempo magazine in 19944.
While Harsono’s installation may have taken as its starting point this particular incident, the representation of power relations in this work could well apply to a multitude of other episodes in civic or political life in 1990s Indonesia. Indeed, the artist has said that he chose to arrange the masks in a square shape within the square piece of cloth, in order to mirror a conference room, hence opening up the work to a more general interpretation. However, the important element of the work is that the masks remain fractured, their two halves disconnected from each other. The broken topeng, which are closely associated with Javanese tradition and culture5, has had its mythical status or aura destroyed. On another level, the topeng also references the New Order regime’s efforts to promote a singular “Javanese” identity amongst all Indonesians, as a unifying mechanism. If the topeng is representative of the New Order regime and its policies, then this work implies that by oppressing the “voices”, the “powers” too are rendered handicapped and incomplete. The severance of the mouth from the head here, this symbolic ‘fracturing’ of the body, may thus be read as a metaphor for a fractured State.
If the above work speaks of fragmentation, or a dis-connect, it is also as much about oppression and control, as suggested by the strictly ordered rows of masks surrounding the mouths in the centre. The body is dismembered, oppressed, or imprisoned. This is captured in another installation work, Voice Without Voice / Sign (1993-4), which comprises a row of panels, each imprinted with a gesturing hand.
Collectively the various gestures spell out, in universal sign language, the letters D-E-M-O-K-R-A-S-I. The row of gesturing hands, and in particular the clenched fists that form the letters ‘e’, ‘a’ and ‘s’ bring to mind the actions that accompany public protests, and, together with the dramatic chiaroscuro, lend this work much of its forcefulness and sense of urgency.
Yet there is a double bind to this work. The gesturing hands are a substitute, a body part performing the role of another (absent) body part, namely the voice. After all, sign language is the recourse of the mute. If The Voices Are Controlled By The Powers is anything to go by, the implication is that the voice has been silenced, hence the resort to sign language, to make demands for democracy. And yet, these demonstrations are apparently futile – these revolutionary gestures are frozen on canvas panels. They have been abstracted from the immediacy of actual action (and hence potency). To make this painfully clear, the last gesturing hand which forms the letter ‘I’ is bound with rope. While the work spells out uncompromisingly the demand for democracy, it is also a sign of the impossibility or futility of political action. Demokrasi (democracy) exists only as a series of empty gestures; it is represented purely as a sign, an abstraction, rather than concrete reality.
Much has been written on the state of political and civic affairs in Indonesia in the 1990s – a turbulent decade marked by a culture of fear and oppression under the authoritarian Suharto regime. Correspondingly, Harsono’s representation of the body in this period conveys a sense of violence and oppression. The body, or body parts, are split and fractured, unable to perform their designated roles, perhaps a metaphor for a dysfunctional state.
The artist’s methods and materials of artistic production during this time may also be understood against this backdrop- with the ‘New Order’ government’s penchant for silencing opposition of any kind, artists such as Harsono who made critical works or who did not make work in traditional media such as painting, were guaranteed little or no support. As a result, many of Harsono’s works of this period have a ‘rough and ready’ aesthetics of presentation. Works are placed on the floor and composed of makeshift or found objects. Voice Without Voice / Sign was exhibited as a series of nine portable panels, meant to be easily packed away and transported in the back of a vehicle should the need arise to flee authorities, then unpacked and re-assembled on a new street corner in order to disseminate its ‘message’ to the public. The choice of everyday objects, as opposed to more aestheticised items, was also a deliberate strategy on the part of the artist to investigate new modes of art-making which incorporated unconventional art materials6, as well as ensure that his installations would be more easily understood by the general public, the intended audience of his social critique7.
Transitions
In the 2000s however, the direction of Harsono’s work began to change course, as did his choice of artistic materials and presentation. Not long after the collapse of the Suharto regime in 1998, Harsono began to work with photo-etching and prints. These made up the majority of works in his 2003 solo exhibition, Displaced. The subject matter of these prints is also more enigmatic, the collage of fragmented images often interspersed with symbols that appear personal or even arbitrary in nature.
One example is the work Open Your Mouth (2001). It continues Harsono’s earlier exploration of figuration in his work, but takes a decidedly different tack. In a series of 4 monochromatic panels, we see the head of a person with his mouth being forced open by a pair of hands; the last panel shows a fist being inserted into the man’s gaping mouth. Hazy images and text float across the background and foreground of each panel; a pair of coloured squares frame the human head and contain images that correspond to the text (for instance, ‘dog barking’, ‘water’ and ‘lotus’). Whether or not these images and text are meant to be visualisations and vocalisations of what is coming out of the man’s open mouth is not clear; there appears to be no narrative binding these disparate images and words together. What is disturbing about this work however, is the representation of the man who has his mouth forced open – his eyes, nostrils and mouth are all represented by vacant white space. It is almost as if his face, or head, is hollow, a mere mask or front, behind which lies nothing but the empty white space of the background. The text and images surrounding him are seemingly irrelevant, or unassociated. The question also arises – whose hands are forcing his mouth open? Are they somebody else’s, or his own? What are the implications of each of these ‘reading’s?
This work was made in the wake of Reformasi (translated as ‘reform’), the post-Suharto period of Indonesian history characterised by greater freedom of expression as compared to the strict censorship of the preceding era. Yet for many artists such as Harsono, this gave rise to its own tensions as well. After decades ‘fighting’ against an oppressive regime, this liberalisation of politics and society presented artists with a new predicament of no longer having a defined target or ‘enemy’ to critique in their art. Socially or politically-oriented art thus had to contend with this new vacuum. At the same time, there was growing disillusionment with the promises of Reformasi as it became increasingly evident that more freedom for society was not necessarily a good thing – Harsono for one, pilloried the apparent democratisation of the mass media in a work entitled Blank Spot On My TV (2003) which suggests that now that everyone and anyone has the opportunity to speak, a lot of what they have to say is often inconsequential, as evidenced by the endless sensationalism and drivel in the mass media.
Furthermore, the May 1998 anti-Chinese riots left Harsono deeply disillusioned with the society he thought he had been fighting for. In his statement for the Displaced catalogue, he wrote: “I felt the loss of orientation on moral (sic), ethics, even nationalism. If the subjects are still brought up, I feel it as empty and meaningless slogans.”8
The imagery of Open Your Mouth can be understood in the light of these new developments. It could well be that the hands forcing open the mouth of the person in the print are a symbol of the newly-liberalised Indonesian society. Or perhaps the hands belong to the man himself. Either way, the man depicted is, or feels, compelled to say something – after all, Indonesians had been denied the right to free speech for so long under New Order – yet nothing comes out. What is there left to say that still makes sense, or which is meaningful? The blank spaces in his eyes, nostrils and gaping mouth suggest that his soul, or inner being, has vacated, and all that is left is an empty, hollow shell, reflecting the hollow victory of finally being able to express oneself in post-Suharto Indonesia.
This sense of alienation or detachment is further reinforced by Harsono’s artistic technique. Open Your Mouth, like the other photo-etching and print works in the Displaced exhibition, makes use of digital technology to layer and collage seemingly disparate images, culled from the mass media and the infinite realm of the internet. This strategy of bricolage has been employed in a lot of art which critics term ‘postmodernist’, in order to critique the myth of the artist as a singular, creative genius. In Harsono’s works, the collage of images that float in the hazy spaces of his prints and etchings evokes the blurred boundaries of the digital realm, where objects are fragmented into strings of numbers and binary code before being recomposed into images; where identity is fluid and ambiguous and anybody can assume whatever persona they want behind the screen of anonymity afforded by the internet. The artist of these prints too, has become anonymous, for what he presents us are collages of images not entirely of his own making, mediated through an additional scrim of digital technology.
Absent Selves
The distancing of the artist and his ‘hand’ from the finished artwork is connected with Harsono’s increasing exploration of the idea of absence, or self-erasure in his work. Cogito Ergo Sum (2003) reprises the familiar hand gestures of Voice Without Voice / Sign. However, this time round, the gestures mean nothing in sign language; the hands instead clutch a piece of paper, which, over the course of 6 panels, expands into a page, then a wad of paper, and finally into a bound book. In the background, the portrait of the artist gets increasingly out of focus and less defined, until it is blurred into nothing more than a shadow in the last panel. In an ironic reversal of Descartes’s famous dictum, cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am), Harsono’s work implies that the more he thinks, the less he ceases to exist. The more Harsono considers his situation, the less sure he can be of himself, his identity and his position in society.
Harsono has written about his alienation and loss of bearings in the wake of the tumultuous changes that swept through post-Suharto Indonesia, and of how “In a change like this, I try to see myself over again”9. This means, for the artist, acknowledging his multiple identities and cultural influences, some of which he has had to repress in the past. Of Chinese descent, Harsono became acquainted with Javanese culture through his grandmother and later, through the policies of the Suharto government. He spent his formative childhood years receiving a mixture of Chinese education followed by the hybrid Western culture taught by the missionaries at a Catholic school. Like many other Chinese-Indonesians, had to cease using his given Chinese name and instead adopt an Indonesian one in the 1960s. In other words, Harsono had to practice a ‘politics of denial'10 for a large part of his life in order to feel part of the society and country he lived in. Now that the artist is free to acknowledge the several (often conflicting) aspects of his identity, there is the suggestion that his sense of self is dissolving – the boundaries that were so clearly defined for Indonesians like Harsono decades ago are now blurred and porous.
We return now to Titik Nyeri, which continues Harsono’s idea of self-erasure and / or absence, combined with new motifs that the artist explores in his 2000s work: the butterfly, pinned down with a needle. Butterflies and needles are the new metaphors for victims and violence in Harsono’s recent work. The former are associated with flight and freedom, yet when they appear in Harsono’s art, they are usually forcibly pinned down, immobile, dead. Needles, as discussed earlier, embody a different form of pain – one that more subtle and hence, easy to repeat, insidiously. These metaphors are connected to Harsono’s personal experiences as a Chinese Indonesian. As he recounts various incidents of discrimination he has endured throughout his life, he observes that “Discriminative actions are not always spectacular, they often take forms as seemingly trivial, daily issues, but they are disquieting…It is as if discrimination had become part of the daily life, and even part of our dreams.”11 The choice of a needle as a metaphor for this kind of pain is hence apt – its pinprick, or ‘point’ of pain, is hardly visible when compared to the brutal, physical violence witnessed on the streets of Jakarta in the past, yet over time it still has the power to wound, and to wear down the spirit, represented by the beautiful and vulnerable butterfly.
Titik Nyeri makes clear that the artist associates himself – and the Chinese – with the victimised butterflies. (For instance, other works in this recent series depict Chinese women under threat from a flurry of needles; the painting Needle In My Consciousness is a self-portrait of the artist with needles pinned onto and coursing through his body.) Another work, Bon Appetit (2008), features a dining table set with chinaware containing dozens of pinned butterflies, offered up as a meal. Charming on the surface, it nonetheless hints at unequal power relations in society, as hapless victims are offered up for consumption. The imagery of the body in Harsono’s recent works has become increasingly abstract – from charred shapes that resemble human torsos to vanishing self-portraits, to the eventual replacement of the human body altogether by insect bodies. This abstraction is accompanied by a corresponding aestheticisation, from rough-and-ready installations made from found objects and placed on the floor, to prints and paintings utilising sophisticated digital technology / techniques and conceptual processes of execution, to the polished presentation of Bon Appetit which displays a carefully orchestrated mise-en-scene.
These shifts in Harsono’s work can partly be explained by the changing socio-cultural circumstances in Indonesia. In the post-Suharto era, with the liberalisation of the mass media, images of brutality and violence – previously suggested in works like Burned Victims in order to arouse shock and indignation – were exploited as a kind of sensationalist ‘selling’ tactic. The emotional power of such images had thus become common currency, even commercialised. The spectacle of violence – often used by political groups to advance their own ends12 – also meant that viewers became desensitised to the representation of violence over time. It was no longer possible for artists such as FX Harsono to harness the power of such images without irony, and different strategies of representation had to be adopted13.
It is perhaps against such a context that Harsono’s shift towards abstraction and aestheticism in his works can be ‘read’. The visual idioms he uses are less direct for a reason – metaphors convey the message of a work eloquently, and at the same time, open up the artwork to more layered interpretations. The ambiguity reflects the artist’s constant re-evaluation and re-positioning of his role in society. Negotiating the new political and cultural landscape of post-Suharto Indonesia, where nothing is as certain as it was in the past and boundaries are blurred or shifting, Harsono’s art reflects this uncertainty in his reluctance to make strong and definitive pronouncements on society and his ideals. This strategy also addresses a new audience for his art. In the past, Harsono may have aimed to convey his critique to the man on the street, so strong is his conviction that an artist is “a social being”. His more recent works are much more sophisticated and polished, and seem to be aimed at connoisseurs of art, more likely to be found in galleries and museums than on the streets of Jakarta – an acknowledgement of the increasing importance and influence of the art market in Indonesia in recent years.
Performing Bodies | The Return Of The Real
The human body – and most notably the artist’s performing body – returns to FX Harsono’s art in 2009. A comparison of a recent work, Rewriting The Erased (2009) with an earlier 1997 performance, Destruction, is revealing of how much has changed.
Destruction (1997) was performed as part of Cemeti Art House’s Slot In The Box art exhibition. The exhibition was held in the designated ‘quiet week’ leading up to the general election, where no assemblies numbering more than 5 people were allowed, in a bid to quell demonstrations and other potentially disruptive political activities. By 1997, discontent with the Suharto regime was palpable, and many saw the election for what it was – a farce. As part of Slot In The Box, FX Harsono created a performance in which he set fire to three chairs (representing the three political parties standing for election, which were all inevitably controlled by Suharto), before sawing them to pieces with a chainsaw. The performance was evidently an expression of the artist’s disgust at the ruling regime and the prevalent political system; the use of fire and the chainsaw are vehement expressions of brute force, and may well have been the artist’s response of ‘like for like’ to the State which was known for its heavy-handed repression of civil protest.
The entire performance was filmed on what appears to be a handheld video camera, hence it possesses a somewhat grainy quality. The performance was also clearly not intentionally scripted – there are pauses and moments of waiting before the artist performs his next set of actions because his props are not ready yet. In the background is a circle of onlookers – supporters who no doubt were taking a risk by attending this performance which was openly critical, and obviously flouting the injunctions of ‘quiet week’. There is thus a sense of community, or camaraderie, between the artist and his audience, who applaud at the end of his performance. In addition, Harsono enlisted the assistance of other people to paint his face prior to his destruction of the chairs, and also to help put out the fire on the chairs. There is a palpable sense of his interaction with others throughout this performance, even though he may be the only one performing, and his actions also serve to echo the sentiments of the wider community in the lead-up to the 1997 elections. His performing body is thus seen as one amongst many; he is still very much a social organism, or part of a wider social network. Destruction is a work that projects ‘outwards’ towards an audience. This is reinforced by the elements of theatricality and ritual in the performance: throughout this, Harsono wears a costume of a business suit, and has his face painted, wayang style, to resemble that of the mythical demon king Rahwana.
Harsono’s 2009 performance, Rewriting The Erased, is dramatically different. For one, the production is much more polished, and looks as if it was professionally filmed. Harsono sits at a table in a darkened room, the spotlight above picking him out amidst the darkness and emphasizing his isolation in the black space. The artist picks up a calligraphy brush, and starts to write his Chinese name on a piece of paper on the table. He then places the paper on the floor. This gesture is repeated, over and over, until the entire floor of the room has been papered over with his Chinese name.
In this performance, Harsono presents himself to the camera candidly, without the mask or ‘costume’ he donned for Destruction. In his plain white shirt, he appears ‘stripped bare’ in front of the audience, so that despite the more ‘finished’ or polished quality of the video, there is an honesty and sincerity exuded throughout the artist’s meditative performance. The stillness of the space, and Harsono’s isolation, suggest that this is a deeply personal and introspective performance, revolving around an issue that not everybody can understand. Harsono is alone with his thoughts and his memories.
In Rewriting The Erased, the artist seeks to remember – reclaim – a memory, a part of his identity, that he has had to repress for most of his life. As he writes the Chinese characters repeatedly, he seems to question, through this work, if that past still holds any significance for him, or is it, when revisited, simply a series of empty and meaningless gestures, taking shape as ideographs from a language and culture that Harsono himself can only half-understand? The gestures of the artist are filled with both pathos and power, as he attempts to reclaim a past that is at once intensely personal as it is politically inflected.
Rewriting The Erased is part of a new body of work by Harsono, in which he delves into his personal (family) history. Triggered by the discovery of a black and white photo album in his parents’ house, which contained photographs documenting the exhumation of Chinese mass graves in the 1950s taken by his photographer-father, Harsono’s new investigative project journeys back to a point in the past where the personal intersects with the political. This is made patently clear in his new paintings, Preserving Life, Terminating Life #1 and #2, where black and white family portraits are placed side by side with the photographs documenting the exhumation.
Binding the two seemingly incongruous ‘halves’ together are words stitched onto the canvas panels with red thread. This simultaneously recalls the needle motif of Harsono’s earlier work and evokes the cultural symbolism of red thread14, suggesting lineage and blood ties; it also serves as a metaphor for the continuous line of history, all too often stained by bloodshed and violence.
In these paintings, as in Rewriting The Erased, ‘real’ bodies return to Harsono’s work. There is the artist’s performing body. And there are the bodies depicted in the paintings, which belong to actual family members and members of the Blitar community who were involved in the exhumation. There are the bodies of the dead too, represented by the skulls that lie on the ground in both works. If the physical body has previously been ‘repressed’ in Harsono’s earlier works – distilled into an abstraction – it seems to reappear with a vengeance in this most recent series of work as a witness to history: a return of the real.
There is another Real that returns with Harsono’s recent work, and this is the Real of Jacques Lacan and of psychoanalytic theory. The return of the Real can be understood as the eruption of repressed impulses or phenomena, previously excluded from the symbolic order. This excluded element is not destroyed, but returns in a form which is traumatic; its return shatters fixed certainties and forces us to acknowledge the materiality of our existence15.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the works that make up the majority of Harsono’s recent exhibition The Erased Time. The juxtaposition of family portraits with documentation of Ndudah (exhumation) makes painfully clear the fine line separating life and death – how precious and precarious life is, how easily threatened; the markedly different fates of those lucky enough to be spared from the massacre and those who were not. It is the bodies of the dead – the skulls and bones – that return to haunt the exhibition spaces of the Galeri Nasional Indonesia during Harsono’s solo exhibition there in 2009. These are the bodies of hundreds of Chinese Indonesians, victims of mass killings that targeted the Chinese community around Java in the years 1946 to 1948.
Why do the dead return? In his reading of Lacanian theory, Slavoj Zizek observes that “The return of the dead is a sign of a disturbance in the symbolic rite…the dead return as collectors of some unpaid symbolic debt. This is the basic lesson drawn by Lacan from [Shakespeare’s plays] Antigone and
Hamlet. The plots of both plays involve improper funeral rites, and the “living dead”…return to settle symbolic accounts. The return of the living dead then, materializes a certain symbolic debt persisting beyond physical expiration.” Zizek goes on to explain that if the dead are accorded proper funeral rites, and their deaths are properly acknowledged by the community, then they have been inscribed in the text of symbolic tradition. However, if this loss or death is not acknowledged, then “the return of the dead signifies that they cannot find their proper place in the text of tradition. The two great traumatic events of the holocaust and the gulag are, of course, exemplary cases of the return of the dead in the twentieth century.” The past will continue to haunt the present, “until we integrate the trauma of their death into our historical memory”16.
The massacre of the Chinese in the post-World War Two years and the May 1998 riots, are both manifestations of ‘the Chinese problem’ in Indonesia. To date, there has been reluctance on the part of the Government to investigate these events and in the process, determine those responsible and ‘put to rest’ once and for all the concerns of the Chinese community by acknowledging this chapter of Indonesia’s history17 and addressing its root causes. Because of this, these issues are still written out of “the text of tradition”. Repression, however, is no solution – as the traumatic events of the past half-century have shown, the repressed will keep returning to “haunt the present”.
Harsono’s body of work since 2000 has been exploring the position of the Indonesian Chinese, and the various forms of violence inflicted upon the community. Interestingly the trauma and violence of May 1998 was sublimated into metaphors in his art – that of needles and butterflies; in the artist’s earlier working-through of the traumatic experience, the elements of violence have been repressed, and the aestheticisation of pain and violence is one strategy to keep at bay unbearable memories or experiences. However Harsono’s most recent work appears to confront these issues head-on: “Through the pictures, parts of the dark history that were almost laid to rest, were beginning to be disclosed”18, like the photographs slowly yielding their images under the lights in Darkroom (in homage, perhaps, to Harsono’s photographer-father). The Real cannot be repressed forever, and Harsono’s new body of work raises afresh these troubling and traumatic episodes in Indonesian history, incessantly pressing for answers and investigation, both personal and political.
Throughout his career, the representation of the body has featured in Harsono’s art in various guises and forms. From the politically-charged fractured forms of the 1990s to the coolly detached visual idioms of the 2000s, Harsono’s depiction of the body has adopted various strategies of representation in tandem with his own examination and re-evaluation of his position and role in society. The representation of the body in Harsono’s recent project charts new territory in its conflation of the personal with the political, and in its direct confrontation of a chapter of his country’s past that nonetheless continues to haunt present politics.
- Speaking of that incident, Harsono recounts, “As an Indonesian-Chinese, I didn’t dare going (sic) out that time.” Cited in “A Conversation With FX Harsono” by Hendro Wiyanto in Titik Nyeri / Point Of Pain, Exhibition Catalogue, Langgeng Icon Gallery, 2007, p. 53.[↩]
- This concept of paintings being jiwa ketok, or the ‘souls made visible’ of the artists who created them, was an approach to art advocated by S. Sudjojono, widely regarded the father of modern Indonesian art.[↩]
- In conversation with the artist, 4 June 2009, Jakarta.[↩]
- One of the most popular magazines, the weekly Tempo was modelled on Time magazine, and prided itself on its investigative journalism and critical perspectives. In 1994, the magazine reported on allegations of corruption that implicated the Suharto Government, and this led swiftly to the revoking of Tempo‘s publication license.[↩]
- That viewers of this work are encouraged to identify its materials and motifs with traditional Javanese culture is borne out in Amanda K. Rath’s observation that this arrangement recalls the Javanese cosmological map, in which the centre represents the heavens, the power of the king, as well as the Void. See Amanda K. Rath, “The Conditions Of Possibility And The Limits Of Effectiveness: The Ethical Universal In The Works Of FX Harsono”, Titik Nyeri / Point Of Pain exhibition catalogue, 2007, p. 95.[↩]
- These principles guided the artists of the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (Indonesian New Art Movement), of which Harsono was a member. Their approaches to art are outlined in their Manifesto – see “Lima jurus gebrakan Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia”, in Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru, Gramedia Jakarta, 1979, p. XIX.[↩]
- In his own writing, Harsono repeatedly emphasizes the social role of the artist. Take for instance his opening sentence for an article he penned for KARBON journal: “As a social being, an artist should always try to communicate and interact with his or her society.” (FX Harsono, “Deciphering The Map Of Indonesian Visual Art Communities”, KARBON, October 2003.)[↩]
- FX Harsono, “The Transition: Artist’s Statement”, in Displaced, exhibition catalogue, 2003, p. 47.[↩]
- Ibid.[↩]
- In the words of curator Hendro Wiyanto, “Erased Time, Disappearing Traces”, in The Erased Time, exhibition catalogue, 2009, p. 18.[↩]
- “A Conversation With FX Harsono: From Opposition To Pain”, in Titik Nyeri, exhibition catalogue, 2007, p. 51.[↩]
- Writing about the May 1998 riots, Hendro Wiyanto observed that the violence “served a particular purpose…serving up visible brutality for public distraction.” Surviving Memories, p. 16.[↩]
- Curators and critics writing in the catalogue for a survey exhibition of Indonesian art in 2000 noted that Indonesian artists were moving away from themes and direct representations of violence in their work, because of the exploitation of these issues by the media. Alexandra Kuss observes: “The artist distances himself from the theme of violence that now is reported quite openly in the mass media and in turn has become the new commodity in art”. (“Proximity And Distance – The Field Of Tension Between Individual And Society”, p. 27) M. Dwi Marianto similarly writes: “It could be argued that by distancing themselves these artists are manifesting public criticism…of the media, which today is developing in such a way that it tends only to peddle hot social political issues as a cheap commodity.” (“Teasing Through Art”, p. 44) Both in AWAS! Recent Art From Indonesia, exhibition catalogue, 2000.[↩]
- For the Chinese, red thread is associated with both auspicious occasions as well as death. Red clothing is worn during the Lunar New Year celebrations and at weddings. At funerals, pieces of red string are given out to guests to bring home when they leave the place of mourning, as a symbol of blessing to keep away unhappy spirits.[↩]
- September 11th, for example, could be interpreted as a “return of the Real”: the repressed fundamentalist impulse, the hidden outcome of America’s political activities, dramatically shattered illusions of peace and prosperity in America and spectacularly revealed the contingency of social relations. See Slavoj Zizek, “Welcome To The Desert Of The Real”, 2001, MIT Web Re:constructions, http://web.mit.edu/cms/reconstructions/interpretations/desertreal.html, retrieved 5 January 2010.[↩]
- “The Real And Its Vicissitudes” in Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction To Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture, 1991, p. 23.[↩]
- The exhumation of the mass graves, documented by Harsono’s father, was a project initiated not by the Indonesian Government, but by the Chinese Chung Hua Tsung Hui organisation in Indonesia, which served as a consultant to the Government in dealing with matters related to the Chinese community in the country. To date, little is known about the facts surrounding these murders, just as it has been difficult to establish responsibility for the mass looting and brutalities of May 1998, although several accounts have pointed out the involvement of the Indonesian military in these incidents.[↩]
- Hendro Wiyanto, “The Erased Time”, The Erased Time exhibition catalogue, p. 14.[↩]