Dadang Christanto
Conceptual Framework: Artist
Born in Indonesia in 1957, Dadang Christanto is a leading contemporary Indonesian
artist who sees his role as an art activist. Since the 1930s independent
artists in Indonesia have generated models for social engagement, believing
that art can help transform society in spite of oppression and punishment
from either the colonial authorities or the government of an independent
Indonesia. Although it is often stated that art cannot stop war or save
lives, it does in fact have a remarkable subversive power; it can bring
public awareness that governments try to suppress. Dadang Christanto's name
is closely associated with the beginning of the end of Indonesia's Suharto
regime. And though the artist was already active in the 1980s, it is his
dissident practice of the middle 1990s that generated international interest
as his work, along with that of a handful of Indonesian artists, reflected
and commented.
Dadang Christanto relocated his family to Australia in the latter years
of the Suharto New Order regime. He was a lecturer at the School of Art
and Design, Northern Territory University (1999–2003), completing
a residency at the Canberra School of Art before moving to Sydney to lecture
at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales (2004). He now
lives in Brisbane. Dadang has shown widely in major international biennales
and exhibitions.
Conceptual Framework: World
Dadang’s professional creative life grows out of experiences in his
home in Indonesia and in Australia and it encompasses the deepest levels
of human experience. Often his work is in response to the suffering of Indonesians
persecuted for their political and religious beliefs or ethnicity. In 1965,
when Christanto was eight years old, his father was arrested and was later
killed by the Suharto regime together with half a million others in the
purge of KPI members, sympathisers and ethnic Chinese.
Known as a radical student during his training in Yogyakarta in the 1980s,
Christanto became part of a community of artists and intellectuals that
worked in interdisciplinary ways across visual art, music and theatre. After
graduation he worked in low-cost media for various community groups, which
heightened his critical approach to social, cultural and political issues
and greatly influenced his perception of what he wanted to achieve through
his art practice.
Dadang Christanto's name is closely associated with the beginning of the
end of Indonesia's Suharto regime. And though the artist was already active
in the 1980s, it is his dissident practice of the middle 1990s that generated
international interest as his work, along with that of a handful of Indonesian
artists, reflected and commented about sociopolitical reality in an increasingly
fractured Indonesia.
Conceptual Framework: Artwork.
Performance, installation, sculpture, video, painting and works on paper
cover the range of Dadang’s art.
They Give Evidence (1996), 16 figures, variable sizes, fibreglass
mixed with terra cotta powder.
They Give Evidence is a larger-than-life sculpture in which 16
standing figures stoically hold various victims of unspoken oppression in
their outstretched arms.
This installation consists of a series of 16 male and female figures, standing
naked and standing tall, representing displaced victims. They stand rigidly
in a grid formation. The figures bear in their outstretched arms stiffened
clothing, remnants of burnings, drowning, beatings and other mutilations.
There is a specific reference to Indonesia through the batik patterning
of the fabric used, a marker of identity in the clothing of the disappeared
bodies of the victims. The figures are mute (opened mouths and eyeless),
but express non-verbally to the viewer a silent monument of communal grief.
Beyond the immediate emotional response, the work invites an examination
of the artist’s particular cultural heritage and impact on his creative
practice. “They give Evidence” was exhibited as part of Christanto’s
solo exhibition in Jakarta in 2002. However, public protest about the nudity
of the figures forced the artist to conceal the bodies in black fabric.
Conceptual Framework: Audience
In They Give Evidence there is a literal and figurative interrelationship
between space and form. This work has large, standing, statuesque figures,
spaced so as to encourage the audience to approach them. The viewer is able
to move around and between the figures enabling an interactive experience
with the work. This spatial relationship is important – both in the
scale of the work and the space in between. It powerfully and emotionally
invites exploration of the relations between the bodies of the dead and
the living. The audience is asked to bear witness to the right to mourn
violent and unrecognised deaths.
The artist is aware of the effect his work has on his audience. “I
am glad to say that many in Australia who have seen my work have been moved
by it, reacted to it, are interested in its underlying themes, as distant
as these may initially seem from their local reality”.
Artmaking Practice: Ideas
Indonesian artist Dadang Christanto's work expresses his views on social
problems such as violence, oppression, poverty and injustice. His work deals
with issues of human rights through moving yet elegant images of political
and social oppression.
The artist feels that people, who live in difficult, repressive places,
develop a different concept of identity. He believes that people who are
forced to show only their public, official facade are in danger of losing
their individual private identity.
“Today I still find it interesting and frightening how quickly people
learn to bury their individuality, their real responses to situations. There
was in my art the idea that everyone had become a puppet of the system,
incapable of thinking for themselves”.
Now, however, his art deals increasingly with ambiguity and nuance when
it used to take a more polarised stand. Initially Christanto’s art
was a reflection of his political and social views in relation to living
in Indonesia. Since living, studying and working in Australia his ideas
have become more ambiguous, not about specifically Indonesian issues. Distance
has influenced his vision although he has not consciously tried to incorporate
Australia into his work. He feels that the situation in his new life, children,
family contentment and a stable and safe existence, has been influential.
However, although his vision is now more big picture, it still focuses on
his roots.
Artmaking Practice: Actions
The installation consists of 16 larger-than-life standing figures made from
terra cotta powder mixed with fiberglass resin, each holding pieces of clothing.
These are shaped into prone, empty figures held in the outstretched arms
of the standing figures. The clothing figures are made of cloth and resin.
Some are the clothes of adults, others of children.
To make “They Give Evidence” the artist formed clay models of
a male and a female figure, which he then cast in plaster. Details of holes
and eyes were added individually to each figure once he had finished casting
so they have slightly different expressions.
The clothing shells are made of clothing worn by the artist and his family
and represent those worn by people in general. To make the shapes he packed
the garments with newspaper to give them shape and then painted the fabric
with several coats of fiberglass resin. With the help of an assistant the
work was completed in six months.
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