F X HARSONO


Conceptual Framework: Artwork

Voice without a Voice/Sign (1994)
Installation including a performative aspect, enlarged photographic screen prints and stools
Dimensions variable

Cogito Ergo Sum (2003)
Digital Print

The earlier artwork, Voice without a Voice/Sign, can change according to the particular site in which it is set. It was originally designed to be totally portable, small enough to be put in the back of a van, set up in city streets in Jakarta and whisked away at the first sign of interest by the police. The later work, Cogito Ergo Sum, grew out of the earlier work but is now designed for exhibition in a gallery.

Conceptual Framework: Artist

FX Harsono (born 1948) in Java is an Indonesian of Chinese descent. He studied at the Jakarta Institute of the Arts where he had his first solo exhibition. He believes that a work of art should express social problems. His artmaking fits within both the Cultural and Postmodern frames. His role as an artist is to be a social and political activist. He addresses what he sees as the urban and environmental issues important in Indonesia today. He uses both 2-D artmaking such as graphics and painting as well as 3-D and time-based forms such as installation and performance.

Conceptual Framework: World

The world of FX Harsono is a post-colonial world where contemporary Indonesian politics and many aspects of society have been shaped in the aftermath of three and a half centuries of Dutch rule and a bitter fight for independence culminating in the end of Dutch rule in 1945. However, there are still internal battles that periodically rage and one of these is the battle for Indonesians to live in a political landscape that is more inclusive and democratic. Indonesians also battle to be comfortable with their own culture and identity, one that is indigenous and not dominated by western cultures. This includes the development of art that is Indonesian in flavour.

Artmaking Practice: Ideas/Actions

FX Harsono’s artmaking ideas in Voice without a Voice/Sign (1994), are based on his political beliefs that Indonesian society, before the end of the Suharto regime, was a society overly-controlled and censored. But because an artist at this time in Indonesia would have put himself in grave danger if his protests were too overt, Harsono resorts to the use of a performance/installation which can disappear very quickly and which makes use of sign language to criticise the political system. This is his way of commenting on the tight controls on free speech; he uses universal sign language to spell out the word D-E-M-O-K-R-A-S-I. This idea is explicit in the last image where the sign representing the letter ”I” is tightly bound with rope. Also part of his concept is to bring his artworks to an audience of the everyday people of Indonesia, to make the streets his gallery.

The ideas in Cogito Ergo Sum (2003), mark a shift for the artist. The tumultuous events following Suharto’s downfall in 1998 included the brutal riots that targeted the ethnic Chinese. Harsono became disillusioned in ‘the people’ with whom he had identified and whose liberty he had defended in his art. He has retained his empathy for human suffering but his former idealism has become more muted. He no longer uncritically defends the masses. Instead his gaze has turned more inwards to an examination of his own identity as both an Indonesian of Chinese descent and an artist searching for a purpose during a time of uncertainty. In Cogito Ergo Sum (I think therefore I am) the photographic images of himself are read from left to right and are increasingly obscured, constrained and erased by external forces.

Conceptual Framework: Audience
Frames: Cultural/Postmodern

Because FX Harsono initially worked within the bounds of a repressive political climate his artworks were designed as political protest and were aimed at a mass audience, not necessarily an art-informed audience, but everyday people who the artist saw as the repressed masses. In Voice without a Voice/Sign Harsono provided stools for his audience so they could stop and contemplate the meaning and political ideas. However Cogito Ergo Sum is constructed for a much more educated and sophisticated audience, one that is more knowledgeable about art, especially western art. Instead of blunt political protest his work is more introspective. He investigates his own personal identity rather than the collective identity of all Indonesian people. He deconstructs the concept of the self portrait, interrogating the conventions of portraiture by deliberately obscuring one of the major components of a portrait, the face. He also updates his material artmaking practice with new technologies.

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