人體寓言Allegorical Bodies－A ART CONTEMPORARY SPACE

人體寓言

Allegorical Bodies

“Social criticism of art does not rely on external palpation. Instead it springs directly from intra-aesthetic formations. The heightened sensitivity of the aesthetic sense tends to converge with socially determined aversion to art”. –TW Adorno

The fall of the New Order regime in 1998 brought a change of atmosphere as well as modus operandi to contemporary artists in Indonesia. Telltale signs of a new freedom emerged from the previous repressive gloom, making the artists feel more freedom in their work. Public spaces formerly considered politically taboo were given meaning again, transformed into expressive alternative spaces for artists. These general tendencies, among others, gave birth to a kind of euphoric aesthetics, which contained socio-political critique and comment through visual language and terms. Art became a kind of “index” for the social concerns of artists, and representative language became a kind of “instrument” for temporary change.

At that time, the discourse and thematic exploration of the body emerged to become the focus of attention among a number of Indonesian artists. On one hand, for some artists the body became a locus for expressing public and political concern. But on the other hand, the body also became a private locus, a place where individuality and personality could be represented.

At individual level, artists tried to shape new meanings, to depart from stereotypical public bodies or communal bodies, by, for example, presenting their own body. Their attitudes to this process gave rise to allegorical nuances to the reality of the body being depicted. In short, representation on and of the body is given meaning once again as political fragments strewn within the jargon of “art on the stage of politics” as if finding the meaning of “wholeness” once again in this representation of the body.

Through these thematic explorations surrounding the body, they seem to want to show that in the relationship between the social concerns of art (man) towards a community, art is not a product of socio-political reduction of the aesthetic. Art is related to community not by design, but by nature. The problem is not to create art in accordance to society’s needs, but to find the root of the issues hiding among art and to express them explicitly. This perception has previously arisen, for instance, from the Frankfurt school of thought, among art philosophers such as Adorno and Walter Benjamin.[2]

The Aesthetic and the Social

As early as in the mid-1990s, Agus Suwage began using the image of his own body as an allegorical form for the various social conditions and social values around him. Aesthetically, Suwage’s work attempts to go beyond artistic portraiture, expanding it to become a channel for various desires: layers of individual and social desires, one on top of the other. The body is a never-ending harbor for public discourse, but often its interior condition also spreads from the body’s own reality. This view seems to give birth to a dual attitude: my body is my own as long as I can speak of something that is not part of my body, and my body is always saying something more than its own physical reality.

Look, for instance, to the work “Holybeer and friends”, which shows the deviation of various similar channels of desire. Beer may be a part of these desires as well as being part of the “secular identity” of an artist, but if this kind of identification is born by an artist, it can be considered to go beyond such secular identity, perhaps even becoming something relating to the aura of authenticity. Is an artist mocking his/herself or his/her status or directing his/her body towards banal social reality? Is this kind of body truly banal, or is the body’s banality determined by the social reality beyond that body?

The object consisting of a human skull in a bucket filled with rice once again presents a crossroads similar to the previous example. This is a universal human portrait that must go beyond the personal or the individual. But the artistic placing of the human skull is perhaps in part to raise childhood memories once again, by using a bucket once used for bathing. But this is also the place we find the skull today, wallowing in luxury, in a stock-pile of rice, a concrete populist reality for a the majority of Indonesian who cannot disjoin the imagery of rice from thoughts of primary needs for nourishment. The problem of rice self-sufficiency, shrinking farmland due to uncontrolled change-of-use, lack of support for agriculture, the growing of food and the life of millions of farmers, are issues that cannot cease to be discussed in Indonesia. Recently, there was a polemic surrounding the seed Super Toy II, which was claimed to have various desired characteristics such as greater yields. Without carefully researching the source of this seed, the issue soon developed to become a grass-roots polemic about “the politics of seeds”, tending towards urban myth. Not to mention that this issue also involved those close to the presidential palace.

FX Harsono and Haris Purnomo are artists who have showed concern towards the social reality around them since the 1970s. FX Harsono started to change his aesthetic strategies by presenting a collection of self-portraits. These were not personal icons, but a lament to the problem of identity within a community. If the portrait is understood as part of an external identity or has the aesthetic characteristics of the artist, then it is on the inside of this aesthetic identity that a social reality problem lurks. Which is, the debate between the “authentic” and “non-authentic”, between citizens of indigenous-descent or not, as was experienced by the artist himself, being of Chinese-descent, facing stigma that continues to be part of his own biographical narrative.

Harsono uses the allegory of a body threatened by large needles to describe the frailty of beauty, using the idioms of butterflies with needles poking through its body to show something fragile, breakable, or frangible, facing the repressive condition of a community’s stereotypical outlook on citizenship/belonging.

Haris Purnomo uses the idioms of tattooed babies now bearing knives—a “baby bayonet” of sorts—to describe the reality of his own community that often has tendencies towards violence or vigilantism. Violence may also come from a past regime that provides a legacy and example for the continuing chain of violence today. There is a utopian tendency among the works of Haris Puromo. The artist imagines a new generation as a tabula rasa, a clean slate free from various karma or retribution due to karmic debt of past violence; a future community or world free from the culture of violence, in whatever form, which has shackled us for so long.

In the last few years Sigit Santoso has used allegorical narratives of his own body to represent an ambiguous attitude towards the reality of punishment and suffering that has to be born by the body, whether it has come from religion or society, in the forms of official institutions such as schools or family as well as the individual conscience that never stops punishing. The body receives punishment and mocking, receives stigma from a source that may not originate from the body itself, but from a reality outside the body, perhaps even thought. The body is not only a biased locus for various praise, but also the nest of punishment and the place where the Via Dolorosa becomes a most banal reality. In short, the body contains ambiguity and risky promises for heaven and hell. Yes, only through this temporary body can such a locus be seen. In aesthetic reality focusing on the artist’s own body, what is presented is in fact the dichotomy between the body and non-body, to reflect the reality outside the body itself.

Fear of empty space is a theme Sugijo Dwiarso explores when depicting representations of the body. Sugijo presents powerful athletic images of his on body as part of mass reality. This is the plural social reality that tends to invade and corner individuality, even someone’s personality, as if it cannot have private identity or any empty autonomic space for an individual in there. The individual is an anonymous identity, while the masses are something of an anomaly. In his paintings an allegory of the body can be observed by imagining another body, the longing of a body towards autonomy and freedom to climb above the mass reality besieging it. But the social is also planted in the individual, so tug and pull emerge between the two powers in the reality of the same body.

On one of the Sugijo’s paintings, the experiment of giving meaning to the body imaginatively and allegorically occurs by alluding to the body as part of a still-life, an order of beauty that once held sway over the imaginations of past artists. Hung dead birds are part of this reality of beauty in natural objects, says Sugijo. Yes, but is beauty here not in fact present as something repressive, the way the social represses the aesthetic and the way the masses repress the individual?

Hendro Wiyanto

Exhibition Curator

人體寓言

1998年，印尼新政權的沒落為當時印尼的當代藝術圈帶來一股新的氣氛及做法，印尼的當代藝術家紛紛開始嘗試不同的創作方式。從各種現象指標透露出過去壓抑憂鬱的沮喪氛圍將隨著新自由時代的來臨而使藝術家在創作上有更自由的發揮空間。而原先被視為政治意識型態濃厚的公共場所重新被注入新的意義轉化成為藝術家展示藝術創作的地點選項。以全面性的意向來說，包含藉由視覺語言及專有名詞對社會政治的批評及議論就中產生出以視覺語言及專業術語堆疊出特有由生活中的滿足感產生的療癒系美學。藝術頓時成為關心社會議題藝術家的指標，而代表性寓言式敘述語法則成為當時時代改變遷的特殊表象手法。

在當時，為數不少的印尼藝術家不約而同的使用人體做為論述主題來探索及表現其寓意。一方面對有些藝術家而言，人體成為藝術家宣洩對大眾及政治關切的一種表現媒介。另一方面，人體自身也成為可以依照個人性格及個人主義做表現的一種私密軌跡所在。

在個人的層面上，藝術家們嘗試賦予人體新的意義以區別與以往觀眾對人體的刻板印象，如同通常一般會認為人體是代表藝術家自身的身體。藝術家們在對賦予人體新意義的過程當中創造了寓言式人體表現，使藝術品呈現些微不同的樣貌。簡言之，在對人體的表現或以人體自身為表象當中套用政府散播的官方話語：「在政治舞台上的藝術」，好比再次在人體的表象當中找尋「完整」的意義。

藉由探索人體為主題，藝術家們期待展示社會和藝術、藝術家與公眾社群共同體的關連。藝術不是一個削滅社會政治的產品美學；藝術並不是藉由設計與公眾社群聯繫，而是藉由自然的天性與本質。創作藝術最重要的課題不是依照社會需求來創作，更深的一層是必須將藏匿在藝術背後所存在的社會議題明白的表示出來。相同的思維也曾被屬於法蘭克福學派的哲學家們如：阿多諾及本雅明所提及過。

最早從90年代中期，Agus Suwage開始利用自己身體的形象為寓言體隱喻在他周圍對社會現況及社會價值觀種種不同的感受。以美學上來說，Suwage試圖超脫傳統唯美的肖像表現模式，擴展使其成為各種形形色色的欲望傳達平台：一層一層個人及社會慾望交錯的堆疊。人體本身像是面對公眾評論時深不可測的避難港灣，但其內心本質現狀大多從人體的實際存在衍生而出。此觀點可進一步分析為下列兩種對人體主題論述的姿態：我的身體由我主宰只要我所表達的意境與我的身體無關；我的身體隨時都在表達超過其實質肉體層面的意義。

舉例來說，Suwage作品＜聖潔的米達斯及朋友們＞採用類似的手法表達對不同程度慾望的體驗。米達斯可解釋為慾望，也或可解釋為藝術家的世俗身分，但若藝術家天生就繼承這樣的身份，視為超越其真實世俗身份，甚或成為權利核心的一份子。這難道是藝術家自嘲自己的世俗身份地位亦或利用藝術家自身人體意指社會陳腐的現狀? 身體意指真實的陳腐亦或身體的陳腐程度取決於社會現況超越身體本身?

雕塑物件以人類的骸骨放置在裝滿米粒的桶子中再一次呈現了與前述作品雷同的訊息。骸骨是超脫個體或私人人體肖像的通用表達手法。骸骨雕塑設計的藝術性擺置方式刻意的喚醒觀者對童年時的記憶。雕塑使用的鐵桶為孩童洗澡所用，但今日卻用來擺放骸骨，看似奢華的沉溺於米堆中意表現時的印尼民眾還是無法把對米的印象從主要營養素來源分隔出來。這反應了印尼當下農業面對的問題：米的生產量無法達到自給自足的程度，因農耕地管制不當造成農地短缺的現象，各方對農業的支持度不高以及無法提供足夠的產能來滿足百萬農民等等的問題一直是印尼當下不斷持續被討論的重要課題。近來所有的議題都圍繞著稱為“二世代特級玩物”的農作物打轉，據稱此農作物有許多有獨特性的如收成率。而在沒有周密的研究種子來源之下，此議題“政治種子”　快速發展為一般民眾爭辯的主題並進一步趨向都市迷思的思維，更別論此議題也捲入那些接近政治權力核心的重要人物。

在70年代間，藝術家FX Harsono及Haris Purnomo同時表現了他們對周圍社會現況的關切。FX Harsono開始以自畫像系列來呈現他在美學上改變的策略走向。這裡的人體指的不是私人形象的表徵，更深一層的寓意為在社會中面對個體身分體認時面臨的課題及所產生的悲痛感。對此表徵，我們可以理解為外在表象的身分亦或藝術家自身的美學特性，而顯現在這美學意義之下的是現實社會中潛藏的問題，此問題特指血統“純正”公民意指印尼血統後裔及“非純正”公民意指其他種族後裔的爭辯及衝突。如同藝術家自身所經歷的，存在血液中為華裔後代所面臨被打壓的種族意識情結。