Boys and girls come out to play

Eilish Kidd ,  The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Sun, 04/20/2008 10:56 AM  |  Arts & Design

Edwin's Gallery is holding a fundraiser. It is called IVAA BookAID Vol. 2/08 and a portion of the proceeds from painting sales go to the Indonesian Visual Art Archive (IVAA).

Gracing the cover of the exhibition catalogue is a photograph of a young couple playing, well, "footsies", that s touching feet under the table at the library.

She is reading The Power of Feminist Art and he, Playboy: 50 years: The Cartoons. It's a delightful photo.

Inside, the booklet explains that the IVAA, which was founded in 1995 under the name Cemeti Art Foundation, has spent 10 years collecting data on Indonesian and international visual art, and cataloguing that information for the purpose of public access.

But it needs funds to continue developing its library, first, by making the data available on the internet and second, by facilitating research programs, workshops and publications.

The first IVAA BookAID was held at Nadi Gallery in 2007.

Now, as could be expected of a fundraiser, it is an uneven exhibition.

The curator, Enin Supriyanto hit on the theme "Boys/GirlsContemporary, Art, Youth Life and Culture," thereby categorizing the works under the label of pop irony

Artists working to this theme profess to like kitsch -- snips and snails, and puppy dog tails, sugar and spice and everything nice -- in the attempt to defy stereotypes and to try make kitsch "work" in an ironic way.

Thus gaudy paintings rehash old themes and thereby put a spin to the whole show.

Terra Bajraghossa's Underneath Marilyn appropriates that famous shot of the star with her skirt lifting up, but this time in the revealing is a tangle of robotic limbs.

Yuswantoro Adi has painted a triptych of children in oil on canvas. A boy with a water pistol sports a square painted with a picture of a banana over his crotch. A girl sits on a chair and a square is painted on her also of a watermelon, displaying a pink gash where a slice has been taken from its center. This between her legs. Then the third part of the triptych: there is a square between the legs of an infant boy which has a painting of a tiny green chili. Ahem. Should one feel sorry for the children, for any number of reasons?

The "keepers", the gems, in this slightly decorous show are ironically the ones that do avoid the treacly sentimentality

Dolorasa Singa's work Me and My Book is a slip of a bronze sculpture (25 x 45 x 14 cm long) with a stunning green patina that is mounted on glossy black. The elongated female figure reclines; with feet lightly crossed, the book is propped on her lap; it is as if she is becoming a pool, quite melting away with the words and by the artist's imagination

Unfortunate it is that in the local art scene sculpture today is considered the poor man's painting.

In Long Distance Relationship, an acrylic on canvas by Rieswandy, the artist has painted a bundle of fibers or hairs in grey, black and white. This bundle is suspended through the middle of the canvas, being like a rope holding two people together. But the bundle breaks apart revealing nodules, which allude to the complexities of the relationship. Yet there are wisps of color, the orange cord suggesting an ear piece and the green, being a glimmer of hope.

Nindityo Adipurnomo's gouache on paper Between My Daughters III is a very satisfying composition in gray, purple, blue and red. I Made Aswino Aji's Akan Memulai is a cheery, lyrical painting of a figure in harlequin's diamond-patterned suit and pointy nosed mask about to descend a staircase. This is very redolent of the Venetian. And the work of Angki Purbandono, Art Soju -- a C-print on photo-paper of a bottle tightly wrapped in colored balloons -- or condoms -- screams out, "Buy me and put me in the lobby of your office building". Indeed why not?

Abdi Setiawan's carved life-sized sculpture of a rather tubby little girl in overalls licking a stick ice-cream is curious and certainly worth an up-close look. The drips from the ice-cream and the active member are rendered in glossy but subtle shades of pink and red and the drips spread across her chin and down her T-shirt and over one hand, all sticky and shiny and dribbly and almost to the point of could it be blood?

Verily, this lacks the falsity of other works and is a more socially aware take on the theme, not merely a brash assertion.

Farah Wardani, the executive director of IVAA, said over the phone on Friday that more than 18 of the works in the show had been sold.

The exhibition ends April 22.

Copyright © 2008 The Jakarta Post - PT Bina Media Tenggara. All Rights Reserved.