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Jompet's quest a reminder of origin
How often do we question something that has been an integral part of our daily life, our identity? What does it mean to be from Java for some Javanese people, for instance? Do we, and they, understand the whole (hi)story that has made Java to be as we live in it today? Such questions moved a young Javanese artist from Yogyakarta, Agustinus Kuswidananto, better known as Jompet, to create a remarkable new media installation in his solo show at Yogya's Cemeti Art House from December 15 to January 18
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How often do we question something that has been an integral part of our daily life, our identity? What does it mean to be from Java for some Javanese people, for instance? Do we, and they, understand the whole (hi)story that has made Java to be as we live in it today?
Such questions moved a young Javanese artist from Yogyakarta, Agustinus Kuswidananto, better known as Jompet, to create a remarkable new media installation in his solo show at Yogya's Cemeti Art House from December 15 to January 18.
The exhibition is titled "Java's Machine: Phantasmagoria".
The basic idea behind the imagery comes from the royal guards whom we still see today watching over the Sultan's Palace in that city.
The corps is known as Lombok Abang (red chili), named for the characteristic red hue of their uniform. In War of Java: Do You Remember? *1, Jompet uses the figure of the guard and that red to represent magic and syncretism in Javanese society today.
In the corridors of the gallery stand five figures of soldiers, presented as if they were ghosts from the past.
The figures are not lifelike; Jompet only erected the caps, music instruments, the guns and the boots on his stand-ins.
The sonic instrument emits a statement spoken in three languages: Indonesian, English, and Javanese.
It is a kind of story on how modern Java was constructed by war after war, colonization after colonization, and the establishment of industrialism.
Jompet continues his narrative through a video running on a television installed not far from the icons. In a follow-up video, War of Java: Do You Remember? *2, we see the figure of a man surrounded by the machine that has been refining sugar on the island since the early 1890s.
The video was shot in the Madukismo factory, an early plant set up in Java which is still operational today. The machines used at this sugar factory often serve as a symbol of modernity in Javanese society.
The man in the video is naked above the waist and wears the black trousers usually worn only by farmers. His stylized movements come from traditional Javanese folk dance, creating a contradictory juxtaposition of old and new, low tech and high.
Starting from the idea of tracing the history of modernity represented by the sugar machine, Jompet searches out the syncretism in Javanese society evident in the uniform of Javanese soldier, the juxtaposition of magic and machine, likewise the traditional and the modern, and the classic duality of East and West.
The troops in Sultan Palace by custom play percussion instruments whenever they march. Jompet puts another four guardsmen with drums into an installation with a backdrop video of a man dancing a Javanese folk dance.
Interestingly, Jompet has worked out a system that connects the drumbeats with the man's movements in the video.
Poetic images stand out in War of Java: Do You Remember? *3. Jompet installed almost the complete uniform for the soldiers, only the boots are missing. By cutting the legs of the soldiers, and projecting text on a vinyl screen on the floor -- an abstraction from Thomas Stanford Raffles's famous text: The History of Java -- Jompet creates the sense the three soldiers are standing in water.
Aside from this installation's strong conceptual underpinnings, it also conveys a quiet and lonely ambience.
From that solitude, the audience is then guided to view the visual recording of a man, in a video close-up shoot, talking about something without any sound.
The man's voice can be heard only after we put on the headphones provided in front of the television. And here it is: a whisper that terrorizes our memory. "Do you remember, in 1629, Sultan Agung sent his troops back to Batavia? Do you remember?"
On the exhibition's opening night, Jompet arranged a performance to accompany this piece, in which actor Bahrul Ulum occupied a chair and worked through a series of expressions from a stone-faced lack of reaction to panic, which some viewers found dramatic and memorable.
The exhibition presents a good example of the development of new applications of media in contemporary visual arts today. With his background in broadcasting while studying at Gadjah Mada University, Jompet has combined the use of visual and audio techniques as materials for art works. Earlier versions of these pieces were exhibited at the Yokohama Triennale 2008.
The atmosphere created in the exhibition space points up Jompet's focus on the quest for Javanese identity. By using symbols and icons that are quite popular among Indonesians, he has built a way to communicate with his audience through collective memory and to underline the ideas of contact, syncretism, and the specter of modernization in our society.
Even though Jompet works from the premise of Javanese-ness as his basic idea, in terms of both his forms and concepts, the imagery as a whole has moved beyond that limitation. These are the questions we pose about our identity nowadays, not about where we come from, or who we are, but about what has constructed us and how we are represented.
