Comment: Indonesia Art Award

June 24, p. 22: In 2003, Jim Supangkat coined the expression “Art with an Accent” to describe art that deviated from the usual canon, and moved away from art as perceived — and created — in the West. He compared it to the English, which, although spoken with a different accent in countries outside of the UK, remains English.  In the same vein, the term “contemporaneity” here is used in the Indonesian context with features leading up to the contemporary. (by Carla Bianpoen, Jakarta).
 
Your comments:

Jim Supangkat must visit America, because we’re not English. It’s an insult to call us that. We may be a colonized land but we stood up against our mother country, because we became a land colonized by many people.
We inherited slavery from the English and we inherited democracy from the native Americans.
 Nathan Ruff
the US

Dear Nathan, you have misunderstood the context because Jim Supangkat remarks, within comparative context only, genuinely referred to English in its sole meaning or interpretation, which is the language.
He was never referring, in his interview, to an Englishmen that, if this is your true understanding, is correct to be said as having a difference in nature to an American (that is why Sting’s song “an Englishman in New York” never sang it as “an English in New York”).
English in Jim Supangkat’s context is always the language (not the people and also not the accent or slang). Supangkat has been more than a dozen times entrusted to curate an art exhibition with international exposure such as in Italy, the US, China or France and I believe his pronunciation in grammatically correct English is clear.
In Indonesia, more than 80 percent of exhibition catalogues have easily been published by Galleries in bilingual Bahasa and English whereby some even did not have the Bahasa section at all, only pure English.
Supangkat was only stimulating our artistic minds by elaborating similarity threads inside the elements of contemporary arts between Indonesia and the rest of the world inside his curatorial foreword.
Rahmat
Jakarta