(Courtesy of Made Djirna)

Most of today artists “think”. Overwhelmed by the maelstrom of changes that occur in their lives, they don’t talk anymore about themselves, don’t abandon themselves to the voice of the heart.

This voice has lost its relevance, and this is not without its reasons.

The changes taking place in the world due to globalization not only raise questions, but they also impose upon many a questioning attitude.

This is what contemporary art is about: it deals in the numerous media now at its disposal, with a multilayered questioning of issues of global relevance — quid of gender, quid of identity, quid of religion, quid of our construction of the past.

Contemporary art is thus a long series of questions in which it is more the society that expresses itself in its dilemmas and contradictions than the artists in their hopes, doubts and beliefs.

Contemporary art is therefore more intellectually interesting than touching. It is art with a new purpose, beyond art in the traditional sense.

Yet there is still, now and then, the resilience of something else, of artists with a voice — their own, unique voices, happen what may with “issues” and the intellect. The works of such an artist, Made Djirna, are presently exhibited, curated by Jim Supangkat, at the National Gallery in Jakarta until Dec. 5.

Djirna is no newcomer to the arts. But apart from his participation in a collective show two years ago titled “Ethnicity Now”, he has for years kept clear of Jakarta’s hustle and bustle.

He waited for time to pass in his village of Kedewatan, a few kilometers from Ubud, Bali. Time had indeed to pass. Fifteen years ago, his name had surged like a comet in the then clear skies of the Indonesian art world.

Then, like today, he “let himself go” and painted ghouls and specters that revealed the dark side of his Balinese soul. But he also painted the cosmic opposite of such darkness: the forces of hope, love and balance. The paintings he made in such a spirit — mothers and children, families etc. — garnered him success.

But too fast, for the fashion passed and Djirna was stuck with the image as a painter of mothers and children. He returned to Bali, and there he let Balinese cultural memory fill him again while he opened his soul and mind to the changes the modern world was compelling upon this memory.

He is now back in Jakarta bringing with him the same Balinese world but in a different treatment. When not of the happy kind mentioned above, his early works dealt with light and darkness — the Rwabhinneda of Balinese cosmology — in a non-narrative way. If there were signs, they did not define. Their purpose was to evoke, the evocations that of a soul inhabited by the intangible forces of a somewhere cosmos.

A primal figure here, a tampak dara cross there, with figuration, if any, always at a minimum, to better, ever, convey the indefinable presence of the Rwabhinneda dynamics of opposite forces. Several of those works are currently on show at the National Gallery.

Even though they rest on the same philosophical foundations, Djirna’s new series is different. The works are narrative, coming to the fore in colorful visual metaphors.

They talk of life and the world — of love and violence, man and cosmos, gods and demons, tradition and modernity — in multilayered contradictions, and always as a cosmic whole, as if to take us into the relentless grinding machine of time.

Some works do express flickers of joy and hope, like Metamorphosis (2012), or the Christian-influenced Noah’s Ark (2012), but most are invitations to melt in the unending dynamics of things.

In all these works, Djirna returns to a certain extent to his early Balinese roots: space if fully occupied, the drawing line paramount, and the background philosophy is that of Hinduism broadened to a reflection about human fate.

Yet, there should be no misunderstanding: what Djirna talks about is his perception of the world, his vision of women, his understanding of the threats, both moral and political, that the world has to face, and most of all, his ill-defined fears and longings for the above-mentioned grinding time machine.

How to better understand it than by looking at his installations — in fact a small part of the eerie magic world his extraordinary Ubud workshop has become. Drawings of spooks, sculpted stones, plaited coconut leaves, meaningless objects all somehow put together as if by accident.

What for? “For no purpose,” he says. But why, when looking at those installations, do they speak to us as moments of awe and prayer?

Yes, Djirna is no “modern” artist, no “contemporary” one, as those words are usually understood. He is someone who issues from the living memory of a living culture. If education freed him from the patterned constraints of his tradition, it was to better enable him to speak, personally, of the soul of his tradition as it is in the accelerating whirling of time.

Curator Jean-Hubert Martin, in his groundbreaking 1989 exhibition “The Magicians of the Earth”, argued that modern creators issuing from world tradition had to be given full recognition in the contemporary art world. One cannot do, he said, as if “they were not alive, as if they were simply ghosts reviving old civilizations that had forever disappeared.”

Djirna is perhaps the foremost Indonesian example of such creators. He invites us to let go and enter, with awe, a different world.

“Ubud 1963 [Re] Reading the Growth of Made Djirna”
Until Dec. 5
National Gallery
Jl. Medan Merdeka Timur No. 14
Jakarta

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