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Sunaryo's wot batu: the dialectics of Matter & Spirit
âBatu adalah waktuâ â Stone is time
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'Batu adalah waktu' ' Stone is time. With those words Culture and Education Minister Anies Baswedan inaugurated what will undoubtedly become one of Bandung's most important landmarks: the Wot Batu stone bridge.
Artist Sunaryo bequeathed the Wot Batu stone bridge ' located next to his Selasar Sunaryo Art Space ' as his legacy.
Sunaryo, 72, is a low-profile man who has built an artistic career trying to essentialize the expression of meaning.
This led him first to abstraction, then to minimalist installation and more recently, to the exploration of physical matter. Is there any physical matter more essential than stone? Indeed, there isn't.
So what a fantastic finale for Sunaryo to crown his career by a work whose nature, dimension and complexity, while enshrining his contribution in 'the time of stone', has us pondering the meaning of human life and the reality of a realm beyond time. Oneness.
But let us be more precise and enter the Wot Batu space. What does one see? First, an open field decorated with totemic dolmens and one menhir. Huge stones similar to the prehistoric megaliths found in various sites over the world's five continents.
Those megaliths were the first human creation that marked our presence on Earth. They signaled the onset of civilization. They were also the only moment when civilization was still one, before it divided into its numerous historical branches. In that sense, the Wot Batu is, at its deepest level, a reaffirmation of human unity.
As one walks around the Wot Batu garden, Sunaryo's 'stone discourse' opens up. Here and there, other smaller stones reveal themselves to the eye. Some have on their surface marks of human intention, a reminder that after using stones as signs, humans inscribed messages on stone too.
Yet, if Sunaryo's Wot Batu gives room to humans, it is to emphasize that this role, minor as it is, is to question and give meaning to the movement of things: What does one find in the garden, next to its megaliths and other stones? The other natural elements through which humans construct their symbolic world. Water, symbolized by a pool; fire, by a row of burning lamps at night, and by the sun in daytime. Scent and fumes symbolize air. 
Finally, last but not least, space itself. Among the stones, Sunaryo also underlines the presence of Indonesia through garden stones and pebbles originating from various regions of the country. Other stones come from abroad.
Having thus shown the Earth and role of humans in it, as generators of meaning, Sunaryo takes us one step further: into the cosmos itself. This is not a cosmos that he wants us to explore in the sky, but in the depth of stone itself, through an underground grotto specially dug for this purpose.
Once inside, in the darkness, a single stone appears, its inside carved and polished so as to create an empty sphere. And, as one wonders about its meaning, a tiny spot appears in its middle, grows, deforms itself into worlds and planets, explodes and then recedes into the void.
Called Bimakti, what we are witnessing is a multimedia installation representing the Big Bang, creation and the end of the world, as composed from Sunaryo's drawings ' with the help of Muhamad Akbar, Angkuy and Nobie.
On the inauguration night this month, as the guests came out from the grotto, they were welcomed by music and dance by Bulantrisna and the poem Lesmana read by Jais Darga that narrates the conditions of humans living in harmony with pristine nature in the mythical far away days of their origins.
The whole Wot Batu raises the immense question of the role of spirit in the unending flow of matter. Sunaryo calls it a bridge. Let humans find a bridge between the two.
' Photos courtesy of Selasar Sunaryo Art Space
