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The Geography of Environmental Crime: Conservation, Wildlife Crime and Environmental Activism 1st Edition
This book analyses the intersections between contemporary art and environmental activism in Indonesia.
Exploring how the arts have promoted ecological awareness from the late 1960s to the early 2020s, the book shows how the arts have contributed to societal change and public and political responses to environmental crises. This period covers Indonesia’s rapid urban development under the totalitarian New Order regime (1967–1998) as well as the enhanced freedom of expression, alternative development models, and environmental problems under the democratic governments since 1998. The book applies the concept of ‘artivism’ to refer to the vital role of art in activism. It seeks to identify and contextualise both the potential and limits of environmental artivism in Indonesia, a country whose vibrant art scenes and monumental social transformations provide a productive laboratory for exploring the power of creativity as a social and political change agent. It provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary art from Indonesia, with an in-depth analysis of artivists who seek to address and find solutions for some of the most pressing environmental issues of our times.
With its detailed, empirical approach to environmental art from Southeast Asia, this project fills in an important gap in the literature on art and activism. It is aimed at academics, students, artists, curators, policymakers, activists, and general readers with an interest in the environment, art history, and Indonesian culture, society, and politics.
Edwin Jurriëns is Associate Professor and Convenor of the Indonesian Studies programme at the Asia Institute of the Faculty of Arts, The University of Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of three sole-authored books, Visual Media in Indonesia: Video Vanguard (Routledge, 2017), From Monologue to Dialogue: Radio and Reform in Indonesia (2009) and Cultural Travel and Migracy: The Artistic Representation of Globalization in the Electronic Media of West Java (2004). He is also co-editor of some edited books, including Disaster Relief in the Asia-Pacific: Agency and Resilience (Routledge, 2014).
Routledge Contemporary Southeast Asia Series
The aim of this series is to publish original, high-quality work by both new and established scholars on all aspects of Southeast Asia.
NGOs and Civil Society in Thailand
Metagovernance and the Politics of NGO Funding
Theerapat Ungsuchaval
Recycling Infrastructures in Cambodia
Circularity, Waste, and Urban Life in Phnom Penh
Kathrin Eitel
Public Expenditure and Income Distribution in Malaysia
Mukaramah Harun and Sze Ying Loo
Territorial Change and Conflict in Indonesia
Confronting the Fear of Secession
Ratri Istania
Marginalisation and Human Rights in Southeast Asia
Al Khanif & Khoo Ying Hooi
Fake News and Elections in Southeast Asia
Impact on Democracy and Human Rights
Robin Ramcharan and James Gomez
Islam, Education and Radicalism in Indonesia
Instructing Piety
Edited by Tim Lindsey, Jamhari Makruf, and Helen Pausacker
The Art of Environmental Activism in Indonesia
Shifting Horizons
Edwin Jurriëns
For more information about this series, please visit: HYPERLINK “www. routledge.com/Routledge-Contemporary-Southeast-Asia-Series/book-series/ RCSEA”
The Art of Environmental Activism in Indonesia
Shifting Horizons
Edwin Jurriëns
First published 2023 by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge
The right of Edwin Jurriëns to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jurriëns, Edwin, 1972– author.
Title: The art of environmental activism in Indonesia : shifting horizons / Edwin Jurriëns.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022053931 (print) | LCCN 2022053932 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032433684 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032433677 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003366997 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Art and social action—Indonesia. | Environmentalism in art. | Environmentalism—Indonesia. | Art, Indonesian—20th century. | Art, Indonesian—21st century. | Art—Political aspects—Indonesia.
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022053931
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022053932
ISBN: 978-1-032-43368-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-43367-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-36699-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003366997
Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Caption: Setu Legi, Harapan Jaya (2014), life-sized sculpture, mixed media, and terracotta, from the exhibition ‘Tanah Air’ (19 December 2014–5 February 2015), Ark Galerie, Yogyakarta
Photo Edwin Jurriëns
Illustrations
3.1 Maryanto, Pandora’s Box (2013) 31
3.2 Maryanto, Tumpah Ruah di Wonocolo (Brimming in Wonocolo) (2015) 32
3.3 Maryanto, Space of Exception (2015) 33
3.4 Setu Legi, Hujan Emas di Negri Orang, Hujan Batu di Negri Sendiri (2014) 38
3.5 Setu Legi, Monokultur (2014) 41
3.6 Setu Legi, Harapan Jaya (2014) 45
4.1 Maryanto, Wheels within Wheels (2011) 65
5.1 Agan Harahap, Maka Lahirlah Angkatan 66 (2017) 73
5.2 Tisna Sanjaya, Yoyon Darsono and Srikandi Rezeki; AsiaTOPA festival (January–April 2017) 81
5.3 Tisna Sanjaya using glue to write Islamic messages in Arabic script; AsiaTOPA festival (January–April 2017) 82
5.4 Tisna Sanjaya using his body as a medium of printing; AsiaTOPA festival (January–April 2017) 83
6.1 Arahmaiani, Flag Project (2018) 112
6.2 Arahmaiani as ‘global nomad’ meeting with a local woman and child at the Tibetan Plateau, 2014 113
6.3 Arahmaiani, Memory of Nature (2018) 115
7.1 Made Muliana Bayak wearing a ‘Bali Tolak Reformasi’ t-shirt, Batubulan, 24 January 2018 126
7.2 Made Muliana Bayak, Industry, Hidden History and Legacy of the Island of the Gods (2013) 131
7.3 I Wayan Upadana, detail of Globalization Euphoria (2010) 133
7.4 Made Aswino Aji, detail of Door of Perception (2016) 134
8.1 Heri Budiman, Manusia Asap (2017) 142
8.2 Heri Budiman, video and leaflet installation of the Melawan Asap campaign (2017) 143
Acknowledgements
This book is part of my ongoing study of socially engaged art and media in Indonesia. It has grown from my conversations and friendships with Indonesian environmental artivists, particularly Arahmaiani, Tisna Sanjaya, I Made Mulyana Bayak, Setu Legi, Moelyono, and Gustaff Harriman Iskandar. It is dedicated to their outstanding creative skills, imagination, courage, and commitment to generating awareness about some of the most pressing issues of our times. Special thanks to Agan Harahap, Maryanto, Heri Budiman, I Wayan Upadana, and Yoyo Yogasmana for providing photos of and insight into their creative practices. I also acknowledge the ongoing support of my home institution, the Asia Institute at the Faculty of Arts of The University of Melbourne, particularly the Head and Deputy Head of the institute, Vedi Hadiz and Andrew Rosser, my colleagues in the Indonesian Studies programme, Michael Ewing, Justin Wejak, Ken Setiawan, Monika Winarnita, and Mughis Mudhoffir, and Deputy Associate Dean International-Indonesia, Kate McGregor. Finally, my love and hugs for Ken, Setia and Raphael, and our extended families in The Netherlands and Indonesia.
Several chapters have been partially based on previously published soleauthored journal articles. These include:
‘Indonesian Artivism: Layers of Performativity and Connectivity’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 20, 2 (2020): 231–52, for Chapter 2.
‘Intertwined Ecologies: Environmental Aesthetics in Indonesian Contemporary Art’, Third Text 33, 1 (2019): 59–77, for Chapter 3.
‘Urban Transition through Indonesian Art: From the Generation of ’66 to the Millennials’, World Art 11, 2 (2021): 229–54, for Chapter 4.
‘Art is Capital: Between Cultural Memory and the Creative Industry’, Art and the Public Sphere 7, 1 (2018): 43–62, for Chapter 5.
‘Gendering the Environmental Artivism: Ekofeminisme and Unjuk Rasa of Arahmaiani’s Art’, Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, 4, 2 (October 2020): 3–38, for Chapter 6.
‘Art, Image and Environment: Revisualizing Bali in the Plastiliticum’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 33, 1 (2019): 119–36, for Chapter 7.
‘The Countryside in Indonesian Contemporary Art and Media: From Distant Horizons to Traversing Drones’, Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia/BKI 175, 4 (2019): 446–73, for Chapters 8 and 9.
1 Introduction
Nation-Building and Nature in Indonesian Visual Culture
Indonesia is commonly referred to as tanah air. Consisting of the words for ‘land’ (tanah) and ‘water’ (air), it literally refers to the natural conditions of the archipelago. At the same time, it has political, symbolic, and intimate value as a reference to the nation-state as ‘homeland’. Tanah air is also the title of a solo exhibition of Indonesian contemporary artist Setu Legi (b. 1971, see Chapter 3). Other common references to nature, such as Ibu Pertiwi or ‘mother earth’, confirm the gendered and religious dimensions of longstanding Indonesian engagements with the environment. Gendered and religious approaches to nature can be found in traditional art, contemporary art, and combinations of both, and are part of creative expressions of Indonesian environmental activism. This includes the work of female contemporary artist Arahmaiani (b. 1961) and other forms of ekofeminisme (Chapter 6). These examples demonstrate in a nutshell that Indonesia’s rich and diverse natural and sociocultural environments are not parallel, but closely interconnected phenomena.
This book analyses the intersections between contemporary art and environmental activism in Indonesia. It explores how the arts have promoted ecological awareness and have contributed to public and political responses to current and looming environmental crises. Organised thematically rather than chronologically, it discusses various generations of artists engaged in environmental action and creative and social change from the late 1960s to the early 2020s. This period covers Indonesia’s rapid urban development under President Suharto’s totalitarian New Order regime (1967–98) as well as the enhanced freedom of expression, alternative development models, and environmental problems under the democratic governments since 1998, especially the Joko Widodo presidency since 2014.
Economic development (Pembangunan), modernisation and urbanisation have been key aspects of nation-building in post-Independence Indonesia. The main political factors that have impacted on Indonesia’s natural environment, material infrastructure and social life are the economic development plans during the New Order. Academic studies have analysed the ideas and policies behind these plans as well as their social and political consequences.1 However, these studies normally do not include the work of visual artists. Their art is important, as it not only
visually maps the physical changes to Indonesian urban and rural landscapes, but also encapsulates how ordinary citizens, including the artists, have experienced and interpreted the radical transformations of their living environments. The documentation of people’s actual feelings and thoughts about economic development are ignored by studies primarily focusing on the more abstract, macro-level of economic figures and political decision-making.
The New Order attempted to create ‘order’ through a combination of state and military control aimed at depoliticising society and promoting economic development programmes. It presented itself as a correction to the socio-political upheaval and economic recession during the final stages of Sukarno’s presidency, retrospectively dubbed the ‘Old Order’ (1945–67). Its ideological path was paved with the annihilation of the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI) and its affiliated institutions, including the Institute of People’s Culture (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat, LEKRA),2 and the massacre of between 500,000 and 1.5 million members and alleged members of these organisations in 1965 and 1966. Throughout the New Order, freedom of speech and other civil liberties were strongly curbed, and the arts and the media were subject to state propaganda and censorship.3 Artists and organisations that were considered leftist were banned, and abstract and figurative art was endorsed.
According to Abidin Kusno, ‘The notion of “development”, broadly similar to modernisation theory, informs the political culture of the Suharto regime and replaces the populist politics of Sukarno’s “revolution”’.4 It brought fundamental changes to Indonesia’s material infrastructure, culture, and society, particularly in the country’s rapidly expanding cities. Five-year development plans (Rencana Pembangunan Lima Tahun, abbreviated Repelita), the practical and symbolic cornerstones of economic progress, were designed by US-educated technocrats and financed by the revenues from Indonesia’s booming oil industry in the 1970s and early 1980s.5 Ariel Heryanto has argued that
Pembangunan realizes itself by exhausting and disrupting the natural environment as a source of raw materials . . . Additionally, like the “pembangunan” of a structure/building/house, Pembangunan of the nation is carried out through a large-scale recruiting (mobilizing) of the energy of members of society.6
The promotion of the discourse of development through government propaganda has not only normalised neoliberal economic principles, but has also hidden, or promoted acceptance of, the social and environmental costs that come with them. By embracing the title of ‘Father of Development’ (Bapak Pembangunan), Suharto presented himself not simply as a political leader, but as someone with a given, predestined ‘“natural” authority and over-all order’ to make decisions in the general interest.7 This created a climate of control and fear in which the public expression of alternative views was discouraged and punished. Apart from its material and discursive dimensions, Pembangunan has also introduced visual regimes that strengthen social hierarchies. For instance, poor
urban neighbourhoods or kampung have been carefully kept in the distance and literally looked down upon by the construction of high-rise buildings and flyovers. The latter provide the urban middle-class and elite with mobility between their status- and lifestyle-defining sites of home, office, and shopping centre. The occupants of luxury real estate complexes have also protected themselves from the gaze of the lower-economic class by the erection of tall fences and security gates (see Chapter 4).8 Environmental artists have taken up the challenging task of not only critically addressing the material aspects of Pembangunan, but also breaking through and providing alternatives to politically and socially ingrained ways of (not) seeing and talking about the aims and impact of economic development and urbanisation.
In response to declining oil prices in the mid-1980s, the New Order started to focus on deregulating the market, attracting foreign investors and donors, and promoting economic growth in other fields, such as agriculture, manufacturing, tourism, and other non-oil industries and exports.9 Ironically, alongside state support for the deregulation of the market, the Suharto family accrued monopolies over businesses ranging from banks, road tolls and hotels to shopping centres and television stations.10 Although designed to promote economic advancement, Pembangunan in fact widened the gap between rich and poor, between Jakarta and the rest of Java, and between Java and other parts of Indonesia, particularly eastern Indonesia.11 According to Adam Schwarz,
From the perspective of resource-rich provinces like Aceh (natural gas), Riau (oil), East Kalimantan (oil and timber) and Irian Jaya (copper, gold and timber), the current system seems like a replay of colonial times. Their natural resources, according to their leaders, are being exploited primarily to improve living standards at the centre.12
By the early 1990s, Indonesia had become one the world’s largest debtor nations.13 The 1997 financial crisis that hit Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia strengthened the popular call for democratic reform and public criticism of widespread practices of korupsi, kolusi, nepotisme (‘corruption’, ‘collusion’, ‘nepotism’, popularised under the abbreviation ‘KKN’ in pro-democracy demonstrations), which eventually forced Suharto to step down in May 1998.14
The Joko Widodo (‘Jokowi’) presidency (2014–current) has been characterised by the continuation of a technocratic focus on renewing and expanding material infrastructure throughout the Indonesian archipelago. On 26 August 2019, Jokowi announced the move of Indonesia’s capital from Jakarta to a new city to be built in the vicinity of Balikpapan in the province of East Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. The new location is in the geographic centre of the Indonesian archipelago and is meant to signal a redistribution of political and economic power to areas outside the traditional powerhouse of Java, in line with the post-1998 Reformasi ideal of decentralisation. It also follows the line of Sukarno, who in 1957 already flagged the idea of having a national capital in Kalimantan.15 The current plan, which is to be implemented in the 2020s, marks a symbolic break with
Jakarta’s colonial history as the centre of Dutch trade and governance (then called Batavia) as well as the Java-centred economic development and urban expansion programmes during the New Order. This government priority highlights the ongoing symbolic importance of urban development, and the urgency for historicising some of the key socio-political problems associated with it. Undoubtedly, it will come with its own environmental challenges for Borneo, the island with the largest remaining rainforest area in Southeast Asia.
From colonial times to the present, visual culture, including art, has played a crucial, but oft-neglected, role in endorsing as well as resisting ongoing processes of human and natural exploitation. While the complexity of Indonesia’s economic development and urbanisation has been analysed in a significant corpus of historical, social, and political scholarship,16 it has also been documented and commented on in a highly varied body of creative work, including visual art. This book analyses modern and contemporary artists and art collectives from Sumatra, West Java, Central Java, East Java, and Bali who respond to the environmental impact of urban and other economic development in and beyond their own regions. This includes some of the worst environmental crises in Southeast Asia, such as the toxic haze that periodically threatens parts of Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia due to forest clearances for the establishment of palm oil plantations in Sumatra and Kalimantan (Chapter 8); the chemical and other waste destroying life in and around the Citarum river in West Java, commonly dubbed ‘the worst polluted river in the world’ (Chapter 5); the plastic waste polluting the Indian ocean and the beaches of Bali and other islands (Chapter 7); and the environmental degradation in West Papua due to the exploitation of the Grasberg Mine, one of the largest gold and copper mines in the world (Chapter 3).
The artists in this book politicise and historicise ecological issues by discussing the intersections between natural, political, cultural, and social problems and solutions. This is different from forms of restorationist eco-aesthetics, which approach nature and culture as separate, autonomous fields, and view environmental destruction as a problem that can be solved in isolation through methods such as geo-or bio-engineering.17 The restorationist approach is based on the same depoliticising and objectifying principles that have facilitated the relentless exploitation of nature by capitalism. The Indonesian environmental art, on the other hand, has contextualised the politics of the environment by addressing aspects of economic development projects in Indonesia from colonial times to the present. Recurring themes are the colonial cultivation system in the Dutch East Indies and the Pembangunan programmes and intensified urbanisation under the New Order regime. Indonesian environmental artists also reflect on other aspects of Indonesian society, such as religious and cultural practices, which are presented as either the causes of or solutions to ecological problems. Moreover, they have re-appropriated and criticised styles from Indonesian art history, particularly the colonial Beautiful Indies landscape painting style. They demonstrate that these visual styles are not merely autonomous documentations of the realities of the outside world, but inherent components of the creation and destruction of natural and social environments.
The work of these artists can be considered ‘postnatural’, as it refers to a condition in which nature cannot be seen in isolation from human activity, due to the scale and intensity of people’s impact on their natural surroundings.18 At the same time, similar to the ‘post’ in the postcolonial, it refers to emancipatory potential.19 In the case of the postnatural, it refers to people’s capacity to find solutions or alternatives to environmental destruction, by exploring and promoting just and sustainable relations between humans and nature. This includes creating awareness about and countering forms of sociocultural and political-economic inequity, which are directly or indirectly responsible for natural disaster.20 In most cases, the Indonesian creative efforts are combined with direct or indirect forms of social activism. In this book, I apply the concept of ‘artivism’, which is derived from academic studies and media reports on global movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy and Pussy Riot. Artivism is a portmanteau of art and activism that refers to the vital role of creativity in these movements (see Chapter 2).21 I seek to identify and contextualise both the potential and limits of environmental artivism in Indonesia, a country whose vibrant art scenes and monumental social transformations in recent decades provide a productive laboratory for exploring the power of creativity as a political change agent.
The role of Indonesian environmental art is not limited to politicising nature and interrelated social and cultural environments, however. It can also help artists and their audiences with intimately relating to and personalising complex environmental issues. In the words of French philosopher Félix Guattari,22 it can make these issues ‘inhabitable’ by people. It can become a means for people to make sensory and mental connections with environmental issues, understand their underlying causes, and/or imagine possible solutions. In some cases, Indonesian artists recount experiences of environmental deterioration or related political or social processes that have directly affected themselves or their families. They use highly diverse creative strategies for addressing the political and sociocultural complexities of pressing local, national, or global environmental issues, and engaging a wide range of audiences. These strategies include personal reflections in realist or allegoric painting on the environmental impact of economic development and urbanisation (Chapter 4); collaborative art works, projects, spaces, and protest movements related to issues such as water pollution and land reclamation (Chapters 5 and 7); spiritual and gendered philosophies and performance styles for creating environmental awareness (Chapters 5 and 6); urban-rural networks for promoting coevality and exchanging traditional and modern knowledge about nature and society (Chapter 8); digital technologies for generating scenarios for more sustainable futures (Chapters 8 and 9) as well as combinations of any of these strategies.
Book Structure
The chapters in this book are organised around the central concept in the subtitle, shifting horizons. This refers to changes and varieties in artistic representations of the natural environment. It also denotes the calls made by artists for
alternative, sometimes radically different, socio-political, and cultural attitudes and approaches for dealing with the complex environmental challenges of our times. Many of their works respond to officially endorsed visual representations during Dutch colonialism and the New Order, which sought to celebrate economic development or were aimed at erasing the impact of modernisation, industrialisation, and urbanisation on social, political, and natural environments.
In Chapter 2, I discuss the role of contemporary art in addressing the complexities of the ‘Capitalocene’. The idea of the Capitalocene is used as an alternative to depoliticised notions of the Anthropocene. It is relevant in the context of Indonesian environmental art, as artists have referred to the impact of capitalism on both shaping and destroying natural and sociocultural environments. I also probe into global and local histories of artivism, especially the creative ideas and practices of pioneering Indonesian artivist Moelyono (b. 1957).
Chapter 3 provides background on visual culture that is characteristic of colonial and New Order-style developmentalism, including the romanticised and depoliticised representations of rural landscapes in the Beautiful Indies style. It focuses on two contemporary artists, Maryanto (b. 1977) and Setu Legi, whose work responds to forms of visual culture that have promoted, legitimised, or ignored the exploitation of nature, culture, and society. Maryanto and Legi have sought to personalise, contextualise, and (re)politicise the environmental threats caused by the extraction of natural resources and the land clearances for the establishment of oil palm plantations in Indonesia.
The two artists politicise historical and contemporary forms of spatial mapping and show the impact of the exploitation of human and environmental resources. They provide critical commentary on the relation between the power of corporations and governments and the pollution and exploitation of nature. I analyse how the symbolic and emotional meanings of their key concepts of ‘space of exception’ and tanah air, respectively, make it possible for the artists and their audiences to relate to issues of natural and cultural degradation in intimate, personal ways. The artists bring up the question of what it means for the country to be called Indonesia, and for its citizens to be called Indonesian.
Chapter 4 covers artistic work about the first few decades of Jakarta’s intensified modernisation, from the political transition from the Sukarno to the Suharto presidencies in the mid-1960s to the New Order urban development plans in the 1970s and 1980s. It specifically focuses on artists who relate to the lived experiences of urban groups and individuals in an attempt to personalise the rather abstract notions of economic development and urbanisation. They also seek to understand and represent the forces behind and impacted by urban transition in terms of the dynamics of a certain generation or ‘zeitgeist’. Some of the artists explicitly compare and distinguish the perspectives and experiences of different generations of creative, political, and social actors. The artistic (self-)representations range from people’s bewilderment and despair in the city environment to their active, sometimes politically motivated, participation in shaping urban space and life.
I examine in detail the historical, socio-political, intellectual, and material contexts that have informed S. Sudjojono’s (1913–86, born Sindoedarsono
Soedjojono) pioneering paintings about urban development at the dramatic turning point from Sukarno’s presidency to Suharto’s New Order in the mid-1960s. Sudjojono’s work is a point of comparison with the visualisation of Jakarta’s intensified urbanisation in the 1970s and 1980s in the paintings of Srihadi Soedarsono (b. 1931) and Dede Eri Supria (b. 1956). Supria, Indonesia’s best-known urban painter, was a member of Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (New Art Movement, GSRB), a rebellious generation of artists who expressed their own forms of social engagement in response to the depoliticising of culture and society by Suharto’s totalitarian regime. The last part of the chapter returns to Maryanto, particularly his work about a fictitious urban village that reflects his highly personal experiences of the impact of development programmes on nature, material infrastructure, daily life, and work in Jakarta.
Chapter 5 discusses a younger generation of artists who have grown up as urban natives and consider the city as their natural creative playground. The chapter starts with a discussion of Agan Harahap’s (b. 1980) digital print Maka Lahirlah Angkatan 66 (‘Hence Was Born the Generation of ’66’, 2017), which is a parody of Sudjojono’s work of the same title. Harahap’s work expresses disillusionment with the ideals of the Generation of ’66 by presenting the political corruption and unbridled consumerism of the Millennial and post-Millennial generations as one of their eventual outcomes. I also analyse Yuswantoro Adi’s (b. 1966) oil painting Tempat Bermainku Yang Baru (‘My New Playing Ground’, 2005), which directly responds to both Sudjojono’s and Supria’s work. The painting represents the Millennial and post-Millennial generations as urban natives, who have been the agents and targets of the individualist, depoliticised consumer lifestyles referred to in Harahap’s work.
At the same time, I argue that their cultural environments have also been the feeding grounds of the socially engaged, collaborative and interdisciplinary art works, projects, festivals, and spaces of the twenty-first century urban art collectives that have produced artists like Adi and Harahap themselves. My main focus is on Tisna Sanjaya (b. 1958), who has used a wide variety of media, ranging from print, painting, and installation to theatre, performance art and television drama, to respond to environmental pollution and deterioration in Bandung, the capital of West Java and Indonesia’s third largest city. Sanjaya has built a community art centre for public events and creative collaboration in a highly polluted area of metropolitan Bandung. I explain that the philosophy and practice of the local performance art genre of jeprut underlies Sanjaya’s social and artistic practices. The genre has enabled Sanjaya and other local artists to address the interrelations between the destruction of the natural environment, cultural heritage, political authoritarianism, and religious fundamentalism.
Chapter 6 focuses on emerging academic and artistic debates around ecofeminism and other gendered forms of environmental activism. These debates extend the interconnections between art and activism beyond the field of contemporary art, to also encompass traditional and popular genres and platforms of creativity. A prominent example of the latter are the performative media of predominantly female demonstrations against the environmental impact of the cement industry in
the Kendeng karst mountain area in Central Java. These and other female artivists literally embody the gendered dimensions of urgent socio-political and environmental problems in Indonesia.
The chapter focuses predominantly on Arahmaiani, one of Indonesia’s bestknown female artists. Arahmaiani’s lifelong journey as a ‘global nomad’ has contributed to her critical and alternative notions of global geopolitics, national identity, religion, and gender. I discuss her artistic roots and contributions to the development of jeprut, which puts the artist’s body centre stage for creatively addressing the interrelations between cultural, socio-political, and environmental issues. I also examine Arahmaiani’s continuing, more practical forms of artistic activism with religious communities in Yogyakarta and Tibet.
Chapter 7 discusses how visual art in Bali has provided the performativity and connectivity for one of the longest, largest, and most successful artivist campaigns in Indonesia, the ForBali movement (short for Forum Bali Tolak Reklamasi, The Balinese Forum for Rejecting the Reclamation). This movement has been protesting against land reclamation plans in Benoa Bay (Teluk Benoa) since 2013, and has succeeded in stalling the development plans. One of the key actors in this movement, visual artist Made Muliana Bayak (b. 1980), has also steered activist and educational campaigns against plastic pollution on the island. He has used the concepts of ‘plasticology’ and the ‘Plastiliticum’ to point to the specific social and material dimensions of this type of anthropogenic disaster.
I analyse how Bayak and other local artists address the environmentally destructive New Order development projects. Their work demonstrates, among others, how the mass violence against members and alleged members of the PKI in the mid-1960s facilitated the introduction of large-scale tourism projects. The contemporary Balinese artists discuss and deconstruct the cultural traditions that have contributed to the image of Bali as a tropical paradise. While critical of the existing imagery, they also suggest that revisualising and revitalising some of Bali’s traditions, especially culturally embodied spiritual values and wisdom, can contribute to more sustainable interactions between humans and nature.
Chapter 8 elaborates on how Indonesian artivists explore and shape new geographies, as part of their creative strategies for addressing environmental issues and renegotiating the meaning of tanah air. This is done not only through international collaborations, such as Arahmaiani’s projects in Tibet, but also through inter-regional and urban-rural connectivities within Indonesia. The first casestudy focuses on the environmental campaigns Melawan Asap (‘Fighting the Haze’) and Save Rimbang Baling (a reference to the Rimbang Baling rainforest) in the province of Riau, central eastern Sumatra, since 2014. The campaigns are directed against the haze and other impacts of forest clearances for oil palm plantations in Sumatra and other regions in Indonesia. They have been steered by local artist Heri Budiman (b. 1971) and the art centre and collective Rumah Budaya Siku Keluang (The Siku Keluang Cultural House, est. 2010) in Pekanbaru, the capital of Riau.
I also discuss the collaborations between Bandung-based Common Room Networks Foundation (est. 2006) and the Kasepuhan Ciptagelar community in rural
West Java. Their projects include the expansion of the rural community’s digital infrastructure, the geospatial mapping of the Ciptagelar territory, the digital collection and distribution of traditional knowledge, and joint art works. Artists from Kasepuhan Ciptagelar have also hosted and worked with international artists, sometimes with Common Room Networks Foundation as a mediator, and have presented their art and community in festivals, conventions, and media outlets in Asia, Europe, Australia, and North America.
Chapter 9 analyses some of the opportunities and challenges of remediations of local art and knowledge traditions in the context of international art projects and festivals, contemporary consumer culture including tourism and social media use, government projects such as digital border mapping, and the commercial art market. I demonstrate how the specific creative and social practices or ideological goals of mediators, including creative collaborators, event organisers, tourists, social media users, governments, and art collectors, may change or even contravene the original intentions of the participating Indonesian artists and communities, including their approaches to and solutions for environmental issues.
I also discuss how Indonesian new media art communities have used the tactics of creative hacking to counter the inaccessibility or ideological or commercial reappropriation of creativity and environmental knowledge. This creative hacking generates innovative multimedia art works and projects, but also assists with giving farmers, women, indigenous communities, and other marginalised groups access to exclusive, commercial, or government-protected information about environmental issues such as pollution, water and soil conditions, and climate patterns. The most influential art event in Indonesia, the Jogja Biennale, has slowly evolved because of the ongoing activism and social engagement of these internationally connected local artists.
Chapter 10, the concluding chapter, recapitulates the interrelations between art, visuality and visibility, and the various environmental crises threatening Indonesia and the globe. It summarises how combinations of art and activism can create affect and effect through representing or triggering socio-political engagement, intimacy, collaboration, networking, and innovation. The chapter returns to the overarching metaphor of ‘shifting horizons’, which captures the remediation of art through different genres, media, technologies, and platforms; the repositioning or changing of perspectives in and through art, politics, and society; and the reimagining of socio-political practices and structures through the dissemination of alternative visions and forms of knowledge.
Notes
1 Two influential sources about these issues used in this chapter are Adam Schwarz, A Nation in Waiting: Indonesia’s Search for Stability (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000) and Michael R.J. Vatikiotis, Indonesian Politics under Suharto: The Rise and Fall of the New Order (London: Routledge, 1999).
2 Keith Foulcher, Social Commitment in Literature and the Arts: The Indonesian ‘Institute of People’s Culture’ 1950–65 (Clayton: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1986).
3 Krishna Sen and David T. Hill, Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000); Philip Kitley, Television, Nation, and Culture in Indonesia (Athens, OH: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 2000); Edwin Jurriëns, From Monologue to Dialogue: Radio and Reform in Indonesia (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2009).
4 Abidin Kusno, Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space and Political Cultures in Indonesia (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 106.
5 Vatikiotis, Indonesian Politics under Suharto, 33–4.
6 Ariel Heryanto, ‘The Development of “Development”’, Indonesia 46 (1988): 1–24, especially 22.
7 Ibid., 22.
8 Kusno, Behind the Postcolonial, 110.
9 Vatikiotis, Indonesian Politics under Suharto, 40–1.
10 Adrian Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 192.
11 Schwarz, A Nation in Waiting, 63–4.
12 Ibid., 63.
13 Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia, 193.
14 Edward Aspinall, Opposing Suharto: Compromise, Resistance and Regime Change in Indonesia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
15 James Massola and Karuni Rumpies, ‘Jakarta Sinks as Indonesia’s Capital and Borneo Takes on Mantle’, The Sydney Morning Herald (26 August 2019), www.smh. com.au/world/asia/jakarta-sinks-as-indonesian-capital-and-borneo-takes-on-mantle20190826-p52kvp.html (accessed 21 June 2022).
16 Abidin Kusno, The Appearances of Memory: Mnemonic Practices of Architecture and Urban Form in Indonesia (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013); Lizzy Van Leeuwen, Lost in Mall: An Ethnography of Middle-Class Jakarta in the 1990s (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Freek Colombijn, Under Construction: The Politics of Urban Space and Housing during the Decolonization of Indonesia, 1930–1960 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2010); Susan Abeyesekere, Jakarta: A History (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987).
17 T.J. Demos, ‘The Politics of Sustainability: Contemporary Art and Ecology’, in Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009, ed. Francesco Manacorda (London: Barbican Art Gallery, 2009), 20.
18 Peter Manley Scott, Anti-Human Theology: Nature, Technology and the Postnatural (London: SCM Press, 2010).
19 Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘The Postcolonial and the Postmodern’, in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 119–24.
20 Demos, ‘The Politics of Sustainability’, 16–30, especially 19.
21 Dagmar Danko, ‘Artivism and the Spirit of the Avant-Garde’, in Art and the Challenge of Markets, Volume 2: From Commodification of Art to Artistic Critiques of Capitalism, ed. Victoria D. Alexander, Samuli Hägg, Simo Häyrynen and Erkki Sevänen (Cham: Springer, 2018), 235–61.
22 Félix Guattari, ‘The Three Ecologies’, trans. Chris Turner, New Formations 8 (Summer, 1989): 131–47, especially 142.
2 Indonesian Artivism in the Capitalocene
The Imagery of the Capitalocene
The nature, scale, and impact of the environmental problems addressed by the Indonesian artists have their unique local manifestations, but also go beyond individual instances and locations. They are symptoms of what has been commonly dubbed the Anthropocene, or the geological age in which human activity has become the dominant influence on the natural environment and ecosystems, including the climate. According to Davis and Turpin,1 art is central to ‘thinking with and feeling through the Anthropocene’, as aesthetics constitutes a tool to counteract people’s ‘anaesthetisation’ or sensory adaption to the human impact on the natural environment:
attuning ourselves, through poetry, art, and description, to pay attention to other times; developing techniques to begin to think through the limits of our temporal frameworks, and then thinking beyond them . . . are crucial practices; in fact, they are matters of survival.2
Creative practices can generate imaginative ideas and practical solutions that are less likely to emerge from within the constraints of formal institutions and discourses, including those of government, business, the media, and academia. While audio-visual culture, including the mainstream and social media and traditional and contemporary art, plays a role in the destruction of sociocultural and natural environments, it also has the potential of documenting, critiquing and/or providing creative alternatives or solutions to such destruction, as attested by the artists in this book.
Some academics, including Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptise Fressoz, Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, and T.J. Demos,3 have rejected textual and visual discourses of the Anthropocene for neutralising, dehistoricising or depoliticising the key factors behind the environmental problems of our age. For instance, discourses in which humanity as a whole is deemed responsible for our current condition, without differentiation between specific actors, or the degrees to which these actors are responsible for, or affected by, anthropogenic disaster. Yet other texts and imagery celebrate human mastery over ‘our’ earth and sanctify DOI: 10.4324/9781003366997-2
Indonesian Artivism in the Capitalocene
an exclusive group of technocrats and scientists in saving the planet through geo- and bio-engineering.4 The politics of imagery and art itself, at the centre of conceptualising or opposing the Anthropocene, often remains contradictory or unacknowledged.5 This includes universalising images of the earth, devoid of any disagreements or conflicts, as in the 1972 Blue Marble photograph taken from outer space.6 Some of the Indonesian environmental artists in this book critique the colonial Mooi Indië or ‘Beautiful Indies’ style of idealised, exotic landscape paintings, which ignore the profound impact of Dutch colonialism or more recent human interventions on nature, culture, and society.
In the worlds of art, academia and activism, concepts have emerged as alternatives to depoliticised discourses of the Anthropocene. Some of these concepts, such as the Thermocene, Thanatocene, Phagocene, Phronocene, Agnotocene, Capitalocene, Technocene, Eurocene, Plantationocene, Homogenocene, or Plasticene, seek to identify the main culprits of environmental disaster.7 Other concepts, such as the Gynecene, promote alternative, presumably more environmentally friendly forms of governance.8 This book predominantly engages with the idea of the Capitalocene, as the majority of the Indonesian artists discussed refer either directly or indirectly to the impact of capitalism on both shaping and destroying natural and sociocultural environments.
One of the foundations of contemporary theories of the Capitalocene is Guattari’s essay ‘The Three Ecologies’.9 Guattari explains that contemporary society is dominated by Integrated World Capitalism (IWC), which has moved away from the production of goods and services to the production of signs and discourses. IWC and its main tool of control, the media, not only influences social ecology, or the dynamic and interrelated processes shaping society, but also impacts on the mental ecology of individuals, to the extent of ‘the introjection of repressive power by the oppressed themselves’.10 As IWC has contributed to ignorance and apathy about environmental issues among individuals and society as a whole, there is a need for the promotion of non-capitalist forms of value exchange. Artists have the potential to produce alternative and innovative experiments with ‘the materials of expression’, meant to revaluate and revalorise labour and social activities based on criteria other than capitalist productivity and profit.11 In the short run, these interventions may not produce noticeable benefit, but in the long run they can become ‘vehicles of processual enrichment’.12
This book builds on media ecology as the study of how the media shape virtual environments that affect people in almost every aspect of their lives, including their dealings with the natural environment.13 It follows the premise that environmental deterioration is due not only to the destruction of nature as such, but also to distortions in and between social and mental ecologies.14 In a media-saturated and highly (self-)performative world, or what Boris Groys calls a time of ‘total aestheticisation’,15 it takes outstanding creative acts to make a difference. According to Marc James Léger, ‘digitalization and capitalization have facilitated the flows of production, allowing for new forms of independence and cooperation, but they have also helped create new conditions of exploitation and self-precarization’.16
Based on Angela Mitropoulos’s work, he argues that in the era of post-Fordist
13 neoliberalism, ‘control is managed through the productivity of desire, affect and sociality itself’.17 Dietrich Heissenbüttel even refers to a global ‘crisis of representation in the dual English sense of the term of delegation of powers, and depiction of reality’.18 He argues that civilian movements ‘are often not in a position to channel the shared uprising into enduring alliances, consistent organization, or political work that goes beyond individual objectives’,19 due to the highly commercialised media environments and the large-scale aggressive media lobbying of governments and political parties that surround them. The mainstream and social media also tend to isolate and trivialise creative or humorous aspects of activist art without covering its broader background and context.20
I agree with Heissenbüttel, however, that outstanding forms of creativity have the capacity to ‘propose points of view and stimulate confrontation with them’ in a personal or communal way, relatively independently of image-making by dominant powers in politics and business.21 Such creativity can escape and respond to state control and criminalisation. Walter Benjamin explained how the aestheticising of politics aimed at creative and social change in ‘the age of mechanical reproduction’ could counterbalance the fatal socio-political and cultural consequences of the aestheticisation of oppressive and exclusivist ideologies, such as fascism.22 In the Capitalocene, dominated by neoliberal image-making and media connectivities, art can function to constantly expand the activist repertoire and counter its exhaustion, normalisation, or commoditisation.23
The concept of the Capitalocene is relevant in the context of Indonesian environmental art, as it facilitates a comprehensive examination of interconnections between local, national and international political and economic systems; the continuities and similarities between colonial and post-colonial governments and businesses; as well as the interrelations between social, mental, and natural ecologies. Capitalism has not only been the dominant force of Indonesia’s economic development, but has also increasingly shaped and been intertwined with socio-political power and hierarchy in the country since the early 1970s.24 As Vedi Hadiz and Richard Robison25 have argued, control over public institutions and state authority has been fundamental to the growth of individual and corporate wealth since the start of the New Order. This has become manifest in the rise of the oligarchy, ‘a system of power relations that enables the concentration of wealth and authority and its collective defense’.26
The media industry has been one of the main beneficiaries and supporters of this type of system, due to the commercial viability as well as socio-political reach and impact of their main products: information and imagery. After the euphoria of the increased freedom of expression and expansion of the media industry in the early post-New Order period of democratic reform or Reformasi, since the 2010s media ownership has been concentrated and media content has become more partisan and less diverse. According to Ross Tapsell,27 the industry is characterised by multiple, competing oligarchies, with media owners pursuing their individual rather than collective interests. Although consisting of thousands of print, broadcast, and digital media companies, the industry is dominated by only eight conglomerates, which have the financial power and political support to
take over other media companies and control key aspects of the communications infrastructure.28
The conglomerates have converged a variety of media such as newspapers, radio, television, and social media into digital platforms for the sake of cost efficiency and ease of sharing media content. Ultimately, this has caused a decline in first-hand, in-depth journalism as well as the diversity of information and views in the public sphere. Rather than serving the public interest, the media platforms support the owners in achieving the commercial and political ambitions of themselves, their family members, or the various businesses and political parties they are affiliated with. The entanglements between politics, business and the media have direct impacts on the content and imagery about the natural environment presented to Indonesian and global audiences, especially when companies that are part of the conglomerates have a stake in the exploitation of natural resources and/ or are linked to forms of environmental destruction.
Notorious examples include the media content and acquisitions by the Bakrie Group in response to one of Indonesia’s major environmental disasters, the ongoing mud flow in the Sidoarjo regency in East Java since 2006, which has swept away entire villages and has left thousands of people displaced. Scientific evidence has pointed to gas drilling activities by the P.T. Lapindo Brantas company as the cause of the mud flow, but the company itself has maintained an earthquake in Central Java triggered the event. P.T. Lapindo Brantas is part of the Bakrie Group conglomerate, with businesses in agriculture, real estate, trade, shipping, banking, insurance, manufacturing, construction, and mining. It also owns various media companies and platforms, including the national television news station TVOne.
The most influential member of the Bakrie family, Aburizal Bakrie, has combined his business career with high-ranked political positions such as Coordinating Minister for Economy (2004–5) and Coordinating Minister for People’s Welfare (2005–9). He was also Chairman of the Golkar Party (2009–14), which even nominated him as their Presidential candidate for the 2014 elections. He was considered Indonesia’s wealthiest person by Forbes magazine in 2006, the year of the mudflow disaster. To contain the impact of the mud flow disaster on his financial capital and political ambitions, Bakrie used his media companies to disseminate the message the mudflow was a natural, not human-induced, disaster. His family business even acquired two East Javanese media organisations, the newspaper Surabaya Post and the television station Arek TV, to influence local opinion.29 PT Lapindo Brantas also paid the local television station JTV to produce programmes to divert attention from or provide a positive spin on the disaster, although the actual productions may have diverged from Bakrie’s preferred storyline.30
The imagery and information steered by Bakrie Group-controlled organisations have also been interrupted by the wide-spread circulation of counter-images and discourses on the internet, including photographs of outdoor installations and performances in the mud-affected area by Indonesian artist-activist Dadang Christanto (b. 1957).31 In May 2014, Christanto installed 110 human-shaped
Indonesian Artivism in the Capitalocene 15 statues made from a combination of mud and white cement on one of the mud plains. The statues, who carried lost household objects in their hands, symbolised the various types of loss and displacement experienced by local communities, and were collectively titled Survival. The hands of the statues, held in front of their bodies with their palms turned upwards, were inspired by the meditative gestures of Buddha statues as well as the poses of people mourning, demonstrating, or waiting for compensation. As anticipated by the artist, the statues themselves were gradually covered in mud due to the continuously rising flood levels.32 Ironically, they also provided income to the displaced families, by becoming a major attraction in the emerging alternative economy of disaster tourism. The visits of groups of tourists with mobile phone cameras only increased the circulation of the types of images and discussions the Bakrie Group tried to avoid or minimise. Other, anonymous local art works included a larger-than-life papier-mâché replica of Aburizal Bakrie himself, which turned into a popular spot for taking selfies.33
The Art of Activism
Contemporary art’s focus on the present, as manifested in Christanto’s installations and performances in Sidoarjo, makes it a force for engaging with and reflecting on global and local manifestations of the Capitalocene. Following Terry Smith,34 the contemporary refers to ‘being in the present, beings who are present to each other, to the time they happen to be in’; similarly, contemporary art acknowledges ‘the power of the present’ and does not see it merely as a ‘transition from the past to the future’. This urgency of ‘presentness’ is not found in other forms or styles of art. Modern realism, for instance, aims at outlasting its ‘necessary contemporaneity’ and secure its place in eternity.35 Contemporary art establishes and thematises connections with people, objects, and environments in the here and now. It is less concerned with representing or imagining the conditions of the there and then, although its focus on presentness certainly does not exclude engagements with the past or imaginative ideas for the future. Some Indonesian contemporary artists provide critical responses to the historical Beautiful Indies style (Chapters 3, 4 and 7), while others use collaborative projects and spaces, digital technology, or hacking strategies for exploring utopian scenarios towards better natural and socio-political futures (Chapters 5, 6, 8 and 9).
Smith identifies various ‘contemporaneous currents’, each with their own artistic ways of engaging with the world, and different worlds within the world.36 These engagements can range from re-adaptations of modernist and postmodernist formats to anti-imperialist, nationalist, internationalist, or cosmopolitan imagery.37 Recent information and communication technology has facilitated the emergence of participatory, Do-It-Yourself (DIY) style art works, spaces, and networks.38 This last contemporaneous current, which includes the activities by Indonesian new media art collectives, is not about erasing difference but about respecting the identity of others and ‘[picturing] all of the worlds in which we live in their real relation to each other; work together to create and sustain a viable sense of place for each of us; [and] establish and maintain coeval connectivity between worlds
Artivism
and places’.39 It expresses a desire for coevality, or ‘the coeval commons’, which is deemed necessary for dealing with the major challenges of our age, including climate change and the risk of the ‘Sixth Extinction’.40
The creative individuals and collectives in this book, each with their own thematic foci and aesthetic strategies, tend to cross the boundaries between the three contemporaneous currents identified by Smith. I use the concept of ‘space of exception’, derived from one of Maryanto’s exhibitions (Chapter 3), to identify the different ways in which Indonesian visual artists have sought to politicise and historicise forms of environmental and social destruction, which themselves are often facilitated by extra-legal ‘states of exception’ in Giorgio Agamben’s sense.41 Through creative spaces of exception, the Indonesian artists enable themselves and their audiences to personalise highly complex and often rather abstract issues such as climate change. As mentioned, their creative efforts often constitute forms of ‘artivism’, as they are combined with direct or indirect forms of social activism. In artivism, art and activism are mutually dependent and cannot function or be approached in isolation from each other.42 Artivism moves people politically because of its capacity to move them aesthetically, and vice versa. Similarly, Gerald Raunig identifies various forms and degrees of ‘concatenation’ between art and revolution.43 To some extent, every form of art is shaped by and reflects surrounding social and political developments, and every type of politics has its own forms of aesthetic representation.44 Distinct from other forms of art or activism, in which the interrelation between aesthetics and politics may be overlooked or deliberately hidden or subdued, artivism acknowledges and actively explores and exploits the tensions in and possibilities of the interrelationship. This is succinctly expressed in a personal statement by dancer, choreographer, and co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto, Rodney Diverlus:
My art allows me to craft particular campaigns, initiatives, and actions in ways that are limitless, refreshing, and relatable. And my activism allows me to produce art that is not only socially relevant but also conscious of humanity. When I realized I was neither one nor the other, but both at once—an artivist—I really began to dig deeper and find innovative ways of working in each field. This dual reality is full of tension and contradictions though.45
Contemporary global activism strongly relies on artistic means to address and propose solutions for crises, including performance-based interventions that are shaped by and disseminated through social and mainstream media.46 According to Peter Weibel, these interventions build on explorations of performative, interactive, and participatory actions in various types of media by artists since the 1960s.47 Their creative experimentations have provided a model for social involvement in politics today. Weibel refers to this model in terms of ‘performative democracy’ and labels the civilians using performative means to have their voices heard as ‘artivists’.48 An example with global reach is the Occupy movement, which was instituted, strategised, and energised by artists, artist-run groups and non-professional creative actors in New York.49 Other much publicised examples
Indonesian Artivism in the Capitalocene 17 are the public protests and interventions of the Russian feminist punk-rock collective Pussy Riot.50 Indonesia has its own rich history of artivism, although these examples are less well known internationally.
While Weibel rightly refers to the predominance of performativity and digital connectivity in contemporary social and political life, his claims that global activism is ‘the first new art form of the twenty-first century’ and that artivists are ‘the new type of artists of the twenty-first century’ are far-fetched.51 Not all activism based on the strategic and tactical use of digital media with a global reach is creative, and not all new media art is activist in nature. In Indonesia and elsewhere, combinations of art and activism existed well before the arrival of the internet.52 This calls for contextualisation of both the potential and the limits of artivism’s performativity and connectivity, including its unavoidable contradictions.
Some Indonesian artists and art critics, including Moelyono, have used the Javanese concept of kagunan to refer to the historical interconnections between politics and aesthetics in local culture and creativity. Kagunan implies skill, knowledge, and beauty, but also utility and ‘moral, religious, authoritative, and ethical dimensions’.53 Consequently, ‘a work of art is not something separate from other aspects of life and is not something alienated from the community’.54 Similar approaches to art are embodied in the idea of artivism, but also in specific cultural interpretations of the very concept of ‘aesthetics’. Based on Terry Eagleton’s work, Nancy Love and Mark Mattern explain:
The term ‘aesthetics’ comes from the Greek aesthesis, and refers to ‘the whole region of human perception and sensation’ or ‘the whole of our sensate life together’. Aesthetic experience extends beyond the arts proper to include everyday life, the natural worlds, and the spiritual realm. Although aesthetic experience is conceptually distinct from artistic experience, it is often closely related in practice.55
According to Love and Mattern, art’s unique capacity to encapsulate ‘the different dimensions of what it is to be human’ within an otherwise highly pragmatic or instrumentalist environment is a substantial aspect of ‘doing democracy’.56 Although the Javanese and Western concepts both imply accessibility, art and artivism cannot escape the limitations and political implications of their own position in society.
Although Indonesian artist-activists may not explicitly refer to themselves as artivists, nor use similar Indonesian concepts to talk about their thoughts and actions, the fundamental interrelatedness of their art and activism invites further exploration, expansion, and specification of the field and idea of artivism. Indonesian artivists approach the interrelation between art and activism not as a given but as something that puts in motion a dynamic and never-conclusive process of politicising aesthetics and aestheticising politics.57 If the first act does something to the world of art, the second affects socio-political life. Either act can be used to show, hide, or change elements of the domain it is targeting, in accordance with the interests and aims of the actors involved.
Indonesian Artivism in the Capitalocene
This double process unavoidably entails challenges and contradictions that can undermine the aims and actions of the groups and individuals involved, but it also constitutes artivism’s very life force. By trying to work through the challenges and contradictions, Indonesian and other artivists seek to critically reflect on the world around them and to effect socio-political and/or artistic change. My case studies demonstrate that the politicisation of aesthetics does not annihilate art or reduce artivism to any other type of activism, as commonly argued by its critics,58 but it makes creativity appear in multiple, fluid, and mutually reinforcing forms and shapes. In these dynamic creative processes, art is not limited to a single object or moment but can be found in various manifestations across platforms, spaces, and times. It can also contribute to the preservation and reinterpretation of cultural heritage. This does not preclude necessary critical evaluation of the consistency, comprehensiveness, and skilfulness or other qualities of the creativity involved. I will discuss this type of evaluation by Indonesian artists, academics, and curators, and also add my own.
Early Foundations of Environmental Artivism in Indonesia
The work of Moelyono, one of Indonesia’s most senior and internationally regarded pioneers of participatory and environmental art, provides a useful starting point for demonstrating the historical layeredness of Indonesian artivism, and for problematising its status as a new or twenty-first-century phenomenon. The performativity and connectivity presented in his work date from before the arrival of the internet and social media, but have inspired many contemporary Indonesian environmental artivists to explore their own forms of performativity and connectivity, including digital forms. His work has provided the younger generation with a model for discussing environmental problems in connection with broader sociopolitical structures and issues, such as poverty, rather than in isolation.
Moelyono and others have referred to his artivism in terms of seni rupa penyadaran (‘conscientisation art’). His art projects, works, exhibitions, and writings are based on the principle of critical dialogue, inspired by ideas and practices such as Paolo Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’, Augusto Boal’s ‘Poetics of the Oppressed’ and ‘Liberation Theatre’ in the Philippines. Key to this approach is that people living in poverty or other disadvantaged circumstances should not be the object of art creation, but actively participate in it.59
Moelyono often works with village children as a point of access to and collaboration with local communities. His main strategies are to present himself as a ‘drawing teacher’ (guru nggambar),60 engage with local visual and performing art traditions, and use readily available media, ranging from wooden sticks for drawing on the beach to rattan for making sculptures. Through art creation, participants are expected to develop the means to reflect upon, communicate about, and suggest solutions to the main factors underlying their disadvantaged position.61
Moelyono started his informal participatory art classes with his 1985 project titled Kesenian Unit Desa (Village Unit Art; KUD) in his home regency of
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Title: Platonism in English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
Author: John Smith Harrison
Release date: February 26, 2024 [eBook #73049]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: The Columbia university press, 1903
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Columbia University
STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
PLATONISM IN ENGLISH POETRY
OF THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
PLATONISM IN ENGLISH POETRY
OF THE SIXTEENTH AND
SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
BY JOHN SMITH HARRISON
New York
THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, A LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., L .
1903
All rights reserved
C , 1903, B THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up, electrotyped, and published September, 1903.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co. Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U. S. A.
TOMy Father and My Mother
PREFACE
This essay was presented as a dissertation for the doctorate in Columbia University. It attempts to explain the nature of the influence of Platonism upon English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, exclusive of the drama. Its method is purely critical. It has not attempted to treat the subject from the standpoint of the individual poet, but has tried to interpret the whole body of English poetry of the period under survey as an integral output of the spiritual thought and life of the time.
In its interpretation of this body of poetry the essay has aimed to see Platonism in its true historical perspective, as it must have been understood by the poets, either as a system of philosophic thought held consciously in the mind, or as a more intimate possession of the spirit in its outlook upon life. The idea of Platonism which these poets had was that which Ficino had made known to Italy of the fifteenth century, and from Italy to the rest of Europe. Ficino saw Plato through two more or less refracting media. To him Plato was the “divine Plato,” the importance of whose work lay in its subtle affinity for the forms of Christian thought. He thus Christianized Plato’s philosophy. But this body of thought was that peculiar product resulting from the study of Plato’s “Dialogues” in the light of what latter-day criticism has named Neo-platonism, or that new form of Platonic philosophy which is expounded in the “Enneads” of Plotinus. But more than this. Ficino endeavored to reform the practice of love by the application of the Platonic doctrine of love and beauty to the lover’s passion. From his “Commentarium in Convivium,” which he translated into Italian, originate the various discussions of love and beauty from the Platonic standpoint which were carried on in dialogues and manuals of court etiquette throughout the sixteenth century. In this essay, consequently,
reference has been made to Ficino’s “Commentarium” on the points involved in the theory of love and beauty. The translations have been made directly from the Latin version of the commentary. On the more metaphysical side of Platonism the “Enneads” of Plotinus have been accepted as representative. The translation on page 77 is taken from Mr. Bigg’s “Neo-Platonism,” and those on pages 153, 154, 155 are from Thomas Taylor’s translation noted in the bibliography. In interpreting the “Enneads” I have accepted the explanation of his system by Mr. Whittaker in “The Neo-Platonists.” All the quotations from Plato’s “Dialogues” are from Jowett’s translation. In quoting from the poets the texts of the editions noted in the bibliography have been followed in details of spelling, punctuation, and the like.
In the preparation of the work hardly anything of a critical nature was found serviceable. In the notes to the works of the individual poets several detached references are to be gratefully mentioned, but no general appreciation of the part Platonism played in the work of the English poets was at hand. Mr. Fletcher’s article on the “Précieuses at the Court of Charles I,” in the second number of the “Journal of Comparative Literature,” appeared after this essay had gone to the printer.
I should like to acknowledge my thanks to Mr. W. H. Heck for his service of transcription in the British Museum Library and to Miss M. P. Conant for a similar kindness in research work in the Harvard College Library. To Professor George Edward Woodberry I am most deeply grateful for innumerable suggestions and invaluable advice. The work was undertaken at his suggestion, and throughout the past two years has progressed under his kindly criticism. But the help and inspiration which I have received from him antedate the inception of the essay, extending back to the earlier days of undergraduate life. The work is thus inseparably connected with the training in the study of literature which he has given, and his help in its completion is only an episode in a long series of kindnesses which he has been ever willing to show.
O , N.J., June 1, 1903.
I C V
I. H
II. T
III. C
T L
I. H L
II. N S
III. E S M
B
PLATONISM IN ENGLISH POETRY
CHAPTER I
I C V
I. HOLINESS
The fundamental doctrine of Platonism as it was understood throughout the period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the reality of a heavenly beauty known in and by the soul, as contrasted with an earthly beauty known only to the sense. In this the Christian philosophic mind found the basis for its conception of holiness. Christian discipline and Platonic idealism blended in the “Faerie Queene” in the legend of the Red Cross Knight.
The underlying idea taught by Spenser in the first book is that holiness is a state of the soul in which wisdom or truth can be seen and loved in and for its beauty. In the allegorical scheme of his work Una stands for the Platonic wisdom, σοφία, or ἀρετή, and a sight of her in her native beauty constitutes the happy ending of the many struggles and perplexities that the Red Cross Knight experiences in his pursuit of holiness. The identification of Una with the Platonic idea of truth or wisdom is not merely a matter of inference left for the reader to draw; for Spenser himself is careful to inform us of the true nature of the part she plays in his allegory. Una is presented as teaching the satyrs truth and “trew sacred lore.” (I. vi. 19; I. vi. 30.) When the lion, amazed at her sight, forgets his fierceness, Spenser comments:
“O how can beautie maister the most strong, And simple truth subdue avenging wrong?”
(I. iii.
When Una summons Arthur to the rescue of the Red Cross Knight from the Giant and the Dragon, Spenser opens his canto with a reflection on the guiding power of grace and truth amid the many perils of human life:
“Ay me, how many perils doe enfold The righteous man, to make him daily fall? Were not, that heavenly grace doth him uphold, And stedfast truth acquite him out of all. Her love is firme, her care continuall, So oft as he through his owne foolish pride, Or weaknesse is to sinfull bands made thrall.”
(I. viii
Here Arthur is meant by grace and Una by truth. In accordance with the same conception of Una’s nature Satyrane is made to wonder
“at her wisedome heavenly rare, Whose like in womens wit he never knew;
Thenceforth he kept her goodly company, And learnd her discipline of faith and veritie.”
(I. vi.
Furthermore, she is represented as guiding the Red Cross Knight to Fidelia’s school, where he is to taste her “heavenly learning,” to hear the wisdom of her divine words, and to learn “celestiall discipline.” (I. x. 18.) In making these comments and in thus directing the course of the action of his poem Spenser presents in Una the personification of truth or wisdom.
But he does more than this; he presents her not only as wisdom, but as true beauty. Spenser is so thoroughly convinced of the truth of that fundamental idea of Platonic ethics, that truth and beauty are identical, that he shows their union in the character of Una, in whom, as her name signifies, they are one. Plato had taught that the highest beauty which the soul can know is wisdom, which, though invisible to sight, would inflame the hearts of men in an unwonted degree could there be a visible image of her. In his “Phædrus” he had stated that “sight is the most piercing of our bodily senses; though not by that is wisdom seen; her loveliness would have been transporting if there had been a visible image of her.” (250.) Convinced, as Spenser was, of the spiritual nature of the beauty of wisdom, he carefully avoids dwelling upon any detail of Una’s physical beauty. The poetic form of allegory, through which his ideas were to be conveyed, required the personification of truth, and the romantic character of chivalry demanded that his Knight should have a lady to protect. The progress of the action of the poem, moreover, made necessary some reference to the details of Una’s form and feature. (Cf. I. iii. 4–6; vi. 9.) But in no instance where the physical form of Una is brought to notice is there any trace of the poet’s desire to concentrate attention upon her physical charms. In this respect Una stands distinctly apart from all his other heroines, and especially Belphœbe. And yet Spenser has taken the greatest care to show that the source of Una’s influence over those that come into her presence lies in the power exerted by her beauty; but this is the beauty of her whole nature, a
penetrating radiance of light revealing the soul that is truly wise. Indeed, when Spenser has the best of opportunities to describe Una, after she has laid aside the black stole that hides her features, he contents himself with a few lines, testifying only to their radiant brilliancy:
“Her angels face As the great eye of heaven shyned bright, And made a sunshine in the shadie place.”
(I. iii.
In other instances he directs our attention to the power which the mere sight of her has upon the beholder. Her beauty can tame the raging lion and turn a ravenous beast into a strong body-guard who finds his duty in the light of her fair eyes:
“It fortuned out of the thickest wood A ramping Lyon rushed suddainly, Hunting full greedie after salvage blood; Soone as the toy all virgin he did spy, With gaping mouth at her ran greedily, To have attonce devour’d her tender corse: But to the pray when as he drew more ny, His bloudie rage asswaged with remorse, And with the sight amazd, forgat his furious forse.”
“The Lyon would not leave her desolate,
From her faire eyes he tooke commaundement, And ever by her lookes conceived her intent.”
(I. iii.
(I. iii.
The wild-wood gods stand astonished at her beauty, and in their wonder pity her desolate condition. (I. vi. 9–12.) Old Sylvanus is smitten by a sight of her. In her presence he doubts the purity of his own Dryope’s fairness; sometimes he thinks her Venus, but then on further reflection he recalls that Venus never had so sober mood; her image calls to mind—
“His ancient love, and dearest Cyparisse,
How fair he was, and yet not faire to this.”
(I. vi.
To behold her lovely face the wood nymphs flock about and when they have seen it, they flee away in envious fear, lest the contrast of its beauty may disgrace their own. (I. vi. 18.)
By these dramatic touches Spenser very skilfully suggests to his reader the high nature of Una’s beauty. It has a power to win its way upon the brute creation, and it has a severity and radiance that set it off from the beauty of physical form possessed by the wood nymphs and even by the great goddess of love, Venus.
The most important consideration that bears upon the question of Una’s beauty is found in the method which Spenser has used to indicate how the Red Cross Knight attains to a knowledge of it. One reason why the people of the wood, the nymphs, the fauns, and the satyrs, were permitted to see the celestial beauty of Una unveiled lay in the fact that through their experiences a means was provided by the poet to quicken the imagination into a sense of its pure nature. But the Knight, though he had journeyed with her throughout a great portion of her “wearie journey,” had never been able to see her face in its native splendor, hidden, as it had always been, from his sight by the black veil which Una wore. The deep conceit which Spenser here uses points in the direction of Platonism; for there it was taught that wisdom could be seen only by the soul. This is a fundamental truth, present everywhere in Plato, in the vision of beauty that rises before the mind at the end of the dialectic of the “Symposium,” in the species of divine fury that accompanies the recollection of the ideal world in the presence of a beautiful object, as analyzed in the “Phædrus,” and in the “Hymn of the Dialectic” in the “Republic” by which the soul rises to a sight of the good. (VII. 532.) In the “Phædo” the function of philosophy is explained to lie in the exercise by the soul of this power of spiritual contemplation of true existence. (82, 83.) In Spenser this conception is further illustrated by the part which the schooling, received by the Red Cross Knight on the Mount of Contemplation, played in the perfection of his mental vision. Up to the time when the Knight comes to the Mount he is, as the aged sire says, a “man of earth,” and his spirit needs to be purified of all the grossness of sense. (I. x. 52.) When this has been accomplished, the Knight is prepared to
“ see the way,
That never yet was seene of Faeries sonne. ”
(I. x. 5
While on this Mount he is initiated into a knowledge of the glories of the Heavenly Jerusalem, and through this experience he is made aware of the relative insignificance of that beauty which he had thought the greatest to be known on earth. He thus says to the aged man, Heavenly Contemplation, who has revealed this vision to him:
“Till now, said then the knight, I weened well, That great Cleopolis, where I have beene, In which that fairest Faerie Queene doth dwell, The fairest Citie was, that might be seene; And that bright towre all built of christall cleene, Panthea, seemd the brightest thing, that was: But now by proofe all otherwise I weene; For this great Citie that does far surpas, And this bright Angels towre quite dims that towre of glas.”
(I. x. 5
With his soul filled with the radiance of this vision of beauty, his eyes dazed—
“Through passing brightnesse, which did quite confound His feeble sence, and too exceeding shyne. So darke are earthly things compard to things divine ”
(I. x. 6
the Red Cross Knight descends from the Mount; and when after the completion of his labors he sees Una on the day of her betrothal, he wonders at a beauty in her which he has never before seen. Una has now laid aside her black veil, and shines upon him in the native undimmed splendor of truth.
“The blazing brightnesse of her beauties beame, And glorious light of her sunshyny face To tell, were as to strive against the streame. My ragged rimes are all too rude and bace, Her heavenly lineaments for to enchace. Ne wonder; for her owne deare loved knight, All were she dayly with himselfe in place, Did wonder much at her celestiall sight: Oft had he seene her faire, but never so faire dight.”
(I. xii. 2
The contribution of Platonism to the formation of the ideal of holiness can now be easily recognized. The discipline of the Red Cross Knight in the House of Holiness is twofold. In the practice of the Christian graces
—faith, hope, and charity—the Knight is perfected in the way of the righteous life. He is a penitent seeking to cleanse his soul of the infection of sin. On the Mount of Heavenly Contemplation he exercises his soul in the contemplative vision of the eternal world. But the emphasis laid by Platonism upon the loveliness of that wisdom which is the object of contemplation results in quickening the imagination and in stirring the soul to realize the principle in love. This is the exact nature of the experience of the Red Cross Knight at the end of his journey. On the Mount of Heavenly Contemplation he has a desire to remain in the peaceful contemplation of heaven:
“O let me not (quoth he) then turne againe Backe to the world, whose joyes so fruitlesse are; But let me here for aye in peace remaine, Or streight way on that last long voyage fare, That nothing may my present hope empare. ”
(I. x. 6
But the aged sire, Heavenly Contemplation, reminds him of his duty to free Una’s parents from the dragon. (I. x. 63.) Obedient but still purposing to return to the contemplative life (I. x. 64.), the Knight descends; and in the performance of his duty he gains the reward that the contemplative life brings. “But he,” says Plato, “whose initiation is recent, and who has been the spectator of many glories in the other world, is amazed when he sees any one having a godlike face or any bodily form which is the expression of divine beauty.” (“Phædrus,” 251.) Thus it is that the Red Cross Knight
“Did wonder much at her celestiall sight.”
(I. xii. 2
With that sight comes the one joy of his life after the many struggles experienced in the perfection of his soul in holiness.
“And ever, when his eye did her behold, His heart did seeme to melt in pleasures manifold.”
