MADE WIANTA: PERNYATAAN DARI MATA PAKU (STATEMENT IN NAILS)
“Finishing one of my works is an important moment for me. At that moment I feel like a bee that stings and then dies. Then the work is finished. It cannot be changed, improved, or re-worked.” Made Wianta.
1. Politik Visual dari Pematian Tubuh (The Visual Politics of Corporeal Death)
Wianta explores – often perilously - visual strategies that are both expansive and complex. An Indonesian artist who has traveled through many cultures, he transforms all that he touches. With Indonesia such a melting pot of different values, and suborder of these same values, Wianta has become an artist who on the one hand is subservient to these values, yet on the other hand is free to move, like a rat finding its own way, through the world of art. And during his various journeys, Wianta has maintained an awareness of his position amidst the flow of trans local traffic that is such an inescapable mark of globalisation.
For Wianta, art is a medium for comprehending the volatile border between peace and conflict caused by value difference. Wianta considers his visual work as though he were blind. From this extreme position of blindness, he carries out visual work through ‘pematian tubuh’, or corporeal death. This negative logic is the rationalisation of the ability to see and the inability to see - blindness as relative awareness. This transcendent aspect of blindness, or this ‘pematian tubuh’ is the moment at which the body develops its own visual language, quite unexpectedly and surprisingly. Effectively this also becomes a way for the individual to avoid becoming a subject of hegemony in the quantitative trans local traffic scenario previously mentioned.
The consequence of this blindness is an intensification of the qualitative and quantitative processes in the work that he is carrying out. The body is no longer a ‘technical protagonist’, or even an ‘intuitive machine’ that monitors its own movement and intentions. Often Wianta uses small forms (points, lines, barbs, nails, wire or pins) in his work, in a celebration of detail that brings about a transformation in which the quantitative becomes qualitative in his work. Repetitive motifs, of measured depth and frequency, serve to energise and laugh in the face of conflict. Values politicking is not meant to destroy, rather to arrive at the same viewpoint in the understanding of difference.
“Pematian tubuh” is Made Wianta’s conceptually aesthetic means to release himself from the limits and the hegemony of technique. The concept can also be seen as a way forward for those of us who enact values as if in a locked safe. Developments in Wianta’s recent work do not represent the technical skills that his body has become able to perform. He has used media to transform 3 dimensional objects into 2 dimensions, and not without visual risk has opened a space for the politics of meaning emerging from public icons.
2. Prajurit Peradaban dan Makna Waktu (Civilization Warrior and The Meaning of Time)
In the work of artists today, there is a movement towards the idea that “all media have the potential for visual provocation in so far as they are able to popularise that which is enchanting about them”. Publishing and distribution is not generally managed by individual artists, rather by many hands in control of the audio-visual media necessary to communicate, document, and reproduce artists’ work. ‘Spirit’, as meant by Hegel, died along with the introduction of digital media, and as a result the exclusiveness of art has been relinquished to the fashion industry.
The bodily aspect of art, in which all artists display the wonder of their character and manual dexterity, is in a state of shock. This is an age in which artists are ganging together and burying their ‘bodily art’, and subsequently there has arisen a kind of ‘new panic’: the rush to use media and tools to replace the manual body, which was previously so revered, due to its being owned by a human - a ‘high’ creature, capable of perceiving the world and its history in a rational way.
This state of affairs would appear to sound the death knell of the world of art. But today artists are striving to find again the meaning of time through what has been termed ‘contemporary art’. Realism has become the central import of the question: “What is time?” Left wing views that a century ago were most responsible for constructing the concepts behind realism, are now considered bankrupt, and the personal dimension that used to form the basic language of every artist has been left to atrophy. That is why realism is once again under review. Realism is no longer seen as the result of the ‘single eye’ of a single individual’s understanding. Rather it is the many eyes boasted by respective media, materials, and the objects that surround us, that contain within them the threshold between the seen and the unseen, the felt and the unfelt. The meaning of time itself is being re-sought in order to give a name to this new relationship.
‘Sharp’, the theme of an exhibition by Made Wianta at Gaya Gallery (Ubud, Bali) 2008, was a conceptual exhibition, and at the same time a statement in the context of this new realism. The phenomenon of humans surrounded by objects is here no longer a truth relating to the idea of humans as central protagonists who determine their world. Rather, humans are the commodities of the objects that surround them, with consumerism just one phenomenon that supports this idea. Objects do not only have eyes in so far as they borrow and then control the eyes of humans, but they also possess a certain ‘sharpness’ as they are in a sense weapons.
“Prajurit Peradaban” (Civilization Warrior), a work by Made Wianta using nails, appears like thousands of soldiers of unknown allegiance and unknown strategic intent. The nails are at play amidst several layers, and arse strategically raked in visual gradations. There is a play of colour, shadow, and gradations of layer. The result is a show of strength resulting from structural intensity in which detail can be appreciated above a tangible density of form on the face of the piece.
“Prajurit Peradaban” is a statement based on the idea of the ‘mata paku’ (‘nail’ in Indonesian – literally ‘nail eye!’) as an eye that has been poked. It is as though this eye will create a view of the world that displays those of our wounds that never seem to heal, so that we might reflect on this.
3. Realisme dari Ruang Pribadi (Realism in the Private Realm)
Broken glass covers and emanates from a mattress, the kind used for sleeping, and glass also covers its pillows. We do not know exactly whether we sleep here in order to rest or to wound our bodies. Indeed, we do not know where these pieces of glass come from, although they appear to spring from the mattress in this work of Made Wianta entitled Glass Room.
Wianta probably feels it is not necessary to ask where the glass comes from. For Wianta, the completion of a work is like a bee that stings and then dies. Perhaps when we sleep our bodies effuse all of the memories recorded throughout the day, and these memories become like shards of glass emanating from our mattress. Will the glass-covered mattress wound our bodies? Or do the shards of glass indeed emerge from our bodies only to become snagged in the weave of the mattress cover and its pillows? All is a kind of realism born of a personal space that stores time, events and memories. In this personal space we are not sure whether that which is represented is a personal space that has been wounded or a personal space that wounds. This kind of realism does not avoid ambiguity in order to overcome any ideological hegemony; it rather upholds ambiguity so that we remain suspended consciously between rationality and provocation in a game of visual politics.
4. Biografi Hujan dan Matematika Visual (Rain Biography and Visual Mathematics)
On a white canvas, thousands of pins shower down like rain. This rain does not make us wet, or flood our homes. Featured in two of Wianta’s works, the rain is a metaphor comprising new meanings for the visual weave of selected materials based on the same kind of consciousness, namely small items embedded within a large form. The visual effect of this choice of material stems from their measured quantity, which converts into quality. It is as though Wianta exercises visual mathematics in order to carry his work to this new level - not only quantity, but also the distance and depths between one item and another. The transformation of quantity to quality introduces a new voice, like thousands of buzzing insects. Biografi Hujan (Rain Biography) by Made Wianta is like a series of stories being told by thousands of small voices, pure and sharp. Here he is more reflective and poetic if compared to previous works. Biografi Hujan is like a distant and pure voice imbued with longing, and we are taught to long again, to wait patiently, to wait for that moment when the purest voice will whisper to us. At moments like this, it is as though we can feel the presence of that ‘spirit’, but not the spirit meant by Hegel that can only be explained in its own terms. This spirit is the spirit – in small letters – that has perhaps been hiding within our pores and that we have been unable to hear. It is the spirit that strives to remove longing, to restore the will to live and feelings of reciprocity. It is the spirit that does not reside in the battlefield engulfed in a war of conflicting truths.
By Afrizal Malna (O House Lab Curator)
Glass Room - 100 x 200 x 35 cm - Mixed Media - 2008
Civilization Warrior - 240 x 360 cm - Mixed Media - 2008
Rain Biography - 240 x 360 cm - Mixed Media - 2008
Rain Biography - 240 x 360 cm - Mixed Media - 2008
