(non-chronological) Archive: 2005-2011

9/27/20

notes on art and life

Cita-cita seni tahun 50-60an (fluxus, situationism, process art, minimalism) pokoknya art di post-mo term, yang pengennya selalu meruntuhkan perbatasan antara "art" and "life", "live very well today [Foster, 2017)." intinya ok uda sukses...perbatasan itu sudah hilang...penonton gak perlu lagi karena ya semuanya uda jadi seniman dan produser barang seni. Gak perlu "aesthetic form" lagi. Trus strategi kedepannya apa? mau dibawa kemana lagi kah "hidupseni" ini?

Masih banyak seniman yang masih naif mungkin bilang "ah gak perlu mikirin art atau hidup juga kali....gak perlu di permasalahkan.." Tapi tetep aja kalo ada donor dateng mau fund suatu grup atau seniman dengan jumlah yang besar ..."wah wah ok yuk kita pikirin gimana jadiin apa yang kita lakukan ini bisa jadi seni dan di presentasikan sebagai "art"". sama aja boong!!!

ada juga seniman yang kl bikin art pasti ada nada "ironisnya" atau "becanda" karena kalo di suruh untuk mempertanggung jawabkan "action"nya ini ke dalam ranah social dan politik ... dia psti ciut dan akan bilang "lah kan gw lagi becanda". Teman! hidup itu gak b'canda...adanya kematian di dalam hidup ini! orang mati di hidup ini bukan metafor tapi "literal". Akibat dari b'candaan elu bisa aja ada orang yang bener-bener akan mati.

intinya gitu kalo art uda masuk ranah "hidup" berarti action action nya dia itu nyata...saking nyatanya orang bisa mati kalo nyentuh benda tersebut. jadi artlife itu "serius" bukan untuk di becandaa-in. tapi tentunya kita masi bisa ketawa-ketiwi - cuma poin gw adalah gak boleh "ciut" dan seniman mesti bisa mempertanggung jawabkan aksi-aksi yang mereka buat di ranah hidup ini dimana "metafor" itu masi ada sangat lah "deceiving".

adanya masalah baru di dunia hidupseni ini yaitu semua pameran art rata-rata dibilang "proses" dan bentuknya uda kaya ruang sekolah...ruang kelas lah....komunitas lah...apalah terserah...lagi lagi "ciut" kalo orang nanya...ini bentuknya apa? mana bentuknya? ya ini gak bisa dibeli pak/bu kan "proses". dari sini pun uda keliatan ciut lagi sama "bentuk" dan tanggung jawab akan "bentuk" yang bisa diambil bawa pulang kaya beli kursi. artlife macem ini tetep aja gak berfungsi!!! padahal klaimnya besar yaitu perubahan sosial. ah butut kalo perubahan sosialnya gak bisa dipake dan dibawa pulang.

ok trus kemanakah jalur berikutnya?

ke beneran "revolusi" dan "sosial tranformation" secara sungguh sungguh kita beneran melakukan transformasi sosial....ini tantangan besar gw sebagai seniman. nah gw lagi mencari jawabannya di buku ini dan smoga-moga ada:

Elizabeth Ellsworth, Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy, and the Power of Address, 1997

karena gw pengajar dan tuntutan dosen adalah meriset - jadi ya sy lagi bener-bener kepukul sama pemikiran dan kritisisme akan seni diatas tadi. gw nyesel berpartisipasi dalam meruntuhkan batas antara art and life tadi. Jadi mulai sekarang gw uda harus serius dan sungguh sungguh bertanggung jawab akan luluh runtuhnya batas antara seni dan hidup. ya itu gw harus bertanggung jawab dan mulai melakukan dan aktif di ranah social transformation dan really educating dan menggunakan education dan birokrasi itu sendiri sebagai medium.

9/5/20

notes on xenotropicsbioperversity

i have solo show coming soon but now postponed because of the pandemic ... the show has been curated by the wonderfull Mitha Budhyarto....and below is some notes to the basic premis of the show

xenotropics

The video montage part of the work aims to present a reimagining of 19^th century tropical paradise in painting from nusantara … from the absurdist surrealist point of view.

What I mean by absurdism is rooted in surrealism, specifically in the movement’s interest in animal, natural history, biology, organs, evolution, and Charles Darwin. We can see very active in biomorphic works by Yves Tanguy, Desmond Morris, Hans Bellemer, Dorethea Tanning, and Jean Painleve nature film.

Painleve film is interesting and new to me....because his film takes us to the weirdness and darkness of nature. The use of camera and the setting of his film in the studio ask us to see the absurdities of the nonhuman world…yet he still able to maintain their explicit absurdness, sexually-charged abject, and that there is this strange pleasure we can derive from looking at this world. There is a hidden perversion in seeing this nature via his work. And this perversity, confusion, mysticism of the natural world is little explored in the mainstream representation of nature, or academic natural sciences illustration, or natural wildlife programming.

If you can just take a look at this 19^th century illustration of a bird of paradise. The bird is clearly a well-mannered creature. The “manner” of the bird is “humanized” and thus anthropocentric. It is sober, and hygienic. And the reality of perverse construction of this bird in natural history is missing. Painleve film, or surrealist zoology, on the other hand, encourages me to practice “looking” at nature’s strangeness outside the heteronormalized, recognizable, highly articulated lens.

So, I use this surrealist zoological lens to intercept within the images of colonial history and representation of paradise in my video montage work. I’m making my version of Dorothea Tanning and the likes but with the content drawn specifically from colonial representation of Indonesian archipelago in painting and natural history illustration. Xenotropics side of this show is basically a hallucination within the tropical island. Ok that’s what I mean by absurdism.

Why?

A return to absurdist dadaist language of surrealism is a strategy to respond to mainstream environmentalism. The campaign of environmentalism has been really using the voices of sentimentalism, gloom and terror, a sense of urgency. There’s nothing wrong with this…but what I’m asking is: is there any other way of saying outside of this narrative? Is there any other alternative energy? Luckily there is. I’m happy to find Nicole Seymour’s Bad Environmentalism, where she reconsiders the role of humor, absurdism, irony, and to add weirdness, absurdism of surrealist zoology into the discussion – as a way to point the irony within the mainstream environmental projects. As you can see in this satire comic on Al Gore:

In short, my work aims to provide a childlike, absurdist, grotesque hallucination, fear and loathing kind of tone or voice to “serious” issues such as biodiversity loss, climate change, etc.

Here, we have extinction rebellion website. It’s great! And I mean it. It says clearly in the illustration here that climate change is an urgent matter. Time is running out and so on and so on. What I’m about to point out, however small and minor is the fact that why “only” the human skull is present in the illustration? Why not other nonhuman head skull? Why not insect or butterfly, birds or rat? Or cockroach? Or plants? Because the message is this: the matter is urgent only as far as human involve. If the extinction does not involve human and only mice then it is not urgent. It is a problem because this activism is also eco-anthropocentric. I know it is urgent, but it doesn’t make “me” want to change my lifestyle and move with them. It makes me wanna prepare my own grave instead.

Bioperversity: oh david

The title is basically a take on biodiversity. it is an assemblage of biology and perversity...so my aim is to offer a pervert guide to biology ...it is also important to note why a "pervert" is to highlight the fact that im not an expert but a pervert or the ignorant or just a viewer or user of biology. in fact i was a very bad student of biology lesson throughout my primary to highschool year. the only thing that attracts me in biology lesson, and like most boyz, was the sexual reproductive lesson. and the boyz watch porn justified as a "research".

And also, my work for this part looks very sexual. Is it intentional or not? well it is open to interpretation. but certainly im not trying to normalized it.

But what I want to discuss is this:

When one speaks about animal and or natural life in art, or the wildlife, we cannot dismiss the fact that there is National Geographic Channel, Discovery Channel, or other wildlife programming on TV. I am too a fan of this program, since I was a kid. And one of my favorite is definitely David Attenborough, but obviously with a cautious reminder of white heteronormative construction of nature by feminist who studies in postcolonialism. I’m not supposed to just enjoy the show. I have to be critical now. And this knowledge is cursed!

Ok so here’s why:

1. According to Nicole Seymour, “Scholarship on nature/wildlife programming tends to favor media texts with ‘proper’… moralist bent”

2. They always encourage us to “love” or “care” for the animals or nature.

Seymour ask important question “what would it look like to ‘do’ environmentalism… without love, or at least without lovingness? … What if we liked animals and nature for their queerness or repulsiveness, not their nobility or beauty? What if environmental activists and scholars stopped advocating education and explored, if only temporarily, ignorance?”

That’s it! my work aims to answer these questions.

Thoughts on the representation of moluska in natural history

ok so i've been looking at the non human world or the natural world at the level of representation and specifically from a lens of a pervert. or at least how nature is perverted in natural history context. and from this my aim is to offer a kind of "pervert's guide to the nonhuman world" and also maybe via this perverted and sexually charged lens we can understand colonial history of the indonesian archipelago.

my starting point is how mainstream natural science intend to portray nature as a "normal" abject...and it is devoid from the fact that some, or, well actually.... most flowers or shell.... looks like a vagina, or anus, or penis, or shit......so i want to draw our attention to this detail and how some natures imitates the look of our (human) vital organs. or are we imitates them?

i havent get the full detail of Linnaeus description of the venus diones shell in his Systema Naturae book yet.... but here is an interesting fact:

Linnaeus' description of Venus dione is even more vivid in his Fundamenta Testaceologiae ("Foundations of the Study of Mollusks"), published in 1771. Gould regards it as "one of the most remarkable paragraphs in the history of systematics." After stating that the hinge joining the two valves of the clam shell is a defining characteristic, Linnaeus writes Protuberantiae insigniores extra cardinem vocantur Nates, "the notable protuberances above the hinge are called buttocks" (§ IX, p. 30). The adjacent parts then are enumerated, each after the female's sexual anatomy ut Metaphora continuetur ("so that the metaphor may be continued"). Above the nates (what now is termed the umbones) is the anus (lunule). Below are the hymen (the ligament connecting the two valves), vulva and labia (escutcheon), and pubes, culminating in a mons veneris. In Table II, Figure 16, these parts all are identified by an accompanying illustration (left): a is the vulva; d, the inner labia; e, rima, "the narrow slit" of Juvenal (Satires, III.97); f, the nates; and g, the anus. It all must have seemed a ribald testaceological jest.

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/aconite/dacosta.html

another interesting finding for this search, is the latin name given to this blue flower from Ternate by a 17th century botanist Jacob Breyne. it's called "Flos Clitoridis ternatensibus". In english called: the Clitoral Flower from Ternate. and then in 1737 it was Linneaus again who established "Clitoria" as the genus of this flower.

to be continued ....

2/26/14

CEMETI RESIDENCE

2014

click here

_____

10/30/13

LONG WIRE INSTRUMENT ADAPTED FROM WUKIR'S DRAWING
2013 ... [click here]

Site-driven sound:
five Long wires tensioned throughout the room extend from a central point on the floor. The wires produce spectral tone when played by an operator, who wears rubber gloves to increase friction and ‘excite’ the instrument through consistent movement. The strings not only produce sound, but also fragment and cut the space of the room into sections that must be carefully navigated by stepping over and ducking under. The wires also connect to the network of signals used to trigger electronic samples in Dylan Martorell’s ‘Drum Plough’.

MATERIALS: long wires, tin cans, rubber gloves, rosin
PERFORMERS: the artist, Wukir Suryadi, Joel Stern, Kristi Monfries
DEVELOPED FOR: Instrument Builders Project
CURATOR(S): Joel Stern, Kristi Monfries
PERFORMED/EXHIBITED AT: Indonesian Contemporary Art Network, Jogjakarta, 2013

10/28/13

A PROPOSAL FOR A PERMANENT FIXTURE AT ARK GALERIE IN TWO EDITIONS: SUPERLIGHT
2013...click here

In A Proposal for A Permanent Fixture at Ark Galerie in Two Editions: Superlight, Melbourne-based Indonesian artist, Ardi Gunawan duplicates the mezzanine floor of Ark Galerie and creates an exact replica of his earlier work, Superlight. Superlight is a sculptural work that consists of an assemblage of detritus that Ardi had selected according to distinct categories. For Ardi, this act of categorizing is important as it emphasizes art practice as a staged practice that is built according to specific parameters, rather than arising from the artist's intuition alone.

 For this exhibition, Ardi utilized a variety of leftover items such as building materials, furniture, soft toys and used fabrics, reconfiguring and assembling them until they reach a balanced point. By doing so, he questions the convention of sculpture as a solid and permanent entity that stands undisturbed by chance. In doubling his earlier work, Ardi also becomes involved in a critical act of self-parody. The technique of parody is further employed in creating a replica of the gallery space as a response to its commercial function as well as modernist, "white cube" design, with its usual preference to authentic works that cannot be duplicated.

WRITER: Mitha Budhyarto
CONTRIBUTOR: Spiros Panigirakis and Keith Wong
PERFORMER: Nadine and Sherine Hassan
EXHIBITED AT: Ark Galerie, Jakarta, 2013

luckily theres no inside no inside ( brick muppet filth face anxiety ladder . emotion traffic reenactment jakarta body )...click here
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POEM-TITLE: Michael Farrell
COSTUME DESIGN: with Lingkan Pantow and Jimmy Gunawan (Jilsi)
PERFORMERS: Sophia Cowen, Tim Darbyshire, Tom Davies, Helen Grogan, John Hewitt, Britt Salt, Lisa Stewart
POSTER: James Ramli
EXHIBITED AT: Open Archive, Melbourne, 2011
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luckily theres no inside re-enacts parts of a performance that i initiated in 2009. The 2009 work, entitled: Sculptural Relations: embodiment, forces, event, and material performance operated through a number of invited artists performing specific tasks, roles, and scores. Mimmo Cozzolino unexpectedly photo-documented this performance. In thinking about how to distribute the re-presentation, re-interpretation, and re-modification of these images, i reconsider the form of soft sculpture and stuffed toys.

For Open Archive, i have constructed muppet costumes inspired by the photo-documentation that Cozzolino captured during my performance. The documentation, stills from Sculptural Relations, depicts Melbourne-based artists Bianca Hester, throwing a brick, Spiros Panigirakis throwing a plinth, and Masato Takasaka walking around with a ladder on his head. From these images, i have collaborated with my parents - who founded and operated Jilsi; a small toy business specializing in rocking animals - to transform them into muppet costumes. Employed models were wearing these at the opening and through the course of the exhibition.

This new project continues/discontinues a deviation from Sculptural Relations and enters an experiment with self-parody, fandom, identity, caricature, bad taste, documentary and fiction, commercial merchandising and perversion. It will form part of ongoing projects and will be adapted into a B-grade horror/sci-fi short film, with a screenplay written in collaboration with an ex-employee of the Indonesian Film Censor Institution based in Jakarta.

9/29/11

/////////DESPERATE EXHIBITION MAKING TECHNIQUES/////////////////
Y3K Gallery, Melbourne
2010

In this exhibition, artists Ardi Gunawan and Nikos Pantazopoulos took as a starting point the model of a studio residency, in which situations and actions are developed on-site. The show involved an instructional script that explored various methods of developing ephemeral sculptures and images of sex, labor, power and institutional and social space through a collaborative and participatory framework.

4/9/11

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Intermezzo - 2010
exhibited within the group show "to give time to time" curated by Domenico de Clario, Queen's Theater, Adelaide. Click here

7/8/10

SCULPTURAL RELATIONS: EMBODIMENT, EVENTS, FORCES, AND MATERIAL PERFORMANCE, 2009.
PERFORMANCE WITH: BIANCA HESTER, SPIROS PANIGIRAKIS, MICHAEL FARRELL, TAMSIN GREEN, MERRYN LLOYD, SAM MARTIN, MASATO TAKASAKA, ARDI GUNAWAN.(Images here)

3/11/10

Instant Network - 2010
Organized around the proposition of a micro-group exhibition that could be embedded within a large mass of a particular curated group exhibition (which was realized for Adaptation), "Instant Network" presents a non-chronological display of object/prop/time-based artworks on a horizontal plane taken from one of the existing - movable - walls of the gallery (enacting as a large-scale plinth).

"Instant Network" included contributions by Kristinare Anthony, Brook Shanti Fenner, Hind Habib, Bianca Hester, Therese Keogh, Andrew Kershaw, John Kyritsis, Tom Nicholson, Spiros Panigirakis, Nikos Pantazopoulos, Lachlan Petrus, Long Pham, Catherine Pieper, Light Projects: Tamsin Green & Leslie Eastman, Nellie Rogerson, Utopian Slumps, Julien Tuckett, and Hae Young Yoon.

Adaptation was a group exhibition curated by Mark McDean which involved works by: Tim Craker, Ardi Gunawan, Jordan Marani, Louise Paramor, Brie Trenerry. This project was presented by the Seven Thousand Oaks: Festival of Art and Sustainability. Click here...

1/23/10

Untitled-clogged passage, 2006.found site: BuildingB; level 5, Monash University.

Images here.

11/2/09

PROPPING, WEDGING IN FOUR MOVEMENTS - 2009; for
gone in no time gone in no time - artist residency series devised by Domenico de Clario
@ Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide.
Images click here...

9/11/09

Influence(s) - with Nikos Pantazis
2009 at LIGHT PROJECTS.

The exhibition is informed by and contributes to Nikos Pantazis’ ongoing project.
Here, i taught Nikos how to use the I Ching,
which involves throwing coins or dice and we
made a video / document with the material gathered.
Subsequently, we developed a score
using the I Ching as a way to devise encounters
with the materials that are available on site.

Click the image above to see the video of the actions in Influence(s).

CONNECTIVES:
Many Things Seen At Once