INDONESIAN IDLE
AKA Bob ‘Sick’ for Dummies or the Other Way Around
Plus the Ups & Downs of S. Teddy D. & Ugo Untoro
1991 - 2005

1. Doing Things despite Whichever Self

We find that at present the human race is divided politically into one wise man, nine knaves, and ninety fools out of every hundred. That is, by an optimistic observer.

(T.H. White, The Book Of Merlyn, 1977)

“All I want is to be an artist,” Bob said.

It has become a routine with him.

He had said that three billion times before in the course of 14 years since I first knew him in 1991. That was, when he was young.

“So what if you were one?” I asked. I always asked a lot when I was young.

“Uh…..Well…..I don’t know…..I’ll do things,” he said.

People Who Do Things are, generally speaking, pretty much unbearable unless you're preparing an extravagant wedding -- in which most of them would miraculously transform themselves into People Who Undo Things, perpetually canceling each other out, like, People Who Do Interior Design undo what People Who Do the Floors have done, and it all culminates in the canceling of the wedding altogether by People Who Do Catering.

I guess Bob just had no choice. The only way to appear like Doing Things while being idle and appear as if idle while Doing Things is by becoming known as an artist.

All sorts of persons have been weaned by every society to scorn whosoever Do Nothing. They wouldn’t subscribe to my kind of belief that whatever great human achievement we have had, all had been attained while one was idle. Not only discovery but invention, too, is gotten more or less by accident when one was idle. Columbus sailed to India to land at America. Fleming found penicillin just because he’s such a lazy fella who never threw away anything. We often set out to find something and got back home dragging something else; once I sat down to write about the Tokugawa shogunate and ended up finishing some divorce papers. Life is like that.

Artists are People Who Do Things, though their mothers in-law would deny this vehemently anytime, armed with such evidence like the roof that has been leaking since 1971 and the mountains of mysteriously ever-present unpaid bills. Other artists would deny the same accusation of doing things, and they make sure that everybody knows they only do themselves. That's social realism versus universal humanism to laypersons like me.

The problem to Bob lies in ‘becoming known’ as an artist. But the primal and automatic question is, what is an artist?

Hegel might say "People Who Do Third-Class Things" -- after People Who Do Philosophy and People Who Do Religion -- but this would pull in certain airline companies. The poet Arthur Thomson would say "Beings with a tendency to board sinking ships", but that's too wide a definition -- it describes not only artists but also the whole citizens of the Republic of Indonesia. The authoritative sources like dictionaries issue some description like "One who takes any of the fine arts as a vocation", but this will necessitate subsequent search of what "vocation", "fine", "arts", and "fine arts" are, since most artists around Bob doesn’t know any English.

My grandma's definition rings true to me, but it's wide enough to house a big chunk of the planet: "An artist is when nobody makes him/her do it but he/she does it anyway because he/she can't help it". This could generate a league which members include my cousin Dessy who always asks where the bathroom is anywhere she goes to, right upon arrival. Very similar to my sister's dachshund.

So we are left with no foolproof definition of what makes an artist an artist, save the vague notion that they do things, undo things, re-do things, or not doing anything according to certain Others. To come closer to a working definition we have to refer to the activities such as smearing clean canvases with paint, chopping good logs to pieces that are supposed to resemble other things logs never be, putting things where they don't belong, and so on. Yet so far without a clearly-defined boundary it has been enough to generate debates on Planet Art.

The debates on Planet Art are boring. Their function is, I guess, simply to wake people up because otherwise they would have been mistaken as People Who Do Nothing. And Doing Nothing is a social sin nowadays. So we heard that some artists were severely rapped at for being formalists, in turn they verbally bludgeoned some other for being capitalists, still others were engaged in a wordy kick-boxing over who's doing art for the people and who slouched on the Syndrome of the Ivory Tower. They fought about visual basix, about lines and contours and media and colors, they quarreled about styles and themes and functions and price (the last one woke more people up). Imported, borrowed, stolen, or clumsily-coined terms were novel from time to time, but the core of the debates itself never changed. From out here we don't see anything new.

I was listening to such a debate recently, between an artist and an art critic (by the way, I happen to keep a healthy stock of definitions of "art critic" – mail me for some), over this question: "What is useful art?".

Nothing short of the right question would ever yield a kind of satisfactory answer.

What is useful art? You must be kidding. Please tell me you are kidding. There's no other way to ask this question unless you are kidding. You are kidding, right?

In the beginning of the world, where no such a corruption like chemical dumplings and Presidential Palaces and paintings which fetch a sum worthy of three countries' combined wealth existed, everything had its function. No one called anything "art" and the physical world and the available lexicon that contained adjectives were tranquil enough because nothing was dubbed "artistic". Myths and sagas. Totems and tattoos. Pictographs and words of gods. Name anything; all had distinctive uses, quite practical, too.

Purposelessness, uselessness, disorientedness, and so on, were genuinely invented and vigorously labored upon and zealously campaigned for -- much later.

So, actually, there was no such a thing as "What is useful art?". Even the social realists whose creed includes "realism ain't a style, it's not fashion, it's the basic transcendental power of art" are dreamy enough.

A piece of painted something, for instance, that's left hanging on the wall, what its use could be? Anything. You can stare at it for hours in a misled attempt to emulate Zen masters, you can contemplate upon its colors and shape and price, you can envision a new place for it where it matches with the colors of the curtains. Or you can toss it into the fire and get some coffee brewed in return.

Sometimes it is really hard for laypersons like me to avoid getting annoyed by Planet Art's existence. The bunch of People Who Do Things created the now agreed-upon uselessness -- and they fight each other about whether it is to continue or not -- some self-generated useless fight on a useless ground. But of course the existence of Planet Art itself depends upon such a debate. "If you don't paint, make some noise". Only on Planet Art this maxim is possible. A real carpenter wouldn't find it practically sane.

What realism? Whose reality counts?

Laypersons are real, and without fanfare we're all realists or else we perish. That's why I can't think of the social realists on Planet Art as the good bunch.

Social realism, aye? When this Republic saw a piece of canvas in bleak colors intended to show a dying boar as a metaphor of political sickness was sold for several thousand bucks, what good the social sphere got? How come I didn't get a cheque, too? I am in the social part of that realism, right?

Since I have written several nonsensical pieces denouncing the "art for the people" thing, some people I know think that I'm a defender of the best-sellers and a promoter of "art commercialism".

Oh, really. Let's get back to brass tacks again.

First time around, no such a thing as "art". Second time, what were called "art" were useful. Third, there came uselessness. Fourth, uselessness fetched money somehow and formed a flock of followers. Fifth, some uselessness was upheld as "the art", claiming that it sought no worldly reward, building a cult along the way. Sixth, un-moneyed uselessness fights the moneyed useless, arguing for some usefulness. What have we got here? Nobody seems to remember what happened in-between the start and the finish lines.

And lo and behold, one day Bob dropped by and said, “I am an artist even though I don’t paint. I am an artist of the people.”

“What people?” I asked. For I was still young at the time.

“THE PEOPLE,” said Bob.

He’d just finished compulsory reading of Georg Lukacs’ Social Realism. And from then on he called himself Sick.

One of the criticisms toward social realism -- if you take the universal humanism standpoint or whatever else -- is that it smacks so much of scary blunderers in the past, such as Josef Stalin. Art, there, is thought of as having the unavoidable sin committed by socialist regimes, namely everybody's having a Supervisor, is compelled to follow certain rules in Doing Things and is expected to push uniformed output, heavily predetermined. Thus the battle-cry is "To Hell with Commands!" or "Uniform Sucks!" and the like.

How can this slogan-yelling spark an enthusiasm in a sane head? Just spare a sec and take a glance around. Anti-commands? Anti-uniforms? Yeah right. Whatever name you're using to call the thing, it still is itself, no more and no less: approval from your own flock, what is said to be "good" by the majority (or worse, by the authority) within the league, is a command, is the thing that creates uniformity.

There's always someone who does well in every field and stands out in each crowd. This Someone is, no matter what, revered, deified to a certain degree. Everyone else strives to be like him, to do what he does. Be it social realism, be it "commercialism", it's all the same. Whoever does well there determines the input for the whole tribe -- and this of course exacts the output.

So who can avoid commands? On Planet Art with its small contesting leagues and the bunch of uniformed and uniforming people who are called "art critics" and "curators": in your dream, my dear.

Even "sickness" is uniformed there on your Planet Art. Even "madness" is. Name anything you can think of. It simply is.

The gregarious animal named Human can't escape its nature, even when it's filling itself up with noble aspirations for Authenticity. Nobody here stands alone. No one dares to. Or nobody has what it takes to do so.

"Sickness"? "Madness"? Claims of seeing ghosts, aching for body piercing and tattoos and booze and drugs and broken hearts and never-ending display of irrational quirks -- a nervous-breakdown every three months or every pre-exhibition or each time no one buys your paintings -- telling and probably believing that supernatural spirits ride your brushes -- burning, shredding your own canvases after the paintings are done for no apparent reason -- calling a buyer and saying that you MUST sell the painting for EXACTLY 666 US$ and refusing any other, albeit higher, price without being able to explain why -- come on, do better.

These are common enough. So un-creative your "sickness" or "madness" is. Those are so dictated by the militia of the Sick and/or Mad on your planet. Those are uniforms. Those are commands.

Laypersons only expect People Who Do Things to do what they do as best as they could. If you can't fulfill this meager expectation, at least leave us alone and don't make too loud a noise. We need some sleep. We work in the intervals, you know.

And to say how art or anything else should be -- what am I, what are you?

To us laypersons, Fine Art is fine, as long as it's not based on such crude thoughts that mean nothing to anyone outside the compound. And to us as long as you Do Things in the artsy ways, you’re an artist. We don’t fuss about our jobs; why should you about yours?

If you can't do such a basic thing as to be, without faking and turning to The Authorities and hiding in Leagues -- be so kind as to join the NASA Amateur Astronauts Program and stay a permanent resident in Mars. I heard some rumors about Mars; one of them is that certain Indonesian art curators are not interested in it. So you’d be free from curatorial systems. Therefore you can, if you so wish, stay on sick.

2. Is A Turtle with No Shell Homeless or Naked?

Bob is not perennially gazing inward like Ugo Untoro. He doesn’t endlessly stare outward like S. Teddy D, either. So he has no idea what he is. “I have no idea what I am,” he said.

I’ll tell you what Bob is, Bob. Bob is Doing Things.

Bob is painting, drawing, writing, yelling, spitting, sickening (the latter is my prerogative).

Bob is Doing Things despite himself.

There’s a perfect word for such a phenomenon, unfortunately it is Japanese. Here it is:

‘Manga’. No matter how Klingonian this sounds to you, it has been a worldwidely-known word since 1990. It means ‘comic books’ (click here for history of Japanese comic books and animation movies). But it’s not ‘manga’ that I’m talking about. It’s what makes it itself.

‘Man’ means ‘despite oneself’.

‘Ga’ means ‘picture’.

The original meaning of ‘manga’ is ‘pictures that one makes despite oneself’. The original meaning of ‘manga’ is then what Bob makes.

Because he can’t stop making pictures. Not even when all of his physical apparatus were in a doodah. He made drawings when strapped on a hospital bed.

The same mode of operation characterizes a good many Japanese artists, such as Yoshitomo Nara. His art expos have never been geared to please highbrows. He’s a worldwide phenomenon in his times (and he still is even if you profess utter ignorance of his existence at all). His way is crystallized in the line scribbled at his studio: “I know it’s only drawing, but I like it!”

Long before theoreticians scavenged what was left out of the debris of modernism and postmodernism and forced you to deal with ‘contemporary art’, in 1980’s Yoshitomo Nara has already done everything. He put his nice dolls into transparent tubes and wrote with it (Indonesian Ugo Untoro also displayed homemade dolls in 2000’s), he showed his fine ceramic stuff (so fine that they looked like Indonesian Bunga Jeruk’s fiberglass objects of 2000’s), he scribbled large mundane slogans that somehow managed to dodge punkish attitude (Indonesian Bunga Jeruk, S. Teddy D., Ugo Untoro, have all done the same since the end of 1990’s), he displayed all sorts of germ-free papery trash at art galleries, including postcards and shreds of notebooks (Indonesian Eddie HaRa did that in early 1990’s). Nara never looked like just wanting to appear different, as most ‘contemporary artists’ obviously do today. He seemed to just play with things, but he played seriously because the game – visual arts – was a serious game. And he couldn’t stop making pictures and doing things when it was the season of so.

Nara’s images are so very himself that they easily slipped into the vaults of the world bank of popular icons, something that also befell the creations of his compatriot Takashi Murakami. Only Murakami often derived his stuff from the Sino-Japanese existing imageries, while Nara mostly created his own from nought. Nara’s most-often-found icons are, among others, a rather mean little girl, a generally sorry little lamb, and a somewhat cynical little dog.

A pity that I can’t show you the images here now (click here for pictures of Yoshitomo Nara and his works). But thanks to the Semarang Gallery (of Central Java, Indonesia), that held a joint art exhibition titled No Name in 2004, you could see Yoshitomo Nara’s trademark images and canvasbound situations through the paintings made by someone named Tennessee Caroline, a graduate of the Fine Arts Dept. of the Institute of Technology in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia. Those are Yoshitomo Nara’s images, that everybody on this planet has been familiar with – except Bob and maybe the curator of Caroline et.al.’s exhibition who notably said nothing whatever about Yoshitomo Nara there, though the unmistakably Nara’s trademark image, via Ms. Caroline’s painting, was put right on the front cover of the catalog.

Bob’s solo exhibitions at the French Cultural Center (he was his own curator there) and Studio Tanah Liat (curatored by Ugo Untoro) in Yogya were both nearly some Xeroxed Yoshitomo Nara’s shows, but in a way that was so darn different from Tennessee Caroline’s way to get Naraesque. Bob ‘borrowed’ none of Nara’s images. What he snatched from Nara’s world was the way of displaying things at the exhibitions, and what to be shown there. To be exact the one referred to was Nara’s I Don’t Mind, If You Forget Me (2001). Bob didn’t mind if he was to be forgotten, either, though only for eleven minutes or so. That no one forgot Nara and nobody remembered Bob was, I guess, just the thing called Providence.

But as if to make up for the yawning reputation gap, Bob himself has never been able to recall the words ‘Yoshitomo Nara’ although it’s such a very-easy name to remember. He still couldn’t for the life of him remember the name even when he acknowledged the inspiration he owed to Nara for the exhibition at the French Cultural Center (“I got the inspiration for the display from.....uh....what’s his name....a Japanese. Tokyo or something,” he said at the opening night’s speech). He still can’t remember it today.

“X said I’m a dummy,” Bob said, “because I don’t know who the famous American artists they’re talking about. X said that, without a reference or role model, I’d be a wretched artist.”

I know X. He couldn’t even tell a difference between George W. Bush and stale yoghurt. That shows what kind of transplant he needs, despite the fact that the difference I just mentioned doesn’t exist.

For the record, Bob’s intellectual capacity never exceeded X’s either. But he was still young.

I think I understand perfectly why people say that the young are poor wretched baby mongrels without any decent role model.

'Decent' is the keyword.

You have to have a decent role model or else you are intimidated to have none whatsoever and be called a poor wretched baby mongrel.

That is a tricky situation, and you ought to know older people are pulling this trick because dirty old bores as they apparently are, they were trapped inside the same situation themselves. Worse still, they are too fed up by now to idolize anything or anyone, while they cannot move without any either.

I may believe you if you tell me you have no idol. Certain people can do without any kind of substance which resembles brain, for God's sake. So they must be more or less okay without idols. They practically have no storage system for something a little bigger than the answer to this ever-present enlightening question: "When is lunch?". And some few extremists can do with no idol, too. Because they are so great, they are threatened to be made idols themselves.

And I have used the discriminating "they". Those entities are not "us".

The problem with average people like you and I is that we are expected to have decent role models, decent idols. A basic database plagued with obesity is already out there, all you are entitled to do is scan the names and pick one. If you do that you might be saved from being asked why you choose that particular name; everybody thinks that such enquiry is indecent.

Just say Einstein, for instance. He is a perfect choice. True, nobody understands what Einstein had done for mankind, yet it is unpardonably dumb to admit it, and there you are, immune and safe with a decent idol.

Even Immanuel Kant is understandable as a choice. Not everybody knows the name, but several do, and you can always give those ignorant mammals a little information about who Kant was ("Jeeez!" + a pitying look straight at the questioner’s eyes). That will make the questioner feels helplessly stupid. I guarantee he would stop there and then and never nags on you again on the subject.

Teenagers are always in trouble because they log in on life in any way but unobtrusively, they are candidates for adopting the stupid m.o. of being, and always name names that wouldn’t last more than a bright night on the #1 Billboard's musical chart. Also because whenever they mention a name, older people automatically get disgusted with no legitimate reason whatsoever, other than that their system is given to register any name teenagers mention as a pop star's name.

So, young or old, everyone has a problem with naming idols.

Of course there are rules.

As you have probably known, rules are created with a sound noble purpose, namely to complicate your already messy business of living.

Your model has to be known by name by at least a chunk of the literate world and be known by deeds by several members of the established highbrows. There is an option though: you can spit out your immediate family member's name; everybody will frown but they can’t possibly talk you out of it or argue with you about the model's merits because that would be, well, indecent.

Then your idol has to be 'politically correct' in some way; say, he or she must be of your own race and ethnicity, because that way you are a part of 'us' rather than a stray morsel of 'they'.

The person is better be someone within your own field. People will get skeptical if you work as a nuclear engineer and you name Anton Chekhov as your model, or, being a painter, you name Red Hot Chilli Peppers. That wouldn’t discredit your idol but it sure is suggesting that you know nothing of your own playground.

But if we speak of generic idols, it is relatively safe to name someone within your hobbies' boundaries. Football players, tennis champs, smashing singers, all are okay. Just be careful to make a distinction between your idols or models and your favorites. A model has to be one thoroughly if you don’t mention specifically which part of him or her is it that you look up to.

Or, you can make an extreme down-to-earth observation, which is showing how decent you are, and anybody who dares questioning you about it can’t be but a pretentious insensitive hellbound critter. In the Indonesian hypocritical intellectualism, this warrants your overnight inclusion. The lower the social, political and economic class your idol belongs to, the higher you get on people’s chart. Some might even say you are heroic somewhat.

Name an anonymous garbageman who comes every Sunday with his rickety orange truck to cut your hangover dream and wake you up cursing and collect your grandmother's kitchen trash at the most unholy hour of the day (six-thirty). Name an old lady, the fruit vendor that you pass by everyday.

Of course you can never say exactly why they be your idols, but if you can, that will sound suspicious anyway, so don’t even try. Trust me, the enquirer wouldn’t probe that deep. Those with ‘THE PEOPLE’ never do.

And do not, ever, neglect to exterminate your true instinct in finding those models.

Role-models are not to be likeable by your standard and taste. You don’t have to love them. They must, though, possess some adequate propellant of likeability concerning People Other Than You.

Your credibility depends entirely upon their opinion of these models.

So, if you're in fine art, you may cite Frieda Kahlo or that unruly-haired Basquiat. They could be your passports to enter the realm of nods. Heck, they might even snatch you some applause.

Basquiat is incurably over-hyped, but that was only my personal opinion, and you should ignore it since I am illiterate when it comes to visual arts. The ever-frowning Kahlo was another overrated creative sick person, yet she would look nice on pedestal in your bio.

You may overlook the fact that other hip painters all over this town, maybe all over this country, have been citing them, too, in their so-called 'artistic concepts', even some went so far as to have exactly scribbled "Frieda" and/or ("and" is worse than "or") "Basquiat" on their otherwise nicely silent canvases.

Your Basquiat is not their Basquiats, anyway.

Come to think of it, neither your Basquiat nor theirs could be the Basquiat.

Once you appropriate something, it is irretrievably yours and yours truly, so help you God. Don’t let anyone dispute this. Don’t let any living thing accuse you of misreading, misapprehending, misuse Basquiat.

What do they know of your Basquiat? They should mind their own Basquiats and not mess around with yours.

So Ugo Untoro yields some lyrical expressionist paintings that you got to feel your way into them since you can’t possibly get them neatly thought of.

So S. Teddy D. produces some supercharged pictorial compositions brimming with the apocalyptic anxieties this age has been so fond of.

Bob only gives you pictures, sic.

So Ugo Untoro and S. Teddy D. both have a winding list ready to answer the question “Who/what is dragging you into this?” with.

Bob can only shake his head.

So what?

Some are inspired by horses, some are geared by Marcel Duchamp, some are moved by puppets and some are fueled by poems.

Some just be without who’s who and what’s what.

There are too many people who created themselves and worship their creators (savvy?). But I would like to deliver this message to you: it is perfectly alright to answer the question "Who's your idol?" with "Me".

Why, you have to be honest with yourself. If you really truly sincerely think so, don’t deny it in the name of modesty.

3. Tear on a Jester's Eye

“The gallery owner said I can’t show my works there,” Bob said, “because they don’t sell, and they don’t sell because Dr. XYZ said they aren’t any good. Plus, Dr. XYZ said, I’m not productive. He means not productive with real paintings, namely oil on canvas.”

Dr. XYZ is an art curator. He’s also a door-to-door aphrodisiac salesman. And from five to seven in the evening he’s a retailer of motorbikes. He transforms himself into a proprietor of a deli that sells chicken porridge on Sundays, while on Monday morning he rides to the campus to teach fine arts. (This is Indonesia, man. Nobody would have been staying for long among the living if sticking to one job as a second-rate art curator.)

So Bob attached no big value to what the Dr. said, yet it hurt him somewhat because the gallery owner bought Dr. XYZ’s words about Bob as well as the aphrodisiac. To this Bob made a gesture not dissimilar with a sneezing cat, and then he watched TV.

At the moment there was a rerun. It’s an old movie where a 'nuclear-physicist' (pronounced with awe) was pursued by every manpower there were with the Authorities (said in such a way that suggests uppercasing of the letter 'A').

That poor man, whose talent in acting is better than everybody else's except his colleague's dog, was playing fox to the hounds because he had refused to go on researching for something called 'the black fusion', an unimaginably powerful weapon for the USA to conquer the entire solar-system (just why even the USA has any such a thought was not in the scenario).

Somewhere along the film, a supposedly naive Marshall said to the CIA agents, "Why don't you guys just leave him alone?"

To which a blond and mean-looking agent replied "Can you imagine Einstein suddenly locks his lab behind and says 'I won't do this anymore, find somebody else to finish formulating relativity'. Do you think we shall let him do so?"

The Marshall, still compelled by the scenario to represent the Ignorant Plain Folks, grudgingly said, "Who needs relativity or the black fusion or whatever it is?"

At which point the agent menacingly stepped closer to him and said, "Barbarian".

That’s what he said.

I am with the Marshall although I don’t find being categorized with the Ignorant Plain Folks particularly interesting.

Why, because I’m practically living in a cave myself. I’m even in the habit of carrying my cave everywhere I go. Which I think is what we all do. No matter how vast your horizon is, you’re barbarically shallow according to other people with other kinds of horizons. No need to have a vaster horizon to sneer; just a different horizon is enough. Thus we are all barbarians.

You can argue that Newton's apples, for instance, had to inspire somebody "for the common good". I believe that the onscreen blond thug who was on his government's payroll would surely prevent Newton from leaving town by imposing a house-arrest on him before the 'task' of formulating the abstract concept was accomplished. They already did something like that to those German-speaking Hebrew refugees who finally yielded the atomic bomb in early 1940’s.

They, i.e. 'the authorities', only recognize two things as their obligation to humankind: either forbidding anyone to find things out or making it an obligation. And both are forced on you as ‘for the common good’.

That is our history.

What bothers me right now is the second tendency.

Me, I would leave Einstein alone, or Newton, or any other person who is immersed in science or drenched in art, alone if so is his wish. I would let Einstein and Shakespeare and Picasso go chasing butterflies if so is their desire. Benefiting or harming the human race, both are merely concepts that we have created a long time ago. The human race itself is a concept, and as far as I’m concerned it still hasn’t even been found yet. Or else nobody would have killed anyone else based on religions or ethnicities or anything to that direction.

'The authorities', Bob, are everywhere.

They are in your world, too.

They made you feel very un-okay when you stopped painting and generally just messed around.

They make artists feel guilty when not being artistic and writers, for getting the block, apologetic.

They were the reason why you felt the acute impotence.

But I never think they have the right to do so. There is no 'right' and no 'wrong' in the world of arts, or so I always believe. And it is better to stop doing what we are supposed to do when we don’t feel like doing it, rather than forcing ourselves up to other people's expectation and turn in 'bad' creations. (I don’t acknowledge 'bad' and 'good' either in art -- I use the term only to replace the word 'unsatisfying' in regard to ourselves).

This Planet Art of yours either consciously or not makes use of all the industrial terms of 1920’s. You aren’t anything to reckon with if you aren’t productive.

That ain’t right.

Even riverbeds show in dry season and the Bible said even God did take a break.

Even a jester is entitled to jerk a tear or two.

4. An Ear for Vincent

Bob painted people’s houses.

So did Adolf Hitler.

“My mom said she’s glad that I finally do something useful,” Bob said.

Glad, too, Hitler’s mother was.

Bob has been having around 200 of his poems, in Indonesian and English, published online since the year 1999 (a chunk of which were ‘curatored’ by Italian musician Marco Ambrosini) when practically no Indonesian artist, art critic, art curator, and art collector even heard of the thing called ‘internet’. Six years online, Bob has been getting a lot of fans and one or two candidates for ex-girlfriends (that wasn’t a typo).

Adolf Hitler wrote poems, too, though his 1999 web site was permanently banned, his fans got restriction order to stay away from computers, and he certainly didn’t get any girlfriend.

But Bob is supposed to be another kind of painter. And another sort of poet. He can’t just lounge about coloring people’s houses. Students who wanted to be painters ridiculed him for it.

I have met stupid dogs, stupid cats, stupid web sites, stupid faculties, stupid poets, even stupid tape-recorders and stupid alarm-clocks. But as the stupidest bores of the universe I would like to propose stupid students who want to be painters.

Any stupid poet is a better companion when we have a shipwreck and there are only the two of us safely landing on an uninhabited island, while the first thing you would want to do on such an occasion is to strangle your fellow-survivor if he is a student who wants to be a painter.

These last few years I have come to know several dozens of them; at least by face and name.

When I say 'face', you can immediately picture two eyes, one nose, and a mouth.

What concerns me is the mouth.

For it is where words come from, and words are, up to some point, under my jurisdiction while pictures are apparently not.

This poor lot knows all about paint-prices and where to get pictures framed most cheaply. They know the trends -- this season, they go for drill-sergeant haircuts and pierced body parts and some kind of very annoying noises they call alternative music, which is, from my point of view (i.e. someone reared when vinyl was hip and moonwalking was all the rage) an alternative to music.

Last season was the season for long Rasta hairstyles and plain reggae and grunge. Before that, came the season of any kind of Native American hairstyles and pure thrash-metal and S&M props dangling everywhere around wearables.

The elements, nay, emblems that stay true and time-tested for all seasons are tattoos, booze like vodka or at least undrinkable products of Central Javanese brewery, and drugs of many interesting colors. And to fight with one another using G.I. blades and their kin. And it is always fashionable to get drunk while riding motorcycles (most praised are Harley Davidsons, or, if one cannot afford borrowing any, it is advisable to take any bike provided it's big and legally someone else's), and got hit by trucks or buses or cars or even an innocent tree.

Those are the signs employed in this society since at least 1970 to distinguish twentysomethings studying company management from those learning fine arts, instead of differentiation by merit – such as that the fine art students can make art works while others cannot. Society is where ‘commonsense’ belongs to, so I guess society just saw that classification by merit was inapplicable since the said merits were by far inexistent.

Bob was a student who wanted to be a painter, too. And God, how the students who want to be artists compete with each other.

Competition in the world of scribblers is stupid enough, but always subtler than the one committed by aspiring painters.

Now a painting has a tremendous disadvantage of being always easy to be seen. That is the way their competition tends to be, too. As far as I know, bitching and backstabbing are overruled in sports, even while the competition itself among athletes is perceived by spectators visually. Not so in the painting-world. Everyone seems to dish out their envy openly, visually, easily.

When my sister was painting peacefully (meaning: no art collector was yet in sight), she was merely the pretty object of pity: "Poor, poor girl, wants to be a painter, aye? Well, well..." Nobody I knew valued her pictures higher than they valued her cats. And all through her college-years she worked harder with her always-diploma-oriented brain than with her brushes. She was, back then, never a rival to the ones who set themselves as painters-to-be out there. She was no enviable 'intellectual' either to them, because she positively disliked reading and firmly believed that discussions were a waste of time. She was just a girl who wanted to paint and get all A's her tutors could afford to part with.

Then came the time her pictures actually sold, and visibly too, for you only had to look at the shiny electronic gadgets and the car to get the proof you need. You can imagine my being severely annoyed when, anytime I was the only one who was at home, any visitor who wanted to see her invariably asked me this shabby question: "Exactly how much does she fetch for one painting? You don't know? Okay, just estimately...?" What might such knowledge about the price be for? Nothing, only to spark some debates and garnering pros and cons.

Still, it was rather well-known that she didn’t sell as skyrocketingly as one other 'lady painter' did, the one who was generally despised yet undeniably heavily envied, Erica Hestu Wahyuni. She had even been such a rage that she’s known in the first-name basis by Indonesian mass media (clue: ‘Madonna’).

I happen to love Erica’s paintings a long way back, and indeed the rumors that she demanded a price beyond the stratosphere for each and every single one of her paintings was delightful news to me.

So, because there was Erica, my sister was not, yet, the sitting-duck for those drugs-laden young painters. I don’t know how long this peaceful coexistence would last, however, for recently my sister has got hate-mails, so to speak, for being able to 'get rich' (though this is unproven) by her works alone. Other Indonesian painters in this category were Nasirun, Nyoman Masriadi, and so forth. Quite a lot of them were there to be targeted by shotgun-charity beggars and proposals-swinging ‘artists’ who demanded them to finance some obscure drama groups that no one ever attended the performance of.

A painter is not allowed to live by the profession - am I, or the others are, crazy, to think that this doesn't make any sense?

Another source of brawl is plagiarism, or at least accusations concerning similarly heinous crimes.

Plagiarism is common everywhere on Planet Art, but those poor boys (I can’t say much about girls, so tiny their minority is) are mortally afraid if someone, anyone in their neighborhood, might -- I quote one young man who calls himself an 'installator' -- "start earlier than his due" on making something artsy.

Their nightmare of being late-starters, however, doesn’t make them overprotective, because there is one other trait whose grip is tighter on the exact same brains: vanity.

Showing-off is their virtue. They simply cannot resist the desire to brag and exhibit unfinished or newest work they are currently doing.

As a matter of course, in the history of the world we have often seen how two or more inventors yielded the same stuff even while they worked in total separation and had never even known that the other existed, and geographically they were thousands of miles away from each other at the time. Like Scott and Amundsen who both sought peril at the Pole at the same time without having made appointments before.

It hasn’t been seldom to witness by me here, either. Woven rattan or bamboo human figures without limbs (shaped like a Japanese wooden kokeshi), which were made by Samuel Indratma in the end of 1990’s, for example. I have seen them before as S. Teddy D.’s works of 1995. Another trademark of Teddy’s since 1996, a bald human head depicted from the side, usually put on a boat and the boat is usually wheeled, can be seen at canvases after 2000 signed by Syah Fadil. Other S. Teddy D.-ist images are around by the name of Jumaldy Alfi’s art works. Teddy’s lone blocky houses in the midst of colored nothingness, that he created since 1997, can be seen in paintings by Rudy Mantovani after 2001. Of course I have seen Teddy’s stuff first, and those others only came public on tomes such as catalogs of the Philip Morris Art Awards, like, three to five years after Teddy’s, but I don’t instantly accuse them of plagiarism, do I?

The mortal fear is lavished mostly on members of the same group, but actually it besieges the artists so thoroughly that they could, upon some hangover, even accuse mosquitoes as 'spying' on their recent art for someone else.

There are, as I not-so-quietly observed, several groups of different painters. This classification is based on their way of viewing others who belong to some different groups outside the observers'.

One group is 'the unspeakables', which means they are metaphorically and literally invisible.

The second consists of 'the talenteds', those quiet ones who are very able to render exquisite artworks but never brag and never show-off and never sell as artists; therefore they are nobody's competitors. In fact they are the willing helpers at the disposal of the ambitious but incurably lazy or the group of untalenteds.

The third group is the bunch of 'the pure artists'. This means they can’t find any moneyed person to buy any of their works, but they always loudly announce anyway that they were born allergic to money, dedicated to Art, 'born with the people', or some other similar, no matter which way they point at, justification.

The fourth is a few (though attracts too many members already) who are favored by professional critics and patroned by the heavy-pursed art-dealers and super-wealthy tobacco manufacturers or real-estate agents or furniture exporters or whatever else the professions of Indonesian private collectors have been. These people are called 'the hookers', 'the a**-lickers', or simply 'the rich' and sometimes 'the successfuls' -- depends on the mood of the caller.

The latest group is on top of the pyramid. But membership there is not just very unbinding but also totally unknown to be by the members themselves, because they seldom meet each other, some have never been on speaking terms with some others, and in general nobody ever needs anybody else of the same group. Their symbiosis is with gallery owners, critics, curators, and collectors, and not with each other.

The artsy group (the third) is the most solid one; it has a leader, 'deputies', spokespersons, and ardent or fanatical followers (all the first three usually exist in one person, but let’s assume they’re not that greedy). The leaders are not automatically the most talented in making artworks. Lacking brainy-activities pitifully, the students are always doomed to follow anyone (incidentally almost always non-artsy universities' dropouts) who can employ his tongue the right way even if he never knows how to hold a paintbrush; one whose brain capacity is rather unembarassing – at least if compared with the collective intellectual fluency of the rest of the group, i.e. average followers, combined.

They are usually found throwing precedence for the other groups (including the 'rich'), creating trends, and etcetera. They can do this because they are the only ones attending fine art discussions and take active duels of arguments therein. They are the only ones reading papers everyday, too, scanning and picking faults in people’s fine art essays.

This group is generally fond of terminologies such as: 1). postmodernism; 2). art-prostitution; 3). the people; 4). freedom; 5.) social-criticism; 6). Foucault; 7). contemporary art; 8.) anarchism; 9.) archaic; 10.) Tarrantino.

For the full dictionary, you can have your own scientifically-inclined research. At this moment I can only offer you some hints that are seemingly trivial but actually tell much of their nature.

Item number 1 (postmodernism) and item number 6 (Foucault) are possibly redundant, but you have to understand that the group just doesn’t think so.

Item number 8 is sent in random sentences on conversations, on pamphlets, or -- this is the worst -- on canvases.

To make the situation even foggier, the meaning of it is not clear to the speakers themselves.

Item number 9 is always said exactly in English, and applied to anything they deem appropriate and 'cute' catchphrases, such as in (this is quoted from a younger postmodernist I have met) "What do you think of this? Please don't be archaic." Or in (another actual comment) "I just hate Nyoman Gunarsa. Who does he think he is? Who gives him the right to be archaic just because he’s Balinese?"

I used to get stunned overhearing such phrases, but gradually I come to understand that the word ‘archaic’ and ‘cynical’ are synonymous to these sectarian artistic mammals, and only God knows how come.

Item number 2 is, of course, an arsenal to be launched with the top of the class (the ‘rich’) as targets.

Unfortunately I have no clue whatsoever on what to make of item number 10, but nevermind. None of the students who want to be painters really digs it anyway.

Item number 7 has been gaining wider and still wider currency lately while some of the others are now decidedly (for real) archaic.

Later, after 2000, every writing yielded by Indonesian fine art essayists and art curators suddenly couldn’t be without these two words (always in English): ‘sensitivity’ and ‘sensibility’.

I have no idea who started it (the Indonesian most-wanted curator Jim Supangkat, perhaps), all of a sudden people just couldn’t write anything if deprived of those two words. They often get incorporated with absolutely no function in essays, or even when they were given totally no meaning at all.

Only when those essayists and curators saw that one or two curators who really can write (two), such as Hendro Wiyanto and Aminuddin ‘Ucok’ Siregar, apparently managed to stay alive without ‘sensitivity’ and ‘sensibility’, and that the fee paid for curatorial prefaces obviously wasn’t affected by the inexistence of the two words, they retreated slowly out of such essays in exhibition catalogs.

When I was busy wondering about the Indonesian art essayists and curators and their perennial uniform eagerness to snatch any new term from the air to overuse until another one is released, Bob told me that according to Tommy F. Awuy 'contemporary art' does not exist in Indonesia.

I didn’t have time to read because of some laundry, but Bob did, so maybe he cited Monsieur Awuy verbatim. And this piece of information taxed my mind heavily.

I mean, how can contemporaneity not exist, in art or in any other human fields? Isn’t it about here and now? That if you do something smacks of here-ness and now-ness, which are destined upon you, anyway, you are doing something contemporary, and be a contemporary to me? Are you or are you not? As long as we both use present tense, aren’t we of the same times?

(Gosh, I really hate it when words, plain innocent words, are mummified into terms.)

What I am saying is, Bob, do not let yourself be confused by theories.

They are words.

You have nothing to do with words. Your world is the visual one, the textured one, the colored one. Do not even bother to conceptualize and get mad at yourself when you are stuck even before starting just because you can’t digest the meaning of ‘to conceptualize’.

What good is your painting if it cannot voice your concerns? What is its value as your medium, if you still have to explain what it signifies? Why painting if you still have to say or even write down what you want people to get?

It’s one of my headaches that art curators have been jamming exhibition catalogs with invariably long and winding descriptions of what are painted by the exhibiting artist, as if catalog-browsers are all severely optically-challenged that they are totally unable to see the large snapshots of every featured painting at the exhibition, that are put into the same catalogs.

But curators need to eat. So this may plague Indonesian artists’ exhibition catalogs still to no end.

Yet, if so, why must you provide explanations about your paintings while there is someone hired by the gallery owner to do it for the catalogs?

And don’t let the gang members' attitude seep into your sphere of thought. Even if it does, keep in mind that they do not make your paintings.

If you lend your ear to their chirp you’d end up losing it like Van Gogh.

5. Beauty is in the I of the Beholder

“My latest paintings are beautiful,” Bob said; “apparently I have turned soft and weak and stupid.”

“If you are soft and weak and stupid,” I said, “that isn’t a change.”

By this time, Bob had some problems with (or more precisely against) art galleries. Despite his ‘sweet’ paintings, they wouldn’t show anything he made. And he got into insensitive remarks and insensible observations (hahaha!) about gallery owners. Well, I routinely do, too, but I don’t come to them begging for an exhibition of my paintings, so this doesn’t mean anything in my case, while in Bob’s it was rather messy.

“See? My paintings are really sweet; they are definitely not contemporary,” Bob added, after the futility of seeing yet another gallery owner in Jakarta.

It was a buzzing season for Indonesian art galleries.

In 2002, the perhaps oldest and most resilient Indonesian art gallery, Edwin’s, in Jakarta, showed the ‘contemporary Chinese art works’ freshly imported (temporarily) from the land of the dragons.

This sparked a nationwide Sinophile exhibitions.

Everyone has been inviting and showing the works of Chinese artists, holding discussions and seminars about Chinese fine arts, and the like. The unscrupulous members of the league even digs up every Chinese-related stuff made in Indonesia, by Indonesians, and shamelessly exhibit them as ‘Chinese contemporary paintings’ or so.

This includes what are, in a saner classification, known as classical Chinese-styled pictures – you know the kind; misty mountains and foaming rivers and flowering bushes and dancing clouds and wriggling carps and such, that characterized the Chinese arts in the times of the Three Kingdoms until the frayed ends of Empress Tzu Hsi’s reign, but which has been, since Mao’s cleansing of 1970’s,a routine feature of roadside souvenir shops catering to Indonesian tourists around the Great Wall.

What Bob was mad about is this latter instance.

Those ‘contemporary’ (classical) ‘Chinese’ (Indonesian) ‘paintings’ (scrolls) are beautiful. How come Bob’s ‘sweet’ (colored in pastels) and ‘beautiful’ (match with your living room curtains) pictures (paintings) not ‘contemporary’?

When artists stopped the marathon crawl towards Beauty and started to nurture the ambition to annoy, you knew something was very, and I mean really, wrong.

You know, there were days when they picked up brushes and put up chisels and produced -- then doom descended and they picked up products and never put them down again. What a woe! What a malady!

Those thoughts were ruminated by my so-called mind whenever I stumbled across the stuff some people called "contemporary art". This came a few headaches after Bad Art. Punk Art. Stupid Art.

My subsequent thought was what any sort of intelligent mammal would think: "Sucks."

Because I saw old pajamas and a pair of unwearable sandals being tossed onto a deceased cupboard in an art gallery recently, and if there was no white paper glued to the floor that distinctly said "Installation Art - The Misfit - Artist: XYZ - 1999" I would have complained out loud about how incompetent the gallery's janitor was.

Next to it was really a sight. There must be hundreds of rocks on the floor. From the roof, a plastic doll was hanged by its feet, and the artist called this assembly “Under Tyranny”. I tried to ask someone that happened to be nearby, how come it says "under" when the doll is clearly "above" whatever was supposed to be represented by the rocks, but he said I should reverse my angle.

There was also a thing I was taught to think of as a painting, i.e. a piece of thick coarse whitey cloth commonly known as "canvas", stretched tightly over a frame, and painted on. It was a mess of greenish black, nothing else was there but a few blurry green lines, and words -- "In", it said at the upper right; "Out" at the upper left; and others were tossed around, "Conspiracy", "Fear", "Power". I couldn't make sense of this either, but I faked understanding after witnessing a few shabbily-dressed guys wearing some reggae aura nodded seriously in front of it. If it made sense to such heads -- mind you, those curls came from a wig company and the multicolors from chemical bottles -- it must make sense to mine, being blessed with my own hair that the Bible says was made and colored by God.

But my layperson's head wouldn't give the thing up even after dinner the next day. It still bothers me, the scenes replayed over and over all around the country lately -- I imagined how the works came into being, and all I could see was my garbageman, only this time with rasta hair and twenty-five tattoos, inhaling a bit of crack and (exactly like him) ignoring organic trash, recycling the inorganic and is ready with sharp retorts if you as much as glance at his carriage.

I can't grab any other word. Just junk. Pure junk. It shouldn't go out. It doesn't even wear makeup.

Taking stuff out of the garbageman's territory and putting them elsewhere is not a displacement; it is a grossly conducted misplacement.

Loitering and littering should have been forbidden in all public places, but obviously the Law has failed to include art galleries.

I'm gravely considering running for President, just in case this trash craze persists.

Meanwhile, Bob whitewashed his ‘beautiful’ pictures and re-paint the canvases with indescribably repulsive smears.

“Ugo Untoro even did worse to his paintings when they were beautiful,” he said when I frowned.

6. Buoyancy of Sickness

And I cannot worship an old fogey of a God who walks round his garden with a stick in his hand, lodges his friends in the bellies of whales, dies with a cry on his lips and comes to life again three days later; all of which is intrinsically absurd and utterly opposed, moreover, to all physical laws...

(Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1857)

In my world, 'insane', 'nuts', 'wacky', 'odd', 'weird', 'kooky' and their whole gang are daily lexicon - artists seem to be incapable of any meaningful conversation if being deprived of such words to sketch their colleagues -- and even more often, themselves -- with.

And most of the time I think they are insane and nuts and wacky and odd and weird - and the more this tendency bares itself, the prouder the soul is.

A mental striptease makes half of the artistic occupation.

A friend of mine was just rescued to the O.R. after he slashed his own belly the other night, not as a clumsy attempt to commit a Japanese-styled suicide but, as he told the officially sane doctor, "I wanna know how is it inside." Because I know him and the good people out there don't, they disbelieved him and I didn't - his newest paintings have been transparent figures whose innards were showing some un-scientific things innards have never been known to do.

Another artist I know has been in and out of mental institutions that didn't change anything except his parents' bank accounts - which is the good couple's own doing, since the son has never been tired of saying that he's more or less okay. He keeps hearing voices that tell him about how to build a bridge - his art project for next month's solo exhibition.

Still another artist wouldn't bathe on Fridays, claiming that she'd lose her hitherto rather useful soul for the fried chicken joints out there, if she dares to clean herself up on that particular day.

One other collects rocks that she says have been "coming by themselves, riding the air around 4 o'clock in the morning".

Her neighbor Bob puts on a new tattoo on his already tattoo-jammed body each time he gets broken-hearted - which happens, on average, once every other week.

And so on. I would have burnt the whole Kalimantan forests for the papers to print such true accounts of true lives on if I were to tell you all.

To most of the populace of Planet Art, actually, Planet Sanity is a bastard cosmological ball whose speech is accentless and which scenery is characterless - severely unappealing, mercilessly boring.

Between the two planets there always exists a great chasm scooped up overnight by the artistic temperament.

So far they exist side by side in peace, despite the occasional border-crossing accidents.

These involve the occasions when somebody from Planet Sanity smuggles himself into Planet Art just for the freedom he couldn't get in his own world, without even grasping the necessity of having a talent first and 'insanity' afterwards - such a person would reverse the order, and after failing to display the kookiest self, he also never fills up the artistic requirement.

I know a blue-collar worker that all of a sudden got rid of everything to dream a musician to life - endurability during the transformation is to be gotten in the form of his mother's monthly cheque -- so far he is lightyears away from mastering stardom, considering how painful it has been to master his own guitar.

There is even a sorrier candidate in this category. This man is typical of his species; he loudly advertises himself as 'insane' with the hope of being categorized as such, and he tries hard to re-invent himself even as the inner reality always pulls him back from the edge. He's as eccentric as a burger out of the McDonald's, as square as Richard Nixon, he can't paint and he can't write and he can't get weird, but he believes God didn't create him to sell insurance and he needs an excuse to decline supporting his wife.

The second sort of trespassers consists of those who are dubbed insane on his and her own Planet Sanity, so he and she emigrate to Planet Art - in this case, too, the artistic obligations are never tackled although they seem to excel in exposing the wackiest selves within.

A person of this kind is to be found in the vicinity; a man who, after his mom's thousandth complaint of the body-piercing he has been enduring, concluded that he must be a sculptor.

The first log he purchased by his mom's help to hurt herself in a bout of maternal masochism is still there in his alleged studio today, wholly untouched - probably destined to remain a log forever and never to be a sculpture and in time would be scribbled about in his will to burden his offspring with.

Another example is a pathetic asylum-seeker - he has always been put into the hands of psychiatrists by his father, his wife, and his friends, in a neverending chain of mental hospitals; then one day he got the idea to obtain a passport to Planet Art to buy his freedom from the officially-stamped insanity. He started, at the time of the revelation, to write essays that nobody could read, not even himself - only God knows why he writes in German.

The knockdown-drag-out fight among artists sometimes occurs because of the existence of the two kinds of 'insane' personalities there. The originally 'insane' and the authentic 'weirdoes' don't need advertisement and seldom got the nag to succumb to emendation.

In my world, it is perfectly fine to be 'insane' and it is alright to be 'bad' - as long as you are not stupid.

Some of the 'insane' persons that I know are genuinely brilliant brains.

Some others, alas, are insane and bad and stupid at once and some even have the looks of the man we see roaming the streets clad in nothing but bare insanity, in broad daylight -- and a chunk among these even do walk along the streets scantily clad in some misled notion of artistic performance - and tragically they are not to be locked up, not here and not in Germany and not in the U.S. and not in England.

They are said to be not unlawful, although they have broken all the physical laws and intellectually anti-gravitational.

They are said to be different from the certified nuts because they are said to be artists.

But it is never vodka and ecstasy that paint.

If you have nothing resembling an artist within, all you are sure to yield is a lifelong hangover you’ll never get out of.

7. Sick or Not Sick, Rivers Run Into the Sea

Now Bob flipped through Bertrand Russell and claimed liberation from sickness.

A fortnight later and in the end of the second dry gin he claimed a relapse.

It was always Bertrand Russell, really. He has something that tickles us humble readers to go, like, Why, I'm sure I thought of that too this morning when the dog pooped! Even his mathematics, that is, something which is never meant to be digested by just plain Anyone, is amusing because it prevented the premature extinction of little Bertrand ("I want to know more mathematics, therefore I am", said he about the undoing of his adolescent sway towards suicide). Such a premature death of Bertrand Russell would have been a dreadful fate which is of course very unhappying, for we need him, though the thought of having to need to know more mathematics to be alive is notoriously known as the cause of the high suicide-rate of students in Japan since the dawn of 1990's.

It is obvious that we need philosophy we can understand easily, and preferably one that can be browsed when about to take a bath and at the waiting room of the physician’s and at airports during transit, but here lays the human dilemma: philosophy is doubtlessly created not to be understood by us laypersons.

Everybody may live a philosophy but the club is marked 'members-only' when it comes to elaborating that philosophy, especially in print.

That is why we seem to be always in the need of someone who can elaborate our philosophy for us to understand.

I used to love Russell; he was a strong virus, he plagued universities. By the end of each book I hated his sweeping comments (those are alright in politics and domestic conversations, which are in fact their destined places, but somehow inappropriate in philosophy), but at least they were understandable -- I mean linguistically.

And linguistics is the only substance that matters in philosophy.

More than in literature, for novelists are not compelled to make up new uses of old words (and to explain the 'why' and 'how'), nor to coin new words entirely (and, again, to explain 'why' and 'how'), while poets are compelled to do something to make words defy any attempt to make sense. Heaps of footnotes are the undisputable evidence. A philosopher is excused from storing footnotes only if he is universally considered as a certified insane person (Bob’s hero Nietzsche), or possesses supreme genius (Bob’s hero Nietzsche, too). Or if he is Bertrand Russell.

Problem about Russell is, he was trying to give us prescriptions, almost as immediate as those handed out by physicians, and some people (well, I) don’t like being told what to do after being lectured on what we (I) factually think about.

Somebody has translated Russell's The Conquest of Happiness into the Indonesian language, some ten years ago. Because the translation was very poor, I wanted to read the original, which safely landed on my bookshelf after some borrowed magic (Visa card owned by a neighbor) did its abracadabra. Imagine my capitalistic nerves, after paying such real dollars, when they discovered how real the poorness of the original book is.

I am always unhappy, so I used to think, and I looked forward to gulp philosophical analysis on how come I end up being such a miserable creature. I think happiness is the only thing worth philosophizing about.

And I forgot that expectations are very reliable in motoring unhappiness.

In Russell's category, I think I fit into the 'Byronic unhappiness' lot. It is real, by way of checking my symptoms while reading the book (once every five minutes, and I have only read it for approximately ten); it is a 'sophisticated' unhappiness, too, which means it is higher than the unhappiness I feel when I empty my purse and to my dismay I find it accurately empty.

I don’t say the classification made me happy, for I have made a startling discovery that my world-view has been exactly like the one written in the book of Ecclesiastes -- a ridiculous evidence of the ‘mistaken view’ that Russell produces at page 27 --

The rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full. There is no new thing under the sun. There is no remembrance of former things. I hated all my labor which I had taken under the sun: because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me.

Russell, of course, dismissed those lines with philosophical arguments, which were, if translated into my own vocabulary, these: How about the tsunami? Didn’t it happen because the sea was full or so? How about Plato’s legacy, which didn’t include the internet that he never even foresaw? Hasn’t Guy Fawkes developed into nuclear warheads? So how can you imply that the subsequent living beings only got your crop and did nothing themselves?

Russell constantly ignored my kind of logic, which would be, like, tsunami didn’t drain the sea. Plato already logged-in on the inter-nets. Gunpowder matured into some nukes, but the personality of the thing never changed.

While Russell accused the writers of the Book of Ecclesiastes as being so very archaic (aha!) because they never knew electricity and the telephone, I’d say let alone phone bills, those writers didn’t even know 'they', 'just', 'did', 'not', 'know', etc., etc., because they didn’t speak English.

However! Now, according to Russell, there are three causes of unhappiness: 1). 'Mistaken views of the world', 2). 'Mistaken ethics', and 3.) 'Mistaken habits of life'.

I wouldn’t dream of shouting back at deceased English philosophers, but I came close to do so.

‘Mistaken’, aye?

‘Mistaken’ is heavy. Who to say so? What is the correct one? Is there a correct one? Who to say so? Not to mention that 'views of the world', 'ethics', and 'habits', and 'life' are man-made concepts, too, and very seldom not being ready-made for those who are not Tarzan.

In short, the ‘correct’ one, according to Russell, is society. Community. Hence happiness is to be attained via compromise. Conformity.

How can any miserable creature be happy after he adheres to those 'correctness', if he doesn’t really, and I mean deep-down-insidely really, accept those rules as the only rules -- not desiring to be popular with the kinfolk, not desiring to be accepted, even not desiring to be happy, therefore believing in the necessity of those rules -- but to believe first, led by his or her own reasoning, and only then, if the act is sincere (and never desperate), he can afford to take a byte of happiness. What if someone doesn’t want to compromise with his society, but wants to be happy? Is happiness possible to such a person who strays from the mainstream? Is a person whose path is not the majority’s doomed to endure lifelong unhappiness?

Russell’s answer to those questions was: “………….”

(He didn’t tackle this subject at all.)

Said Russell, if one is lacking the trinity of correctness, one is inevitably led "to destructiveness of that natural zest and appetite for possible things upon which all happiness ultimately depends" (page 17.)

Possible Things are stored in Infinity, I believe. 'Infinity' is rather smart for a department-store's name, but of course like all stores, its infinity is actually definite.

Like human faces, drives, attitudes, and behavior in general, which are not as varied as we'd like to think they are. Few are the possible prototypes. And in the course of a lifetime one cannot meet all types that are there, so one is apt to believe in infinity, but actually one is only lacking access to the rest of the types one would never meet.

Are there ultimate things upon which all happiness depends? What things? Says who?

I’d say happiness depends on a great number of things, varies from person to person, but none is 'ultimate'.

Not everybody wants to play God, you know, and not only because of relentless religious proper-training. Some never want to play God just because they never want to play God. Is this truth so hard to imagine?

Lunatics, said Russell, are sometimes genuinely happy, but such happiness "is not of a kind that any sensical person would envy".

Sure, for any lunatic is not going to write a fat book about just what kind of happiness he is entitled to or must strive for. And if he does so, nobody 'sensical' will understand it anyway because it is bound to be severely different from the sensical notions of it. One can envy the unexplainable ("How come X could afford that Sony Home-Theater set with his clerical salary?"), but cannot envy the things not understood. At least, if X seems to be happy though he can’t afford any technologically-advanced gadget for the next century, you may feel some kind of envy-resemblance, but it is not plain envy that causes you to eventually remark "Well, he must be crazy" and then put your consciousness to bed because it’s already 2.30 AM.

I can’t forgive Russell for his contempt of 'distractions' and 'escapades', because he prescribed just the same cures for the unhappy folks.

If you think the world is hopeless, think of geraniums instead, he more or less prescribed. If contemplation on Homo sapiens is unbearable, contemplate on Dalmatians.

To me, there is no other way to avoid unhappiness than to distract oneself or to find (or to create) escapades.

Just acknowledge this fact and drop any attempt to re-word it.

And Russell hasn’t finished yet annoying me:

Those who quite sincerely attribute their sorrows to their views about the universe are putting the cart before the horse: the truth is that they are unhappy for some reasons of which they are not aware, and this unhappiness leads them to dwell upon the less agreeable characteristics of the world in which they live. (Page 25)

So I’m still unhappy until today, because I read that book of Bertrand Russell’s.

Are you sick, Bob, or just unhappy?

Is sickness synonymous with unhappiness?

Anything could be a driving force. Even pain. Especially pain. It is much easier, for instance, to compose songs about broken-heartedness than a jovial mood (evidence is abundant for this).

Yet it somehow alarms me when pain is exalted, put on a pedestal and dusted. It is somewhat worrying when pain is kept as a house-pet.

And it is colossally troubling when pain is hailed as the little god you pay homage to.

Why?

Because then I must worry that you might not be able to create anything once the pain is gone.

And it could be gone, Bob, though of course the hard way, though certainly not in a snap, though invariably it has the opportunity to linger for a lifetime if it is so lavishly fed.

Maybe you cannot accept the notion that it is you who creates, not the pain.

Harder still is to gulp the notion that probably the pain itself is your creation.

The sea is not full, is it? Not yet. Not ever.

8. When Nature is always Wrong

“I won’t change a thing in his portrait. Is it my fault that he looks like squashed egg yolk and that his face is all lopsided?”

(Edouard Manet, 1878)

Bob became a tattoo model since the 21st century unfolded. He started to get used to having snapshot at, and in-between modeling he lent himself for free to any local punk or rock or ska or reggae band in dire need of onstage attraction.

He also made countless self-portraits. All of which looked exactly like every other critters he got emblazoned on t-shirts and sold at tattoo parlors.

“But that’s how everyone looks to me,” he said, “including myself.”

That’s why I’ve been grateful that he’s never painted me. I’m still grudging about Ugo Untoro’s scary dolls that he said were made based on me, and S. Teddy D.’s scarecrowy figurine that he yielded as my portrait.

My idea of a portrait is, it is some representation that doesn’t look like the portrayed at all. Both Ugo Untoro and S. Teddy D. seem to disagree with me.

In this matter Bob is a bit more sensible. Most of the time, he didn’t take any living human as his subject.

So it’s a shock to know that there really could exist someone who’s willing to pay Bob real cash to paint unreal people by the name of ‘portraits’. It would have been a major mental tsunami even if the existence of such a person is just a possibility. How could Bob make anybody’s portrait?

To be sure, how could artists who have obviously been so turned on by nothing but their own selves, make anybody else’s portrait?

“Well, actually Bob can paint portraits,” one of his acquaintance said. “Too bad he doesn’t have attitude.”

Both S. Teddy D. and Ugo Untoro are attitudes. They could survive on scraps of anything their systems constantly produce, as long as they haven’t yet exceeded the threshold of painkillers for the day. If they, God knows how come, take someone’s physical existence as their subject, it is not the person that got onto canvases or whatever medium they happen to pick up; it would be a picture, a sculpture, or an object of their attitude towards the person, or at least towards the image of that person in their heads.

Bob, though, is lamentably normal.

Oh, yeah, he is.

He’s always absent from his own work, even if it is a self-portrait.

That’s incredible.

But all truths are.

Yet sometimes his arrogation of uniqueness is archetypal – even such that equals that of S. Teddy D.’s.

“I have painted before I could even talk,” Bob said.

However, not all of Bob’s claims are preposterous.

He was a prodigy in 1991. No one painted like him except perhaps the would-be-globetrotters Eddie HaRa and Heri Dono. And the latter was at the time still under some rocks.

Bob assembled his nightmares in loud colors and acid strokes (of somebody else’s paints), feverishly yielding collages of canvases, paper, glass, strings, wood, metal, and whatever he dug from his grandma’s trash bin. Paintings were to Bob some vehicles of chaotic ideas in his head, and more often, of unsorted emotions. Bob dug things out of the only environ he knew of; the peripheral subculture of local youths. This was dished out as shapes and slogans. Rock music, reggae, and bumper stickers got in; as well as roadside posters and graffiti on public walls.

It was a genre.

Sure, Eddie HaRa started it around five years earlier, but somewhere out there Bob was making his own cult, too. His pictures were ‘darker’ than HaRa’s. There was nothing like a happy-go-lucky attitude in them, no optimism, no sunshine and summer languor – if anything was present, it tended to get into the category of nihilist depictions.

It sounds unbelievable today, but students who wanted to be painters followed him around like they do today at the heels of Agus Suwage, Ugo Untoro and S. Teddy D – all three were not even heard of yet when Bobmania had its heyday. The students who wanted to be painters endured being Bob’s sidekicks in everything unprintable just for the sake of having a mission.

But then a collapse snatched Bob away back to oblivion.

And there he’s been staying since.

Because S. Teddy D. has somehow, between hangovers, lifted subjects up into contents via his attitude towards them.

Because Ugo Untoro has, albeit the appearance to the contrary, found the best ways to dish out his intellectual entrails.

Because Agus Suwage has somehow managed to convince people that his self-portraits were worth buying as an attempt to come to grips with the fast-pacing polluted world in which parodies sell like nuts, especially when it comes to the branch of the so-called pop art in a way unimaginable when the term was coined by British critic Lawrence Alloway in 1954.

So there Bob went, as one of the ‘groupies’.

At 25 he was already wrecked by Post-Power Syndrome.

He said, “What is conceptual art? I can’t make anything of the sort even though my life depends on it right now.”

Californian artist Edward Kienholz released this maddening term in early 1960’s, a full decade before Bob was born.

Bob was still Doing Things, which were things that couldn’t stand being reviewed in broad daylight and never assumed ‘conceptual’ existence. If not for S. Teddy D. and Ugo Untoro, especially Teddy, since Ugo has always been busy with his own stuff, perhaps Bob wouldn’t have seen another day on Planet Art. Somehow Teddy seems to be always finding it necessary to lift Bob up.

That’s why when Teddy talked about ‘conceptual art’ Bob did try to understand what it was all about.

But my lament consists of why ‘conceptual art’ doesn’t just exist conceptually instead of harassing passersby via visibility.

So I could offer Bob no line that might be consolatory.

After two wives, two kids, and seven girlfriends, Bob still wants to be a painter, just like he did when he was conveniently all by himself in 1991.

Now that ‘contemporary art’ allows everything (in other words, imposes permission of everything to everyone), Bob might just get a second chance.

The anti-authoritarian rhetoric of last postmodernism has passed. The litany of proper names (mainly Frenchmen’s) that clogged every Indonesian curator’s and critic’s essays has dwindled to uncertain whispers. The crowd of complicated jargons that ushered Ph.D.’s into prominence by no other merit has been bleached back to blank.

Now Bob makes portraits.

It’s a gallery owner’s idea to get some people he knew to come to his place and get painted simultaneously by three or four artists at once on the spot in whichever shabby dress they left their houses in.

Along the Yogyanese street of Malioboro, a whole regiment of portrait painters and drawing artists have been lurking since Bob still wore diapers; they’d ask to draw a likeness of you if you’re around, for at least three bucks. In a blink, no longer than what it takes to say ‘Malioboro’ (especially if you’re Australian), a portrait will be finished and paid for. So this sort of posing-and-painting activity is very familiar to locals. I and all my neighbors will never get surprised about the way Malioboro painters flutter the faces of public figures to fish your dollars with – and that we have to be told that they are public figures to ‘recognize’ the unlikeness.

Public figures sell. It doesn’t look like so as far as Malioboro portrait-painters are concerned, since the trick never works, but it’s not their fault that their public isn’t the same public that you think of yourself as belonging to. For instance, there is no use whatsoever for them to boast to me of having drawn portraits of Britney Spears and Avril Lavigne and all Indonesian Idol contestants, since those personalities never belong anywhere to me but to oblivion; while those painters can never dig either why I crave portraits of Oda Nobunaga.

So there is no such a thing as ‘public figures’ that are such to all people.

More than that, there always have been, on Planet Art, non-artistic people who roam around even in unholy hours of the day, while their ever-presence can’t get justified by anything at all. ‘Collectors’ who never bought anything, for example (ask any artist, they know this species). Fans of some art works, or more often, of the artists as persons – preferably as persons in very personal settings where angels never dare to thread. These can’t be forced on us (okay, maybe just on me) as ‘public figures’.

Frankly, the League of Laypersons would very much prefer to have realistic likeness of just any belle in the vicinity, than ‘public figures’ who invariably characterized by substantial presence (that’s German; in English the same term would be ‘pot-bellied’), contemplative expression (a ‘duh’ look and vacant stare), understated fashion style (utterly tasteless garments), and so on.

And collecting famous names on one’s address book is tasteless enough; once in an airport I had to call a cop because some stranger insisted to show me snapshots of himself with approximately half of Hollywood. It’s, like, yuck.

I have no idea if portrait-painting here includes blocky texts and scavenged images, but the inexistence of rules have been rules in themselves in this ‘contemporary art’ time, and it’s been kind of painful to watch the denizen of Planet Art roam around with the obvious air of missing something fundamental. Postmodernism has been now around the cornucopia of memories of refinement, found from time to time at the nooks of fine art essays of the shyly nostalgic.

What surely will come out of this bizarre phenomenon of Ugo (for all the gods’ sake I can understand if Teddy does something like that, but why Ugo Untoro?) painting live models that were not even lured there by himself is his own people who were not even lured there by himself.

Thus the gallery owner’s idea actually does make some sense, in one point: if S. Teddy D., Ugo Untoro, Bob and God know whoever else, all paint you, the result will be as many You as there are heads, although as a matter of course none of them would be of any use to run for President with, an aim that is impossible today to attain at for there is no more Da Vinci.

Bob does it for the oldest reason in the world. Yet it makes no difference to some point, since he still paints despite himself. And he takes every day as an epoch and every portrait as would-be historical.

Those are things that can only be done by someone who’s restarting from scraps.

A less-than-friendly criticism would slash through him at this stage.

So – Bob, as a member of the non-painting crowd, I must express my deepest condolence for the need to expose yourself so starkly under the gallery-going public's eyes that more often than not misunderstand you.

But it is a painter's sad fate. So get on with it and pay the consequences. Or, if you really can’t stand the heat and can’t endure the rap, consider a much more lucrative career, such as plumbing.

© 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 NIN. Re-written for the joint art exhibition of Bob 'Sick' Yudhita, S. Teddy D., and Ugo Untoro at Langgeng Gallery, Magelang, Central Java, Indonesia, 2005. Curator: Hendro Wiyanto.

Footnotes, in order of appearance: