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FLYLEAF OF THE INTERNATIONAL MOMENTARY FUNK a.k.a Lessons from Bunga Jeruk, Inc. ©
2001 Nin 1. Fine Art for Absolute Beginners In general, Planet Art's constituents could be divided into The Ones Who Make Art and The Ones Who Talk About The Ones Who Make Art. Although both are necessarily unpleasant to marry, the second league bathes more often and is sober most of the day. They also know the whereabouts of The Ones Who Make Art while members of this club are oblivious of each other until one of them wins the Philip Morris Art Award -- in which case all of a sudden everyone else wants the person dead. BJ is with The Ones Who Make Art. Tragically like the rest of the flock she fears and loathes The Ones Who Talk About The Ones Who Make Art, because they write Planet Art's history. Her mother might have had this wisdom in mind when advising her to be an art critic. Alas, BJ can paint. Worse, her paintings are salable. End of the noble wish. Start of some real work. Lessons: 1). some mothers know best; 2). you know even better than they do. It is a curse, to be a visual artist. Exhibitionism is mandatory -- or else nobody would be able to say how crappy your art is. Having somebody to verbally retell your very own utterance is obligatory, even if you have attached a long essay to each work, unless you aim to be unheard of. Before entering this sphere you are required to get familiar with its special lexicon. People who live with a single mission to dig you and your art up, expose both to the public, remake your stories, make social affidavits in which it is stated that you are the most promising artist ever, and let others to send you with your stuff back to whichever rock you came from, are officially dubbed 'curators'. People who do all of the above and also tackle the sending-off business themselves are commonly called 'critics'. People whose wallets are the origin of the curators and critics' worldly existence are gallery owners. People who come to your studio and talk a lot about other artists and make you show them every artwork you got with some soft drinks and leave their business cards and never answer your calls later are specified as 'collectors'. The rest of the community, that tends to borrow your money, is 'friends'. The most important thing that you have to keep in mind is, don't piss anyone off, unless the person belongs to leagues other than the ones I have mentioned -- excepting people who handle transportation. BJ has been an expert in this, so perhaps it's better be your recipe too. Lesson: gosh, maybe your mother really do know best. Perhaps you should have been selling Tupperware. It's safer. 2. Art Criticism for the Severely Clueless If you have given up the really perspirating and inspirational business in being an artist and decided upon re-entrance as a critic, the minimum requirement is that you are alive. It is better if you master the alphabet in your language, too, but this is not obligatory, especially if you already have a diploma issued by some Fine Art colllege, and/or you are a member of its faculty. You may add some familiarity, or better still intimacy, with certain artists and/or artworks. For instance, I and the rest of the so-called family have been rubbing glances with BJ's art for 24 years straight. Automatically BJ's successions, reforms, and status quo have been imprinted on our collective memory. This makes us credible as critics, as long as every personal opinion is instantly tailed by some scientific-sounding justification, and as long as we vehemently deny such an outrageous accusation of having personal preferences displayed as some valid art criticisms. BJ could display her extensive files for you to show the basics of fine art criticism. It invariably consists of these elements: 1). a presumably poetic and scientific title; 2). a mention of the writer as having some formal university diplomas; 3). nothing. The third element could be atomized into several steps that you have to take: 1). repeat what the artist said about the work, but make it sounds like it is your own description; 2). use as many adjectives as your vocabulary allows, to vivisect the work and the artist alike; 3). employ some self-control to refrain from an all-out bashing and a winding compliment -- this so-called "neutrality" is your insurance, just in case you will be proven horribly wrong by other critics; 4). be brief, since you have used up the downpayment for the piece anyway. As a postscript I must add that this profession is recommended if you can't make any artwork whatsoever and are not qualified to enter literary gatherings where real authors are present, no matter what your mother says. 3. The Colorblind Guide to Fine Art Practical artists wouldn't waste so much on imported tubes of paint if they can do without any. If you can't digest the term 'Contemporary Art' as it is used in Indonesia -- e.g. "Your painting is not contemporary enough!" jeered a critic, and "I hate my own works because they're too contemporary," burbs an artist -- you are pretty much not alone. But -- and this is supremely important -- don't ever, not even under gunshots, admit that you have no idea what 'contemporary' means here. Your cluelessness won't matter once you go with the mainstream: colors are cultural apples you must not touch in this artistic Eden. Stay away from beauty, too. Once, not so long ago, a stone-broke artist got really frustrated because nobody bought anything and paint was too expensive, and before noon the whole world has fallen into this pit named Contemporary Art, suffering some brain concussion in the process. This in turn elicited amnesia, thus no one remembers what beauty is like anymore. If you have some problems in committing the self-inflicted amnesia, just give me a call -- I know some people who can help, if their schedules are not full yet with debt-collecting. BJ's art, on the opposite node, is loosely speaking nothing but colors. She's almost a master in this. It's not a sudden collapse from today's 'contemporary art' -- she's been doing the same since 1980 and doesn't seem to intend to shift gear. Not all of the end results are Beauty, but you can't escape the impression that most of them yield it. The Man Who Sells His Own Bed (2000), Memikul Terigu: Oh, Beratnya! (2000), just to dig some examples -- non-brainers doing things that necessitates them to stretch the muscles, carrying a wooden bed, shouldering a flour sack, but -- and this is the trademark -- no sweat. Literally. The colors used in those oil paintings are up against the essence of The Painted itself. It doesn't need much of brainwork to understand why some say BJ dabbles in Beauty and as if this isn't sinful enough she looks like succeeding there. Her art has been ripped-off as 'ugly' by those whose 'beauty' lies on colorlessness, and whose diehard conviction is that colorful depictions render shallowness. To avoid BJ's fate, you'd better start to reconstruct your own preferences to be all the go. For instance, replace bunnies with wild boars -- and don't forget to tell everybody that they represent corruptors or other common enemies for the common idioms users. Unless you do this, you will be a sitting (painting) target for the merciless critics and artists' communities -- and you are not BJ, so you might need S. Teddy D.'s psychiatrist's number from now on, just in case. Or keep your mother alert and nearby. 4. The Miseducation on 3-D Art BJ's Animaux! (2000) are a painter's 3-D art, so are the stuff neatly packed but still untitled yet for her 2002 solo expo. She herself has announced that the fun lies on coloring those objects. My notion of sculptural work was largely Jogjanese Anusapati's fault: whatever strays from the play upon curves and hollows and such are somewhat un-sculptural. About statues, the fiery, patriotic people who populated Jakarta with concrete mass of such work must be my personal culprits -- statues are like that, and if something deviates then it belongs to some other category. One of my very personal boogeystuff is the thing called 'Installation Art', and about this I have been fed-up with virtually every artist in town a few years back -- if it doesn't smell the same, i.e. invariably better, and it doesn't look like what my 7 year-old niece regularly makes out of her bedroom, it can't be 'installation art'. Thus BJ's 3-D art is more or less no person's land, the only word I can conjure up is, each one of them is a 'thing'. What else? Of course BJ herself isn't bothered by the namelessness -- but if you aspire to be a critic you can't help but striving to know the proper way to dub her 3-D art. The whole art of hers emits the fragrance of a cabal: they know exactly what they are, what they are for, what they contain and what is not materialized; we don't. Amidst the cacophony of colors and forms, a silence of terminology except 'three dimensional'. This is the sanest term in fine art by far. I'm convinced that if we know what to call BJ's "things" with, we'd get richer in 3-D art terms. 5. The Art of Meaninglessness It is known by every artist in Indonesia that everything must be something else -- you can't, from this point of view, possibly yield something utterly meaningless or that is intended to embody none of the stuff other than the creation itself. Because of the mass connivance, there came the league of artists whose sole aim is to claim big narration contained in every little thing they produce. An obese book could be written to translate just one piece of canvas which shows nothing but haphazardly vomitted red paint and a human figure several inches away -- you are not only allowed to call it "On Human Condition", "Profanity and an Ache for the Trancendent", or the like; it is sort of mandatory. It must connote something -- or so you say -- at least it has to look like pregnant with some meta-narration. That's the rule. The conglomerate of BJ's art doesn't easily induce such impression, though at times people cut and paste something grand to an individual work in review. In 1995 I screamed to her because of this characteristic silence -- she has finished a watercolor pic dominated by blue titled Combing Hair, it showed a girl on a window sill with a cat, (doing what else but) combing her hair. "What's behind this?" I asked. And she showed me her written conceptual framework for the painting. "A girl is combing her hair at the window," she wrote, "because it is easier to dispose of falling hair there." In 2001 this artistic nightmare was replayed when she started to make her giant teddy bear in my garage. "I don't know what to say if anyone asks," she confided; "My only purpose in making this thing is to piss people who hate dolls off." Then she sent a small canvas to Widayat's gallery for a joint expo. She called it Hello, Takashi. A nook in a garden, all greenish, a puppet-like little girl on a doll-like pony. The official concept was -- and this is printed in the catalogue -- "I want to say hello to one of my favorite artists, Takashi Murakami". My inner system could only come up with this intelligent response: "Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggghhhh!!!!!!" Of course you are entirely free. Your only limits are your own soul's capacity. If you let yourself to pursue a wild idea to the realm of Beyond, it's at your own risk, and usually your brain automatically shuts itself up rather than taking you to the nearest mental hospital. The farther your mind roams, the better you are as an artist. But the truth is not many people out there are ready to embrace the (incorrectly used, but you know what I mean) 'meaningless' art. As far as I know, BJ's art is from time to time quiet because it is saying nothing beyond the visual stuff. And like BJ herself I got to say, why not? Call your mother; she might have some clever retort to spare. 6. The Myth of Creativity A few days ago BJ was, as always, sitting in her hot studio, the TV was on, the Liputan 6 news on the air, and I, commuting from the kitchen to the studio and back again, couldn't possibly know if she did watch the news or not. But then came the piece about Akbar Tandjung's alleged corruption (Tandjung is chairperson of Indonesian Parliament). "Look at that!" BJ snapped. "Jeeez! Who's gonna think of such a lie but him? This is disgusting!" I joined her for a while, long enough to see how she snorted and wrinkled her eyebrows, and got back to her canvas to paint -- not a yellow-tied boar, but a mouse doll. (It's really cute, by the way.) That's how BJ functions. Underneath her creambathed bob, there are morsels of care and awareness -- in her own way. A street rally against the bombings of Afghanistan, the constitutional congestion and the physical brouhaha at the Parliament, the teenagers' fashion show, N'Sync's video; each of these are stored there in her head, all of them are equally meaningful or equally unimportant -- we can't possibly know for sure. Something triggers the retrieval of a certain file later. Then she visualises it. Sometimes, the same with other artistically skilled Homo sapien, BJ makes her artwork to exorcise the demons out of her closet. But realistically she admits that there are things that choke her but about it she can't do a thing; there are stuff which are bottomless enquiries for mere mortals; there are unspoken extreme insanity. So she said, she's not very creative, visually -- colorplay aside. She doesn't create something out of nothing, she doesn't populate the congregation with her own creatures, she is, as an artist, down to earth; so are her artworks. I believe that entities like writers, painters, and such are only different from other earthlings in one thing: not creating anything is something out of the ordinary to them; creating art is just as natural and easy as eating, drinking, running to the toilet, having an erection -- for 'normal' artists, this is no big deal. If you got to get a nervous breakdown every time you're about to create, if you need to travel 200 kilometers to some remote beach to contemplate on how many coke cans are left littering the sand, if you must attend endless art debates and poison your blood with tons of drugs or else you're impotent, I'd say you should stop trying to create stuff and apply for the Army. 7. Clowns En Route According to (whoever else but) me, the most exasperating sin people seem to be keen to commit on Planet Art is the zestful clinging on the illusion of being Somebody in Something particular and the certain thing chosen as the area of expertise is entirely offending sensibility. There exists, for instance, the notion that political ingredient is 'better' than other kinds of subject. There exist artists whose job is to write on canvases. There also lives the belief that Performance Art is lawful. A good number of people have been drenched in the multiple sins against humanity by: 1). being unable to paint, sculpt, install, write, dance, direct, and so on; 2). being unable to be a performer; 3). loudly so. It's really heart-breaking for onlookers. Let's face the truth. It is visual art. If there is nothing said by the visual element in it, what is supposed to be contained then? An eerily empty painting, which mental and emotional vacuum is so loudly presented, is it kosher to put the voice into words written across the mute canvas? You're a painter and your painting says nothing whatsoever -- I'd say you should have stopped annoying yourself -- your real talent is probably somewhere else, like plumbing. The non-painting-non-sculpting-non-installing-non-writing-nonetities who bare themselves in public places and do the completely predictable and entirely thinkable and severely non-unique and extraordinarily boring actions like dipping feet into red paint and smearing pillows with simplistic political jargons and dressing in mummies' clothing and getting surrounded by empty shotguns should be rounded and locked up in an art class for the rest of their lives until they can paint. If the only thing asserted is intellectual flatulence and the sole chemical reaction from the part of the audience is a lifelong nausea, for the sake of your fellow humans please channel your adrenaline elsewhere, such as into culinary art. If Angelina Jolie or Ben Affleck do those 'performance art' gigs, I would clap aloud with the rest of the world -- the performance itself would still be supremely silly and exhaustingly disgusting, but what the heck, we'd be applauding God the Artist for creating Jolie and Affleck among the hordes of people in dire need of major cosmetic surgeries. But you are never that lucky. So -- paint, like BJ does. Under the New Order's iron clasp (click here for elaboration on the second page of History of Indonesia) BJ never got to build a gigantic statue of Suharto for the purpose of littering any city. She has never made any for a symbolic lynching in any gallery either. She didn't say anything -- because there was nothing in her that needed voicing. She wasn't with the flocks of protesters, she's never been jailed for activism, Suharto has never barged into her studio and kidnapped her dogs -- she didn't like him and considered the whole regime and its tentacles deadly and foolish and mean, in a certain portion of her mind only, not a major internalized hatred -- nothing, in a personal realm. So, what was there to say? Nearing the regime's downfall, S. Teddy D. painted a big portrait of Suharto, adorned it like a virtual shrine, in pink, titled it All My Life (1997). It was supposed to be exhibited at the Bentara Budaya, Jogja -- his trio expo with Hafiz and Tonny Volunteero. He cancelled it after some other people's voiced concerns -- his argument that it was painted pink, for Christ's sake, it meant nothing evil, the face was undistorted, copied meticulously from official stamps, the title was only a description of an undisputable fact (he was born in 1970, Suharto came to power in 1966-7), were all in vain. He wasn't surprised -- he knew it was coming, though he couldn't resist the temptation to waste some breath arguing. BJ said, "Why do you paint it, anyway, if you know it's not gonna get on display after all?" Why did Teddy paint that darn thing? Because he had something to say about Suharto -- living the same national life, she didn't have any. So she didn't paint either Suharto's face or a duck in perfect suits with the inscription "Mr. Dictator" or similar stuff. It doesn't, it can't, mean indifference -- she verbalized her nausea in interpersonal sphere -- it doesn't, it can't, mean ignorance -- she gulped the available public knowledge -- it does, it can, signify the simple fact that while the same thought and feeling dragged Teddy to visualise them, BJ didn't tune in their frequency. So, no such artwork. At all. Some love beer, some are caffeine addicts, some are vodka junkies, some prefer tea -- so what. Somebody's personal preferences are never yours. You can be Teddy, you can be BJ, you can be Arahmaiani or Iwan 'Tipu', you can be Djoko Pekik, Eddie HaRa, Nasirun, Erica, or their cheap copycats, or yourself. Nothing is wrong. Unless you fake your concerns. Even if you do and seem to get away with it, remember that talent can't be faked. 8. Gender Murderers What is 'gender', by the way? In fine art, it has been ignorance in stereo. No user of the word so far seems to know what it is supposed to mean -- that it isn't a synonym for 'sex', that it isn't interchangeable with 'women's issues'. I almost come to the arbitrary conclusion that the Visual People shouldn't be allowed to use words at all, by law. If you aspire to be an art critic or curator, I suggest some vast real reading first before you even as much as dust your keyboards. BJ just shrugs whenever this word appears in reviews of her art. She pleas not guilty. She has almost never, ever, talked about gender with anybody -- and I have good reasons to suspect that she's never even read my trash around the theme, or if she somehow did read, she's not interested in it. The only thing that can be validated is that BJ owns those books on gender, at least mine, that have been adorning her shelves for years. How come they got into her possession if she's not into gender theories and debates? Because they're given gratis by my publisher :-P So I demand vindication here. I'm not guilty of BJ's somewhat gender-related concepts underlying some of her artworks. She herself tirelessly proclaims that she doesn't consciously take gender as a theme. She says she knows what the patriarchal system has been and done, but she also says it doesn't have anything to do with much of her visualisation. She can't really paint males and she isn't interested in them in this sense unless the particular males are visually irresistible (Last Season, 2001, she painted the oh-wow-jeeez-gosh footballer Alex Del Piero). The scenes she wants to recreate most of the time are where men are scanty. Simple reasons. But I think it's not so far-fetched either, the impression that sometimes BJ is out to ridicule the adrenaline-laden world -- like in the 3-D work I Am the Greatest (1999). Yet it doesn't have to be some darts thrown at some patriarchs. This wooden construction could also be read as a kick right on the human nature's butts -- the rat-race this generation is so absorbed in. It's the 26th round. Will anyone still stand? Including the referee. You can start being an art critic by (at the time you have finished the homework) acknowledging that you're about to use some light gender analysis on some of BJ's art -- but don't claim that you have found BJ's blue line, that gender is her constant stuff. It is your prerogative to dig out her works that show women, doing this or that or nothing. But claiming them as the art of BJ is insane. Accidentally (and only some of) her well-known works took women as the subject. It makes analysing her art easier, if you take one point of view and apply it -- but not indiscriminately. If you whitewash an artist's whole products based on just a little specimen, the 'Doctor' that precedes your name will loudly spell 'Stupid'. It's so tempting, being a critic, to just scare up what corroborate your own theory and discard the rest -- but you are not about to be this kind of critics. Or are you? Considering how many and how rich your future colleagues out there that get away with the ignorance of unborn twins, I can't really blame your appetite for the path. But ask your mother again. What if there is an afterlife? You would then meet me in hell. So, repent. 9. Snapshots from a Distance One day this momentary international funk after some determined morons blew the US of A up and it retaliated in kind will come up again, quite unsolicited, and turned into some blue, annoying artworks somewhere. But who says you must be interested in how many Afghans have fled the territory? What if you're more into the grand opening of Bvlgari's shop in Moscow that happened around the same time? What if your system only reacts to the fact that your grocer lied about the eggs? Let's see how BJ lives her days. She got up around 8, or grudgingly 7 if she has to catch the vegetable vendor, or cursingly 4 to put out the cats. She makes some coffee and cooks some instant noodles with an egg. She reads Kompas and Kedaulatan Rakyat, every page of them, all day long, haltingly. She also browses magazines like Hai and Kosmopolitan. She takes up a brush and continues what she has started the day before. She plays with kittens. She gets up to the postman's horn, taking invites and bulk mail, reading shopping leaflets from Matahari and IndoMart Department Stores. She watches the MTV. She listens to the radio. She plays a video. She watches the evening news. She sends and receives short telephone messages which mostly consist of jokes, cute graphics, just "hello"'s and small talk. She talks with the ironsmith that does her 3-D stuff. She calls her mother, she calls the persons her mother has called, she gets calls from the persons who called her mother. Woe unto thee, reviewers whose lives are so separated from that. A lot is bound to be amiss. You wouldn't know where BJ's art starts and where it reaches the finish line. Unless you're more or less with the 'ordinary people' -- e.g. myself -- you'll tend to get too myopic, scanning her stuff. Ordinary people rely heavily on the mass media -- which mostly is seen with a slanted eye in this part of the globe by the highbrows. BJ has never liked reading to begin with. So she turns on the TV for everything that (is said as) happens outside the studio. She's a classical specimen of what is known as 'audience'. With the media, trivial bits and colossal important matters are served within the same old tube. Attention span is short, the lifetime of anything is stunted, everything is fleeting, it's all scrambled and peppered and packed for almost instant delivery. And this m.o. fits into BJ's internal system. She loves the KFC, she loves the Pizza Hut, she's a TV viewer -- in her own circle, she's notorious as the owner of a maddeningly compartmentalized mind, she can lecture someone on quitting drugs, telling a story about a cat, commenting upon somebody's wife, expressing disgust at the Parliament, all in an unbroken singular line. Everything, to her, is equally important, or exactly the reverse. Nothing -- not a thing -- could give somebody like this a sleepless night. So it's 100% off-target, art critics' assertions that BJ manifests "her agony over the fate of women in households"; "the paintings reflect BJ's dilemma in being a woman". Big, obese, homemade bull. She doesn't agonize over anything -- more impossibly abstractions. She doesn't contemplate upon anything either. Not even in the toilet. Among other things, the fact that BJ works in a harmony with the media's mode has taken her to have the so-called 'global outlook'. She's the most non-racist I've known for life. She only knows humans -- to her it doesn't make any sense, the racial divisions and such, except for socioanthropological purposes. I am a racist somewhat -- so I know what I'm talking about. In effect, that she is allegedly 100% Javanese, Indonesian, Southeast Asian, Asian -- isn't anything to her but the annoying stuff at airports. Even before getting the chance to fly anywhere, she has already had this kind of worldview. In the identity politics era, she's not in the stream. Her thing transcends a mere "I=This" -- ascribed status doesn't make any noise within BJ's head. We've been more or less exposed to the same stuff, but my everlasting consciousness of such identity is conspicuously absent from her sphere. Education doesn't have anything to do with a good many things in a person -- I guess this is one of the instances. So -- she knows that not everybody enjoys the same sort of freedom, she knows tyrants and oppressors and generally evil persons exist, she knows whatever is knowable as far as the media's audience is concerned -- but none of those is her thing to ponder upon and to be made into artworks. She only paints or designs 3-D objects about and because of what she knows. It's a narration with a dash of personal opinion -- it's never an argument seeking challengers. BJ always stands a few feet away from Life. Cultural stuff doesn't interest her, so she doesn't aim her missiles at the Javanese way of thinking, just for an example. Politics is equally unappetizing to her. So are a good many things under, over, beyond the sun. She doesn't pretend to emphatize -- she can only offer sympathy. It's not her who washes like mad or carrying big heavy bed or flour sacks -- it's them, seen through the eyes of hers. It's a completely sane position to be, if you ask me. But I might differ from your mother. 10. That Humor Thing Recently I bumped into a big gallery owner in Jakarta who said that I have absolutely no talent in humor and that I should be working in a slaughterhouse -- so I was a bit let down when Laie Seele's essay was mailed to BJ and she showed it to me. Thanks for dragging me back to the -- umm.... slaughterhouse. BJ has tried every stage of humorized opinions. She relies on incongruency that is supposed to produce the laughing matter -- from just an irony (Keluarga Kolektor/Collector's Family, 1999), climbing up to cynicism (Ibu Bijak Pintar Mencuci/Wise Mother, Master Washer, 2000), right into sarcasm (Meat Market, 1999). BJ's humor is, most of the time, told as a parody (Ibu Bijak Pintar Mencuci, 2000) or satire (Ari Ingin Anak Lagi/Ari Wants Another Kid, 2001). And humor does not mean laughter. A lot of other things are involved -- so what strikes you as 'funny' might be a grim ghastly tale to me -- or vice versa. We have different heads with different stored files. We even operate with vastly different programs. BJ is not always a maliciously grinning comedienne; at times she's a jester with a tear in her eye. Let's take a case. Ibu Bijak Pintar Mencuci (2000) is an obvious parody. There's a very popular ad series on TV, selling some detergent by the name of 'Surf'. It follows through a young woman's life cycle since she was a newlywed to her kids' growth. There's always this young housewife and her mother in-law in every episode, a domestic friction about how much of the man's money is spent on whatever (food, flowers, and -- of course -- washing soap), which always ends with the mother in-law's cheerfully gulped defeat, "You really are a wise daughter in-law!". In a prestigious award-giving for the ad people, they conducted a public poll and this ad was voted as the most beloved by the TV audience nationwide. BJ was upset. Not only because of the idiotic (albeit commonsensical, given Indonesia's economic downfall) underlying thought behind the ad, but also because of its popularity -- probably this factual info made her madder than the semiotic vivisection of the ad itself. Too bad, curators don't watch TV. In the Name of Love (1999) has been cited as an example of BJ's sense of humor. "She depicts men in funny faces", an unfortunately well-known critic said. "She makes fun of a pregnant bride and drunken groom," another chimed in. While to me this picture is not funny at all. Conjugal relations are eternal springs for humor-weavers, and weddings are -- kick out the stuff you can do without -- entirely silly. But human societies started from that one scratch. Question this thing, you question the whole foundation of any human organised flocking. Religions resort to some family-like structures and imageries, too -- Christians have been having the gender dispute over how to call God, to start with; is it a He or She or what; nuns claim to be Christ's own brides; priests vow undying faithfulness in marrying the Church -- you can see just how big the core of the thing is, completely knowing that shotgun marriages occur every several seconds on earth and lifelong domestic miseries are moss in monsoon. Animaux! (2000) isn't a case of endless cuties, either. Nothing elicits laughter there. Browsing through the 3-D works, what grabs me is Death. All the thousand chicks died -- the dog died -- the cock died. From the technically spiffy Dive (2000) to A Kid for the Soup (2000) that isn't so convincing (the fiberglass fell to pieces), everything there share the same line: we're not immortals, so why fast-forward what is bound to befall these animals? Just the usual: a snapshot of humans as the destroyers. But of course what stabs my eyes could be your pet, or the other way around. BJ herself said it's about loving animals, anyway! Isn't there anything better to do in fine art but creating stupid taboos? 11. Lessons from Bunga Jeruk, Inc. What Jim Supangkat might say and what Umar Kayam could have been thinking still halt BJ's steps nowadays. Some big names still send her withdrawing to uncommunicable feelings. She even bothers to seek the right term to call her 3-D art with, because a bunch of professional sculptors have reportedly been against the use of the word "sculpture" when it comes to her 'thing'. You might, from here, learn something: perhaps you'd maintain humanity by assigning humbler places to yourself. But ask yourself how low can you go. And keep in mind that Somebody is never Everybody. Godspeed. |
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