Rare Novelty in Art Competition

The jury members of the Indonesian Art Award 2008, which runs until July 13, were asked on Sunday to select 100 finalists from 3,200 artists taking part in the competition held by the Indonesian Art Foundation.

It was supposed to be an easy task given the large number of participants, but in the end only 36 names were selected. The remaining 3,164 artists simply did not qualify as finalists, art critic Enin Supriyanto, who headed the board of jury, said.

The art world, according to author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is part of a province called Extremistan, which has no place for mediocrities and epigones that belong to the other province called Mediocristan.

In Extremistan, recognition is saved only for prodigies and those who are exceptionally creative and capable of breaking the status quo.

The competition has shown that epigonism remains a problem within Indonesia’s contemporary arts scene, and that despite the political and aesthetical freedom enjoyed by today’s artists, which allow them to break conceptual and medium boundaries, creativity and novelty are still hard to find.

Of the paintings participating in the competition, Enin said the jury found a lot of self-portraits and portraits of famous people. They tend to follow the current trend in painting: the presentation of realist imageries combined with texts or objects that are meant to be seen as symbolic expressions.

There are also painters who tried to revive Raw Art, or Art Brut, in their works by applying chaotic sketches, scratches and colors that seem to have sprung from their wild and impulsive inner selves.

However, Enin said they sadly failed to go beyond the achievements of their predecessors in the 1980s and early 1990s.

“In the end, those works look more like bad imitations,” said the jury members, who were surprised that they also received plenty of landscape paintings depicting the romantic images of the country’s flora and fauna or the lives of its people in a clich‚d and anachronistic way, as if those works were thrown from the past centuries to the present.

The 36 finalists are exceptional in their approaches. The jury members chose five winners considered to have utilized distinctive qualities.

“We decided not to rank the winners. It is not an athletic competition where you can tell the first and second winners by a matter of seconds,” Enin said.

Although many competing photographs and video installations did not escape certain criticism, including for being epigonistic, it is not surprising that only one acrylic on-canvas art piece made it to the final round in the competition, which ended up being dominated by young artists.

The rest, including the five winners, included video art, video installations, sculpture and photography.

It is ironic because the Indonesian Art Award, formerly named the Phillip Morris Art Award, was initially a competition for paintings only.

Starting in 2001, when it changed its name, the Indonesian Art Foundation decided to include non-canvas art works in the competition, but the change lasted only three years.

When the foundation revived the competition this year, after a four-year hiatus, it made another crucial change: It no longer categorizes art works according to certain disciplines. Paintings, photography or videos, among others, are treated equally.

Coagulation #1, an installation by Faisal Habibie, Seeing the Paradise, a video installation by Banung Grahita, Kirab Budaya (Cultural Parade) a photograph by Johan les Wahyudi, War for Fun, an installation by Gatot Indrajadi and Jalan Tak Ada Ujung (Endless Alley), a video by Maulana M. Pasha were announced the winners of the competition at the opening of the exhibition of the 36 finalists’ art works at Galeri Nasional on Sunday. It ends on July 13.

Faisal, who studied sculpture at Bandung Institute of Technology, explores the technological relationship between human beings and nature.

Coagulation #1, which presents a rocking chair that moves right and left instead of back and forth, implies our neophilia will bring us to an unthinkable future where humans are frozen and objects take on life and make the decisions.

In Seeing the Paradise, Banung shows how the mass media has created new myths in a society exposed to visual culture. “What appears in television has now become something that we dream of, a purpose for many people,” the 25-year-old artist said. The heaven in the installation is symbolized by surreal nature above the clouds that is seen through windows.

War of Fun, which mixed paintings and puppets, is a criticism of human beings’ fondness of playing war games with puppets, while Kirab Budaya displays the way the people in Solo, Central Java, respect cultural diversities through an impressive collage photography technique.

Maulana drew the attention of the exhibition goers with his work, Jalan Tak Ada Ujung, which tells the story of a man who is looking for his friend’s house. It cleverly depicts the labyrinth of Jakarta’s narrow alleys where directions and addresses are no longer certain and therefore we are drawn into perceiving spaces and locations as fantasy.

The other 31 finalists are also worth noting, but two of them deserve special attention. They are Djoni Basri, who uses styrofoam in his sculpture installation entitled Para Pecundang (The Losers), and Agung Suryanto with his space installation entitled The Blue Down.

“We hope that this competition serves as a place for artists to test the quality of their works and where standards of judgments for good visual arts can be made,” Enin said.

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