KOTA SUNYI : Solo Exhibition by AHMAD ZAKII ANWAR
May 5 - May 26, 2007
CP ARTSPACE, JAKARTA




Engineering Art Discourses
by Jim Supangkat, Curator

Art discourses converge and collide in the works by Ahmad Zakii Anwar. They clash, and then lose almost all of their underlying assumptions. One must, however, use these art discourses as an introduction or a footnote as one tries to understand Ahmad Zakii Anwar’s creative process as well as his works.

Ahmad Zakii seems to glide among those art discourses—combining the philosophies behind them, changing their orientations, bringing all the basic principles upside down, and even denouncing their ideologies. Ahmad Zakii’s expressions are born from such a process of engineering art discourses.

If we view an art expression as a text, then we can say that Ahmad Zakii’s expressions reveal intertextuality. The art discourses, set as they were in a linear art history, converge randomly in Ahmad Zakii’s texts as they enter a post-historical space.

Ahmad Zakii’s works are realistic and formalistic at the same time. This shows that he has been exploring the discourses behind the realist tradition and their relationship with the modernist tradition. In my reading of his works, I see him as “playing around” with these complex discourses.

In art history, ‘the realist tradition’ is a long history full of tensions due to the differing opinions. The tradition is based on the search for the reality which underlies appearances. In the beginning, there were efforts to find a single, absolute (ontological) concept about ‘the real’. Already there were conflicting opinions during this early period. Various discourses claimed to have found the absolute truth about ‘the real’.

This tradition went on with the emergence of ‘realism’ in the nineteenth century, along with art movements that included ideologies and even doctrines in the identification of reality. The philosophy behind realism rejects the idea that ‘the real’ is only related to appearance; as such a relationship only records a static reality and a visual world dominated by the elites. Such a record fails to read the psychological reality, both on the personal and the social level, as it cannot register movements.

Since the emergence of realism, representations of reality reveal both the seen and the unseen realities. The debates become even more complicated, as the unseen realities serves as a space in which the varying ideologies are contained. The differing opinions due to the varying ideologies make it difficult for us to map the realist discourses, and this is true even in the case of art history.

Ahmad Zakii does not extend this complicated thinking. His drawings and paintings reveal no signs of his believing in a certain realist discourse. He, however, is moving from one discourse to the next. He plays around with the multitude of beliefs behind these discourses and uses different aspects of them to expand his idioms.

Such a symptom is revealed in one of his paintings entitled Presence (red) (1997). Here he deliberately clashes his expressions with realism’s basic assumption. The painting shows the picture of a red couch filling almost all the space of the canvass. There are no other objects; the couch is empty.

Two words in the title of the work—“presence” and “(red)”—jolt our memory about an underlying philosophy in realism, which questions the matter of ‘presence’ in its relationship with ‘the real thing’. This is the basis for the search for the reality of something. There are differing opinions about this philosophy.

If such differing opinions are applied on this work by Ahmad Zakii, we can say that ‘(red)’ in the title is merely a name for the nominalists and serve as a locutor for all things red. The conceptualists, however, see ‘red’ as a sign of visual sensations in humans and therefore think of it as a mental idea. Meanwhile, the realists believe that ‘red’ is something objective and absolute. Albeit different from one another, all those views are inextricably linked with rational observations in facing the material world.

Unlike its teasing title, Ahmad Zakii’s painting does not question the presence of the couch at all, let alone philosophizing about “what is red”. The ‘presence’ on this painting reversely confronts us with an ‘absence’ of a person who usually sits on the couch.

The painting presents the unseen reality not only through absence (the emptiness of the couch), but also in the spiritual level, in terms of the relationship between the red couch and someone who usually sits on it.

In his other painting, entitled Contemplation in Red (1999), Ahmad Zakii goes on with such a problem. Here he again presents us with the red couch, but now there is someone sitting cross-legged on it.

Ahmad Zakii’s paintings, print works, and drawings follow the most ancient painting concept in the realist tradition—i.e. to copy precisely the appearance of reality. In modernist tradition, the painting tendency that focuses on the copying of the seen reality is considered outdated. The most severe criticism perceives such painting tendency as obsolete since the birth of photography.

In his essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”, André Bazin scorns such tendency, considering it as humans’ obsession to fight death and impermanence by calling forth humans’ portraits, assumed as being able to outlive us all. André Bazin thinks that the basis for such an obsession is similar to the Ancient Egyptian’s tradition of mummification.

Here André Bazin criticizes the realist tradition and celebrates the aesthetic autonomy of the modernist tradition. This aesthetician writes,
 
“Photography is clearly the most important event in the history of plastic arts. Simultaneously a liberation and a fulfillment, it has freed Western painting, once and for all, from its obsession with realism and allowed it to recover its aesthetic autonomy.”(“The Ontology of the Photographic Image” in André Bazin. What is Cinema. California Press. Berkeley, 1967)

André Bazin’s prediction did not come to be. Photography did not stop the efforts done within the art world to understand the reality. It turned out that photography was able to register the unseen reality which the realist tradition in the nineteenth century had desired. Photography also changed human’s limitation actually to grasp reality. In the stream of mass media revolution, photography makes us to be in touch with the global reality without having actually experienced it.

In the mid-twentieth century, the photorealism tendency—along with hyper-realism and super-realism—emerged. This tendency copies reality through photos. The presented images are still realistic images, although here the problem of seeking the reality that underlies appearances has been discarded. In photorealist paintings, images are idioms that see the visual reality in our daily lives as a system of signs.

The photorealism approach also forms the basis for the realistic images in Ahmad Zakii’s works. Such images are no longer fully copies of reality. Ahmad Zakii uses photos to develop these paintings. We cannot, however, use the photorealism discourse as the base to understand Ahmad Zakii’s works. The realistic images in his paintings are far from referring to system of signs. These images do not seem, for example, to process iconicity by presenting popular things or signs—which has been the approach taken by many photorealist painters.

I think realistic images in Ahmad Zakii’s works have become a language of expression. This visual language, however, is not used to create symbols. Therefore, subject matters in his works—male bodies, wayang, stone sculptures, faces, beetles, figures in space—are not meant to carry a story, a meaning, or metaphors. Ahmad Zakii uses this language as a media to express his intuition and emotions. Here the process of painting becomes very important.

In such a process of painting, the emotions that carry various mental sensibilities find a channel to flow bit by bit. Therefore, the process of painting, which might have seemed as an effort to copy reality, is actually a process of articulating his emotions (or the varying mental sensibilities) in the effort of developing artistic expressions.

During a conversation in Jakarta, Ahmad Zakii says that when he paints, images seem to find forms on their own on his canvass. In the process of painting, he feels that he is not the sole cause for the development of composition. In the process of painting, the provoked plane of canvass gives rise to reactions. Armed with mental sensibilities, Ahmad Zakii responds to those reactions. From such a process of action – reaction, an unpredictable way out emerges, which rarely matches what he had wanted.

It turns out that the expressions of emotions in the works by Ahmad Zakii do not leave real traces of emotions. The expressive impression in his paintings is revealed only in the processing of textures, which generally appears as a background, or as lines or sharp contours that are present as accents. The main object in Ahmad Zakii’s paintings and drawings are invariably realistic and do not reveal distortions that generally emerge from emotional intentions. These realistic paintings precisely reveal an order of forms, which is the hallmark of the modernist tradition.

Ahmad Zakii explains that he often needs quite a long time to start creating a work. During this time, a multitude of considerations and calculations grow in his mind, especially the consideration of composition. The structure of forms is important to him, because it is the framework in which further painting process takes place, when his intuition will hold sway.

This statement gives a strong impression that Ahmad Zakii is a formalist painter, and therefore a modernist. However, such a conclusion is would be too naïve as, again, Ahmad Zakii merely plays around with the modernist tradition. His sharp joke (and this is a note for André Bazin) is that his realistic paintings show that realistic images can be expanded as an autonomous aesthetic matter.

Ahmad Zakii’s mind-set can be clearly read through his opinions. Although he is a realist painter, he states that reality in the material realm does not tie him up. When painting, he avoids rational considerations. He places bigger trust in his intuition, which he believes as able to become the channel for various mental sensibilities and even energy that arises from his subconsciousness.

Ahmad Zakii also explains that his works which carry the theme of ‘meditation’ and ‘contemplation’ reflect his personal search that has to do with questioning existence. In my reading, I see Ahmad Zakii as someone who is seeking some form of spirituality. The force that relies on the belief which is not based on the real world is not fully explicable and often illogical. This form of spirituality plays a role in facing conditions that are difficult to understand, and it is the fundamental strength that makes us survive.

Within the art world, spiritualism is known as a “dustbin concept” that legitimizes all the dubious signs of “the east”. Usually, “the east” is expressed in exclusive local languages and cannot therefore be understood internationally.

Ahmad Zakii does not go down that path. He uses the language that the international art world is familiar with (and one which has been based on the art ideologies and premises in the West during the nineteenth century). One cannot deny the fact that this language provides nary a room for the expressions that explore spirituality (and therefore such an expression is not known), because its development has been closely linked to the explorations in the material world and to rational observations.

There is no other choice. Ahmad Zakii must deconstruct the language used in the international art world, in order to present spirituality. He does this by neutralizing the art discourses in the realist and modernist traditions—the two grand traditions that play the biggest role in the development of the international art world. Here lies the contemporariness in the realistic works by Ahmad Zakii Anwar.

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