POST-PHOTOGRAPHY REALISTIC PORTRAYAL
Solo Exhibition by CHUSIN SETIADIKARA
Juni 7 - July 15, 2002
CP ARTSPACE, Washington DC, USA




Post-Photography Realistic Portrayal

Questioning about the realistic portrayal in the works of Chusin Setiadikara, which are now being exhibited, is questioning about idioms in art. This is an aesthetic question, which is no longer considered significant in the contemporary art discourse.

Under the shadows of recent contemporary thinking such as cultural studies, pluralism, politics of difference, and post-colonial discourses, the development of the contemporary art tends to not dwell on aesthetic problems anymore. Such problems are considered as an esoteric question that cause the “bankruptcy” of the development in the world’s art (once called the international art), as they are based on the tradition of aesthetics that mirror the tastes of the elites in the Western society. Such aesthetics became the basis on which the world’s art grew (such condition arose due to the world’s modernization processes), and is perceived as the tradition that was (and is) constructed by the ruling elite class. The aesthetics is thus read as the sign of the domination of the elite’s tastes over the general public’s; and also as the domination of the Western aesthetic tradition over the non-Western one.

As the reaction over the domination symptoms, works and thoughts in the contemporary art tend to look for the contextual meanings and the contents of the art works, which show the social and cultural contents of the work. Such thoughts celebrate the cultural plurality and try to develop and explore the knowledge of the dominated groups (the general and the non-Western public). In other words, contemporary art is more interested in the context rather than in the text of the art works (or simply the “text”), and tend to perceive works of art as a “cultural text” or “social documents” with the aim to find signs of oppressions.

It cannot be denied, indeed, that the tendency to put an emphasis on the context and to ignore the text itself shows an attitude that is actually trapped in a bi-polar thinking; here the contrasting poles can both become absolute and have the same chance to become dominant. Such principal weakness makes the tendency to emphasize context and deny text unable to become a paradigm in the contemporary art. The underlying thoughts still must deal with harsh critiques, and they are still vulnerable when faced even with the very basic question: Can the text and the context of a work of art be separated?

In reading the non-Western art works (identical with the Third World’s art works), one will soon be trapped by various stereotypes as the political and social backgrounds of the Third World, which become the base on which one will read the art’s context, are easy to be recognized. Meanwhile, the act of ignoring the text (the aesthetical dimension of the non-Western works of art) becomes the total denial of the text, as it is very difficult to recognize the aesthetical dimension of the non-Western works of art.

In the texts of such non-Western artworks, let alone the domination even the genealogy of the “westernity” of the text are never clear-cut, as the absolute premises of the (Western) art theories and critiques do not give ample room for a the reading of hybridity In reality, non-Western artworks are not based solely on Western aesthetic principles. There is still the resistance, which although cannot be seen but can still maintain the local aesthetic. This causes the texts of the non-Western artworks cannot be easily considered as being dominated by Western aesthetics. The works of Chusin Setiadikara, which are exhibited at the National Gallery of Jakarta (February – March 2002) and at CP Artspace, Washington DC (May – June 2002), can give some explanations on the position of the non-Western artworks amid such textual and contextual problems.

The realistic portrayal in the works of Chusin Setiadikara cannot be separated from the development of the Indonesian contemporary art. The tendency toward realistic portrayal was a major development in the Indonesian contemporary art. Such tendency arose in the late seventies and continues today. From this twenty-year tendency, a discourse arises.

In the early nineties, there were debates around the tendency. Could the tendency be called surrealism? As a result of the debates, this “surrealistic works” was not considered worthy to be included in the exhibition of the modern Indonesian visual arts in The Netherlands in 1992. The debate continued as other arguments arose saying that the trend could not be ignored. The tendency toward realistic portrayal was, in fact, a major tendency at the time, especially among artists in Yogyakarta.

Another round of debates came up again several years later, due to the inclusion of paintings with such tendency in the Jakarta National Biennale IX, 1993—a major exhibition that for the first time highlighted the developments of the Indonesian contemporary arts.

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Jim Supangkat |Curator

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