HERI DONO
Upside Down Mind
March 4 - April 4 2003
CP ARTSPACE, Washington DC, USA




Upside Down Mind

Heri Dono is a Yogyakarta based artist with an international reputation. In the last ten years he has been traveling extensively, on a creative odyssey in Asia, Europe and Australia and is widely recognized for his unique works depicting current issues in contemporary art. In the US he presented his works several times by joining collective exhibitions at Asia Society Gallery, New York. This exhibition entitled, “Upside-down Mind” presented at CP Artspace, Washington is his first solo exhibition in the US.

Heri Dono who was born in Jakarta, Indonesia and now is at his 40’s started his career in late 1970s. By this time he invited controversy. It was by reason of his statement that art should be like the world of cartoon. He confirmed, this is an outcome of his insight questioning “what is art”. He said the world of cartoon is interesting because it does not make sense.

Everything is alive on account of everything included objects have soul, spirit and feelings.

Based on the belief that invited controversy, Heri Dono came to a belief that the main purpose of art activities is to explore illogical world of the mind. When “twisted logic“ is expressed in works of art, he is sure, it could trigger motives among people to resist the domination of the logic. He affirms that seeing reality through an upside down mind is meant for finding sub-version of “the truth”. Heri Dono’s opinion in some way does make sense. Globalization has given birth to an atmosphere under the influence of developments in production systems, multinational economics, and the communication revolution. In this atmosphere, technology and systems of mass production affect both our perceptions and sensibilities as we try to understand virtually everything around us.

Despite he himself is Javanese, his encounter with wayang was not at all related to efforts that tend to find an exclusive identity.

Heri Dono is Javanese who grew up in metropolitan cities – Jakarta and Yogyakarta. This is why his encounter with wayang includes a kind of wayang illiteracy. At least he faced an inside-outside dilemma when he tried to understand his so called own culture.

Wayang gave him a new understanding on aesthetic experience. It was a kind of enlightment. On one side he felt the aesthetics and the philosophy of wayang having a strong spiritual dimension. However on the other side wayang is strongly related to matters in everyday life. “Wayang made me think that there is a difference between art expression and cultural expression. I think representations in art tend to find the essence of nature while representations seen in cultural expressions show efforts to communicate and the search of shared values that does not have to be absolute and eternal, ”he said.

Based on that insight, Heri Dono came to the belief that art expressions should be based on cultural matters and not on personal matters. He stated, “After seeing wayang more closely I came to a conclusion that aesthetical feelings link to collectivity and this is why I reacted to the common belief that a work of art should reflect the artists’s feeling. I feel something is not appropriate whenever I discover my works reflect only my sorrowful feelings. I felt it was not only this kind of feelings that should be expressed in a work of art, since what is important is experiencing feeling of joys as well as sorrows.

Wayang is not only a matter of making wayang puppets however it is indeed a sophisticated art practice. Similar to other puppet performances everywhere wayang performance includes musical and theatrical measures. Facing this fact Heri Dono felt the need to explore musical sensibility, theatrical sensibility besides visual sensibility. Here he started creating installation, mixed media works and doing performances.

Using new mediums after years of painting has brought Heri Dono to a new awareness on art and on medium of art. “Art and its medium is merely a vehicle,” he said. “That is why the importance of art lies not in its beauty expressed mostly through the medium but in its content that reflects shared values.” Medium for expressing art for Heri Dono is not a personal domain of artists. The medium in art expression is collectively built. The medium is not related to originality or individuality. It is a language hard to know who actually invented it. In his opinion artists should build medium by taking things in their surrounding. The medium could be anything: an object, ready made, a sign, a symbol and even an idea. Through this practice artists can be considered as borrowing the medium from a culture.

The search of rightness in an activity of thinking tend to explore the tensions in between good and bad. Customarily the thinking is based on rasa (sensibility) and akal budi (wisdom, prudence). The result is a sophisticated way to feel and to understand in depth the rightness in the sense not just knowing what is good and what is bad or what is right and what is wrong.

Rightness in Javanese morality is not a concept but a discourse. Understanding of the rightness is dependable to a negotiation process where representations, including representations in art, are discussed. The negotiation has a particular context and particular time frame. It is then a matter of course if the perception of rightness in this morality is unstable and continuously changes. A rightness could be different if seen in a different time frame.

Heri Dono’s representations that mingle traditional and modern life realities reflect a vision that tries to see the relevance of that Javanese morality within modern world in Indonesia. Basically because he witnesses how the understanding of rightness has lost its negotiation process. How societal opinion on rightness is dominated by taking for granted techno-industrial logic that makes the understanding of rightness become insensitive and insensible.

Seeing Heri Dono’s works more closely it is apparent that nearly all of his representation is a kind of self-criticism that celebrates paradoxical and oddness in his daily life. Mostly the obedience in executing conventions not completely understood in modern life. The self-criticism shows a strange positive optimism based on Javanese spiritualism. Through “black jokes” Heri Dono tries to understand the kind of reality.

Based on his belief that art practice has a close relationship with culture, Heri Dono gravitates toward making his work of art collaboratively in the sense he tends to work with common people to create works. As if he wants to assure himself that he is doing a work that deals with culture in the sense avoiding doing works that merely tells personal artistic sentiments.

Based on that belief he explores communities that are less developed in modern sense. As a result he found people who are still committed to the rasa and the akal budi that are the basis of Javanese traditional morality. These people do not realize what modernity is even in the slightest sense. Considering the ignorance, Heri Dono sees these traditional people survived in dealing with the modern world. Through twisted logic they can even make breakthroughs.

In doing the collaboration Heri Dono tends to make works out of thrown away things for example used radios or used Coca-Cola cans. On this he stated that it is not significant to consider this tendency as showing his art.

It is more important to see the using of thrown away objects as a reflection of efforts of urban poor people using their artistic sensibility to survive in difficult economical situation. To Heri Dono the tendency to recycle junks and thrown away things among the poor people is an innovation that is based on artistic compassion. In his perceptive the innovation is a cultural matter. “The facts show the efforts of poor people using tradition to survive in difficult modern situation. The creations show how tradition continuously makes breakthroughs not for the sake of artistic means but more for survival means,” he said.

Up until now Heri Dono works with mechanics to develop machinery of his installation out of components of used transistor radios. He knows quite well the people who help him., “They work every day at their small radio shops repairing used transistor radios. There are thousands of them in Yogyakarta. After repairs they sell the radios cheaply to the grassroots,” he said. The used radio business is again a cultural matter for Heri Dono. In his reading, he sees the mechanics have made devices out of invaluable things and by selling them, they provide information and entertainment among the grassroots. This attitude indeed is far different from behavior of consumerist society that easily throws away things like clothes, televisions, furniture, even cars that actually are still good and useful.

It is a matter of fact in traditional Javanese society every person is a craftsman since they make their own utensils. However they also make work of arts. The term for doing this kind of work is penciptaan. The direct interpretation of the term penciptaan is creating. However, seeing it more precisely the term has a unique meaning. The word penciptaan derived from a term cipta that means imagination, hopes, fantasy, dreams, also communal idealism relating to share values in daily life.

Correspondingly penciptaan means making dreams, fantasy and idealism become tangible or visual, through the capacity of hands by enforcing rasa (a kind of intuition) and the feeling of beauty that goes beyond sensation. This artistic practice is far from expressing opinions or making statements. Related to this activity, art in Javanese is kagunan that point out an activity of emitting feelings that expresses the beauty of moral ethics. The term kagunan derived from the term guna which means an insightful idiosyncrasy of a person.

Perceiving that artistic sensibility, Heri Dono asked the common people to collaborate with him in making works of art. The people who actually are craftsmen accepted graciously the invitation. In the process of collaboration, these people do not just help Heri Dono doing the production. They also give him advises and ideas. At the end, they together created works that not only show Heri Dono’s convictions. The works also show surprisingly dreams, fantasy, hopes and beliefs of the poor urban in facing today’s reality. Considering this Heri Dono’s collaboration project opens the opportunity of including societal dreams, idealism, hopes and fantasy. The inclusion will enrich Heri Dono’s representation of the today’s reality.

Jim Supangkat | curator

back to top ^