Arahmaiani: The grey paintings
Words, voices and images: Connecting to cultures around the world
"We are part of nature and not the master of it".
Duration
6.36
Director
Peter and Andrea Hylands
Cinematography
Andrea Hylands
Our special thanks to Tony Godfrey, Deddy Irianto and Equator Art Projects.
In this film we join Arahmaiani as she paints Grey by the Elo-Progo River in Central Java and in Singapore, Tony Godfrey, Equator Art Projects, talks to Arahmaiani about the grey paintings.
We step back twelve months and to Singapore and to Equator Art Projects at Gillman Barracks as we join a discussion between curator Tony Godfrey and Arahmaiani during her exhibition The Grey Paintings in March 2013. The grey painting film was shot at Deddy Irianto's property in March 2014 during one of this year's visits to Indonesia.
Tony Godfrey writes:
What are these paintings about? Nature, spiritual experience, meditation, the act of painting or the state of grey? I want to argue that they are, to greater or lesser extent, about all of these things.
Where also, do we place these works in the overall trajectory of Arahmaiani's career? She has, after all, been best known as a performance artist and sometimes as an activist or a poet, but rarely as a painter. Are they a surprising oddity, an exception to what she normally does, or the culmination of something that she has been working towards for some time? Are these the forerunners of other similar works?
We step back twelve months and to Singapore and to Equator Art Projects at Gillman Barracks as we join a discussion between curator Tony Godfrey and Arahmaiani during her exhibition The Grey Paintings in March 2013. The grey painting film was shot at Deddy Irianto's property in March 2014 during one of this year's visits to Indonesia.
Tony Godfrey writes:
What are these paintings about? Nature, spiritual experience, meditation, the act of painting or the state of grey? I want to argue that they are, to greater or lesser extent, about all of these things.
Where also, do we place these works in the overall trajectory of Arahmaiani's career? She has, after all, been best known as a performance artist and sometimes as an activist or a poet, but rarely as a painter. Are they a surprising oddity, an exception to what she normally does, or the culmination of something that she has been working towards for some time? Are these the forerunners of other similar works?
Being in nature
Arahmaiani talks of how she was inspired - or calmed - by leaving her studio in Jogjakarta and going to work in the hills nearby where she was surrounded by animals, plants and trees. These paintings are not of nature, but of being in nature. She puts an emphasis on how we should not use landscape or nature as a mere backdrop to our human activities but be in it and part of it. Water is a key material here, symbolically and actually: we can literally immerse ourselves in water.
These paintings do not reproduce elements from nature so much as bear witness to an involvement or immersion in it.
Arahmaiani in conversation with Tony Godfrey
Tony Godfrey How were your earlier paintings conceived - that is to say, the cartoon paintings?
Arahmaiani In the beginnings I wasn't thinking of them as paintings. I began doing them on paper - I was having fun with the absurd politics. Mickey was dressed as an American symbolic figure, Minnie as a radical Muslim. Tom and Jerry are always competing with each other but they never finish their fight, it just repeats and repeats. It was a good metaphor for US fundamentalism versus Muslim fundamentalism. Then came the idea: "I could make it bigger, why not?" "Yes!" So they became paintings. but I don't see them now as paintings - more my visual jokes.
But I have done with that. It is not exciting anymore.
Tony Godfrey So these new paintings represent a return to painting after 25 years away.
Arahmaiani Not entirely, I have been travelling so much it has been difficult to find and work in a studio. There have been lots of breaks in my life.
Tony Godfrey Were there any good paintings in that long period between college and now?
Arahmaiani Yes, some black and white paintings - I was trying to find my own style, but it was frustrating... I tried for years and finally that became grey. That happened in Sylt.
This is the longest time I have concentrated on painting, but it was the experience of being in Sylt, an island in Germany near Denmark for two months in the winter that made me very aware of greyness. Everything was grey. At first I was depressed - maybe also because of being trapped by bad weather - and therefore drinking too much red wine! But then I realised this grey was not as dull as I thought and then I saw the beauty in it. I was in Sylt about eight years ago. I was there alone. I have lived almost all my life on my own so that was no problem.
It is very cold and very grey and strong storms often hit. The sound of storm is really frightening. I had to stay in the apartment and watch the grey of nature through the glass windows changing and transforming. I saw the world is just a shadow – and I guess what I’ve seen as reality is in fact only shadow!
The first week was like torture because everything seems to be just plain grey – everything seems to be dead! But when the storm hit... then everything turned like it was after death and there were lots of ghost around! I drank a lot of red wine and just stayed in the living room with paper and pencils. Nothing happened. Yes, after that I begin to see that the grey began to become rich and I saw the beautiful array of grey and it moves me and my brush and paint on my paper! And it makes me happy – really happy!
While working in front of the grey canvases my mind was wandering around just like a wanderer in an open, un-limited space. All of a sudden a memory from the past - from of my childhood appeared. I have never seen this as far as I remember – this memory seems gone from my bank.
It’s a memory of shadow, but not a shadow play like the Javanese puppet show. It’s a shadow created by light from cars from far away. Somehow these lights shining through the trees then through glass windows projected some moving shadows on the wall of the dark living room. I'd be lying down on couch for hours! I got really fascinated by these shadows on the wall! The images would be moving and changing depending on how strong the light was and what is happening to the nature. If it is raining or windy then the shadow would be a different variation.
It is almost like an addiction: I’ll be lying down there in the dark room on the same couch every evening (luckily when we got a TV set my father placed it in another room). So I could always enjoy my shadow trip whenever I wanted it, except, if there were guests in the evening then I would have to miss it.
As far as I remember this “shadow play” always fascinated me – at least I remember I had that habit in two different houses. First one was the house where I had been brought up till probably around the age of 9 years old. Then we moved to another and bigger house – and still I kept that habit until probably I was a teenager. I don’t remember exactly. But I lived in that house with my family until my time in art school. Though there was a break during my high school time when I lived with my aunt.
Anyway, I think now I understand better this fascination with “grey”.
Tony Godfrey So memories came back and things crystallised in a landscape situation?
Arahmaiani Right! Exactly! I see something ... but it is a memory really. I had a childhood in nature. My surroundings then were nature. It was a happy childhood, right up to high school, every weekend I was up in the mountains. Though later on we drove rather than walked. I had no idea then of how dangerous and dirty technology was. At art school my work became room world. I spent all my time in the studio or reading or writing. Nature disappeared from my life
Tony Godfrey Without you realising?
Arahmaiani Then I woke up when the earthquake hit Jogja in 2006. In my district more than 4000 people died. In the Eighties I was invited to the Jakarta biennale and I was planting rice on my installation.
Tony Godfrey Just as you did in your Art Stage installation?
Arahmaiani ...but this wasn't to do with nature - rather politics. I was concerned with how the poor can help themselves despite the profits industrialisation makes from them. How can poor people survive? At the same time on the walls I hung black and white paintings of poor, bald people. I don't know where these paintings have gone - they were on paper. Many older works of mine were eaten by insects or got mouldy - this tropical climate is not so good. All the time I was, I think, conscious of these issues that I am now obsessed with.
I am just curious as to what this all means, so I am currently reading Simon Shama's Landscape and Memory.
Tony Godfrey I dislike the book because of his emphasis on how landscape is always seen through cultural expectations: landscape can be a naked experience too. His earlier book, Embarrassment of Riches, about material culture in seventeenth century Holland was much better. A book on landscape I prefer is Rebecca Solnitt's Wanderlust.
Arahmaiani Please lend me both those books! I am also doing research on the colonial past, partly because I am working at the Van Loon Museum. They owned the VOC! The grandmother of my grandmother on my mother's side was Dutch, but was disowned by her family because she married a Sundanese & Javanese mix man. She was also of Jewish/German ancestry. So this is an opportunity to also deal with my family history. I was in Holland as a student, but only for one year, because of the Suharto problem: he expelled the Dutch, so the Dutch expelled me!
Tony Godfrey When did you start working on these grey paintings?
Arahmaiani That painting with the blue woman, Confluence 3 is three years old. I knew at the time that it wasn't finished - it had to have its own life.
Tony Godfrey Was it always a diptych?
Arahmaiani No, it was single canvas then. I knew it wasn't finished, but I didn't know what to do to complete it. I visited it often, but it was as if all I could say to it was, "I am sorry, but I have no idea for you yet".
Tony Godfrey Is that the oldest grey painting?
Arahmaiani The other women in water paintings - Confluence, 1, 2 and 4 - are two years old. Dolma (Sri1) 1 is one year old, Dolma (Sri2) 2 much older. The blue painting was too rigid, but I liked it.
I learned about the confluence of two rivers near Deddy Irianto's place: He wanted me to build a centre for meditation there, so I went there and sat meditating beside the two rivers. That gave me this idea - the river Progo is calm and hardly moves, but the river Elo is vigorous. It was at this meeting point of the rivers that the king traditionally had to go in and meditate in the river. For years I have been busy with gender issues and somehow my understanding developed by working with nature and with Buddhists. For example, the Buddha is not a god - he is energy not a body - so as a Bodhisattva he can be a woman too. The ideal form is the merging of feminine and masculine.
I am expanding my imagination... I tried to work these things out visually. I tried to merge the two. I looked especially at the Javanese Ken Dedes aka Pradnyaparamita... a symbol of the highest knowledge and highest wisdom. If you look at Javanese art and her statue you see it has male elements too - many female sculptures have male elements. In my painting the person seen from the back could be a man.
By the way, the water was already in my paintings before I went to the confluence.
Tony Godfrey The painting of the more blurred woman, Dolma 1, which you began a year ago, was it always like that?
Arahmaiani No, I began with clear forms, but I got more interested in this blurriness: it gave me more space to ... to just do it. Like with Elo and Progo.
Tony Godfrey Is it like disegno et colore? The traditional division in Italian art between drawing and colour - one is more rational, the other more emotional.
Arahmaiani Yes! I want to accept and merge both energies. But how? And how to make it into something beautiful. Maybe with such limited colour it helps this merging. It is idealised, of course, but - and this is important - working with this material is like working with light. I don't think like this when I work with colours.
Tony Godfrey What difference has it made working in the countryside?
Arahmaiani You are much more aware of changes in light. I felt the last time you came to see me when I was in my old studio in Jogja I couldn't work there. I couldn't get good light. As for the plant forms? They come from my mind and what I see. The nature around me stimulates me but when I paint I just follow my hand. As always the problem is how to combine line and the expressive quality. At school I used to do tight linear forms and then splash paint over them. My tutor was horrified!
Tony Godfrey Why have you had to make these paintings as diptychs?
Arahmaiani Why should nature always be merely a background? My Buddhist approach says, "no... the human being should not just always be standing in front of the nature as if it was a backdrop or an object. This is not a good way to relate to nature - we are part of nature not the master of it." This is where the water comes in - by putting the figures in water they were literally put in the landscape.
Tony Godfrey The woman you painted two years ago in the painting Confluence 3, she now has a crown. Is she a queen?
Arahmaiani Maybe. They call it the marriage of two. I want to come back again to the form of the woman. Especially now, because of way women are marginalised in Aceh and other places. I want to continue celebrating women. They deserve respect.
By the way, I have to tell you that since you saw her last the Queen in Confluence 3 has turned her back and she now has water falling on her head.
I think this is the way that a Queen has to be - the real Queen will have this energy from above (something that moves downward) and will turn her back on the "world".
Tony Godfrey But you don't want this cliché of woman as nature - and passive?
Arahmaiani No, no, no! Both man and woman are part of nature. After hanging about with Buddhist monks my thinking on gender has changed. I no longer see men and women as opposites. I hung around with 500 male monks in a monastery for three months and I forgot that I am a woman. They seem to forget they are men too - they do female things like washing and cleaning.
Tony Godfrey So these are post monastery paintings?
Arahmaiani Ha, ha, yes, I was changed by that experience. The male /female thing is not formed - the spirit is either. Gender theory, gender anger is too linear for me at this moment and on this level of understanding. I guess there are different levels of understanding and each has its own function.
Tony Godfrey When did this looser, more lyrical, more painterly way of working start?
Arahmaiani Actually that way and that quality has always been there, it is only that I haven’t really explored it. Yes, through these paintings I’m exploring this area and it’s really fascinating.
Tony Godfrey Is painting becoming more important to you as an activity? Will painting continue to be an important aspect of your career? Or is this series of works somewhat of a one-off?
Arahmaiani I think it will become important element of my work more in the future – it’s like a cycle of going back to where I was before. These meditative and contemplative aspects are in my nature so I will always have the need to express it I guess.
Tony Godfrey This greyness reminds me of the Danish painter Hammershoi. But he mainly painted interiors. How does this new work of yours relate to the performances? Will this affect the performances?
Arahmaiani Yes, it is affecting my whole way of working. I started to work in the dark with a camera - clearing the dust from the floor by blowing and then after I make a circle I light candles. 12 in all, one by one.
Tony Godfrey Oh this is like the tenebrae service backwards. The tenebrae service is rarely performed in the Catholic church now - it is held at night-time before Good Friday. It is a very long service and after each reading or chant one of the candles in the church is extinguished until only one is left burning and that, representing Jesus - who is sometimes referred to as the light of the world - is hidden under the altar. Gesualdo, Lassus and Charpentier all wrote very beautiful music for the tenebrae service.
What performance are you working on now?
Arahmaiani At Art Stage I made a Mandala like that of Borobudur, but I made it as a small garden. I used Buddhist ceremonies and at the end it was be swept away.
Being in nature
Arahmaiani talks of how she was inspired - or calmed - by leaving her studio in Jogjakarta and going to work in the hills nearby where she was surrounded by animals, plants and trees. These paintings are not of nature, but of being in nature. She puts an emphasis on how we should not use landscape or nature as a mere backdrop to our human activities but be in it and part of it. Water is a key material here, symbolically and actually: we can literally immerse ourselves in water.
These paintings do not reproduce elements from nature so much as bear witness to an involvement or immersion in it.
Arahmaiani in conversation with Tony Godfrey
Tony Godfrey How were your earlier paintings conceived - that is to say, the cartoon paintings?
Arahmaiani In the beginnings I wasn't thinking of them as paintings. I began doing them on paper - I was having fun with the absurd politics. Mickey was dressed as an American symbolic figure, Minnie as a radical Muslim. Tom and Jerry are always competing with each other but they never finish their fight, it just repeats and repeats. It was a good metaphor for US fundamentalism versus Muslim fundamentalism. Then came the idea: "I could make it bigger, why not?" "Yes!" So they became paintings. but I don't see them now as paintings - more my visual jokes.
But I have done with that. It is not exciting anymore.
Tony Godfrey So these new paintings represent a return to painting after 25 years away.
Arahmaiani Not entirely, I have been travelling so much it has been difficult to find and work in a studio. There have been lots of breaks in my life.
Tony Godfrey Were there any good paintings in that long period between college and now?
Arahmaiani Yes, some black and white paintings - I was trying to find my own style, but it was frustrating... I tried for years and finally that became grey. That happened in Sylt.
This is the longest time I have concentrated on painting, but it was the experience of being in Sylt, an island in Germany near Denmark for two months in the winter that made me very aware of greyness. Everything was grey. At first I was depressed - maybe also because of being trapped by bad weather - and therefore drinking too much red wine! But then I realised this grey was not as dull as I thought and then I saw the beauty in it. I was in Sylt about eight years ago. I was there alone. I have lived almost all my life on my own so that was no problem.
It is very cold and very grey and strong storms often hit. The sound of storm is really frightening. I had to stay in the apartment and watch the grey of nature through the glass windows changing and transforming. I saw the world is just a shadow – and I guess what I’ve seen as reality is in fact only shadow!
The first week was like torture because everything seems to be just plain grey – everything seems to be dead! But when the storm hit... then everything turned like it was after death and there were lots of ghost around! I drank a lot of red wine and just stayed in the living room with paper and pencils. Nothing happened. Yes, after that I begin to see that the grey began to become rich and I saw the beautiful array of grey and it moves me and my brush and paint on my paper! And it makes me happy – really happy!
While working in front of the grey canvases my mind was wandering around just like a wanderer in an open, un-limited space. All of a sudden a memory from the past - from of my childhood appeared. I have never seen this as far as I remember – this memory seems gone from my bank.
It’s a memory of shadow, but not a shadow play like the Javanese puppet show. It’s a shadow created by light from cars from far away. Somehow these lights shining through the trees then through glass windows projected some moving shadows on the wall of the dark living room. I'd be lying down on couch for hours! I got really fascinated by these shadows on the wall! The images would be moving and changing depending on how strong the light was and what is happening to the nature. If it is raining or windy then the shadow would be a different variation.
It is almost like an addiction: I’ll be lying down there in the dark room on the same couch every evening (luckily when we got a TV set my father placed it in another room). So I could always enjoy my shadow trip whenever I wanted it, except, if there were guests in the evening then I would have to miss it.
As far as I remember this “shadow play” always fascinated me – at least I remember I had that habit in two different houses. First one was the house where I had been brought up till probably around the age of 9 years old. Then we moved to another and bigger house – and still I kept that habit until probably I was a teenager. I don’t remember exactly. But I lived in that house with my family until my time in art school. Though there was a break during my high school time when I lived with my aunt.
Anyway, I think now I understand better this fascination with “grey”.
Tony Godfrey So memories came back and things crystallised in a landscape situation?
Arahmaiani Right! Exactly! I see something ... but it is a memory really. I had a childhood in nature. My surroundings then were nature. It was a happy childhood, right up to high school, every weekend I was up in the mountains. Though later on we drove rather than walked. I had no idea then of how dangerous and dirty technology was. At art school my work became room world. I spent all my time in the studio or reading or writing. Nature disappeared from my life
Tony Godfrey Without you realising?
Arahmaiani Then I woke up when the earthquake hit Jogja in 2006. In my district more than 4000 people died. In the Eighties I was invited to the Jakarta biennale and I was planting rice on my installation.
Tony Godfrey Just as you did in your Art Stage installation?
Arahmaiani ...but this wasn't to do with nature - rather politics. I was concerned with how the poor can help themselves despite the profits industrialisation makes from them. How can poor people survive? At the same time on the walls I hung black and white paintings of poor, bald people. I don't know where these paintings have gone - they were on paper. Many older works of mine were eaten by insects or got mouldy - this tropical climate is not so good. All the time I was, I think, conscious of these issues that I am now obsessed with.
I am just curious as to what this all means, so I am currently reading Simon Shama's Landscape and Memory.
Tony Godfrey I dislike the book because of his emphasis on how landscape is always seen through cultural expectations: landscape can be a naked experience too. His earlier book, Embarrassment of Riches, about material culture in seventeenth century Holland was much better. A book on landscape I prefer is Rebecca Solnitt's Wanderlust.
Arahmaiani Please lend me both those books! I am also doing research on the colonial past, partly because I am working at the Van Loon Museum. They owned the VOC! The grandmother of my grandmother on my mother's side was Dutch, but was disowned by her family because she married a Sundanese & Javanese mix man. She was also of Jewish/German ancestry. So this is an opportunity to also deal with my family history. I was in Holland as a student, but only for one year, because of the Suharto problem: he expelled the Dutch, so the Dutch expelled me!
Tony Godfrey When did you start working on these grey paintings?
Arahmaiani That painting with the blue woman, Confluence 3 is three years old. I knew at the time that it wasn't finished - it had to have its own life.
Tony Godfrey Was it always a diptych?
Arahmaiani No, it was single canvas then. I knew it wasn't finished, but I didn't know what to do to complete it. I visited it often, but it was as if all I could say to it was, "I am sorry, but I have no idea for you yet".
Tony Godfrey Is that the oldest grey painting?
Arahmaiani The other women in water paintings - Confluence, 1, 2 and 4 - are two years old. Dolma (Sri1) 1 is one year old, Dolma (Sri2) 2 much older. The blue painting was too rigid, but I liked it.
I learned about the confluence of two rivers near Deddy Irianto's place: He wanted me to build a centre for meditation there, so I went there and sat meditating beside the two rivers. That gave me this idea - the river Progo is calm and hardly moves, but the river Elo is vigorous. It was at this meeting point of the rivers that the king traditionally had to go in and meditate in the river. For years I have been busy with gender issues and somehow my understanding developed by working with nature and with Buddhists. For example, the Buddha is not a god - he is energy not a body - so as a Bodhisattva he can be a woman too. The ideal form is the merging of feminine and masculine.
I am expanding my imagination... I tried to work these things out visually. I tried to merge the two. I looked especially at the Javanese Ken Dedes aka Pradnyaparamita... a symbol of the highest knowledge and highest wisdom. If you look at Javanese art and her statue you see it has male elements too - many female sculptures have male elements. In my painting the person seen from the back could be a man.
By the way, the water was already in my paintings before I went to the confluence.
Tony Godfrey The painting of the more blurred woman, Dolma 1, which you began a year ago, was it always like that?
Arahmaiani No, I began with clear forms, but I got more interested in this blurriness: it gave me more space to ... to just do it. Like with Elo and Progo.
Tony Godfrey Is it like disegno et colore? The traditional division in Italian art between drawing and colour - one is more rational, the other more emotional.
Arahmaiani Yes! I want to accept and merge both energies. But how? And how to make it into something beautiful. Maybe with such limited colour it helps this merging. It is idealised, of course, but - and this is important - working with this material is like working with light. I don't think like this when I work with colours.
Tony Godfrey What difference has it made working in the countryside?
Arahmaiani You are much more aware of changes in light. I felt the last time you came to see me when I was in my old studio in Jogja I couldn't work there. I couldn't get good light. As for the plant forms? They come from my mind and what I see. The nature around me stimulates me but when I paint I just follow my hand. As always the problem is how to combine line and the expressive quality. At school I used to do tight linear forms and then splash paint over them. My tutor was horrified!
Tony Godfrey Why have you had to make these paintings as diptychs?
Arahmaiani Why should nature always be merely a background? My Buddhist approach says, "no... the human being should not just always be standing in front of the nature as if it was a backdrop or an object. This is not a good way to relate to nature - we are part of nature not the master of it." This is where the water comes in - by putting the figures in water they were literally put in the landscape.
Tony Godfrey The woman you painted two years ago in the painting Confluence 3, she now has a crown. Is she a queen?
Arahmaiani Maybe. They call it the marriage of two. I want to come back again to the form of the woman. Especially now, because of way women are marginalised in Aceh and other places. I want to continue celebrating women. They deserve respect.
By the way, I have to tell you that since you saw her last the Queen in Confluence 3 has turned her back and she now has water falling on her head.
I think this is the way that a Queen has to be - the real Queen will have this energy from above (something that moves downward) and will turn her back on the "world".
Tony Godfrey But you don't want this cliché of woman as nature - and passive?
Arahmaiani No, no, no! Both man and woman are part of nature. After hanging about with Buddhist monks my thinking on gender has changed. I no longer see men and women as opposites. I hung around with 500 male monks in a monastery for three months and I forgot that I am a woman. They seem to forget they are men too - they do female things like washing and cleaning.
Tony Godfrey So these are post monastery paintings?
Arahmaiani Ha, ha, yes, I was changed by that experience. The male /female thing is not formed - the spirit is either. Gender theory, gender anger is too linear for me at this moment and on this level of understanding. I guess there are different levels of understanding and each has its own function.
Tony Godfrey When did this looser, more lyrical, more painterly way of working start?
Arahmaiani Actually that way and that quality has always been there, it is only that I haven’t really explored it. Yes, through these paintings I’m exploring this area and it’s really fascinating.
Tony Godfrey Is painting becoming more important to you as an activity? Will painting continue to be an important aspect of your career? Or is this series of works somewhat of a one-off?
Arahmaiani I think it will become important element of my work more in the future – it’s like a cycle of going back to where I was before. These meditative and contemplative aspects are in my nature so I will always have the need to express it I guess.
Tony Godfrey This greyness reminds me of the Danish painter Hammershoi. But he mainly painted interiors. How does this new work of yours relate to the performances? Will this affect the performances?
Arahmaiani Yes, it is affecting my whole way of working. I started to work in the dark with a camera - clearing the dust from the floor by blowing and then after I make a circle I light candles. 12 in all, one by one.
Tony Godfrey Oh this is like the tenebrae service backwards. The tenebrae service is rarely performed in the Catholic church now - it is held at night-time before Good Friday. It is a very long service and after each reading or chant one of the candles in the church is extinguished until only one is left burning and that, representing Jesus - who is sometimes referred to as the light of the world - is hidden under the altar. Gesualdo, Lassus and Charpentier all wrote very beautiful music for the tenebrae service.
What performance are you working on now?
Arahmaiani At Art Stage I made a Mandala like that of Borobudur, but I made it as a small garden. I used Buddhist ceremonies and at the end it was be swept away.
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Our special thanks to Tony Godfrey, Deddy Irianto and Equator Art Projects.