A Joburger in Jakarta: Notes on Ruangrupa and the Art of the Network

(PM10 measurements for Jakarta and Johannesburg – concentrations of minute liquid and solid particles that penetrate to the deepest parts of the lungs, World Bank Development Economics Group Estimates)

  

 

Visiting other places, one is aware of the need to guard against the tendency to transform what is fundamentally ordinary into a metaphor or spectacle that operates as little more than a cipher for ones own preoccupations. The traffic in Jakarta is beguiling in this way - a richly expressive realm that it is difficult to pass over when trying to say anything about anything that is happening in this city. The roads are governed by a buzzing horde of scooters which weave seamlessly together in a mesmerising, incessant ebb and flow of people and machinery. This is not an apocalyptic scene – there is a kind of domesticity at work, with children, mattresses, all kinds of things, being accommodated in seemingly impossible ways on these tiny vehicles in a self-regulating, intensely focused system of apparently unconscious give and take. Transposed into a Johannesburg context, one would anticipate carnage and gridlock were our comparatively elephantine taxis to attempt comparable levels of speed and volume.

 

Many of the qualities of Jakartan traffic are present in the aptly titled Decompression project – a ten year retrospective of the work of the Jakarta-based artist collective Ruangrupa (literally visual-space), which on one level functions as a sustained meditation on the city of Jakarta itself, a very compressed place.  This gentle behemoth of a project was orchestrated across more than five venues (including the entire National Gallery of Indonesia) and consisted of an extraordinary array of activities staged over a period of about a month: 4 major exhibitions, an archive, screenings, rock concerts, seminars, markets, performances, instant projects and… karaoke. During the course of a week I had the opportunity – through the invitation of the Dutch based Arts Collaboratory - to explore the ins and outs of the project and the organisation behind it.

 

Walking into the Ruangrupa headquarters in a converted house in the middle of an inner city suburb, one’s first indelible impression is of a group of people who do not seem to be doing very much of anything.  People wander in and out of a slightly ramshackle space, conversation floats over tea and snacks, people tinker on laptops in an enervating fog of humidity. The contradiction between what Ruangrupa looks and feels like and the scope and professionalism of what it actually does is an abiding impression during my stay, one which is confirmed by other visitors. It is a refreshing contrast to the Johannesburg contemporary arts scene, where it can sometimes seem as though we are all insanely busy with generating ‘a lot of nothing’, as an astute friend likes to put it.

 

Ruangrupa is directed by Ade Darmawan, one of the two remaining original founders of the project from its origins at the turn of the millennium – the other is Hafiz, who now runs an activist video project (Forum Lenteng) alongside an ongoing involvement with Ruangrupa. Conceived together with four other artists in 2000, Ruangrupa has been centrally concerned with redefining the purposes, spaces and the publics for contemporary art in Jakarta. The project has had an overtly activist dimension from the start, concerned with the possibilities for creative production to operate both at the level of reimagining public space and of intervening in public space. Research and cross-disciplinary collaborations have also been a signal feature of Ruangrupa projects.  A number of ambitious core programmes evolved out of these preoccupations - a residency programme drawing in artists from across Indonesia, South East Asia and a broader international circuit (now the ArtLab project), a video art festival (the OK Video Festival) and an annual exhibition of emerging contemporary art (Jakarta 32°C).

 

The advent of Ruangrupa roughly coincided with two crucial ‘shaping’ phenomena: the end of the Suharto military dictatorship in 1998, and the proliferation of internet access and web-based technologies. The first circumstance established a broader playing field in which a project like Ruangrupa could exist at all - until the 1998 exit of Suharto’s New Order regime, alternative creative spaces existed largely in the necessarily limiting confines of universities. The second provided the fuel for a project that is predicated on dynamic networks and the smart use of technology. 

 

The unprecedented social and political reconfiguration of Indonesia in the post 1998 ‘reformation’ period was a result of popular uprisings fuelled by the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s and more than thirty years of military rule under Suharto in the wake of the massacre of communists that took place in 1965 – a year that to this day operates as a kind of blind spot in public consciousness. In this new and uncertain landscape, Indonesia is now a country caught acutely between what the Dutch curator Charles Esche - one of the panelists in the Decompression seminar programme - describes as the two ‘invisible hands’ that have replaced ideology as a shaping force in the new millennium – ‘the hand of god’ on the one hand, and the ‘hand of the market’ on the other. Running through the diverse projects that Ruangrupa has initiated or collaborated on is a concerted effort to make the work of these ‘hands’more visible, and in so doing diminish and bring into question their power.

 

This has manifested itself in a variety of forms, both nuanced and overt. The 2003 Apartment project involved artists living and working in two very different kinds of contemporary urban dwelling – a recently developed seventeen story upmarket apartment building (Rasuna apartmen) and an older ten story low income block (rumah susun Benhil). The project hinged around a consideration of the ‘verticalisation’ of urban life in Jakarta in the context of a belief system traditionally built around ‘horizontal living’ and proximity to the earth, and ownership of land. Months of interviewing, observing and interacting with residents led to a rich and complex set of creative experiments. Arjan van Hemhold created a dense cognitive map of conceptions of home through getting current residents, as well as residents displaced by the construction of the Rasuna apartmen, to create drawings of where they used to live, accompanied by short narratives. Reza Afisina developed a video piece showing an imagined crime taking place within the Rasuna block, accompanied by a voice-over recounting his experience of the building during his time there. Another Indonesian artist, Henry Foundation aka Batman, created a work involving slide projections, stickers, posters and t-shorts with the words ‘We Are a Part But We Are Apart’ distributed throughout the building.

 

A series of projects convened during the course of 2006 involved ruanrgupa collaborating with artists from Holland, Mexico and Argentina in a series of creative investigations into concepts of work, play and leisure in Jakarta. One of the projects involved the creation of an urban picnic kit (accompanied by a mock promotional video) that would generate an instant ‘holiday situation’ for the inhabitants of Jakarta ‘anywhere, anytime’. A second involved the creation of a new kind of playground device for children integrated into the dense urban landscape - responding to the ways in which technological development and urbanisation lead to decreased opportunities for connection among children.  A more recent project, still in development, involves the creation of a prototype for a mobile film production and screening facility that enables ordinary people to create and present a picture of the world/s that they inhabit. These examples provide only a very limited insight into the character of the output of the collective during the past decade - it is extremely difficult to identify a work that is somehow characteristic or emblematic. Approaches and creative strategies arise in a myriad of different ways out of the specific collaborators, concepts, technologies and contexts involved in each project.

 

An abiding sense from my time with Ruangrupa, and my stay in Jakarta, was of a place and a creative context that is fundamentally interesting and important when viewed from the vantage point of Johannesburg/South Africa. On the face of it, Johannesburg and Jakarta have much in common, as suggested by the following description of Jakarta from Ruangrupa collaborator, art historian, curator and critic Agung Hujatnikajennong:

 

“The city keeps growing in an untamed fashion, enduring ever-escalating numbers of migrants; the spread of slums and the simultaneous mushrooming of luxurious apartments; seas of banal advertisements occupying the shrinking public spaces; waste and pollution; lack of proper sanitation; poverty; annual floods during the rainy season; criminality; traffic jams; and many other problems. For decades, all these issues have kept recurring, but no solutions have been found. Jakarta is a locus of crisis, a labyrinth in which anyone who heroically attempts to alleviate a mess will inevitably end up in a bigger one.”

 

That this could as easily be a description of Johannesburg is clear. Closer inspection suggests however the ways in which ‘developing world’ contexts – so quickly lumped together and assumed to share a set of salient characteristics and qualities – are perhaps profoundly variable, inevitably the products of significantly different social, political and cultural histories. While my experience of the Jakartan/Indonesian arts scene was necessarily punctual and partial, my over-riding impression was of a vital and profoundly original world, in a perpetual state of reinventing itself.

 

The network dimension of this world is perhaps one of its most striking features – one of the main components of the Ruangrupa retrospectiveproject, ruru.net, involved an entire annex of the Indonesian National Gallery precinct being devoted to a kind of trade show-cum-map of more than 70 of the local, regional, national and international organisations, groups and collectives that Ruangrupa has worked with during the course of the past decade. It is also an aspect of Ruangrupa that has been influential in the shaping of the Indonesia arts scene – during the last decade, collectives and independent spaces have proliferated across the cities and towns of the Indonesian archipelago, many inspired by the example set by Ruangrupa. Significantly, despite its seminal role in generating this network, Ruangrupa does not see itself as occupying a position of centrality, but regards itself rather as an engaged participant, in a manner that departs from the standard artworld structure of (urban/developed) centre and (non-urban, undeveloped) periphery.

 

In Johannesburg by contrast, one can more or less count on one mutilated hand the number of independent, artist-driven platforms for research, production and presentation of contemporary art. In South Africa we sometimes attribute this to the fact that there is not sufficient funding available for the arts. In Indonesia there is however practically NO public funding for contemporary art, beyond state investment in museums and art schools – there is no regularised system of grant funding at either a regional or national level. Independent projects run on a combination of voluntary time, earned income, cash and in-kind support from institutions and businesses, and funding from international sources and partners. Most artists involved in these projects cross-subsidise their practice through commercial sales, teaching and freelance work in adjacent areas such as design, advertising and video production. For the Decompression project, more than seventy organisations, institutions and agencies who had in some way or another provided support for the realisation of the project are acknowledged through an epic logo spread in the project catalogue cum guidebook. There is a sense of an evolving infrastructure for contemporary art that is sustained not through government institutions and funding agencies, but through dense and extensive networks of co-operation, sharing and friendship – local, regional and international.

 

One of the other salient features of this world is the extent to which it appears to be substantially less framed by Anglo-European and American artistic and philosophical traditions than our own, and the extent to which these traditions are treated as dynamic resources that are put into play alongside an acute and nuanced engagement with the local. The dual and dull horizon of extreme seriousness on the one hand, and extreme irony on the other, that seems to have established itself as the background noise against which our own practices and discourses are callibrated, is largely absent from the Indonesian art world environment. There is a pragmatic sense in which the world of commerce in art, critical and independent practice, activism and academic inquiry are intertwined and inter-related in a context which has experienced a version (albeit a more modest one) of the Chinese boom in the market for locally produced contemporary art. The category of ‘contemporary art’ comes across as a substantially more porous and flexible one than the largely white-cube based construct that continues to stand as the frail centre of gravity for our art world. A significant portion of what Ruangrupa does could be misconstrued as ‘community arts’ in a Johannesburg and South African context – a lazy shorthand for anything that involves interaction with people and issues that exist outside of a an unhappy discursive bubble, one which sometimes retards our capacity to embrace the wider potentials and applications contained within what we think of as ‘contemporary art’.

 

 

This inquisitive practice – built out of a fusion of high theory, technology, participation and laughter – is wonderfully realised in a project of the Malaysian artist and longtime ruangrupa collaborator Yse (aka Roslisham Ismail), that formed part of the Ruru and Friends exhibition component of the overall project. The project involved the generation of a series of posters, postcards and trailers for a trilogy of imaginary horror films, involving the participation of people from a Jakarta neighbourhood. The project solicited a complex engagement from local people, who in a variety of ways became involved in transforming the mythology created by the artist into a lived reality.   This fusion is also evident in the now famous karaoke sessions that Ruangrupa stages in relationship with exhibition openings, project launches, the arrival or departure of friends. My birthday coincided with one of these sessions and I found myself being compelled to mumble my way through an American rock anthem from the late nineties in the middle of a throng of young Ruangrupa groupies. An evening of people belting their hearts out to music that traverses many times and places, but which finds purchase, for a moment, in this time and place.