The Way of the Artist

The Way of the Artist

I’ve begun to paint again. Only ten minutes at a time, blocking in one tone and then having to stop, have a look, resist the urge to make another cup of tea, allowing myself the reward of cleaning the bathroom. The reward being for painting first instead of feeling I have to leave painting till everything else is done.

This follows a period of drawing, mostly with charcoal, mostly the figure and mostly with lots of black, shadows. And feeling sad and cheated and like I failed even though I passed art school, because I still lack the skills to feel confident to paint, and draw accurately and well. Which I so wanted to learn. And graduated having no idea what painting was for any more.

I had a great time at art school. I really enjoyed most of it. But all the time I thought it was taking me to where I would know who I am as an artist, and have the skills to express that.

I’ve seen the ‘Artists Talk’ program on internationally recognised Indonesian artist Dadang Christanto twice now, (it was repeated on Sunday Arts), I watched it again because he influenced the direction of my life very profoundly. It’s a visually beautiful production too, images of the artist among tropical plants, images of the intricately cut out leather Wayang Kulit shadow puppets, images of Dadang’s installations, which are often set up in a forest, a pool or on the edge of the ocean.

I met Dadang in Java in 1987, given the contact by a colleague as someone who could assist my research on contemporary artists in Indonesia. I was doing an Honours year after my BA in Indonesian Studies and Visual Arts. Suharto’s regime was in power and interviewing or even chatting with artists about the underlying themes of their work was dangerous for them. I was fully aware that criticizing or being interpreted to criticize Suharto was likely to land them in jail for a significant period of time. In my research I learnt to ‘read’ the visual language of many of the young, thinking and passionate artists working in Yogyakarta.

I wrote my thesis, then pestered my wonderful supervisor, Dr. Keith Foulcher, until he agreed to it being published as a monograph by the Asian Studies Department at Flinders University. At that time, modern Asian artists were not taken seriously except by a small handful of Western art observers. Their art was often labelled as ‘copying’ and regarded as of no importance. That is no longer true. The art world is international now and there is some appreciation of the history of modernism in other cultures.

I went back to Indonesia in 1991 for a whole year to research for my Masters thesis. The research explored in more depth the way in which visual language was used to communicate ideas masked and diffused so that any direct interpretation was impossible. This was partly culturally derived – word play, jokes, indirectness, and subtlety are part of Javanese language and culture that Westerners would find it hard to get their heads around, we being so direct and ‘what you see is what you get’. The other aspect was that it gave artists a means to express their true feelings in a way that enabled survival.

I knew that Dadang was from a Chinese background, so it was likely there was a tragedy in his family from the 1965 anti-communist killings, but I never felt I could ask about it, and it never came up. Dadang was always gentle, good humoured, serious but with a smile. Many, many Indonesians lost family members during this time, but it was not spoken of except obliquely and in the fewest of words, and to ask about it was unthinkable. Not all were communist, often it was the educated – teachers for example, or ethnic Chinese, or even just someone who a neighbour had a grudge against and dobbed in.

It was in this TV footage, where Dadang talked about himself as an artist, that – twenty years on! – I heard the story of his father’s murder by the military for the first time. Now he lives in Australia, he is able to make art that directly refers to this event, and to the mass killings that occurred throughout Indonesia in 1965. He is free to talk about his life and experience as an eight year old boy whose dad was taken away and shot.

Dadang spoke of his admiration as a young art student for the Samurai, Musashi. He felt that, as Musashi followed the Way of the Samurai, he, Dadang would live his life following the Way of the Artist. The Way being to express the truth of his feelings, to be honest in his art.

I’m painting a beach with storm clouds gathering. I’m painting it from a photo I took on Cottesloe Beach in Western Australia, a while back. There’s a gleam of white light on the horizon line of the water.

I’ve also returned after countless aeons to drawing with a pencil. Probably since I was in primary school and trying to draw a realistic picture, with shading, not leaving anything out. Not modern at all. As for post-modern…..

At art school, we had this compulsory unit called Concept Development. I just couldn’t come up with anything clever. I passed of course. But I still can’t think of anything clever, ironic, politically correct in the postmodern art sense of being sensational, different, playing on kitsch, gender, sexuality, politics, well we all know what is shown in art biennales, don’t we. I don’t have a problem with that, artists should be free to do whatever they want. Some of it is really good. I know it’s not the way for me.

Remember Keats, the English Romantic poet, who wrote something like ‘Truth is Beauty, and Beauty Truth, that is all I know and all I need to know.’ Thinking about Dadang and his Way of the Artist, doesn’t this acquire a new layer of meaning, beyond the Romantic? But still aligned with truth, and still creating beauty.

I’ve recently returned from Berlin, where I spent a day in the huge exhibition ‘The Myth of the Artist’. The main hall was filled with works by Joseph Beuys, including his famous blackboards, piles of them heaped up, written in chalk. Beuys was Professor of Sculpture in the 70s at whatever university I forget. (All my notes and brochures and things from the exhibitions I went to have disappeared forever with my suitcase, stolen in Rome within an hour of my arriving there). But I still have my camera, the most important thing, with all the photos in it.

Anyway. All the blackboards say one thing: ‘Show your wound,’

On the way to Berlin I stopped over in Singapore and took some photos of some Australian artists’ work in an exhibition there.

I loved the photo of the book by Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, going up in flames. Good joke. Love it!

A week later in Berlin, I walked on the square, the Bebelplatz, in front of the Humboldt University – where among other famous scientists, Einstein taught. On that square, the Nazis had all the books they disagreed with pulled out of the library and burnt.

They say that people who burn books will end up burning people.

We know that Matthew Bradley’s photos are a expression of disagreement with the theory (and if I got the artist’s name wrong, I apologize and blame the thieves in Rome, who have probably thrown all my art catalogues and stuff in the bin – and who the Romans assured me were ‘not Italians, but Gypsies or people from somewhere else’, which reminds me that the Nazis wanted to get rid of the Gypsies too).

They’re not a bookburning at all, simply an ironic comment on the French theory that has crushed the creative urges or confused and bamboozled of so many of us. But still.

Another interesting result of allowing myself to do babyish things like a seascape on a $3 canvas board or pencil drawing of a corner of my kitchen, is that I keep having all these ideas and want to write them down – like I’m doing today!

I’m wondering what you other artists out there, especially the Remodernists, think.

I’ve uploaded some photos to go with this.

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Tags:

artist, berlin, beuys, indonesia, killings, modernist, of, postmodern, re, the and way