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Talking Back to the Landscape: Trajectories of an Indonesian Discourse in the Video Art of Krisna Murti

by Amanda Katherine Rath

Although diverse in its articulations, the development of contemporary art in Indonesia has in large part been based on a similar self-conscious engagement and weaving together of multiple temporalities and cultural traditions, techniques, materials and values. While some artists have set these in opposition to one another, thus creating a somewhat simplistic binary between tradition and modern, most artists articulate the simultaneity of these within Indonesian society. They explore and underscore a certain ambivalent relationship to modernity, among other things. In developing an artistic practice capable of articulating the complexities of Indonesian society, while also in a way that has universal appeal, installation has for many artists proven best suited to the task. Installation art initially emerged in Indonesia in the 1970s. Aside from certain artists taking such art in a particularly political direction, most artists combined objects from popular culture and in absurd ways as a means of rebelling against the aesthetic boundaries of modern art imposed on them by the academy. However, installation as a more critical practice did not seem to attract many artists until the late 1980s, and then in earnest by the mid-1990s. It was this second chapter of installation art in Indonesia that older artists such as FX Harsono and Krisna Murti, along with younger artists such as Heri Dono, Dadang Christanto, and Nindityo Adipurnomo began using installation in complex ways to make more sustainable arguments; as multi-layered networks of different discourses, cultural and religious traditions, temporalities, narratives, etc.

As one of the first installation artists and well as video art pioneer, Krisna Murti has continuously explored new ground. While this catalogue is perhaps directed more toward his new body of work, to which I turn later in this article, I want to first revisit some of his earlier installations to underscore and emphasize some of what I see as general patterns in his artistic practice and philosophy. The first section is to also allow the reader to see some of the ways his work has changed over the course of the last decade or so.

Krisna’s Early Video-Installations

Trained as a painter at the Fine Art and Design department in ITB in Bandung, Krisna moved away from painting in the early 1990s to become one of the first video installation artists in Indonesia. He was also one of the first to combine the possibilities of video technology with organic and so-called low art forms and the forms, techniques, and materials of traditional local culture. 

Objects from Nagrak Village (1994) is one of his earliest video installations. Some have suggested that this piece speaks of the collision of high and low technologies, tradition and modern. Yet, it is perhaps also possible that the technology of video itself, the apparatus of video is not such a big issue in this work. Nor does the artist deal with it in a critical way. Rather, the piece can be read as a juxtaposition between different kinds of time and the possibilities of manipulating time: namely that of the natural growing process, particularly through the growth cycle of the rice plant, with the time of the video which itself is Krisna’s recording of 24 hours in the life of Agung Rai, Balinese rice farmer and tradition dancer. However, such a relationship of different modes of time does not place these different modalities of experiencing time into a confrontational relationship, nor does it attempt, in my opinion, to place emphasis on any either side of the thorny and now moribund binary of tradition and modern. Rather Krisna puts to great effect the possibilities inherent in video with that of other artistic mediums to underscore the multiple and simultaneous temporalities of contemporary Indonesian society, and its diversity of cultural traditions, beliefs and values.  In other words, typical of Krisna’s work in general, it is a matter of both/and, not either/or.

Krisna’s installations tended toward the monumental in scale. And in these works from between 1994 and roughly 2000, video plays an integral but not predominant role in the overall project. Video, both ‘found footage’ and that produced by the artist himself, at times provides the glue that binds together the other layers of narrative and metaphor; anchoring the intention and meaning of the overall piece. In other pieces, video provides only one of the streams or layers of the overarching concept.

In his 1995 Belajar Antri dari Semut or Learning to Queue from the Ants, as Agung Hujatnikajennong states, “make the viewer aware of the ideological powers that function behind technology’s uses in Indonesia.” This also entails the question of ‘social engineering’ through the use of television by the New Order government in its program of economic and social modernization. In this work, Krisna takes on such issues in an ironic way. Like his earlier Objects from Nagrak Village, among others, here he combines his own video footage transmitted through a series of television monitors with organic materials and traditional Balinese cultural forms to create a monumental installation work.
Hujatnikajennong provides a useful discussion of this piece and is quoted as length here:

For this piece, Krisna reinterprets the petulangan, which he enlarged as sculptural objects in the form of fierce lions. Small television monitors were placed beneath the paws and in front of the face of each lion figure. The identical demonic expressions of the immovable figures were in sharp contrast to the dynamic movement of the ant collective. Each monitor showed footage of ant culture, their regimented and organized behavior of cooperation. This was intended to suggest that the ants are teaching the powerful lions how to behave. Krisna also covered the gallery floor with dried leaves. Hung from the ceiling, long skeins of cloth containing written Balinese aphorisms convey admonishments to leaders to learn from their subordinates. The entire space was diffused with the tranquil sounds of small traditional chimes.
As direct modes of criticism were dangerous, Learning to Queue from the Ants implies criticism through parody, intended as a veiled commentary concerning the current political situation in Indonesia during the early 1990s. As symbols of the power or status quo, the lions are confronted with and stand upon metaphors of the government’s control over information [1].

Hujatnikajennong points to the use of video as a means of evoking and critiquing the uses of technology, in this case television, in social engineering during the New Order. This is reflected in the many television monitors, as well as in Krisna’s choice of theme for his video.
However, from the above, we can also see that the video component is not primary, but integral to the overall structure and significance of the work. Another key aspect is process; process as part of the “work” that art does. Krisna does not merely appropriate the ritual form of the petulangan or lion-shaped sarcophagus used in Balinese cremation ceremonies. As part of the process of this work, he attempted to include the local people and their concerns over the use of their material and religious culture. For instance, he asked permission from Balinese Brahman and locals to take this typically ritual funerary form out of sync with its intended time and function, to shift its significance from the ritual of the funeral to the ritual of art. In Learning to Queue, the lion form for Krisna connotes power as such [2]. After obtaining permission to use these forms as material for a work of art, he hired local artisans to produce the many lionforms. Krisna’s exhibited piece also has a ritual element to it: a Balinese dancer performed a traditional dance specifically for the opening of the exhibition.

Era Reformasi

For a brief period during what in Indonesia is called era reformasi or the era of [political] reform, Krisna’s work, like that of many artists in Indonesia, became overtly political and aggressive. Most of this art cannot be said to put forward a sustainable critique, but rather was an explosion of deep seeded anger and years of frustration at the abuses of power during the New Order. For about one year (between 1998 and 1999), artistic expression leaned toward euphoric paroxysms and vitriolic indictment [3]. It was as if the corpse of Suharto’s presidency was forcibly exorcised through vicious imagery, political satire, and propagandist art and literature. This was combined with attempts to come to terms with the ensuing racial and religious violence in the country that seemed poised to rip the country apart. It was during this period that Krisna made some of his most overtly political and aggressive work. This would include his Presidential Brand Pantyshield and The Growth, both from 1998. After this necessary period of collectively shared catharsis, many artists, like Krisna, began to weave constructive alternatives to the official version of national history and culture imposed by the New Order government. This includes his 1999 solo exhibition/installation Makanan tak Tahu Ras (Food Knows no Race). Again, in keeping with his earlier installations of the 1990s, the work is monumental in size, taking up the entire gallery space. Here, he deals with a highly contentious subject through the use of parody and visual play.

On one level, the piece alludes to and directly challenges the New Order concept of SARA, an acronym for Suku, Agama, Ras, and Antara Golongan or Ethnicity, Religion, Race, and Class. SARA was the New Order government’s injunction against such issues in the public and political discourse. This of course included what could and could not be directly discussed in art. However, after Soeharto was forced to step down, all bets were off.
Krisna approaches the quite contentious issue of race in a seemingly light-hearted way by reproducing colorful images and descriptions – the type that might appear on food packaging or menus –  of the variety of ethnically and racially specific foods that can be found throughout Indonesia. These are placed in a series of bright pink toilets, requiring the viewer to lean over the toilets in order to see the gastronomical delights therein. In this juxtaposition, Krisna underscores that although there are dangerous categories of such pribumi (native or true Indonesian) and non-pribumi (non-Indonesian, i.e. racially Chinese) which serve to separate society at the official and non-official levels of society, Indonesians in general engage in what is perhaps an unconscious cultural exchange by eating the foods of the various racial and ethnic groups which make up the Indonesian population without disparaging its racial or ethnic origins. The artist further underscored this by offering freshly cooked local delights by street hawkers directly outside the gallery. Krisna explains that he wanted the visitor to have a chance to “first taste/ experience the sensation of food before being invited to understand it.”[4]

The sea of pink toilets is framed on three sides by wall projections. On two walls, the artist projected enlarged images of Dutch East Indies style of landscape painting called Mooi Indies or Beautiful Indies (see below). During the New Order, the conventions of such landscape painting sold quite well in the fine art auctions. It was also inscribed with the idea of Indonesia Indah or Beautiful Indonesia. For many contemporary artists during the late 20th century, the Mooi Indies/Indonesia Indah landscapes represented conservative aesthetic values, as well as an inherent hypocrisy: a dream sold to tourists but one neither experienced nor possessed by the Indonesian people themselves.

This comes further into relief in Food Knows no Race when seen in relation to the third projection, a video projection comprised of found footage.  Here, Krisna brings two different narratives into direct confrontation, by splicing together footage taken from the national indoctrination film Pengkhianatan G-30-S/PKI and recorded daytime cooking television programs [5]. The film was originally produced as part of the official construction of the events leading up to, during, and after the failed Communist coup of 1965. In essence, the film was designed to embed within the national collective memory the image of General Suharto and his military as the savior of the country, as the embodiment of a New Order. It also heightened the issue of race. The Chinese were suspected for some time after the failed coup of Communist leanings more than were other ethnic or racial groups in the country. After 1965, Chinese culture and language were driven underground, effectively creating a culture of silence regarding the “Chinese question”. 

By splicing the film together with scenes taken from various cooking programs, as well as distorting and overwriting portions of its original soundtrack with the chatty banter and cooking instructions from said programs, Krisna intervenes in and recodes the official version of national history, and through the taboo subject of race.

From the above, it is clear that non-linearity and intertextuality is the basis of his work. “At the moment that one texts falls silent [or has been decoded by the viewer], another one takes on more meaning.”[6] It is a constant process of revealing and concealing. As such, the space of the whole installation serves as the tableau that, like allegory, requires the viewer to unravel all the various layers, to read the one across the other simultaneously in order for its significance to unfold.

Forbidden Zone: Talking Back to the Landscape

It was not until roughly 2000 that Krisna began to create video installations that used video as the primary medium in his work.  He continuously experiments with the temporal possibilities of video, and experience of time, combining multiple aspects of a similar theme into one piece. In his new work, it seems that Krisna is once again anxious to try something different. In his work intended for exhibition in 2008, he explores the idea of landscape through the languages of painting, digital print, and video. 

For the last decade, a few contemporary artists in Indonesia have reengaged the landscape in a variety of mediums. Some artists deal critically and ironically with the ideological moorings behind certain types of landscape painting, particularly that of the Mooi Indies style of the Dutch East Indies school. Others construct landscapes in video and digital photography, in which spiritual and perceived redemptive connotations of nature are stressed. Yet others emphasize the sense of alienation from nature, the ways in which we drive through or fly over it but never wonder through or come into direct contact with it. It can be said that since 2002, Krisna has created works across these trends.

At first glance, Krisna’s foray into the concept of landscape and images of landscape (moving and still) perhaps seems to participate in the ubiquitous eye candy that comprises much of the contemporary art in the glutted market of the international art exhibition, or Biennale-ism. Since the early 1990s, many contemporary artists participating in the international art exhibition have engaged in a quite market friendly project of recuperating the “beautiful” in art, which had fallen victim to the political and cultural wars that were waged during the postmodernism debates. One trend in this project has been to digitally reproduce or fabricate the “beautiful” image for its own sake that in-effect most often arrests critical thought.

On one level, the above state of affairs is the case with Krisna’s new body of work, particularly his series of works in Forbidden Zone. In this piece, comprised of the works “Airplane”, “Colloseum” and painted ‘scapes’ (urban, countryside, roadside, etc.), Krisna produces a series of different landscapes, in video, painting and the digital print. In other words, he engages the landscape through a variety of different technical conventions, each with its own rules. In this he professes to blur the boundaries between the discourses of high and low art, fine art and advertising, between high and low art. Such a supposed transgression is not in the theme or images but in the manner or way they are presented. The question remains: Does the artist merely reproduce the codes and conventions of dominant media? For example, his video “Airplane” becomes a “moving picture” in that he has framed this back projected video with a frame typically reserved for fine art paintings. The footage for the video, taken with a fixed camera, is of a seascape at the edge of a runway Changi Airport in Singapore. The line of vision toward the seascape is interrupted with the airplanes that take off and land, that then also become part of the overall landscape. So while the artist points to the affiliation between painting and video in terms of how they are presented, i.e. hung on the wall as a flat surface, the duration of time emphasized through video also underscores its difference from painting.
Part of this experience of time, and one of the things that has consistently interested Krisna, is the length of time it takes for the viewer to go from being absorbed by an image or action to a state of daydreaming or boredom [7]. He once commented that he felt that the time it takes to go from one state to the other is significantly shorter when looking at a static image (i.e., photograph or painting). But this is a fairly recent phenomenon, one particular to a society intimately familiar with the rhetoric and time of cinema and video. In Krisna’s “moving picture”, it remains to be seen whether the viewer is actually aware of the cognitive oscillation between the rhetoric of video and painting, between the movie and the picture, between motion and stillness in his or her journey from direct engagement to boredom and daydreams.

For this writer, the main point of criticality in Krisna’s new work derives from the artist’s own ambivalent relationship to the legacy, discourse, and ideological moorings of the “landscape”, particularly landscape painting, in Indonesia. As I suggested above landscape painting in Indonesia is a colonial legacy, and although it is still considered a secondary form of art, one associated with conservatism, nostalgia, and tourism, it continues to command high prices in the many auctions in the region, and is a staple of street painting stalls. Additionally, the aesthetic principles behind a “proper” landscape still influence the ways in which nature is seen and interpreted.

According to W.J.T Mitchell (1994), landscape is originally and centrally constituted as an imagery associated with a new way of seeing with the advent of industrialization, which greatly and irrevocably affected the ways in which people perceive and experience time and space [8]. He further points out that the history of the landscape, in both the West and elsewhere,  is also deeply connected with conceptions of ‘man’s’ ability to intervene in and control nature, to visually produce an ideal image of a balanced and harmonious world.  In other words, Mitchell argues that landscape is not just a genre but a medium: a network of cultural codes; a “seemingly ‘different structure’ of nature [that] can be read as a symptom of alienation from the land; the ‘reflective’ and imaginary projection of moods into landscape [can be] read as dream-work of ideology.”[9] The conventional Landscape had its required objects that go into making a ‘proper’ landscape; a formula that revealed some of the issues around which identities were being discussed.”[10]
 
Although moribund as a genre of especially painting, seeing Landscape as a medium continues to have resonance today in relation to digital and video technology. Digital technology has allowed for not only new depth and detail in the conventional photograph, seducing the viewer with an unprecedented level of detail and color saturation. It has also made it possible to take the form of “landscape” to another level of fiction. Such images are still designed to trigger a sense of awe and desire in the viewer, a desire to commune with nature, a “captured” nature that may not exist in the “real world”. In other words, such constructions underscore the old “chestnut” of “simulacrum”, a signifier that has no referent in the “real world”, data without knowledge. 

In as much as the above conceptions of landscape-as-medium pertain to its history in Western art, it is also quite applicable to other cultural contexts, in this case Indonesia.  This is particularly the case when taking into account its specific historical trajectory and discourse in Indonesia to which Krisna’s new work speaks.

Legacies of Landscape from the Dutch East Indies

Without realizing it they had already climbed high into the terraced hills, and now spread below them was the wide spans of golden yellow rice, villages shaded by slender coconut trees that loomed high over head.  Towards the horizon spread the blue of a lake, and opposite from this was terraced hill upon hill, fading into the tall blue mountain, the top of which was lost in a blanket of gathering white cloud. [11]

While the above quote taken from a 1980 Indonesian novel describes a particular and actual scene that can be seen throughout mountainous Southeast Asia, as a landscape it had already become a topos (traditional theme developed in literature or rhetoric) by the 1920s. For example, Sumatran poet Muhamad Yamin suggested 1921 what should provide inspiration for a Malay-language modern poetry in what was still the Dutch East Indies: “Ah the high mountains, the thick jungle, the foaming rivers, the rolling sea, the steeply sloping hills, etc.,are things urging you, as it were, to take up the pen and compose poems.”[12]  Such have been the formulaic elements required of an Indonesian modern landscape.

This is not to suggest that formulaic means of articulating images of the land did not exist prior to the modern period. Similar landscapes can be found in ancient texts [13] in the pre-Dutch period in Indonesia. This includes court chronicles written by court poets who recorded the ruler’s wanderings and spiritual retreats, as a means by which to also imprint the king’s power and ownership onto the land. There are also examples of landscapes carved in relief on the walls of some East Javanese Hindu-Buddhist temples of the 13th and 14th centuries.[14] Inherent in these landscapes, in which the world is in balance and harmony, rich and fertile, is also cosmological boon, political power, and spiritual communion with God through nature.

While landscape as an ideological medium and as cosmological map [15] has existed for centuries, such imagery, as seen through the lens of the urban poet, was heavily influenced by romantic Dutch poetry of the late 19th century, a time when the Netherlands and most of Europe was undergoing industrialization. Romanticism imbued in images of the landscape was transmitted not only through the required reading list in Dutch-language high schools and Dutch-language literary journals and expatriate writers. The same ideas were spread through the drawing courses that were part of the Dutch arts education curriculum, including the arts teachers training school at ITB (now the Fine Arts and Design Department).

The genre of landscape painting was also imported by Dutch artists who came to the Indies as tourists, as well as propagated by Indies born Dutch painters who shared similar cultural horizons.[16]  Many of these usually second rate artists took on indigenous pupils who then started their own studios. Some of the elite from the region of Bandung and the Javanese courts, some were trained in the Netherlands, also became known for their romantic landscape paintings.  Their sweetish, romantic style of painting came to be known as the Mooi Indies or the Beautiful Indies. Mooi Indies painters did not comprise a cohesive group, but their paintings consisted of the same combination of symbolic forms of those discussed above.[17]

Mooi Indies paintings typically demonstrate and communicate the individual painter’s awe and wonder evoked in seeing “natural beauty” and the beauty of the cultivated rice fields. And herein lays the crux. Although such landscapes to perhaps the Javanese sensibility, for example, more than likely possessed and articulated certain spiritual beliefs about the harmonious balance of the landscape, modern landscape paintings are the individual expression of the artist’s emotional response to something seen. Although preexisting ideas of the sacred and cosmological landscape may have persisted in these paintings, these were first and foremost works of art meant to be seen as such, and not as integral elements to another person’s vision or cosmological map. 

Mooi Indies paintings demonstrated a self-conscious expression on the part of the Indonesian painters[18] of the virtues of rural life, of which the artist (and poet) had little experience. Most artists, like their poet counterparts, lived in the cities and had little experience with village or rural life, at least not as peasant farmers.  

A Nationalist Trajectory of “Landscape”

In addition to nostalgic interpretations of the ‘countryside’, by at least the late 1920s, the landscape in poetry was also inscribed with the ideology of nationalism. Repeating Mohamad Yamin’s call to his fellow poets in 1921, already quoted above, this time with a deliberate shift in emphasis:

…pour your thoughts out on to paper, express the feelings which fill your breast, squeeze the end of the pen with determination, and enrich the literature of our nation.  Do you have no reason to write, or nothing to say?  Ah the high mountains, the thick jungle, the foaming rivers, the rolling sea, the steeply sloping hills, etc., are things urging you, as it were, to take up the pen and compose poems (italics mine).

It is not just any land, but that of our nation, that is the proper place for inspiration. Such land then was associated with the nationalist Tanah Air Tercinta or Beloved Homeland. As several scholars have pointed out, poets from mainly Sumatra and Java were quite aware of the burden of the landscape as a colonized image.[19] However, as a convention, it need not be eliminated. Instead, and at the very least, it had to be least disengaged from its Dutch locus of origination. This shift demonstrates what Kenji argues was a growing rupture, or “a separation of what was considered an indigenous possession from that of the Dutch.”[20]
 
It is possible that the landscape paintings produced during this period of increasing nationalism in some way also reflect some of this nationalist spirit.  If this is the case, then it would also suggest, borrowing from Mitchell (1994), “the possibility of hybrid landscape formations that might be characterized simultaneously as imperial and anticolonial.”[21] The message of tanah air tercinta was still based on Dutch (European) models, much to the consternation of more leftist leaning artists such as Soedjojono.

Influenced by his own negative experiences as an apprentice to the landscapist Pirngadie, Soedjojono began to publicly voice his disdain for such types of paintings by the late 1930s:

The paintings we see nowadays are mostly landscapes: rice fields being plowed, rice fields inundated by clear calm water… or a hut in the middle of a ripening rice field with the inevitable coconut palms or bamboo stools nearby…with blue-shimmering mountains in the background. This is not a healthy situation…What are the causes? First, the majority of painters here are Europeans, foreigners, who remain here two or three years only and are thus in a sense tourists themselves. Second, our local painters only want to serve the tourists. Third our painters only imitate the works of these foreign painters and serve the needs of tourists because they do not have enough force to create anything original...
They are the people who live outside our real life sphere. But fortunately a new generation is coming up…with new and fresh ideas…[22]

There is a number of underlying subtexts in the above passage that need to be teased out in order to better understand his position. First, he couches his disdain in nationalist rhetoric, viewing the artist of such paintings as a foreigner with little concept of life in the Indies, or as collaborative and complicit local artists who cater to tourists’ tastes. In this regard, he also gives over to a romantic vision of the ‘authentic’ artist who does not ‘sell out’ to market expectations.[23] In this regard, the landscape became a second rate type of painting. Thirdly, Mooi Indies paintings were relevant to an elite class within the social spheres of Colonial life. 

According to him, artistic inspiration should instead come from lived reality of the common people (rakyat). However, after the war of independence (1945-49) he painted landscapes that contained much of the same elements he criticized 20 years earlier.

Ever since that time, landscape painting continued to be associated with low or commercial art. Nonetheless, Mooi Indies era painting is heavily sought after by collectors, and training in landscape painting is still required in the art academies. The same formulaic conventions continued to be propagated, yet also dismissed as not ‘serious’ or ‘original’ art.

Entering the Forbidden Zone

It is to this ambivalence toward the legacy and history of the landscape in visual art in Indonesia that Krisna speaks, and attempts to figure out his own position in such a history and discourse:

The theme of Landscape in “Forbidden Zone” is inspired by three things: namely, art education, Mooi Indies, and Sudjojono. I am an academically trained artist. When I was a student, I completed two years of studying landscape painting (and still life) as a method of art education. I realized that the system of education at ITB is a legacy from the Dutch (Ries Mulder, painter and pioneer of art at ITB). The Dutch gaze and education system has influenced my understanding, perspective, proportion, color, etc.; this, although in reality my instructors at the time never questioned Indonesian identity (in painting) or reality in Indonesia. Therefore, I had no other choice except to employ the Dutch discourse. In other words, since my student days, I [my identity as an artist] have been constructed by this concept. […]
In “Forbidden Zone”, I try to map or reconstruct this [identity constructed by the Dutch discourse and concepts of landscape], also what is currently happening to me personally. Where is my position in all for this right now? I suppose that the landscape in “Forbidden Zone” is only a small portrait of a cultural position, identity, or an attempt of the Indonesian people to understand this reality. It seems that in fact we have yet to really discuss and understand this reality.[24]

Between the conventions of landscape painting seen through the lens of the Dutch gaze that persist in the art education in Indonesia and anti-colonial nationalist sentiments made by those such as Soedjojono – which is the ‘truth’? According to Krisna, both are the realities in Indonesian art history that continue to influence, confound, and shape certain discussions in the Indonesian art discourse.

Whereas “Forbidden Zone” seems more like the artist’s personal questioning in the process of constructing his own artistic identity, in “Glare” and “Mirrorscape”, the artist views the question of landscape from a different perspective. In these works, it is an act of rejection on the part of the Balinese rice farmer to the tourist’s gaze that becomes the theme. Aside from Bali being stereotypically known as a culture of artists, its immense terraced rice fields that are carved into the hillsides throughout the island have become iconic of “Bali”; a fantasy fueled by the tourist industry through sumptuous brochures selling the dream holiday package. People from all over the world came to see the splendor of the Bali landscape. Balinese rice farmers became the object for tourist photos for the international market, yet without compensation. They began to fight back in what Krisna calls a “silent protest”, by placing reflective objects such as pieces of mirror and metal into thier rice fields. These would capture the sun’s rays, creating a glare, thus disrupting the surface of the desired landscape. It not only frustrates the ‘perfect’ photographic shot, but also the desired memories the tourist wishes to take back home with them.

Krisna takes advantage of this glare as the very subject of his “Glare” and “Mirrorscape”,  to underscore precisely this idea of frustrated desire and memory, as well as the conscious rejection of being objectified. “I reconstructed this [glare] effect in the rice fields in the region of Blimbing, Kabupaten Tabanan in Bali. This involved working with the rice farmers there. In this work, I represent the aesthetic layers of beauty, exoticism, as well as the silent ‘anger’.”However, a few questions arise: what happens to the agency behind such an act if it is reconstructed and reproduced, even though with the help of local farmers, as art; as an image also to be consumed? What are the critical implications of artistic acts of appropriation on the object? Does the artist mean his reconstruction also to be a part of the local act of defiance, or is it the objectification of that defiance?

_____

From the above, it is clear that Krisna is constantly evolving artistically, experimenting with and not afraid to enter into risky territory. In his new body of work, he continues to present issues that connect on a universal level, while at the same time articulating his own ambivalence and questions regarding his own position to a particular aspect of Indonesian art history.  

Throughout this new body of work, Krisna presents his various landscapes in a variety of ways. For some of these, he uses fine art frames to perhaps underscore the affiliation between video and painting. Certain images, particularly the digital prints are presented in ways that appropriate the language of advertisement displays. However, a question arises as to whether or not he critically questions the relationship between these different languages of representaiton, the boundaries between categories and particular discourses of representation. In any case, the landscape is there to be consumed in some form, to trigger desire. In underscoring this desire, by reproducing in some of these works the very aesthetic he wishes to critically engage, Krisna also runs the risk of the criticality of his idea being overshadowed by the seductive power of the image.

(Published in exhibition catalogue)

References

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