Last night, I had a little conversation with my old friend. He was a lecturer in Indonesia Art Institute Yogyakarta, but now he is an artist based in Pakistan. Kind of surprise when I found his photo located at some places around Pakistan. So I chat with him til the clock show all zero. I found out that he also study in art major. It's an unusual choice to study art in West Asia countries and as I guess he told me about how the art impregnate with individual uniqueness deep from the heart. None of them likely industrialist art in some first world countries such as Germany.
When I was in Jogja, Mas Popok showed me some photos when he was at early 2000 Venice Biennale. I was impressed by most of the photos until it stopped at paintings or installations by African artist. How I described those, hmm, a compilation of contrasted arts. and now I feel like a colonizer.
I don't want to distinguish western and eastern art, but there really are differences between them. Let's not talk about Indonesia art especially the capital city arts, were really influenced by the western. Meanwhile western like to show off some hi-tech art, eastern shows the art of nature form. When western thrown out some odd stuffs, eastern took it and make it as a new form of art. It was a really bad of me to talk about two sides of the world while I'm concern about equality.
Since art takes its spectacle when the contemporary term arises, people tends to not to judge good or bad works, maybe useful and useless. Still there are differences. My friend said, he was fascinated by how rubbish Jakarta's young artists' works are. He said there's nothing to compare the trashy of their works. But, that's what they did cause there's only two choices to be in the pages of Indonesia Art History: be brilliant or horrible while hoping that one day they were saved by abstract future thought. As if we followed the contemporary of postmodernism (how hard it could be, ha-ha), we still the unconscious colonizer who put no boundaries but art.
totally random thought of mine.
and sorry.
