POLITICAL EXPRESSION IN THE PAINTINGS OF DADANG CHRISTANTO 2005-2021

• Main Author: Dhianti Chairunissa, Rahma
• Format: Final Project
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/71665
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

Politics in art is a rich, long-standing theme that evolves and manifests in artworks in varied ways throughout time. It is used as a tool for anything ranging from social commentary to national propaganda and revolutionary cries in it's most explicit form. In others, it bears to remember that 'political charge' is one that arguably permeates in every aspect of life, reflecting values and ideologies, one that explains what was so ground-breaking about Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain' or the Pop Art movement in context of their art world climates. As such there are forms of politics in art that doesn't feature an explicit means of protest. Indonesia comes with a rich political art history, its modern art inexplicably linked with colonial history and relations with power, first within the confines of operating within it with defiance, then to working together with new oppressing forces, then after independence, going on a range of being a prominent aspect of government and national morale to being something altogether discouraged. Dadang Christanto, an Australian-based artist originating from Tegal, Central Java is famous for artworks that are rooted in a shared humanistic pain with a universal appeal, focusing his works on sympathizing and re-centering narratives on victims of various tragedies and hoping to give them a voice and a place in collective memory. These works are stemmed from a personal tragedy regarding the Indonesian Communist Party Massacres of 1965-66, and has become a cause he's championed for almost two decades. Despite this, the collectivist values of his art and its subtle visualizations generally does not place him in discourse, particularly in Australian circles, as a 'political artist'. His signature style revolves around abstract and symbolic imagery in red, white, brown, and black, with the main motif of heads as a 'memory site', depicting figures in shapeless, androgynous ways. However, leading up to the aforementioned massacre's 50th anniversary and then after, he shifted his style to slowly get more explicit, with depictions of violence growing steadily outright and human faces gaining realism, invoking something more visceral beyond the more 'aesthetic' and metaphorical approach he applied before. This change is explained through an analysis of his artworks through Feldman's art critique method, followed by a reading of the artist's visual decisions through Feldman's social function of art theory to gauge whether it can be counted as art made with political intentions and how those politics manifest and change, and particularly how they affect his newest work, that upended the change back into his more well-known style. The findings of this research concludes that the change of visualization in his artwork is present from the starting range of this research, 2005, up until 2021, in a culmination of several factors, builing up following the Indonesian president's non-acknowledgement of the International People's Tribunal ruling of the 65-66 massacres as a genocide and 50 years without any affirmative action. The exertion of his political expression changed from a more passive stance on acknowledgement and respecting the memory of victims through humanistic visual choices towards a more firm plea to his audience for tangible change and compensation. 2021’s ‘Cactus Man’ shifted from this message to not specifically center on victims at all, instead utilizing his more abstract style and a blue color palette to ask audiences to be attentive towards the ways mainstream agencies might compel people to forget dark pasts and those affected by it.