Navigating the interstices of cosmopolitanism and modern Indonesian art through the Flash Gordon batik

• Main Author: Syaza Nisrina Binte Khairul Lizan
• Other Authors: -
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Humanities::Literature::English; Humanities::History
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/166321
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change, Claire Holt addresses what she calls “The Great Debate”, questioning if modernisation is equivalent to westernisation. She categorises the idea of modern Indonesian art according to its localised definition by artists from different Indonesian cities. However, this classification is too simplistic and limiting as it does not take into consideration the overlaps present through cosmopolitanism, as suggested by Peter Keppy in Southeast Asia in the Age of Jazz. The Jazz Age in Indonesia influenced a rethinking of concepts such as class. The emergence of the middle class integrated ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, complicating Holt’s strict categorisation of modern Indonesian art. This is exemplified by the Flash Gordon batik, a commissioned piece of batik from the 1930s that features characters from the American space-themed comic series Flash Gordon. The batik comprises motifs and colours that are characteristic of batik from both Pendalaman and Pesisiran regions. This thesis argues that the unification of different types of batik into the singular Flash Gordon batik is therefore a representation of modern Indonesian art — one that breaks away from strict categorisation, as posited by Holt, and instead proposes a new kind of Indonesian identity that does not fixate on hierarchies.