The dance to abstraction: Wayang, dance and the aesthetics of interartistic exchange in the abstract paintings of Bagong Kussudiardja 1980-2000

• Main Author: Lee, Isaiah Christopher Xin En
• Other Authors: -
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Visual arts and music::Art history; Humanities::Literature
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/166339
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Regarded as one of Indonesia’s key exponents of Indonesian dance during the modern period, Bagong Kussudiardja (1928-2004) embraced notions of tradition and modernity in what can only be described as an integrative practice towards the creation of something new (kreasi baru). Despite being known primarily as a choreographer, his establishment of Padepokan Seni Bagong Kussudiardja (PSBK) whose educational model remains similar to that of Rabindranath Tagore’s ashram in Śāntiniketan, India testifies to his approach to art making as one that refutes neat distinctions of form. That is, in both his practice and teaching, he has championed a more fluid, communal and holistic approach to making art, one that saw no distinction between performance and painting, music and dance, spirituality and aesthetics, tradition and modernity, the sacral and the profane. In Bagong’s paintings, the connection between a predominant subject matter of performance (dance, wayang, rituals and ceremonies) and his later works which experiment with abstract geometry and colour has yet to be studied in Indonesia and is effectively unknown at an international level. Having studied dance with Martha Graham in New York, focused on transnational Japanese and Indian techniques, and subsequently choreographed based on traditional Indonesian dance and wayang, Bagong’s visual idiom is one that virtually reimag(in)es artistic conventions that govern painting. He draws on the artistic, intellectual and spiritual disciplines of the performing arts, both locally and beyond, to rewrite the possibilities for Indonesian painting, one that is free from Euroamerican artistic boundaries and which integrated, rather than contrasted, different modes of thinking about art onto the canvas. Focusing on the aesthetics of interartistic exchange in his paintings, this dissertation seeks to draw links between his figural oeuvre of the performing arts and his abstract spiritual representations of the world. Based on a selection of Bagong’s art, I attempt to offer an alternative vocabulary to critically engage with an artist whose practice did not conform to strict art historical categorisations and who chose to make art on his own terms.