Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

that we can see more clearly the artist’s struggle “to
politicize and alter art by creating a different social
position for art in order never to be a colonialist artist at
this moment of history.” (Hagiwara, 1995) Like that of
Shimada and Bamadhaj, Tomiyama’s work is not just
about “looking back at the past critically but generating
debate about Japan’s war crimes, still unadmitted to in
the present moment, so as to break through the silences
of the silenced.” (Hagiwara, 1995)
CAN THE WOMAN ARTIST SPEAK?
But in their efforts to clear the space and break the silence,
can these women artists speak? Have they succeeded in
clearing the space for dialogue? In the case of Bamadhaj,
there were some viewers of her work who acknowledged
the need for a public dialogue on the events of 1965.
But despite the fact that her exhibition was well-attended,
there were others who chose to pick on her personal
history and her status as a well-funded artist and hitand-run
foreigner whose “foreign passport meant that
if anything happened, I could just leave.” (Bamadhaj,
2003)
At the discussion workshop of Enamlima Sekarang, one
of the first questions asked was: “Did you mount this
show because of your brother’s death?” Bamadhaj wrote
that: “Though my brother had been killed by Indonesian
military in 1991, it had been loosely perceived that my
concentrating on 1965 had been an act of “revenge”. I
gathered from these questions and comments that by
being a foreigner, my exhibition was interpreted not as
a critique of the New Order propagandists and human
rights violators in particular, but of Indonesians, in
general.” (Bamadhaj, 2003) It is ironic that the “backlash
of words did not come from official sources, but from
artists themselves, the same Post-New Order artists I looked
up to as being the most politicized in the region.”
Similarly, in Japan, the backlash against artists who dare
to speak by critically remembering the past is clearly
evident in the reception to works by Shimada Yoshiko
and Tomiyama Taeko. As in the case of Bamadhaj,
Tomiyama and Shimada’s work are not that universally
well-received, appreciated and understood, since what
they do is categorized as “political art”, which in Japan
is a degrading label. “In this country,” the art historian
Hagiwara Hiroko writes, “the idea that good art should
be sharply separated off from politics prevails. This idea
is working to sanitize the gallery, cleaning up any taint
of politics.” According to Shimada, Japanese artists—
those who should know better—generally avoid the
kind of self-examination she is espousing because there
is a strong belief that “fine art” should not deal with
ENGAGING MODERNITY: RELIGION, GENDER, AND ART 115
politics.
It is thus impossible to predict the affectivity and
effectiveness of an art work: the passage in the transport
is uncertain, “and the transport does not happen in
each encounter for every gazing subject.” (Ettinger in
Pollock, 2005) If the artist is to speak at a dialogic
level of utterance, there must a co-affectivity between
individuals who may be perfect strangers and may
be coming from diverse contexts, but who may find
a common humanity in a shared event occasioned by
the art work. The audience or viewer needs to be attuned
to the “unspoken that lies beneath what is said, to
the intimated that lies beyond the visible.” (Pollock:
2004, 215) As we listen to and discover aspects of other
women’s lives, we may be able to discover aspects of
ourselves by “being momentarily the place where the
many threads the artist has sometimes unconsciously
wove converge.” (Pollock: 2004, 218) There is, in
other words, a covenant between artist and viewer in
the transport-station of art, both sharing a sensibility
that transforms in the place and space of the aesthetic
encounter.
To illustrate, let me cite the observations of Kasahara
Michiko, one of the most important feminist curators
in Japan—to a recent work by Idemitsu Mako, the Past
Ahead, which Kasahara showed in the exhibit Life
Actually at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo
in 2005. As we enter the space where the work was
shown, we see projected on a screen a formal portrait
of an ideal family: two nervous younger sisters,
a dignified father, a gentle-looking mother holding a
baby, and other awkward children. This portrait is of
the artist’s own family, one of the wealthiest and
well-known in Japan, and whose present patriarch, the
artist’s brother, was displeased by her use of family
portraits to express her issue-oriented artistic vision.
Behind this tableau are video footages of war, whose
agitated images flit in and out and spill into the transparent
screen of the ideal family portrait. The tranquility of the
portrait is thus interrupted and invaded by the images
that include Japan’s invasion of Asia to the war with
America in the Pacific- battleships, tanks and soldiers,
crowds of fleeing people, kamikaze attacks and execution
scenes, stories of comfort women and a list of rules for
a military brothel, and finally, portraits of the emperor
and the torii gates that stand in front of Shinto shrines.
As the title Past Ahead and as the juxtaposition of
family and war images suggest, that larger events of
history coincide with the artist’s life and that of her
family; the patterns of family and life depicted in the
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows