Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

arts and design and were not formally educated as
curators. Somporn earned a degree in Fine Arts and Art
Education. Apinan and Supangkat were practicing and
recognized artists before becoming curators. As artists,
they were at the front line of innovation: the former as a
conceptual and performance artist with national awards
and a doctorate in Art History from Cornell and the latter
as a luminary of the Indonesian New Art Movement.
Curatorial effervescence was conditioned by unsettling
incidents from the seventies, among which was the
protest against the art institutions in the early part of
the decade in Indonesia. The seeds in Thailand might
have been sown at the Bhirasi Institute of Modern Art,
where interdisciplinary events took place beginning in
1974. The turbulence in Indonesia inevitably gave rise
to the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru [New Art Movement]
that strove to dispute the depoliticization of art in the
Suharto period and to resharpen its political edge; in
the late eighties, this was carried through at the Cemeti
Gallery in Jogjakarta. In the post-Suharto era of
Reformasi, there was a marked proliferation of curators
in Indonesia, reaching a high of 35. Perhaps as cognate
with an increasing decentralization and deregulation of
the political and economic system, there was a steep
increase in curatorial projections in the open market of
contemporary art and the commodification of the career
of curators. It was not very difficult to become a curator;
it was a matter of laying claim to the status, learning
in the field, and addressing certain expectations such
as contriving themes, selecting artists, writing essays,
installing exhibits, organizing symposia and workshops,
and other attendant duties. The curator, however, need
not attend to all these responsibilities; asserting clout in
vetting names is sometimes sufficient already. Central
to this status is discourse, which curators in Indonesia
construe as in itself a commodity that endows
exhibitions with value for the market or significance
in the history of art. Young Indonesian curator Heru
Hikayat would venture that the more difficult the
discourse, the more prestigious the art appears; and as
researcher Sarah Murray (1995) observed, arcane words
are potent: “a tendency to use language in a formulaic
way which looks to powerful words as source of
authority, prestige and perhaps magic, and rarely bothers
with precise definitions”. (30) Here the aura of curator is
reckoned not as a nostalgia for singular authority but as
a historical accumulation of symbolic capital that may
be converted into access and acknowledgement.
The case in Thailand is somewhat different. Owing
perhaps to a stronger hierarchy in the academy, which
arguably is the source of the art world’s stranglehold,
the stature of curator is not liberally dispensed. Curators
HERITAGE, IDENTITY, CHANGE AND CONFLICT
recognize the obligatory specialization to be considered
legitimate curators, and the demand is not as high as in
Indonesia, which also counts more artists. For instance,
in Thailand, galleries put up their own exhibitions; in
Indonesia, even the most frankly commercial enterprises are
propped up by curatorial gravitas. The difference can be
detected if we compare how exhibitions are organized
in creditable galleries like Numthong and Surapon in
Bangkok and Edwin and Nadi in Jakarta.
The initial impulse of the necessity for curators was
articulation, their verbal skills. There was a need for
artists to take part in discourse, a requirement that had
stemmed from different concerns. Inasmuch as curators
had the facility to speak about art, artists, and art
history that were to be discovered by the international
art market, they found themselves in the trenches of
transactions. In Indonesia and Thailand today, there are
two full-color art magazines, Fine Art (Thailand) and
Visual Arts (Indonesia), and there is adequate art reportage
and commentary in mainstream papers like Tempo,
Kompas, The Nation, and Bangkok Post, not to mention
the myriad of alternative publications. But critical
thought in Thailand is not thoroughly encouraged;
stories on artists, who posture like celebrities, and a passing
review of exhibitions are the norms of writing. In
Indonesia, critical discussion among artists is viewed as
fundamental, a vital element of the art scene that makes
distinctions between the “market of discourse” and
“discourse of market”.
Since the early nineties, there have been succeeding
waves of curators in Indonesia, some of them having
been mentored by the pioneering practitioner Supangkat.
Others came into their own independently, getting
education abroad and learning from experience. We
note that there is no formal education in the field of
curation in Thailand and Indonesia, although in Bangkok
three institutions at Chulalongkorn, Thammasat, and
Mahidol universities offer programs in cultural management
at the graduate level. Several Thai curators obtained
graduate degrees outside Thailand as exemplified by
Gridthiya Gaweewong, Luckana Kunavichayanont,
Ark Fongsmuth, and Praporn Kumjim. In Indonesia,
only two people trained in curation and museum studies,
Amir Sidharta, who studied at the George Washington
University, and Wulan Dirgantoro, who studied at the
University of Melbourne.
In the present, the role of young curators, especially in
Indonesia, cannot be overlooked. The art gallery of the
influential Institute Teknologi Bandung (ITB) is curated
by Aminudin TH. Siregar and the commodious Selasar
Sunaryo Art Space by Agung Hujatnikajenong. These
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows
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