Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

14
SESSION I
portals of strategic locations in the art world are kept
not by senior curators, but by their successors who are
in their early thirties, thus establishing a new hegemonic
scheme within a new coterie of curators. Here is a tentative
history of the emergence of curators in Indonesia
and Thailand, indicating the time of their practice and
their educational background. (See Appendix 2)
Modes of Practice: Typologies
Most of the curators in Southeast Asia work within
an institutional framework, structures of which vary:
academic institutions, government offices, and cultural
centers of foundations and foreign organizations like
Alliance Française, Goethe Institute, and the British
Council. The art infrastructure in Thailand has been
provided a stable ballast with the creation of the Office
of Contemporary Art and Culture under the Ministry of
Culture in (2002), with Apinan as Director. This ascension of
Apinan signals the rapprochement between State
and art world, with the curator becoming part of the
grants apparatus; in contrast, the government support
for the arts in Indonesia is nominal, thus stimulating
very unpredictable and animated grassroots initiatives.
These divergent states of play are intimately related to
the kind of art produced in these ecologies.
Independent curators, whose practice is tangential to
these institutions, find and create their own spaces for
their projects. These spaces oftentimes already move
beyond the museum/gallery architecture to provide the
appropriate milieu for contemporary expressions like
installation, new media, and performance art. Their
independence does not, however, mean isolation from
customary arrangements; it merely implies a less rigid
stance on the part of the curator to engage with various
platforms of art making and the hospitable spaces for
these to operate. It is also not meant to be anti-hegemonic,
but is largely survivalist. In Indonesia where the art
market is very strong and ameliorates infrastructure in
the conduct of commerce, independent curators sometimes
find themselves working with galleries. Within this
potentially compromising situation, they insist on
creative latitude as they deal with the motivations of
gallery owners, who are also collectors, to profit on art.
We note, too, the sway of the auction houses in Indonesia
such as Larasati, Borobodur, Masterpiece, and
Campaka, which opened after the Asian crisis in 1997,
to say nothing yet of the aggressive enterprise
of Christie’s and Sotheby’s and the auction arm of the
government itself. In effect, the crisis induced a surge
in art, with banks and other firms unloading their art
holdings and rousing a frenzy of buying, selling, and
collecting largely through the auction houses. Perusing
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows
their catalogues, we discover that these firms do not
only trade masters, but artists whose careers have yet
to mature. This illustrates that the auction house functions
like a gallery that promotes new art, and in doing so
conscripts curators as part of the tricky process of
validating the art in circulation. This can be espied quite
sharply in Jogjakarta, which is home to the most active
artists in Indonesia. Here, in view of the relatively few
art spaces, curators take art from the site of production to
other places, from Semarang to Bandung, for exhibition.
Curators, therefore, serve as conduits of art works and
careers, facilitating exchange between the art
institutions and artists and the public. An impressive
illustration can be found in the projects of Mamanoor,
a curator based in Bandung. He is one of the curators of
the National Gallery, which rents out space for exhibition
and fails to implement a sustained program, teaches art
theory at ITB, and organizes exhibitions outside the
well-trodden loop of Java and Bali. It is only Mamanoor
who is able to organize exhibitions and events in such
remote places as Sumatra and Sulawesi, courtesy
primarily of his network with art galleries and collectors,
local art councils, new art programs, artists who take
part in competitions like Philip Morris, and his position
at the National Gallery. He has also developed links
with China and Germany.
Patronage of contemporary art in Indonesia is part of
a larger speculation industry. Amir Siharta asserts that
“the prices of stocks and paintings often have a direct
relationship… as many collectors obtain funds to buy
works of art from profits they gain from the trading in
the stock exchange”. (Sidharta: 2001, 53) He attributes
the stimulus to the economic crisis in 1997 that drove
the following: the hoarding of art works of
new collectors who hoarded dollars before the rupiah
plunged; the unloading of art works by collectors and
liquidated banks; and the establishment of galleries by
collectors. As early as the seventies because of the oil
boom, the national oil company Pertamina sponsored
art competitions and engaged in collecting. Earlier,
Sukarno maintained a vast collection of modern art,
which influenced government offices and the elite to
amass art. The cumulative effect was to style art as a
democratic good or developmental index:
The new political outlook that has emerged in
Indonesia since Soeharto’s Fall has certainly
contributed to a rising appreciation of art.
Along with increasing political openness and new
freedoms of speech and opinion comes the
appreciation of artistic expression. People who in
the past were more interested in art for its economic
value are now beginning to appreciate ho art’s aesthetic