The National University of Singapore (NUS) Museum has enjoyed something of a renaissance since the 2006 appointment of Ahmad Mashadi----ex Singapore Art Museum----as the institution’s head. Increasingly focusing on regional contemporary visual art, and perhaps more insistently on Indonesian art, NUS Museum recently mounted “Jendela: A Play of the Ordinary”.
Featuring the painting of the Yogyakarta-based Jendela Art Group (Kelompok Seni Rupa Jendela) or KSRJ, the exhibition includes some 70 paintings, sculptures and installations spanning the mid-1990’s to the present by current Jendela members Jumaldi Alfi, Handiwirman Saputra, Rudi Mantofani, Yusra Martunus and Yunizar. Though the Jendela group was formed as far back as 1993, its members are better known individually than as part of their cooperative. This, for those who have somehow managed to miss Indonesia’s selective contemporary art market boom of the last few years----recent market uncertainties notwithstanding----because four of Jendela’s five (Alfi, Saputra, Mantofani and Yunizar) have seen the prices of their paintings and 3-dimensional pieces increase exponentially in the course of this boom.
In various ways the show----the largest yet devoted to KSRJ---- was a brave move for co-curators Mashadi and Jakarta-based Enin Supriyanto. Firstly, the works are controversial. Indeed, despite the meteoric price rises enjoyed by some Jendela group artists---–pundits insist because of these increases----a number of respected art world professionals have dismissed much of the group’s work as shallow, facile, mercenary, and at best, a mere exercise in technical proficiency. Secondly, an exhibition such as this, showcasing very recent, critically untested works borrowed virtually exclusively from collectors, is a potential mine-field of patronage that can easily make responsible curators market accomplices, particularly when the exhibition is co-sponsored by a commercial art gallery that sells the artists’ works (to everyone's credit, this connection was made perfectly transparent). Such conflicts of interest are historically of little concern to Southeast Asian institutions, notorious for working closely with art dealers and collectors who have much to gain from the credibility a public museum inevitably confers. Conversely, it can also be argued that regional institutions have little choice but to collaborate with dealers and collectors, particularly in the field of contemporary art, due to the paucity of specialist public collections. But as the Southeast Asian visual art arena evolves, increases in sophistication, and aspires to be examined critically within a global art-historical framework, such ethical issues should matter, particularly to a museum affiliated with a national university. Problematic ethics aside, it is precisely because of the controversy surrounding KSRJ, all the more acerbic for its members’ commercial success, that the critical examination of Jendela and the painting at the heart of a market phenomenon unique in Indonesian art history should be seen as legitimate and even overdue.
How then was this show constructed and what conclusions, if any, could one draw from the art?
A bit like the exhibited works themselves, curators managed to keep a distance from their material, with Supriyanto getting closer to giving a personal opinion of the work in his analysis than Mashadi. No doubt anticipating a mixed response from the field, they set out the polemic surrounding Jendela in theoretical terms clearly in the show’s introduction and went on, in the exhibition brochure’s two essays, to expose the point of view of Jendela’s detractors. Presenting the Jendela Cooperative, Mashadi and Supriyanto describe its production as thematically inspired by the mundane, visually seductive, detached, cool and formalistic. Beyond this synopsis, curators suggest, as others before them have posited, that the work’s formalism may be a reaction to the socially engaged art of Yogyakarta, possibly operating in contrast to both ‘the stridency of activism’ and the ‘culturally authentic and political’. Aptly however-----and the very suggestion of this third, non-polarised way is perhaps the show’s most valuable contribution----they ask whether this body of work can be released “from the burden of reductive interpretations” and “the specter of expectations’. In conclusion to their brief gallery introduction, Mashadi and Supriyanto sum up their exhibition’s purpose as invoking ”a crisis of significance”.
Since Jendela’s work may be reaction-based (assuming there is no release from this reductive interpretation), this show provided a good excuse to shed some critical light on Indonesian art of the past two decades. This was achieved to some degree by the catalog essays, and the exhibition brochure, though slim, is a helpful survey document in this respect. This being said, one can not fail to be surprised by the curators’ sweeping reference to Yogya’s “stridency of activism” when some of the most subtle cultural commentators of the post-colonial period have emerged from Yogya’s visual art scene of the last 15 years. Though a brief review of the complex history of 20th century painting in Indonesia and the role of decolonization and nationalism in the shaping of the country’s modern art history may elucidate the contextual raison-d’etre of KSRJ, it sheds little light on the art itself. At the core of this show is indeed “a crisis of significance”.

Neither essay grapples wholly satisfyingly with this key issue. Formalism is advanced as a defining characteristic of the KSRJ’s practice. Formalism for the sake of formalism is not new but neither theorist delves much into Western art history to draw comparisons and contrasts with the detachment of 1960’s formalism that was, amongst other things, a reaction to the emotionalism of abstract expressionism: Mashadi touches upon the topic as analyzed by Jim Supangkat but infers that the Western example cannot apply. Of course analogies with Western art are difficult to manage in Southeast Asia where localism underpins most critical cultural discourse. But here, discussed with confidence and integrity, the comparison could have proved useful. In his essay Mashadi, citing critic and curator Rizki Zaelani, reminds us that it is all about reception; in other words, let the audience decide meaning. Certainly. But is this not the contemporary standard, the best Indonesian socio-political art of the last decade having taken this route anyway. Mashadi drives the point further, invoking the “subjectivity of the individual artist”. Surely. But then for at least a decade the majority of Indonesia’s socially engaged artists have left behind the monolithic orthodoxies of their predecessors, much of their work subjective to say the least. Enin Supriyanto, for his part, in his essay, discusses the artists’ common Minang origins and their art’s “allusiveness” and interaction of signs that does not necessarily result in any defined code (he suggests a correlation between this “allusiveness” and Minang culture). Again fine. But then much art presents a lexicon of jumbled signs and icons and however much it means---–or doesn’t mean----to the artist who has produced it, for the work to be successful, surely one does need to go back to the receiving party. Beyond Yogya’s socio-political art, Southeast Asia is full of art that is subtle and allusive. The best art from the region is highly personal, far from literal and often marries conceptualism and form. But in order to call itself “art” surely it has to speak to the viewer; it also has to allude to something----- even if the latter is ill-defined; surely the viewer must be party to the allusion. Marcel Duchamp’s urinal is allusive; a supermarket display can be allusive. The question is not whether urinal and supermarket shelves are art, but whether the supermarket employee stacking the shelf is an artist. Intention counts. Though Mashadi and Supriyanto make many interesting points, they bring us no closer to the artists’ intention.
The show’s display was purportedly organized around themes. However, the curators stressed the looseness of these so in essence, the hang was as dictated by formal imperatives as the artworks themselves. Most of the works’ titles, in Indonesian, were not translated, leaving the non-Bahasa-proficient viewer no further ahead. Having understood the pieces’ contextual background and gleaned the crisis of significance, the gallery-goer was left to find a connection with the art. In this commentator’s case, connection was made with several pieces by Yusra Martunus. Ironically, Martunus is the only member of Jendela who has not met with extraordinary swift market success. Pieces such as the 2007 07101 (the anagram of ART), the 1999 990102 (glass and nail house) and 99105 (barbed wire hanging cage), also from 1999, unlike the contributions of his co-members, were conceptually pared-down and visually edited. Rather than a random collection of signs, icons and symbols, they offered, in a non-committal way and generally with a single material object, a poised if oblique entry-point into a variety of situations----Supriyanto’s evocation of the force of allusion most convincingly applied here-. Martunus’ NUS work is not glib and instead creates a low but continuing tension as the viewer strives to put his finger on the object of the commentary. Paradoxically, his pieces though visually self-contained, are not self-sufficient, discreetly lobbying for the viewer’s thought and input. Perhaps not as aesthetically attractive at first glance as Alfi and Yunizar’s collection of totems, Martunus’ pieces were quietly assertive as they engaged through form, eliciting connection. Pondering them seemed worth the effort and as their reward they gave a sense of the artist behind the work.
Going back then to “meaning”, it is all down to the artist’s intention. Do the signs and symbols characterizing KSRJ art, however different from the trite mainstream and past orthodoxies, truly open possibilities for those looking at the work? Can art that apparently excludes the viewer fulfill its role as art? Is the viewer entitled to his “specter of expectation”? This viewer thinks so! This exhibition, like the art it contains, leaves each to draw his own conclusions.
A huge and powerful market force stands firmly behind the work in this show, so examining it neutrally was never going to be easy. As the first institutional display training a critical eye on KSRJ, “Jendela: A Play of the Ordinary”, though not without flaws, is an important pioneering effort.

Jendela: A Play of the Ordinary
5 March- 19 April 2009
National University of Singapore Museum
Singapore