Roads to Frida

“Won’t it mean ‘snuffing’ Frida once again? Some put forth the question. Doesn’t this affirm a new absurdity? Or is this paying tributes to absurdity and accident, after Frida was ceaselessly mistreated by life and later ... Diego?”

The paragraph above was taken from Hendro Wiyanto’s curatorial note in the catalog for the exhibition Membaca Frida Kahlo [Reading Frida Kahlo] at Nadi Gallery in 2001. Hendro Wiyanto, one of Indonesia’s prominent art curators, opens his writing as follows.

“This exhibition refers to a specific theme. The phrasing of the theme contains the name of a painter whose life history and works already become somewhat iconic and mythical: Frida Kahlo (1907-1954). Her popularity has reached far beyond the world of art.”

Then Hendro Wiyanto goes on by describing the reason for picking the theme, the creativity-based considerations behind the theme, and the working process involved, in three important paragraphs. 

“Frida Kahlo as the theme of this exhibition is meant to accommodate possibilities and extensiveness: Frida Kahlo doesn’t merely signify her biography, body and works but also things and issues associated with the interpretations of them.

The question ‘why Frida?’ was of course unavoidable. Yet for reading the content of the exhibition mere explanations about ‘who Frida was’ would of course be inadequate. After perceiving the theme, actually more significant is examining what the painters have painted, read and represented as well as the ways they have read the theme. The more so since in this case ‘theme’ didn’t imply the imperative of rendering the characteristics of the legendary figure as well as other features developing around those characteristics. The theme even implied distant issues or even ‘anti-theme’.

The Frida Kahlo theme was actually a kind of an ‘untitled invitation’.  The invitation was extended to several artists, asking them to develop interpretations in the forms of works. More specifically speaking, the artists in question were given the suggestion that they ‘read Frida’.  Yet, is there any ‘limit’ of reading, where should one start? Where does reading end? There is the merging of horizons, as commonly occurs in a process of reading or interpreting, between the horizon of the reading material and the reader’s horizon to generate a new reality. But there is also the attempt to transcend horizons.

Hendro Wiyanto realized very well that the decision to adopt the theme didn’t just fall down suddenly from the sky of his own ideas. In all modesty he acknowledges:

“Agus Suwage and Regina Bimadona in Yogyakarta, Murniasih in Bali, Asmudjo Irianto in Bandung and Maartri Djorghi in Jakarta are our artists who recently – with their respective keenness – made works associated with the Mexican painter famous for her self-portraits. On various occasions their works came to my mind: in a certain sense this exhibition owes to and got its early impetus from their works before it could eventually launch its own challenge: inviting those artists mentioned above to ‘scribe’, together with several others, their significant interpretations on a piece of ‘untitled invitation’.”

Hendro Wiyanto also knows very well that ‘reading’ then ‘interpreting’, and next engaging in a creative process to make the results of the reading and interpreting manifest in an artwork, form a working process that is highly personal, evasive and unpredictable. He describes the complexity of such process in the two paragraphs quoted below.

“Reading. Yes, Frida Kahlo has been transformed by her reader into a text. That is what we can figure when each of those artists receives the untitled invitation. When ‘the Frida Kahlo theme’, for instance, is regarded as a text, then the process of creating new meanings from the text will be radically undetermined. The reader’s production of meaning out of the text will generate something that is labile, ever shifting. An effort to read such text means more than just conjecturing the single meaning and ‘semantic core’ of the text. This is what is seen as an anti-hierarchical game in meaning production, which doesn’t merely try to grasp ‘the author’s’ truth. Thus spoke ‘theory’.

It follows that reading the theme of Frida is plausible to lead to the letting go of the persistence effort to discover a sort of essence associated with such issues as ‘what is most Frida’, ‘what is more Frida’, or ‘what is not Frida’ and ‘less Frida’. What’s more, the reading may even result in something completely detached from the material read.”

The extensive quotation from Hendro Wiyanto’s writing is necessary here for the very reason that this current exhibition project resumes his idea. It would have been very much ahistorical should nothing be said about the rationale originally offered by Hendro Wiyanto, the project initiator. He admitted that for Membaca Frida Kahlo exhibition he owed the idea to certain artists who with their works had already taken the step before him. Now it is the turn of this current project to acknowledge its indebtedness to the earlier project with Hendro Wiyanto as curator.

The difference lies in the fact that the earlier project involved a number of artists while the current one comes about as a solo exhibition.

***

That evening, like other evenings, the Muslim’s community gathering known as pengajian with the speaker Emha Ainun Nadjib and Kiai Kanjeng musicians, was proceeding lively, spontaneously, characterized by mischief and humor. Cak Nun, also well known as Emha, also dubbed Kiai Mbeling (‘kiai’ is a title given to a Muslim religious scholar or leader, and ‘mbeling’ [here used as a personal name] means ‘defiant’), suddenly stopped his homily. He heard one of the Kiai Kanjeng musicians took a mike and intervened “Cak, someone in the audience wants to present you a painting. Brother Dafi, please come to the stage!”

Quiet. The many people waited. So did Cak Nun. Then from a corner quite distant a burly young man moved closer to the stage carrying a painting neatly wrapped. His face looked uneasy. He cursed a bit in his heart. The musician is a friend to him. Before the program began he had asked the musician to help him give the painting to Cak Nun. But the musician told him to give it directly to Cak Nun. It is only that Dafi, the name of the young painter, didn’t ever think he was going to be summoned to the stage.

Once Dafi had brought the painting to the stage, and after a handshake with Cak Nun, he hurried back to his place in the audience. But again he was stunned seeing Cak Nun unwrapping the painting on stage. As soon as those in the audience saw the painting, they broke into laughter. Cak Nun was no exception.

They clearly saw there on the canvas a portrait of George W Bush, and with an obvious scale. But the painter renders the face in such a way that it resembles that of an ape. We know that in portraiture the very function of a scale is to make sure that the drawing really looks like the original face reproduced.

Cak Nun immediately remarked, “Now, look! If you’re a bad guy, even painting you is this hard!”

The audience’s laughter burst again. Then Cak Nun went on, “And this also interesting, the subject of the painting is George Bush, and the name of the painter is Kadafi! Kadafi paints Bush!”

Again the audience responded animatedly. Only after it Cak Nun concluded the session by saying, “Well, thanks to Dafi. He is smart giving this painting to me because it’s impossible to give it to our bureaucrats. Should he give this to them, none of them would understand what the painting is all about!”

Resounding responses again. At his distant corner Dafi felt satisfaction. He would never be able to forget this particular event in 2003. Once a month, since 2000, he had been an unflagging attendant of the gathering, listening to Cak Nun’s homily and the music of Kiai Kanjeng group in Bantul.

Cak Nun’s influence on Dafi is quite significant. This is with regard to the enrichment of Dafi’s religious perception and the discovery of the spirit of his art practice.

Dafi sees Cak Nun as a figure of the complete artist. The Kiai from Jombang actively delivers homilies, sings, writes essays and poetry, and he is a man of culture.

Thanks to Cak Nun, Dafi eventually found what he had been searching for. “Art is spiritualizing everything material”, he said confidently.

“Paint, canvas, brushes,” he said, “are but matters. But once I make a painting, for some good intentions, to earn a living, to offer aesthetic experience to the viewers, to give spiritual fulfillment to the maker, those material things raise in status. Then art becomes a spiritual pursuit. A way to worship God.”

Dafi regards a sound foundation important for one’s art practice because it is from there that intent should be managed. From intent springs something he calls ‘greget’  (verve) or enthusiasm for doing art.

For some time it is just the spiritual foundation for doing art that Dafi sought. Earlier, he had quite mastered painting techniques.
***

Born in Jember on 12 July 1974, he was given the name Kadafi Gandhi Kusuma by his father. His painting talent was already notable during his primary school years. His father bought him a board for him to learn to read and arithmetic. Anyway, Dafi more often used the board to make drawing on. He admitted that since childhood he’s been more attracted by pictures than by letters. In cases of schoolbooks with illustrations in them, it is the pictures that would draw his full attention rather than the sentences there.

Realizing his child’s talent his parents brought him to a drawing course in a studio led by Pak Ketut. “He is Balinese, but had been living in our neighborhood for long” Dafi said, recalling his first drawing teacher.

But another figure that later much influenced Dafi’s process as an artist is Soeroso. “Pak Soeroso is a pupil of Dullah. I learned painting at his studio when I was in grade 2 at the Junior High School”.
 
Dullah that Dafi mentioned was one among Indonesia’s legendary painters and he was famous for his realistic style. He was well known for his portrait works and as a ‘revolution painter’ because his works very often deal thematically with the struggle to defend the independence of the Republic of Indonesia. Soekarno, the first President of the Republic of Indonesia, admitted Dullah to the position of ‘presidential palace painter’.

At Soeroso’s studio Dafi go the training to paint in Dullah’s fashion. He also learned to make paintbrushes himself and to deal effectively with various materials. For example he learned how to mix paint with kerosene so that a painting will look dull thus suggesting oldness.

In this particular phase of his life history Dafi began making money from his painting skill. He would often receive commissions to paint portraits as well as to make murals of realism painting on house walls. Back then, he most frequently painted stars of Hollywood action films and those of Indian films.

In 1992, soon after finishing his Senior High School education, he went straight to Yogya, enrolling in the Indonesia Institute of the Arts (ISI), and was admitted right away. He belonged to the same generation with three persons who later became his close friends both personally and professionally; they are S Teddy D, Dipo Andi and Rain Rosidi. The first two names are now known as among the famous painters of Indonesia while the third is recognized as a young art curator and a lecturer at the ISI.

Dafi calls his early period at ISI as one of astonishment. This is for the simple reason that before studying at the Institute he only knew two schools of painting, which are expressionism and realism. Once he began studying art and living in Yogyakarta, a city of art, he was amazed in learning there were so many schools of painting and so many forms of arts. Soon he began trying to paint according to different schools.

But he was apparently strong in realism. As an illustration, when every student was supposed to submit twelve works of realism painting assignments, for Dafi three were considered enough by the lecturer to decide that Dafi got an A, the highest mark.

Dafi said that in addition to making realistic paintings he enjoyed making outdoor sketches. He enjoyed the process very well. “In doing it a painter is tested with regard to his/her ability to snap the right moment by immediately putting it into his/her sketch in the making. The result is very genuine.”

Quite mastering skills of painting, Dafi neglected classes he was supposed to attend. He would be busily making explorations in painting. There was a time when a collector from France asked him and some of his friends to make abstract works. Also, for quit some time he wrestled with what he called ‘melukis deledekan’ [‘spill painting’]: he would set his empty canvas flat on the floor, pouring paint from above it, and immediately respond to the spills of paint as dictated by his imagination. But then he abandoned such painting mode. Later several other painters adopted the mode to harvest successes.

Dafi’s skills do not seem to necessarily make him successful in the world of art. According to him, financial needs once forced him to work for an art gallery in Bali. It began with him helping a friend. It happened that when he was once there the gallery owner asked him about how to make a painting of Buddha have the texture that looks like real natural stone. Dafi’s experience in dealing with different materials, back in his teenage years, helped him find what needed to make the painting suit the demand: he added some sand to the paint.

“But I was fed up with the atmosphere there. There wasn’t any discussion on art; the only topics were business and money” said the painter who finished his art study in 2002. After staying four months in Bali he decided to return to Yogya.

To his close friends Dafi is known as an all-round artist. Besides painting, he gets involved in musical activity by forming and maintaining a hadrah musical group called Kanjeng Kembar. Hadrah is said to have come from the Arab world and spread to various places in Indonesia via India and Malaysia. In Java, the Wali Sanga promoters of Islam used hadrah music for advancing their cause. The music is performed by a mass of players and it conventionally involves mostly percussions such as rebana tambourines, snare and bass drums. In essence the music is a means to praise Prophet Muhammad and tell stories bout him. In the passage of time hadrah has welcomed other instruments like the guitar, flute and violin. Up to now Dafi and his Kanjeng Kembar has often performed in various places. “It may seem easy, but actually playing the rebana tambourine involves quite complex beat patterns. One player must know the others’ beat patterns and the ensemble must work well”, Dafi said. Dafi even took a specific course in order to be able to play hadrah music the right way.

Meanwhile, to the people in the neighborhood where he rents a house, which also serves as his painting studio, Dafi is known as an ustadz, a religious teacher. He has ever, for as long as three years, taught small children to recite the Koran. In addition to teaching them to recite the Koran, he taught music and the theatre to the kids. But those activities had to end when he left Yogya for Bali. Back in Yogya again, his painting activity soon began to be interspersed by teaching teenagers in the neighborhood to paint. He has been doing all these for free.

Finally he realized it was time to decide what track to run. Over twenty years he’d spent most of his time exploring different modes and schools of painting.

This painter of a low-profile appearance has so far taken part in 40 group exhibitions and won at least 5 prestigious awards and recognitions one of which is as a Philip Morris 2000 finalist.

Talking with Dafi is fun; in addition to his spontaneity and frankness, without any tendency of sophisticated air, he will introduce humor here and there. Often, while recounting things at length, he will suddenly mimic the typical TV program presenter introducing commercials, “Ladies and gentlemen, don’t go anywhere, just let the following pass through!”
 
***

The book Interpreting Sargent by Elizabeth Prettejohn looked crumpled, lying on the floor of Dafi’s studio side by side with the Membaca Frida Kahlo [‘Reading Frida Kahlo’] exhibition catalog. It has been almost a year since he began making preparation for his solo exhibition called Membaca Frida Kahlo #2 [‘Reading Frida Kahlo #2’] to take place at Nadi Gallery.

“I want to touch Frida in an after-Sargent fashion” Dafi frankly remarked. John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was a portrait painter Dafi admires very much. Sargent’s works fascinate Dafi in that  “While realistic, showing traces of spontaneous and somewhat rough brushing”.

Here is a challenge for Dafi. “I can make refined and detailed realism painting. But that’s not what I want and it doesn’t satisfy me. I love spontaneous brushing that leaves its traces of expressiveness…”

Usually, Dafi said, people make realism painting by using very many paintbrushes, particularly the small ones to paint details. “But I don’t. I only use three brushes at most, hardly ever, sometimes just one. And I use big brushes.”

If a painter is likened to a master fighter, and brushes weapons, he’d like to identify himself with a master fighter that doesn’t need a lot of weapons. Jokingly he remarked, “The greater a master fighter is, the less weapons will he use.”

Regarding his solo exhibition, he as jokingly expressed feeling, “It’s fun running a solo exhibition, no one rivals me …”

The effects of the big paintbrush are what Dafi wants. “In the brushing process I stake on my skills but also still get unpredictable effects.”

He enjoys very well the process of painting itself, from making rough sketches on canvas through applying the paintbrush. “But what I enjoy most are the moments of deciding what color should be the basis of a given painting, of subverting existent photographic objects, and those approaching the final point of a work.”

With “photographic objects” Dafi meant to refer to photos of Frida, those of Frida’s works, as well as other photos that Dafi will respond through Frida’s figure. All the pictures are printed in black and white. Dafi adopts the pictures as the main materials for his painting. Yet in the execution on canvas Dafi uses certain dominant colors such as green, red and yellow. And when he said “subvert” what he meant is to change certain icons as found in the photos in accordance with his interpretations. Moments “approaching the final point of a work” refer to the phase in which he applies more spontaneous strokes. The whole process makes him ever enthusiastic through the end. This very enthusiasm gives Dafi a great staying power when doing a painting.

“Approaching the final point,” said Dafi, “is a challenge in itself.  Because I have to wrestle with myself on when I shall finalize the work. Otherwise, the itch to apply the paintbrush on the canvas will keep going. In my opinion, good painters should know when to finalize the canvas they are facing.”

Dafi is right. Painters should know when to finalize their paintings, musicians should know when to end their playing, and a writer, too, should know when he’d better conclude his writing.

Yogya, 25 February 2010