His father taught him to draw, placing a toy by the window to show how bright sunlight made it and how dark it was. When he was 14, he had a caricature published in a national newspaper: a sketch that lightly pokes fun at the Indonesian army, about goofy soldiers who might be outsiders of the Beetle. Bailey. After school, he studied printmaking at the Indonesian Academy of Arts in Yogyakarta, a course heavily laden with the rigorous principles of Western realism. It reflects nothing of the city’s legacy of collective art studios, known as sanggars, or the recent affair of socialist artists, who built many of Jakarta’s great leftist monuments during the two decades of rule of Sukarno, Indonesia’s first post-independence president.
Darmawan has spent time meeting other artists, and together they publish magazines, perform, and learn about capitalism. (During one performance, he taped a wall with handwriting copied from an overheated promotional copy of deodorant packaging.) These little experiments and joint projects are refutations. the view that art must convey great social messages; In Indonesia, Darmawan says, previous generations of artists felt cursed by that compulsion. In 1998, he was still more disgruntled after entering a two-year artist residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. The facilities are excellent and the residents are diverse, but they are all given their own studio and let themselves be. “It’s like an office,” Darmawan said. Rijksakademie is an exclusive space; A passerby cannot point in to see a painting or a sculpture. “You need a magnetic keycard to get in,” he said. The practice of art seems to be an antisocial, even antisocial activity. It feels, he said, “limited, elite, clinical.” He longs for the easy, easy collaborations he left behind.
From Amsterdam, Darmawan watched Jakarta burn. Indonesia’s second president, Suharto, has ruled the country since Sukarno was ousted in 1967, overseeing not only a brutal crackdown on the left but also a financial crisis over the years. 1990. Afisina, who was studying cinematography at the Jakarta Institute of the Arts during those years, was so short of money that he had to live in an art school’s studio. In the terrible summer of 1997, when the economy was in full-blown crisis, political clashes spilled over into the arts sector. Protesters fleeing the army and police broke out during a dance festival, and when the soldiers followed, they attacked the audience. “This was the first time we were beaten, and we didn’t know how to deal with it,” said Afisina, who attended the festival. The following year proved both for the worse and for the better. The army shot dead four students during a protest at a university, causing unrest, looting and arson. Suharto was forced to resign. When Darmawan returned in the early 2000’s, his country had sunk deep into to revolutionize, pursue a freer, more liberal democracy.
The founding of ruangrupa later that year was a recognition of the end of Suharto’s oppressive cultural climate – surveillance and censorship, limiting dissent. But ruangrupa is not necessarily pointing the finger at political power. Art historian Supartono says its first members were from Indonesia’s middle class, only a few generations later. As a result, ruangrupa is almost post-ideological in that it is not intended to induce far-reaching political change. Instead, it wanted to be local, overcoming the problems created by the commercial nature of Jakarta’s art scene: selling pressure, the tedium of galleries, the divergence of Western trend. Like many cities, Jakarta has little physical space to support anything new in the arts. Ruangrupa’s main business imperative is to provide a ruang: a place for artists to meet, try things and fail, and put aside for a moment the demands and dogma of the outside world.
A late morning In March, when I was visiting Jakarta, Darmawan asked me to meet him at a house in Tebet, a neighborhood in the city center. When I arrived, he was sitting on the sidewalk, smoking and posing with a stocky young man whose father used to fix cars on the street, when ruangrupa rented the house back in 2008. This is the fourth house. so – or ruruhouse, you can say – that they were occupied; Annual rents for 1,300 square feet started at around 65 million rupiah ($4,500), but when it doubled in seven years, ruangrupa decided to move out. Today, a cafe occupies part of the ground floor, its tables and chairs distributed under a canopy of leaves on the porch. The largest space of the house is a dull meeting room. Darmawan and I stood there for a moment, trying to imagine that in ruangrupa day: as a venue for exhibitions and late-night gigs, a meeting point, a place to take a nap. The street has also changed, from a quiet residential lane to a congested street. We sat in the cafe for four hours. Not a minute goes by without motorbikes whizzing past us.
