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Hidden Side of Bali - February 2005
I Wayan Sudiarta, born in Peliatan, Ubud, 23 April 1969.
Listen to the confession of Wayan Sudiarta about the concept of his art: “…I am still painting themes of Bali that perhaps considered as cheap and of market quality themes, not because I admire them, let alone act blindly trying to preserve them. I concentrate on them because I feel I have not comprehended them completely.”
This has been stated by Sudiarta in writing when I asked him to write about his concept of creation and his background for creating his works. On many occasions, I frequently asked him questions about his creative process. Sudiarta frequently gave me the same answer about his creative concept.
This, certainly, is not strong enough to uncover the mystery of his works.
We then question about what and why he is so faithful to present the objects of Bali. Why should Sudiarta feel that he has not finished in his comprehension of Bali, about its dances, about the instruments of ceremonies in the temple, about the rituals of Hindu in Bali, while he himself is Balinese grown up among Balinese that strictly observe the adat and tradition of Bali.
This is the kernel of his personal identity that he himself continuously questioned. Then he said: “Let me take the risk of being considered naďve about the construction of my identity that is primordialistc. Who am I ? Where am I ? What am I struggling for ?” Sudiarta’s questions on his personal identity can be immediately related to the thought of Anthony Giddens. “Tradition”, Giddens said, “is the medium of identity, either personally or collectively. Identity assumes meaning, but at the same time it also assumes constant process, of recapitulation and reinterpretation. Identity is the creation of constancy in time, relating the past and the future. In all societies, the maintenance of personal identity and its relation with the wider social identity is the main condition for the ontological safety.
Where can we read Sudiarta’s identity? We certainly can find it in his paintings. Paintings are the emotional expression showing the truth of spiritual experience. Paintings are the total representation of self and the thought of the artist. Let us look at Sudiarta’s background of his creative process and the motivation that follows.
Sudiarta’s art is built on two large groups growing in his biography. The first group is his adolescence when he learned of Balinese traditional painting, the Ubud style. Sudiarta is the grandson of a famous painter named Wayan Djudjul. He learned from his grandfather and also from Wayan Gendera, Nyoman Daging, and Wayan Barwa. >From these teachers he acquired the skill of drawing human anatomy, Balinese traditional ornaments and stylizing form of nature. Early since his careers as a painter, he has already been rich in the glossary of eastern paintings with a special visual dialect.
The first group lays ground of his comprehension of the Eastern (Balinese) aesthetics. He obtained the second group formally at the Department of Art Education, Singaraja Institute of Teacher Training and Education. In the multicultural environment of this campus he acquired the skill of painting with a formalistic approach. He learned about lines, plane, color, texture, up to creation that questioned about the dynamics, rhythm, composition, and configuration. On the same campus he also acquired the understanding of the problems of art contexts around or reflects texts of form. This is the second group, the modern (Western) aesthetics that he understands later.
These two groups perform tense and restless creativity for him. He then saw carefully questioning the language of his art as a means for personal expression. His understanding of modernism does not immediately put tradition aside. Although many people believe that tradition is an absolute contradiction of modernity, Sudiarta tries to combine modern aesthetics with traditional aesthetics. How does he execute visually in his works ?
Most Balinese painter’s verbally present elements of Balinese painting tradition using western aesthetics... But Sudiarta does not choose that verbal technique. He re-reads tradition using personal interpretation. Tradition is not understood fragmentally, for example, taking the visual element separated from the other, but he muses over the what and the why. Sudiarta decides to muse over these things by repeating subject matters from one side to the other continuously. He many times works on Baris Gede, Getar Agem, and variants for Legong. These activities are close to the activity of zikir (repeatedly chant part of the confession of faith, often in unison, a form of worship) by which he questions about the essence of Baris, Legong, and other dances. He then, essentially questions about himself, his position, and his personal view about the repertoire of tradition.
Unlike most Indonesian modern artists who interpret components of tradition by doing distortion or abstraction on, for example, by doing ornamentation of tradion, Sudiarta presents the ornaments completely as practiced in its original style and technique. The creation as he presents is the creation of the dance. For example, he reinterprets the Kebyar Sabung dance by looking for the main source reference of the dance: cock fighting. After watching cock fighting at the outside yard of Pura Dalem at his village, he personifies cock fighting on Kebyar Sabung dance. The representation of his painting is the movement and gesture of cocks fighting in the bodies of the dancers. Sudiarta, in fact, has eliminated the double distance between himself and his subject matter of the dance by intruding into the original source of the dance. This technique makes him free to create his own choreography of the dance. This way, he is not a painter that freezes a scene of a dance. In principle, he is a choreographer that reinterprets dances (classical tradition) on his canvas. His painting contexts are interpretations of his subject matter.
This kind of method also shown in a rather different type.Sudiarta relates two opposing subjects in one composition on his canvas. Barong that is frequently pictured as a frightening and tough creature is put side by side with butterflies that normally considered as beautiful, gentle, and supple. This is a form of Sudiarta’s musing on the Barong, which for Sudiarta also has human aspects.
He also builds tension that emerges from his method of painting. His understanding of aesthetic elements of tradition of Bali is strong, but then this gives him problems. He realizes that he masters the skill of painting in Ubud style that is very stylize but he also realizes that this can trap him into a stagnant position. Therefore, he explores the painting techniques by using impasto technique. By applying this technique he can control the habit of filling in too many ornaments. This technique also leaves clots of paint with the pureness of bright colors. This visual text shows relation between the understanding of art tradition and the awareness of modern creation. This is a linking dot that relates his spiritual truth and his thought.
Sudiarta seems not to be satisfied with his technical achievement He also totally treats his painting area as an area for exploration of text. The choice of various compositions, the appearance of the centre of object, all worked on with a formal calculation. Some compositions, such as a diagonal composition, asymmetrical composition, directional composition that he proposes essentially related to his effort in building the freedom of his choreography. To state the obvious, Sudiarta is a choreographer for his paintings. This has been explicitly shown by the use of colors and the processing of colors that present contrast between the main object and the monochrome on the side objects. This is in fact, the effort and the results of the choreography.
Most important, in the works of Sudiarta, there is a hidden side of Bali. i.e., dances that are rarely performed, and some choreography, and art texts move on.
Hardiman
Lecturer at the Department of Art Education,
Singaraja State Institute of Teacher Training and Education
Executive Editor of the Journal of Culture Studies, Udayana University, Denpasar, Bali.
