Papers (Part 1)

• Postmodern Experimentations: The Making of a Southeast Asian Avant-Garde Leonor Veiga University of Lisbon

  Between the 1970s and the 1990s, gradually, experiments with traditional arts in the realm of contemporary practices took place all over Southeast Asia. Interestingly, this event took place simultaneously in The Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, and between unrelated artists who didn’t know one another. When ASEAN came to be in 1967, and launched a series of exhibitions, slowly, a network of artists and their practices started to appear in the regional artworld. In common, they had the fact that they were using elements of their cultural realm (such as traditional arts and ritual practices) in the midst of very conceptual artworks. This talk will show how this process started, how it developed, which networks supported it and how in the 1990s a “boom” of such postmodern practices came to be and was widely exhibited internationally. Postmodernism in Southeast Asia, I argue, has looked at traditions differently than its Western counterpart; that is with an agency and critical discourse that made it possible for a Third Avant-garde to emerge.

• Sufi Aesthetics of the Indonesian Writers of Angkatan 70 Kris Ramlan Goethe University of Frankfurt

  This paper explores the subsequent discourse on literary aesthetics propagated by Abdul Hadi W.M. after he declared, the “demise of formal realism, anti-rationalism and openness to improvisation” on the Indonesian literary scene in 1970. Abdul Hadi, a writer-poet and an academician, rallied around a loose collaboration of writers known as Angkatan 70. The group urged for a sharp break from the previous period, and instead to produce experimental literary work inspired by new aesthetic awareness. This includes a discourse on Islamic values in literature and giving expression to literary products.

  Abdul Hadi expounded the term “Islamic literature” and a new genre of “prophetic” or “sufistic” literature, that is underpinned by the teachings of Sufism. Its ambitious aims are for the purification of the souls of the readers and to energize the spirit of the colonized people in the East. The prophetic literature is not interested in any particular form, but it emphasizes “traditional” elements such as the “return to the roots of local cultures,” including “Javanese Sufism”. For him, the traditions and culture of Indonesian society are formed thanks to the inclusion of its major religions, i.e. Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam.

  Throughout its centuries-long tradition, Sufism has been an especially literary religious path. In the region, the earliest known Malay Sufi poems was authored by Hamzah Fansuri c. late 16th century. Hamzah’s poems remain an important part of the tapestry of Malay Sufism, serving as a model for Abdul Hadi's understanding of poetic production. Hamzah is considered a heretic by a many Muslim scholars and he epitomizes anti-establishment, anti-conformist artistic experimentation--yet “traditional”. What then is traditional? or prophetic literature? They have stirred up debates, yet, this model is also seemingly very attractive for many.

Papers (Part 2)

• Experimental Film-Making as an Independent Film Movement in Indonesia Yvonne Michalik Hochschule der populären Künste Berlin

  Experimental film has been received by the professional world as a subcategory of Film. Although it occupies a small niche in film history, the works have made significant contributions to the development of film as an independent art form and film aesthetics. Also in Indonesia, the experimental film genre was discovered by some filmmakers and artists in the 1970s. Their films provide important insights into culture-specific manifestations of the experimental film genre. But they are also testimony to a global culture that has spread worldwide since the 1970s. Among the most important representatives of the Indonesian experimental film are the filmmakers Gotot Prakosa and Foazan Rizal. Their works, like the experimental film in general, are characterized by a variety of expressions. In addition to the heterogeneity of their films, it is also essential that they and other Indonesian filmmakers have always emphasized the culture's own expression. Their films are therefore not only to be regarded as examples of a global culture, but above all as a cultural-specific works of art. The experimental filmmaking is therefore presented here as an independent film movement, with its own culture-immanent interpretations of criteria and aesthetics. The contribution shows the historical beginnings of the Indonesian experimental film and introduces these two important Indonesian experimental filmmakers.

• Experimentation and Redemptive Intervention Amanda Katherine Rath Goethe University of Frankfurt

  This paper focusses on the trajectory of concepts of experimentation and experimental art in the Indonesian arts discourse between 1968 and 1975. This period brackets the inauguration of influential institutions and the emergence of the now canonical New Art Movement of Indonesia (GSRBI). This paper takes D.A. Peransi’s concept of redemptive potentiality of creative practice, art’s potential agency as a mode of redemptive intervention, as an entry point into this complicated terrain. Peransi was a painter, writer, and film maker, and established experimental film at the Jakarta Institute of Art. He was the main author of the iconic Black December Manifesto (1974). Beyond its context of the New Art Movement, little attention has been paid to the signatories of the manifesto comprised of visual artists, poets, writers, and playwrights. Some of them had recently returned from residencies abroad. Some were members of Angkatan 66’, hence already influential institutionally. They formed a momentary collective with a shared sense of urgency, claiming the autonomy to choose which cultural points of reference and traditions were relevant to the local discourse’s needs. This paper critically engages this under-represented aspect, as well as moves beyond the confines of the manifesto to engage Peransi’s concepts of a socially responsible experimentation in creative practices. After being a jurist for the Oberhausen Film Festival (1971-1974), Peransi reconsidered radical experimentation. Thereafter, Peransi articulates a relationship between experimentation, renewal and self-reflexivity, in which the artist is given a high degree of moral authority, tapping into a rich tradition of cultural activism in Indonesia.

• Listening to Experimental Aesthetics: Sounding Experiments on Postcolonial Democracy? meLê yamomo University of Amsterdam

  Immediately succeeding colonial independence, the birth of the Southeast Asian nations and the region as a whole is inextricably linked to the rise of the Cold War. Nowhere else was the Cold War felt the hottest as in the Southeast Asia. Experimenting with their new national identities the postcolonial states played their allegiances with the Cold War powers. This paper reflects on how the aesthetics of anti-colonial Soviet/Maoist ideologies and the liberal capitalist democracy influenced the avant-garde and experimental practices of artists in the region at the time. How were the artistic experiments of the time served as experimentations of postcolonial democracy? How did the ‘international’ culture of the Cold War instigate local independent/national practices? How did the Southeast Asian experimentations flow into the transnational art institutions? In particular, this paper will examine the cases of the work of composer/ethnomusicologist, José Maceda, whose work challenged colonial aesthetics with his experimentations of the precolonial sounds with the global avant-garde movement.

Abstract

Keywords

• Art
• History