As Face No Longer Bespeaks The Soul

Sometime in 1995, Ugo Untoro had a solo exhibition at Bentara Budaya Yogyakarta. In the exhibition catalogue he wrote a kind of aesthetic “credo”. Thus, he wrote: “I don’t have to strive for shapes and forms. Because there have been David, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Cezanne and Basoeki Abdullah. I don’t have to trouble myself about colors, since there have been Delacroix, Manet, Monet and Seurat. I don’t have to fuss around lines, because there have been Durer, Matisse, Miro and Oesman Effendi. I don’t have to bother about content, since there have been Van Gogh, Gauguin, Dali, Rusli and Amang Rahman.”[1]

So, what way out did Ugo take to keep on painting, which eventually led to what he called his collection of doodles (corat-coret)? In the same text, we find the following extension of Ugo’s thoughts: “After that, I started to know how good it feels to paint … Without paying any attention to shapes, lines, colors, composition, techniques and –isms in the history of art. I paint anything in any way, and about whatever I find in me when facing the canvas. I’m sure that, whenever I’m hungry, everything I paint would show hunger. When I’m all by myself, lonely, in the dark, besieged by anxieties, can’t breathe, and cry out, my painting will honestly carry all those elements.”[2]

Apparently, for Ugo, painting along the traditional lines of modern painting provided no space for the contemporary painter to engage in invention or renewal. And, at the end of the long road of tradition, Ugo decided to go back “within himself”. And, with that, although separated in time by decades, it was as if he were echoing S. Sudjojono’s conviction about the artist’s “honesty” in channeling “himself” into each of his works, presenting his “soul” in every painting.

With particular regard to the issue that the arena of the practice of painting and paintings has been exhaustively explored by all the painters of past periods, Ugo is clearly not alone. All the painters in the US and Western Europe, who thoroughly developed the art of painting in the post-World War II period, eventually came to the same journey’s end in the 1960s. In his latest book, Painting Today, Tony Godfrey touches on this issue. He quotes Joseph Kosuth, who apparently got frustrated and broke with the tradition of modern painting and paintings: “Painting has become a naïve art form because it can no longer include self-consciousness (theoretically as well as that of historical location) in its program.”

Then, moving on from Kosuth’s statement, Godfrey describes the general problem faced by painters at the end of the golden age of Abstract Expressionism: “In other words, painting could no longer criticize the nature of art, because it had accepted its limitations as a type or genre of art, nor, by inference, could it criticize the world at large. Painting, Kosuth conceded, would continue because the market demanded it, but it had no significant role in the world of ideas.”[3]

It is precisely there, in the last part of the sentence—that painting no longer had a significant role in the world of ideas—that we shall encounter Mahendra Yasa and his paintings.

Mahendra Yasa is a painter. This we know for sure, as he has indeed been working for years as an artist who continues to pursue this very thing: the making of paintings. However, it should also at the same time be proposed that Mahendra Yasa is an artist who seems keen on treating his own paintings, or his own artistic practice in general, as a work of philosophy—the critical thinking endeavor of an artist, to continually test or examine his own art practice, within the limits of the history and philosophy of aesthetics that encompass it.

I hope that this brief introductory essay can explain the matter adequately enough. Because, so far, I have not discovered any other way to understand or explain how much the paintings of Mahendra Yasa deserve proper attention from the art public in Indonesia. And even more important, how the art practice of Mahendra Yasa can provide food for thought for the artists of Indonesia—especially those who still continue to pursue the work of creating paintings—that more than mere technical skill or an interesting theme are required to give birth to a painting that can reaffirm its own existence as a relevant practice in the contemporary fine art context.

*****

The paintings of Mahendra Yasa in the current exhibition can quickly attract anyone’s attention because, visually, all of their elements are so easily recognizable: faces, or self-portraits of the artist, smeared with colorful paint, or integrated with masks and stacked images of the self-portrait itself. Further, all of the paintings are made—or created—by hand, by the artist or some of his assistants, working as a whole to bring forth every detail on every existing millimeter of the canvas, working hard to rival the detail and precision of the mechanical reproduction of photographic imagery, which is the main reference for each painting. All the paintings are made using techniques of painstaking photographic realism—a contradictory term, which indicates the surrender of the practice of painting to the greatness of photography, and at the same time, an effort to reclaim the greatness and technical capacity of painting to rival the capacity of photography.

They are like visual appearances; this is all that we find in each canvas in the current exhibition. No more, no less. The titles of each painting—instead of helping us to enter the domain of narrative, symbolic, or poetic interpretation, as commonly happens when we come face to face with a work of art—just stop at the affirmation of whatever exists and is tangibly present on each canvas plane. The title simply stops there, as an index of the initial reality—the main object—now presented in the painting. Mahendra Yasa is presenting a set of paintings that he has designed and has executed in such a way as to emphasize the main idea of his painting up to now: that the painting is present and lives of and for (the painting) itself. In other words, it can be said that each canvas in this exhibition refuses any reading effort whatsoever by those of us observing it. The paintings—in this context meaning Mahendra Yasa as well—only say: What you see is what you get. Or: It is what it is; they are what they are.

This definitely sounds like an echo on the rebound from a statement of Susan Sontag’s, several decades ago, when she said: “The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is, what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”[4]

It is as if Mahendra Yasa, through his current paintings, were providing some concrete examples of how this might be done. Not through the epistemological disciplining of methods of interpretation, but by positioning the object of interpretation itself—the painting—so that it can stand on its own and refuse to be revivified by means of hermeneutic interpretation. And, simultaneously, it is spared from becoming the mere bearer of a sensuous visual experience. What is present before us is only the visual appearance of the painting—utterly physical and chemical: dye, oil paint, spread and stuck onto the surface of the canvas. What we see is the surface. None of these paintings show us any signs of a trail or process for channeling the thinking or emotions of the artist, as it would be appropriate for us get as a function of the general process involved in paintings created in the tradition of gestural painting (compare this to Ugo’s statement at the beginning of this article). Rather, what appear to us are procedures: the paintings are made based on certain considerations, along with following certain stages of work to bring forth paintings entirely constructed using certain techniques, while the painter himself maintains emotional and conceptual distance so that the paintings are clean of any traces of the artist’s selfhood. The procedures are carefully calculated, so that technically and physically, we can eventually be brought face to face with a set of paintings that are preoccupied with looking at and questioning themselves. The paintings rely entirely on their physical materiality, while at the same time leaning strongly on the tradition, history, and philosophy of modern painting itself. I shall gradually expand on this in the following paragraphs.

Just look, for example, at the no less than eight paintings that display Mahendra Yasa’s paint-covered face: black, white, gold, silver, and multi-colored. These paintings were actually born of the following working procedures: First, Mahendra Yasa daubs acrylic paint on his face. This objective reality, the paint-covered face, is then recorded by a photographic camera, to later be printed on photographic paper. Based on these two procedures, we have already got two visual facts, manifested in two different physical realities. The first: there really are layers of gold or silver paint pigment, for example, which really adhere to the surface of the skin of the face. Second: on the photograph, what we see is an index of the former fact, which now features entirely as a photographic duplicate, printed, by the mixing of paint pigments modulated by a printer, on a sheet of paper.

Visually, we still accept the “fact” of the spreading of paint on the surface of the skin of the face, but physically, what we are facing is a totally different paint pigment. The gold or silver colors in the photograph are completely illusory; a set of informational data and visual signs of gold or silver, received by our visual perceptions.

At the next stage, all of the visual aspects of the photo are imitated and copied as closely as possible by Mahendra Yasa onto his canvases using oil paints. It is the outcome of this final stage of the work that we see in the paintings. Now, we are face to face with yet another visual fact: a painting the presents a paint-covered face, created with techniques of painstaking photographic realism. Does this not, in the end, lead us to the question: What was this painting made for, if it is entirely a copy of a photographic image that is precisely the same? Is the photo itself not enough to present the image of the paint-covered face? Why is it that the photograph to which it refers, featuring precisely the same image, does not become “art”, while the painting that imitates the photo is entitled to carry the title, “art”?

It is the answers to these questions that can lead us into the issues of painting, in the context of the philosophical ideas and history of art in general—the concerns that have underpinned Mahendra Yasa’s work in creating paintings over the past few years.

Believing that art (painting) today has already reached the endpoint of its journey—on the assumption that modern painting, which up to now has operated and thrived in a groove of its own, had the flow of a progression—is something that makes Mahendra, Yasa as a painter truly nervous and upset. The reason is simple. Because, in the course of that progression, the art of painting and paintings have actually reached an impasse—or stage of completion—as described by Ugo, or Kosuth above: the art of painting has come to the end of its story. As a painter, Mahendra Yasa endeavors not to stop, even once he fully agrees with and knows about the end of the journey of the art of painting today. Exactly there, at the end of the road, Mahendra Yasa is faced with a clear opportunity: the art of painting and paintings can now be done and be present only by grappling with various aspects of tradition, history, philosophy, even all the aspects of their materiality itself.

The easiest aspect for us to examine, of course, is the last. Let us take Mahendra Yasa’s work from the series he made before this exhibition, and showcased in two of his previous solo exhibitions: White Series: Allegory of Painting (Richard Koh Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2008) and The Painter’s Palette (The Aryaseni Art Gallery, Singapore, 2008)—his “white” paintings in particular.[5]

Of course, as many of us know, the matter of color in the tradition of modern painting has actually seized the attention and creativity of many artists. Yves Klein went to the point of making a special blue color, conclusively following his conviction that color is an adequate and sufficient element as an aesthetic reality in itself. International Kline Blue—whose main ingredient was a fixative resin called Rhodopas M60A, which he later patented—resulted from his experiments with Édouard Adam, a chemist and seller of painting supplies in Paris in 1955.[6] Then there was also Barnett Newman, who, as if to extend Klein’s idea, filled his canvases only with color fields. In the next period, Robert Ryman too occupied himself with “colorless” situations—or, one might say, the absence of color—in his all-white paintings, simply relying on different kinds of white pigment for his canvases.

Mahendra Yasa began his practice of the art of painting precisely at the point where the paintings of Ryman left off.

If, with Ryman’s all-white paintings, we are physically confronted by canvases whose surfaces have been smeared with white paint, Mahendra questions whether what we receive visually—or more precisely, optically—can be separated from the physical reality of completely white paint pigment. This, he put to the test in a straightforward manner: by taking Ryman’s white paintings, or palettes smeared with white paint only, as the objects of his paintings. He captured and recorded all the visual-optic facts of these all-white objects, to later be turned into paintings using conventional and realist painting techniques, by applying layers of oil paint onto canvas. And, indeed—as we will soon see in Mahendra Yasa’s paintings—to replicate even the whitest of objects in a painting takes more than just white paint, does it not? Yet, in the end, we still accept it as a painting that is “all white”.

The same procedure recurs in the current paintings of Mahendra Yasa, featuring his paint-smeared face. It takes more than just the same paint to re-present that paint—in our visual-optic perception—in the painting. If photography could fully record the reality of Mahendra Yasa’s paint-covered face as an image that is an analogue of the reality recorded, then Mahendra’s painting would indeed not wish to be a mere analogue of that reality. Mahendra Yasa’s paintings actually only render the materiality of painting—oil paint as the chemical vehicle that conveys the color of the optical reality of color as pigment—which he then presents as the main aesthetic issue in his paintings. Thus, Mahendra Yasa’s problem is not merely a matter of how to present his paint-smeared self-image. A task and goal of this sort could very easily be accomplished by photography. Painting—with all of its traditions and aesthetic issues—indeed provides him with an opportunity to conduct a re-investigation of the aesthetic issues—which may still remain—in the contemporary practice of the art of painting.[7]

Expressed in another way, it could be asserted that what Mahendra Yasa is doing this time really falls within the trajectory of issues of the philosophy of art, as once described in a set of essays by Arthur C. Danto on the end of art. For Danto—when he was reviewing Duchamp’s Urinal as well as Andy Warhol’s Brillo—contemporary works of art have reached the endpoint of the aesthetic journey when the artwork: “… raises the question of the philosophical nature of art from within art, implying that art already is philosophy in a vivid form, and has now discharged its spiritual mission by revealing the philosophical essence at its heart.”[8] And, for this reason, he added, the time has come to surrender the practice of art to philosophy. To the point that in the end: “… [what] art finally will have achieved as its fulfillment and fruition is the philosophy of art.”[9]

This certainly does not mean that Danto thought that all contemporary art practice has shifted to become, or is unvaryingly the same as, the practice of philosophy. What he meant, I think, is that art can no longer rely solely on itself alone to redefine itself as art.[10] Mahendra Yasa’s practice of painting—ironically—is an affirmation of exactly the contrary. Almost the opposite of Joseph Kosuth, who considered painting no longer capable of being “self-conscious, of its own history and theory”, Mahendra Yasa plunges himself into the practice of an art of painting of exactly this sort.

****

This sequence of aesthetic procedures he tries out with a number of different visual-optic effects, the results of which we can also see in the current exhibition. There are a number of “self portraits” that he has made based on the visual reality of the self portrait resulting from the stacking of two visual realities: his real self in addition to his self portrait illuminated by the lens of a projector. In another, the self-portrait overlaps with and hides behind a mask that features his own face. Still more complex, he also tries to present color as waves of (projected) light later turned back again into paint pigment on canvas (Projection: Paint, 2009).

The paintings occupy themselves with aspects of the materiality of painting, attempting to transfer and mimic various visual-optic aspects of form and color in the reality of painting, relying completely on the mixing of paint pigments to arrive—or stop—at a visual-optic reality that is the same as, and congruent with, the main object of reference at the level of our visual perception. This is what I mean by paintings, which, at the end of their aesthetic journey, take themselves as their own subject matter, look at themselves in all aspects of their own materiality as paintings. This is most clearly and vividly evident in the works, Watercolor on Paper (2009) and Pointillism (2009).

Finally, one question may remain to tempt us: What is the use of presenting all of that in the form of self-portrait paintings? Is it not true that in these paintings there is a clear subject matter: the self-portrait?

As in the case of paintings/the art of painting, the self-portrait—in the course of modern and contemporary painting—is a line of tradition, or genre, which has been thoroughly and exhaustively worked through by a great many artists. From Albrecht Durer to Rembrandt, all the way to Affandi, S. Sudjojono, and Agus Suwage; from Chuck Close to Ronald Manullang, to Ariadhitya J. Pramuhendra; there is a long list of names of artists, from the Renaissance period in Italy up to today in Indonesia, who have dealt with the self-portrait genre in painting in myriad ways.[11]

I think that—as with the general issues I have described regarding paintings and the modern art of painting—the self-portrait, as a genre, as a tradition, has also reached the endpoint of its aesthetic journey.[12] Of course we can accept the self-portrait works of Chuck Close or Agus Suwage, for example, as the results of creative endeavors to revitalize this genre of painting. However, they are not endeavoring to test and then negate this tradition and genre. Whereas Mahendra Yasa actually enters this very territory: of the self portrait as a continuation, or completion, of his efforts to place painting, or his own particular practice of the art, into an internal struggle over issues related to the main traditions, ideas, practices and materials of the art of painting.

In general, it seems that the painting of portraits, self portraits in particular, in the final stages of its development in the present period, like it or not, must face itself as well, along with all the traditions and aesthetic principles that have supported and made it thrive up to now. In that way, as in the case of what has happened to the traditions of the art of painting in general, this practice still reserves its own internal dynamic. I think this is something that Chuck Close clearly realized, for example, when he declared that his painted portraits—and self-portraits—were no longer about issues of the self, or of the body. He said: “I reject humanist issues in my work.” And with that, Close—I again quote Godfrey—actually wanted to affirm that in confronting his portrait paintings, what was there was only: You see what you see.[13] So, we could say that rather than being concerned with problems of the “self”, Chuck Close is mainly questioning the “portrait” and painting, in the context of a contemporary society inundated by technology and media that wreak an explosion of visual imagery and turn everything into spectacle.

This issue was clearly described by David Campany, when reviewing a work of portrait painting by Chuck Close, Phil (1969), and focusing attention on areas ranging from the procedure of making the painting to a comparison of the differences between painting and photography in Close’s practice of painting. Thus, what he wrote about the issue was: “Close’s photorealism is both an expansion and a collapse of painting. The artist’s hand is subordinated to a laborious system for translating visual data, which echoes the mechanism of the photographic source. Close initially grids his canvas and works from an inverted image. He can then relate to it with indifference. In some respects this corresponds to the mechanical indifference of the optical camera lens which inverts the image it casts.”[14]

Following this line of thought, we can understand how the painting of portraits, or self portraits, may be treated as an object for raising technical and aesthetic questions around paintings/the art of painting, and have nothing to do with questions of a personal, humanistic, or poetic nature.

Thus, we can see the self-portrait paintings of Mahendra Yasa as the antithesis of the self portrait, for example, in the work of Affandi, who strongly and clearly intended to display the “emotions” or “inner experience” of the artist at different times and in different situations. Further, there are no real traces of the gestural from the artist on the surfaces of his canvases. What we see are illusions or simulacra, almost mechanical, clinical, precise, of what is visually-optically perceived.[15]

If we have ever concurred with the thinking of S. Sudjojono, who once proposed the importance of the “visible soul” in painting as a measure of its achievement of “artistic quality”,[16] then Mahendra Yasa considers these issues as an entirely technical and optical matter. And that, for that reason, a contemporary painter can imitate the “visible soul” in every which way, then re-present it as painting, in a most simple and terminal objective reality: a painting, layers of paint on canvas. We can see, for example, his self-portrait painting, titled Face Paint #2 (2010)—the largest painting in the current exhibition. Although it displays “facial expression”, we know precisely that the expression in the painting is only a form of the strokes of colored paint that at one point washed the face of the artist, who then reproduced a record of that fact—from a photograph—to later be re-presented as a painting; the result of the manipulation of various colors of paint in attempt to reproduce the original pigment colors.In other words, it could be said that Mahendra Yasa is presenting a type of self-portrait that negates the tradition of self-portraiture in general; and in a contradictory way, actually revitalizes it.And that is why Mahendra Yasa’s current paintings have the internal power to keep moving, in search of various possibilities of change and difference that can be conceptually achieved by the contemporary art of painting, after the practice of painting has been accepted for so long and has continued to keep going until today.

This last issue is the most interesting challenge of all, for anyone who still believes in his or her profession as a painter, and still has faith in the “power” of painting.

Enin Supriyanto
Curator
_____________________

Footnotes:

[1] Ugo Untoro (1995). Prakata pameran “Corat-Coret ‘91-‘95”, Bentara Budaya: Yogyakarta, as quoted in Omi Intan Naomi (2008). The Sound of Silence and Colors of The Wind Between the Tip of a Cigarette and Fire of the Lighter, Museum dan Tanah Liat:Yogyakarta, English version, p. 26.
[2] Ibid., p. 27.
[3] Tony Godfrey (2009). Painting Today. Phaidon: London, p. 12.
[4] Susan Sontag (1990). Against Interpretation. Anchor Books, Doubleday: NY, p. 14.
[5] An interesting interview with Mahendra Yasa by Wang Zineng was featured in the catalogue for the exhibition, “The Painters Palette” at the The Arya Seni Gallery, Singapore (2008), pp. 4-8. Based on Mahendra Yasa’s explanation in the interview, and also, on rechecking a number of his paintings from that period, I believe that there are no allegorical qualities at all in Mahendra Yasa’s paintings, as suggested in the title of his exhibition in Kuala Lumpur. The only elements that might lead people toward an allegorical understanding are the “poetic” messages that Mahendra Yasa still leaves in some of the titles of his paintings. On a visit to Mahendra Yasa at his studio in Denpasar, Bali, in early March 2010, we discussed this issue. It was not until a month later that Mahendra Yasa sent complete data on his works with the titles changed, into ones like those in the current exhibition.
[6] Philip Baal (2001). Bright Earth and The Invention of Color. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, p. 248.
[7] To emphasize the intersection and differences between Mahendra Yasa’s self-portraits and the paintings he creates based on the photographs, we can imagine the following situation: A self-portrait in a photograph obviously has the value and function of documentation. The photo asserts that: at a certain time and place, it truly happened that Mahendra (his face) was stained with colored paints. When this picture was replicated and transferred as closely as possible onto the canvas, it became a painting; it embarked on the path of fate and a history of its own, a history and concept of painting/the art of painting. The painting, however similar it may be to the photo it refers to, is never, or would be difficult to accept as, factual documentation, as in a journalistic report, for example.
[8] Arthur C. Danto (2005). The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. Columbia University Press: NY, p. 16.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Jonathan Gilmore, in his introduction to the book by Arthur C. Danto, ibid, p. xiv.
[11] Shearer West (2004). Oxford History of Art Series: Portraiture. Oxford University Press: NY; Chapter 7: Self Portraiture, pp. 163-185, in particular.
[12] Recalling the late 1960s period in the US, Chuck Close—who continues various portrait paintings today—once explained the fate and curse of the self-portrait (not to mention paintings in the photo-realist style) in that period: “If you think about the late 1960s, painting was dead, sculpture ruled. Painting seemed like a senseless activity. If you were dumb enough to make a painting, it had better be abstract. It was even dumber to make a representational image. Then the dumbest, most moribund, out-of-date, and shopworn of all possible things you could do was make a portrait. I remember Clement Greenberg said to [Willem] de Kooning that the only thing you can’t do in art anymore is make a portrait.” See the complete interview at: http://visualarts.walkerart.org/detail.wac?id=2036&title=Articles
[13] Tony Godfrey (2009), p. 96.
[14] David Campany 92003). Art and Photography. Phaidon: London, p. 150.
[15] What he would do is to fully imitate—in as full detail and as precisely as possible—all the visual-optical data he could perceive in the Affandi painting—either using aids in the form of photographic records, or by viewing it directly with the naked eye. The result: a painting which is similar (but not the same), complete with all the scratches, slashes and twists of Affandi’s signature blobs of thick paint. However, this time, all we would see in Mahendra’s painting would be the result of the application of paint layers that are completely flat and smooth on the surface of the canvas. By this stage, Mahendra’s painting would not be a “fake” Affandi, but a painting that presents itself as the result of a work involving the alteration—or, conceptual manipulation—of a “loophole” in techniques and practices of painting made feasible and sanctioned by the traditions and history of the art of painting itself.
[16] In 1946, S. Sudjojono—taking the example of “a painter who wants to paint a bird”—wrote his view of this: “ … And it is here that the design and style of the picture takes place. So the picture is the fruit of the workings of a process of our soul, and not just a picture of a photographic optical work for our eyes alone.” S. Sudjojono, Menuju Corak Seni Lukis Persatuan Indonesia Baru, quoted in Aminudin TH Siregar & Enin Supriyanto, eds. (2006). Seni Rupa Modern Indonesia, Esai-Esai Pilihan (Indonesian Modern Art, Selected Essays) Nalar: Jakarta, p. 8.

Isn’t the painting work process that Mahendra Yasa engages really aimed at a full reliance on, and presentation of, that “optical work”?

Time and place:
Borobudur Auction
May 5th – 9th, 2010
SIGIarts Gallery
May 12th – 22th, 2010

Discussion Session
SIGIarts Gallery
May 22th, 2010


Curatorial, Events, Exhibition