Ratu Kidul

I recently saw Karen Strassler present a paper at Cornell University, a work in progress she titled “The Aura of Power:  Ratu Kidul’s Photographic Appearances.”

Ratu Kidul is a deity or spirit in Javanese and Sudanese mythology.  She resides in the Southern Sea of Java, often sighted near Parangtritis, a famous beach outside of Yogyakarta.  Ratu Kidul is described with many powers – she is a shape-shifter, a protector, and possesses a divine and royal sexuality (she is a famed lover of the Javanese Sultanate).

I recently gave a short lecture about my own photographs at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and in this talk, I mentioned my interests in Indonesia and the arts and cultural of the nation.

I showed a few pictures by Wimo Ambala Bayang, a Javanese photographer I find interesting.  I showed one picture from his series High Hopes.

It’s a picture of a young woman, resting casually and perhaps seductively on a sandy beach (presumably Parangtritis), with her head and face covered with a white, fluffy mask or stocking (with the series title High Hopes, it’s easy to assume this is meant to represent a head lost in the clouds).  This photograph always seemed to be about Islam and women, but giving my talk the other day, I made a connection with Karen Strassler’s paper, and now see a connection with Ratu Kidul as well.  So really this picture is more complicated than I originally thought, referencing several layers of Javanese history, the animistic deitty of sexual fecundity and the repressive roles of women in conservative Muslim cultures.

Opportunity for Indonesia Painters

My school is offering a fellowship for a new USA resident to come and work for 3 months in New York, at the school, with our students, facilities, and faculty.

I seem to get quite a few readers from Indonesia here, so I am hoping you all might help spread the word (I would love to get some applications from Indonesia).  If you are interested, or no anyone who might be, please take a look at this, the pdf will give specifics about the fellowship, as well as offer information on applying:

Randall Chair_Announcement fall 2012 DPP[2]

 

Tanah Air Kita

Tanah air kita.  The literal translation is our land and water, though typically translates as Our Homeland.

As part of my own going research into photography in Indonesia, as well as pursing the opportunities afforded to me by my recently awarded fellowship in the Southeast Asian Project at Cornell University, I spent a day recently looking through boxes of photographs by the Dutch photographer Niels Douwes Dekker, located in the Cornell Rare Manuscript Collection.

First published in 1950, Tanah Air Kita is a collection of photographs documenting and celebrating the diversity and unity of Indonesian culture.

I spent much of a day going through a few boxes of these photographs.  It was a pretty mixed bag.  For the most part, the pictures offered a pretty simple view of culture.  The technique of the pictures also left something to be desired.  They were strictly about conveying a particular sort of information, perhaps even a sort of propaganda.

Though despite that, I found a number of gems (as Steichen once said, photography was born perfect, and thus can prove to be greater than the photographer), and it was wonderful to take a stroll through Indonesia during the early 20th century.

Stutterheim’s Mistress

I’ve spent a few afternoons over the last 2-3 weeks reading through more of the Claire Holt archives housed in the Cornell Libraries.

There are lots of great things to discover here.  These afternoons, I thumb through boxes full of labeled file folders.  Found within is every possible thing leftover from her research – photographs, negatives, lecture notes, travel diaries, and letters, as well as number of other kinds of documents.

I have found a number of great things for my own interests in these folders.  High on this list is a small notebook with 6x6cm contact prints pasted to the ruled pages, each listing the names of those found in the pictures.  Flipping through the pages, it’s clear she used these photographs and notes to learn names and the social structure of a village – in Sumatra, if I am not mistaken – where she was conducting some research.

I also found an exhibition catalog from The 1st International Photosalon of Indonesia.  The exhibition was held in Bandung, 13-19 of July, 1956.  The pictures were unremarkable, typically of any amateur competition.  Though the document itself was interesting, as a marker of both the social changes leading to national independence, and the growing role photography was assuming in the urban centers of Java.

I also found one file folder packed with dozens of typewritten pages filled with artist biographies (many of these are included in the appendix of wonderful work Art in Indonesia:  Continuities and Change).  The biographies are 1-3 pages in length, and offer information on birth and early family life, education, work experience, and exhibitions for each of the artists.

In a folder marked Dance Research, I found a newspaper clipping from the 1960′s about the national ban on the teenage dance craze, the cha-cha-cha.  Sukarno himself came forward as being anti cha-cha-cha, and felt the Indonesian people and nation should actively promote the traditional folk dances of the islands.

I found documents about the opening of ASRI Jogja (today known as ISI Yogya) in the 1950′s.  Documents about a show of Affandi’s paintings at Cornell.

Of equal interest are the parts of Holt’s biography as revealed from all the letters and correspondences archived in these boxes.

Within the letters are traced a number of different relationships – with the development and founding of different Asian Cultural Councils in the United States; exchanges about working and editing the manuscripts that eventually became her seminal text; and even letters and invitations leading to her dinner with Lyndon Johnson at the White House.

The letters I found most interesting on a personal and biographical level, however, were exchanges between the Mangkunegaran and Willem Stutterheim.  The Mangkunegaran is an extension of the royal family living in Solo, Central Java.  These letters talk about her work, and some of her struggles with depression.  They also offer a glimpse into the long cultivated relationships it took to develop her research.

The letters exchanged with Willem Stutterheim – a Dutch born archeologist – offer a look into what seems like an elicit affair; Holt was his mistress.  Stutterheim was a fellow Indonesianist, married with one child.  The two met while doing field work.  Some of the letters deal with Holt’s internal conflict about her work and her love, and not wanting to sacrifice her independence and ambitions.

At least the fragments I’ve read make it seem this way.

Vernacular Javanese

I just recently finished reading Refracted Visions by Karen Strassler.

It’s remarkable book by an anthropologist trained at the University of Michigan; she completed her fieldwork in Yogyakarta.  Her primary interest is photography, and she offers a study of Javanese vernacular photography during the New Order.

Strassler offers a case by case study of the New Order by looking at some of the different ideologies of populist photography during these years.

The first of her studies she calls the amateurs, the photo clubs that all cities have.  The amateurs compete in regional competitions taking picturesque photographs of the real Indonesia, full of mystical beauty and a boundless history.

Many of these contests are funded by the national tourism commission as a marketing strategy, to help insure the tourist trade of the nation.

The second study is about studio portraiture.

Strassler argues that in post colonial Indonesia – as across Europe and America – photography was the defining tool and metaphor for modernity.  In Indonesia, the caused a strange conflict; photography was both an alien force brought by the western occupier of their nation, then later practiced mostly by the ethnic Chinese (an ongoing culture tension in Java), and yet was also consumed wildly by the population and seen as a necessary tool for nationhood.

With wonderfully executed backdrops, brought into Yogya from a neighboring village of painters and craftsmen, the studio photographers of the modern age offered a taste of dreams, and articulated many of the predominant ideologies of the nation.

These studios created an opportunity to offer the self as you’d like it to be.

The third section is about identity photographs – pasfotos - a tool by the government to count and control the population.

The next study looks at family, ceremonial photography.  Like in the west, photographs are major contributor to ceremonies of all kinds (birthdays, Easter egg hunts, etc..), and rights of passage.  Strassler argues the act of photographing is the meaning, is the memory.  The printed photograph itself fills a variety of functions, some related to this memory and time, some more independent because of the materials and the culture(s).

From here, she continues by looking at student photography during the Reformasi, and the functions photographs fulfill in creating social and political histories.  She compares the pictures of the recent student uprising against Seoharto to Solo 1965.

The final section is about the mystic of Sukarno.

It is a profile of one man who sees himself as a political and historical mystic, name Noorman.  Using photographs, photocopies, and collage, Noorman attempts to record the real history of Sukarno, and his legacy in Indonesia.

Strassler began her study by looking at Kassian Cephas, and the documentation of turn of the century photography in the Dutch East Indies.  All said and done, I appreciate this book quite a bit, both as a photographer and  the study of the medium, as well as as an Indonesian-ist.

More Photographs, and Photographs of Photographs

If you scroll back a few pages, I recently posted some of the photographs I made in my recent travels in Indonesia.

This is still a work in progress.

In the end, these pictures will become a boxed edition – an artist book of sorts – much like this one.

Most of the pictures are made in Java, but a few are from Bali.

Originally, I gave the pictures the working title of The Writing on the Wall and Other Observations.

Many of the photographs are of photographs I found walking the streets.

And so, I’ve since decided to use the title of the last post and the working title for the pictures, Some Photographs, and Photographs of Photographs:  Sanur-Yogya-Jakarta, 2011.

As always with my pictures, I am interested in photographs as a material presence, and each photograph is a unique print and object itself.

The printing is an improvisation, involving various combinations of selenium, gold, and an assortment of teas.

Javanese Tea Plantation

My ongoing perusal of ebay has led me to another great photographic find.

I found this wonderful print of a Javanese tea plantation by the great studio Woodbury & Page.  It’s an albumen print, in perfect condition.  And just gives me more of a taste for Java.