Proses adalah ketika kita. (Process is when we.)
About the research
In November 1982, Danarto wrote what would today be called his 'artist statement'. The title is “Process, process, process, process, process, process, process, process,” that ends with a comma, repeated like a mantra dozens of times, in a statement that ends with a decisively unfinished sentence: “Process is when we” referring to his view about the then national political situation that had been polarized for decades, even to this day. Widely acknowledged as a pivotal figure on the Indonesian literary scene, Danarto was not only a writer and poet. He is one of those rare artists who did everything and did it all well. He would perform his poetry, write and direct plays, deliver monologues, paint and make installations, design posters and interiors, draw illustrations for children’s and high-brow cultural publications, build sets for films and theatre and write critical reviews, while teaching at an art school, offering weekly satirical social, political commentary, and an Islamic lifestyle column. We would not be surprised to uncover more.
He was born on 27 June 1940 in Sragen, Central Java and died in Jakarta in 2018. By the age of 19, he had made illustrations for children’s magazines and co-founded Sanggarbambu (Bamboo Monastery, est. 1959), a group of purportedly apolitical painters whose shared studio and gallery space fast became a hub for artists from right across the spectrum of music, theatre and literature. In the early sixties, as in many new nations at the time, the schism between the Indonesian ‘left’ (be it socialist, communist, or bottom-up citizens’ initiatives) and the various right-wing movements was acute, polarising not only national politics but ordinary people too. Sanggarbambu was a conscious attempt to offer a third way amid these tensions, a dissolutive, non-binary proposition.
This was an era of the new, of many new initiatives happening in different places simultaneously, often without immediate connections or relationships. Everything was new, or being renewed. The sixties and seventies are broadly considered the peak of vanguardism in Indonesia, in the arts, culture, and national development, as in many other post-colonial nations. Danarto’s artistic practice began in the midst of that ferment. Everything he and his friends did was new to them, and to those around them. It didn’t matter if someone elsewhere had done it or not—experiments in concretism amid the rapid growth of recording technologies, for example, or explorations of subjectivity by way of audience participation in art happenings. What mattered was to reflect critically the social and political environment that was taking a repressive and militaristic turn, toward an extractive neo-colonialism, some would say. Despite the cosmopolitan aspirations of many newly independent nations, their governments were often susceptible to a simplistic, capitalist American dream. Soeharto’s authoritarian New Order regime, like many new states, subscribed to that dream and was indeed supported by the U.S. government. A genocidal purge of alleged ‘communists’ and ‘Islamic extremists’ started in 1965, and the ‘Jakarta Operation’ (or ‘Jakarta is Coming’) became the U.S.A. 's model campaign for obliterating communism in Latin America. Since then—even after the ‘Reformation’ that toppled the dictatorial president in 1998—that polarization has endured, deeply ingrained in Indonesian political life.
Danarto dkk
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Taman Bacaan Danarto
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Nayamullah
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