Giving Indonesia another perspective
Kartika Affandi claims she’s ugly. She was also raised to be truthful.
Let’s settle the conundrum.
To push her point she adds make-up and fractures another
taboo. Instead of masking womanly mysteries by preening in private, she steers
her wheelchair into the open, opens her box of tricks and faces her fans.
The voyeurs seek more than rouge, red chili ear danglers and
an upturned clown mouth. Deceptions or
pointers?
They strive to catch character on canvas and the best
succeed with wild swirls of color and shades of darkness. Their model has got to that certain age where
she no longer cares a damn what anyone thinks.
Or maybe it’s always been that way.
There’s no brashness, nothing unkind. Her eccentricity is benign. It’s not a gimmick, though it might be a
shield against past pains: “I’m doing
this not to look beautiful, although I enjoy people looking at me,” she said.
“I want to get rid of bad spirits, to help us all enjoy life.”
The Yogyakarta painter and
sculptor turned 85 in November; it’s clear she’s been boisterously independent
for all eight decades.
When her famous father Affandi told the only child from his
first marriage with artist Maryati: ‘What a pity you’re my daughter’ she could
have sulked at best or become a psychotic mess.
Instead she replied: “I’m glad
I’m a woman, though I know it’s easier to be a man in Indonesia. And that’s wrong. I want equality.”
Does she get angry?
“Sometimes. Then I walk away. Or
paint. Move on. There’s no place for hate.”
Yet some of her self portraits look so tortured they could
be used in campaigns against domestic violence.
In life she’s frothy female, laughing to offset the feminist messages
that make insecure men fold their legs.
Affandi erased his disappointment and set about teaching his
tough little girl to be original and “never tell lies; don’t just see, but
feel.” Kartika squeezed her first paint tube
when she was seven and has since exhibited in Europe, South America, the US and
Australia where she painted with Aboriginal women in the central desert town of
Alice Springs.
“I want to be outdoors, among people where they live,” she
said. “I’ve worked in Amsterdam’s red light district and a mental
hospital. I went to Aceh to be with the
survivors. Art is therapy.” All good – but in Indonesia tall poppies need the
scythe.
 |
| With portrait by Zam (psychologist Dr Azam Bachtiar) |
Professor Astri Wright, a Canadian Art Historian has written
that Kartika ‘paid with social ostracisation and sexist reviews for presuming
to become a modern artist … (and) for painting too much like her father’.
In The Jakarta Post
author Julia
Suryakusuma described Kartika as ‘an antidote to state
ibu-ism (state motherhood), the New Order militaristic, feudal Javanese social
construction of womanhood whereby women were defined as appendages to their
husbands’.
Despite her colorful past – or maybe because of it - Kartika
reluctantly acknowledged she’s better celebrated outside her homeland. A biography in English by Dutch poet Barney
Agerbeek is scheduled for November 2020. The documentary Kartika: 9 Ways of Seeing by Christopher Basile, an
American in Australia,
was released in 2018. She said it has
yet to be shown in Indonesia.
The girl from Jakarta
soon kicked the dust of orthodox Java off her sandals. By 18 she was a pregnant student in London with her older artist
lover Saptohoedojo. She’d already
studied in India
on a government scholarship for exceptional children, but knew little about
making babies.
The couple couldn’t find a mosque so used a registry
office. Eight children and 20 years
later they divorced after battling Islamic authorities claiming they weren’t
married.
“I was fed up with his polygamy,” she said. “A partnership
can only hold together if there’s trust and honesty. The rest is bullshit.”
A second union with Austrian Gerhard Koberl came and
went. She ponders proposing to her older
Australian academic “boyfriend” who lives in Melbourne.
Although they’ve known each other for 55 years “that’s not the same as
living together. I don’t want another
divorce. Maybe I’m difficult.”
If so there was no annoyance on show as she held court for four
hours in the garden
of Malang artist and
author Bambang Adrian Wenzel. A dozen painters and sketchers gripped brushes to
capture more than a “mish mash” of her complex personality.
Two of the more successful in “getting to see what I think”
were Azam Bachtiar and Sadikin Pard.
Their tangled lines forming a whole, abstract other world image let the
viewer peer behind the paint.
Pard (left) is one of the nation’s leading mouth and foot painters,
and has just opened a gallery in the East Java city.
Kartika also has one in Yogyakarta
honoring her father who died in 1990. The New
York Times called him ‘Indonesia's
foremost Expressionist painter … whose works were exhibited worldwide’. Apart from being an artist he also supported
first president Soekarno – and for this he and his family’s movements were restricted
for six weeks in 1948 by the Dutch.
“The Soekarno years were the golden era of Indonesian art,”
she said. “He appreciated my father’s
work. He was a good man but his main
fault was polygamy. Under Soeharto the
military was worshipped more than humanity.
“So many Indonesians don’t go to galleries because they feel
shame. That’s so sad. We need art education is schools so children
can appreciate the importance of culture and expressing the imagination.”
Kartika said she spent 40 years as a Buddhist “but now I
really don’t know about religion ... I just want to be a good person and be
honest to myself. I accept gays and lesbians – everyone. I try to encourage women to show their
creativity. Art helps us live better, to
have spirit.”
How should her obituary read? “I gave Indonesia another perspective of
the quality of life.”
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Pix by Erlinawati Graham
First published in The Jakarta Post 28 December 2019
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