Monthly Archives: October 2017

Fire, Humor, and Water: Videos by FX Harsono and the Propeller Group at Asia Society

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Installation view with FX Harsono’s 1998 Burned Victims in foreground

Several provocative video works in After Darkness: Southeast Asian Art in the Wake of History, on view at Asia Society through January 31, caught my eye, notably ones by FX Harsono and the Propeller Group. The curators chose the works in the exhibition not as a survey of art from Southeast Asia–there are only 7 artists and 1 collective from 3 countries–but because they speak to the role contemporary art can have in countries struggling with reform, free speech, and democracy. FX Harsono uses blowtorches and chainsaws in aggressive performances that express rage at political events in his native Indonesia. Of a later generation, the Propeller Group, a collective of three artist connected to Vietnam, use humor in their polished video works to point to lingering dissonances in contemporary Vietnamese society.

FX Harsono. Detail, Burned Victims, 1998. Burned wood, metal, shoes.

Destruction and Burned Victims are literal titles for these late ’90s video performances. FX Harsono performed Destruction in 1997 as a response to concerns about voter fraud under president Suharto’s authoritarian New Order government. In it, he destroys theater masks resting on three chairs, which represent the three political parties then vying for power. Couched as a piece of public theater–with Harsono in traditional make up and the masks referring to puppet theater–it was also an act of civil disobedience. At that moment, assembly of more than five people was illegal in public space. Harsono attacks and destroys the wooden masks, first by chainsaw and then by blowtorch, in front of onlookers.

FX Harsono. Still, Burned Victims, 1998. Performance video with sound; 8 minutes, 41 seconds.

FX Harsono. Still, Burned Victims, 1998. Performance video with sound; 8 minutes, 41 seconds.

Burned Victims memorializes a protest in 1998 against Suharto that turned violent–rioters locked civilians inside a shopping mall in Jakarta and set the building on fire. The sculptural installation is equally grisly–a row of charred, torso shaped pieces of wood suspended on metal frames, each of which has a pair of burned shoes at the end. The different pairs of burned shoes turn what might be a more abstract sculpture into something much more stark and horrible, reminding of the individuality of the victims of the fire. In the video performance, Harsono douses the torsos with gasoline and lights them on fire. Signs with slogans of Riot burn, and Harsono places another sign in front of the audience: “Who is responsible?”

The Propeller Group. (Still) The Dream, 2012. Single-channel HD video; 4 minutes, 20 seconds.

The Propeller Group, who had an exhibition last year at James Cohen gallery, strike a different tone. Their two video works use humor to critique society in a more distant and subtle approach than Harsono’s outraged cry. One, called The Dream, shows a Honda Dream motorbike that, strategically placed overnight on a city street by the artists, is dismantled of its parts by various thieves as the night wears on. The skeleton of the bike is on view in the gallery in front of a time-lapse video of the night. It is quite humorous to watch this ubiquitous Vietnamese status symbol disappear over the course of the night. Behind the joke, the Propeller Group also comment on the corrosive elements of capitalist change that has swept the nominally Communist state.

Installation view of The Dream at Asia Society, featuring stripped down body of Honda Dream motorbike in foreground

The second work that they show, The Guerrillas of Cu Chi, consists of two facing monitors–one plays Viet Cong promotional footage from 19631 and the other shows present-day foreign tourists shooting old AK47s leftover from the Vietnam war. The tourists mug for the camera as they gleefully enacting war scenes. Both videos are about the Cu Chi Tunnels, underground passages used by the Viet Cong to combat the U.S. during the Vietnam war that are outside Ho Chi Minh City. The same soundtrack and captions overlays both, highlighting eerie parallels despite the disjunct in time and purpose. Both the old propaganda and the new tourist site are distant from the carnage and suffering that characterized the lived experience of the war, and indeed, instead seem designed to perpetuate such history as war games.

The Propeller Group. Still, The Guerrillas of Cu Chi, 2012. Two-channel synchronized video installation with sound; 20 minutes, 4 seconds.

The Propeller Group. Still, The Guerrillas of Cu Chi, 2012. Two-channel synchronized video installation with sound; 20 minutes, 4 seconds.

From the far end of the exhibition galleries comes the sound of rushing water. Already, in contrast to blowtorches and AK47s, the use of water rather than fire or guns strikes a less violent note. In this video performance, Harsono writes his name in Chinese characters over and over again. The artist is ethnically Chinese, a minority in Indonesia, and in the face of discrimination against the language and culture, he only learned the Chinese characters of his name as an adult. We watch from the other side of the glass panel as the strokes of black paint begin to overlap and take up more and more of the surface, growing into a black mass. Suddenly water pours down from above, washing away the ink even as the artist keeps making the motions with his hand. Rather than water as a cleansing agent, here water is a deluge sweeping away the artist’s Sisyphean efforts in a show of force and might.

FX Harsono. Writing in the Rain. 2011. Video performance

Belkis Ayón: Printing Oneself Into Power at El Museo del Barrio

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Belkis Ayon at the Havana Galerie, Zurich, Aug 23, 1999 (Fowler Museum at UCLA)

NKame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón is on view for another month, until November 5, 2017, at El Museo del Barrio. These wonderfully textured, large-scale prints centered on the mythology of a secretive male brotherhood in Havana are well worth seeing, remembering when you do how a young Afro-Cuban woman took up this obscure subject matter in the 1980s while pioneering techniques in a medium then considered passé. Belkis Ayón lived and worked in Havana, where she was born in 1967. Her retrospective, which comes to El Museo from the Fowler Museum in L.A., introduces a substantial body of work to audiences in the United States. However, during her own life, Ayón already enjoyed considerable success internationally. As an artist, she received special dispensation from the Cuban government to travel. She participated in the 16th Venice Biennial in 1993 and attended residencies in Europe, Japan, and North America. In 1999, at the age of 32, Ayón took her own life. Nkame, a word which means greeting or praise in the Abakuá language, is an homage to the artist as much as overview of her short career.

Belkis Ayón, La Cena (The Supper), 1991

Ayón was neither religious, nor a man, yet she took the Afro-Cuban religion of Abakuá as her subject matter. Abakuá, which has a strong community in Havana, only allows male participants and it secretive. Yet the bulk of Ayón’s work presents characters and scenes of Abakuá doctrine. The focus is often on the only female figure in the pantheon, Sikan, with whom the artist herself identified. In the image above of La Cena, the central figure is the white silhouette of Sikan. Recalling images of the Christian Last Supper, male initiates surround the seated lone female as they prepare a ritual. It is also an image of a powerful woman who is unlike those surrounding her; here Sikan is set off by the bright contrast in tone. Implicitly the image challenges a patriarchal culture, because the artist takes it upon herself to tell the stories of a religion she is excluded from and portrays herself in the center of the scene. Rather than positioning herself on the outside looking in, she is on the inside looking directly out at the viewer.

Belkis Ayón, La Cena (The Supper), 1988

La Cena, often considered Ayón’s masterpiece, was preceded by the work pictured above of the same title. This colorful antecedent was exhibited in 1988 at her first solo exhibition in Havana, Propuesta a los veinte años (Proposal at the Age of Twenty). After this point Ayón settled into a palette of grey, black, and white, but she continued to work with the subject matter of Abakuá. With it she created a powerful visual iconography that both fascinates me and remains resistant to straightforward interpretation. Taken at face value, these are literal depictions from stories, characters presented with symbolic attributes in full frontal depictions to maximize legibility, which Ayón presents seemingly without agenda. Yet her commitment to the subject and its obscure nature confound, and indeed perhaps that mystery is part of the appeal.

Belkis Ayón, To Make Me Love You Forever, 1991

Her work is also notable for its technical skill and innovation with form. To Make Me Love You Forever, her work for the 16th Venice Biennial, is created of 18 separate printed sheets joined together on a shaped support to create a structure that resembles an alter. Although the surface is delicate, the work becomes monumental. Ayón developed a collographic process that allowed her great and subtle textures, giving her blacks in particular a lush Baroque quality. Collography is a printing process that involves applying various materials to a cardboard matrix, and the collage, in turn, functions as a printing plate. Below you can see the collaged printing matrix on the left compared to a print, both on view at El Museo in the same room as the color La Cena of 1988 and the final version of 1991. The varying absorbency and texture of the materials used in the printing plate determines the final texture.

Details of printing plate and print studies for La Cena

The final room in show highlights some of the artist’s last prints. Smaller single sheets feature a central, circular compositions in dark tones. Although similar aesthetically, these works abandon the recognizable stories or characters of Abakuá in favor of faces or masks amidst abstract, densely worked backgrounds. In hindsight, it is hard not to read these compositions as uncomfortable, where hands seem to pull at the skin of the face—as those of a person whose world had come to feel smaller and more constrictive.

Installation view, NKame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón, El Museo del Barrio

NKame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón is on view until November 5, 2017 at El Museo del Barrio.