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Historical critique of exhibitions? Art and ethnography

Review of Grand Parade for the VU course module ‘Historians, heritage and the nation’, 2014-2015

Susan Legêne

1 - The first image of Grand Parade I saw, was a poster with a graphic representation of figures

parading. No people, but signs: ceremonial head covers, drums, weapons, banners, legs with black

boots. The legs are designed like the notation of a rythm, the poster could be played as the score of a

piece for a drum band.

Grand Parade, a ‘Theatrical art installation’ by Jompet Kuswidananto was created as a temporal

exhibition in the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam (31 October 2014 to 22 March 2015) and is tailor

made for the museum’s Central Light Hall. Earlier Centraal Museum Utrecht had displayed work by

Jompet Kuswidanato in Beyond the Dutch – Indonesia, the Netherlands and the visual arts, from 1900

till present (17 October 2009 – 3 January 2010). This was the installation ‘War of Java, Do you

remember #3’, an installation referring to the war between the Yogyakarta Prince Diponegoro and

his followers, and the Dutch colonial rulers between 1825-1830. In that was two million people had

suffered, cultivated land was devastated, some 200.000 Javanese died at the side of Diponegoro,

whereas the Dutch colonial army lost 7.000 Indonesian soldiers and 8.000 of their European troops.1

1- poster of the exhibition by Jompet Kuswidananto, 2014. Exhibition concept, realization and organization: Jompet Kuswidananto and Tropenmuseum. Design advice: OPERA Amsterdam.

2 - In 2009 Jompet declared about ‘War of Java, Do you remember #3’: ‘This is to remind the people

that the spirit of “war” is still alive in Javanese culture, a new kind of war that highlights more

intercultural negotiation and transaction. We call it “syncretism”.’2 Syncretism here is an indication

of the appropriation of foreign influences by Javanese culture and its transformation in something

new. It refers to uniforms, customs, (musical) expressions, as the signs of a deep change in Javanese

culture. The leading historian of the Java War Peter Carey, translator of Diponegoro’s

autobiographical chronicle from Javanese into English, 3 is of the same opinion, when he states that

the legacy of bitterness caused by the colonial takeover of the autonomy of the Central Javanese

courts of Yogykarata and Surakarta in the early nineteenth century would ‘lay the foundations for the

future nationalistic movement of the early twentieth century’ and ‘set the course of Indonesian

history for the next hundred and fifty years’. Both Jompet and Carey thus suggest an ‘Old Order’

where, following Carey, tensions in society had been limited to dynastic struggles. With the War of

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Java, for the first time social-economic unrest, fuelled with religious rhetoric, had established the

potential of a mass movement in which violence was contained. This meant a fundamental change to

the old political order.4 Their notion of Old Order refering to a pre-19th century historical context,

broadens the perspective on Indonesian national historiography. Suharto, after the violent takeover

of political power in 1965-1966 and the fall of Soekarno, had framed his military regime as the Orde

Baru, the ‘New Order’. Jompet’s installation in the Beyond the Dutch exhibition, suggests an

Indonesian national history prior to the establishment of the Dutch colonial state after the turn of

the 19th century, and that would form the basis for the process of synchretism that came with the

expansion of Dutch rule and colonial control.

2 Photograph of ‘War of Java, Do you remember #3’. At the wall: still from the shadow projection; also imagine sound (drum beats) and light movement. Centraal Museum Utrecht 2009

3 – In Grand Parade at the Tropenmuseum the installation on the War of Java has been incorporated

into a larger Theatrical art installation. The exhibition exists of 85 figures, staged in formations

heading from three directions to a central square. The visitors who enters the square, walks past a

row of horses with heavy loads. At the other site one can see a festive Community procession with

lifesize figures at the first rows and stilt-walkers at the last row, towering over the others. Behind

them are the Papuan Bishpoles, famous landmarks that are on permanent display in the

Tropenmuseums Central Lighthall and now without emphasis beautifully integrated in this parade.

Walking towards the centre of the square in between the trudging horses and this carnivalesque

Community procession, attention is caught by the headlights of a row of mopeds that flash on. The

mopeds are part of the second parading group, a Mob of demonstrators, with megaphones, text

banners and shovels, their heads covered with their shirts. A wooden camion suggests that they

come from the countryside. Sneakers at the bottom of the furthermore empty bucket of the truck

provide at first instance a somehow disturbing view. It reminds of images of rally places where the

people just ran away. In the second instance each pair of shoes pairs with a head covered with shirts.

Here are the demonstrators indeed, parading in a curve like shape with their camion and mopeds is.

Somewhat fan-shaped is the third group, confronting the visitor in a solid formation. The figures are

modelled on the Royal Army Brigades of the Sultan of Yogyakarta. The group actually exists of two

brigades, wearing different fashions and weapons that show how mixtures of Javanese and European

elements keep changing over time. One brigade reminds of the War of Java installation; the other

brings this to the present, as shown, for instance, by means of the modern black shoes. In this group,

one figure has a megaphone; and as in the Community procession, some also keep a small film

screen on their drum.

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The whole square is surrounded with rusted corrugated iron, painted in different and fading colours

and some suggestions of texts. A simple wooden bench is placed at the imaginary vanishing point of

the four parading groups. The visitor is invited to take a rest and look at the spectacle. From there,

the visual angle to the Grand Parade is 180⁰; one can’t catch it in one still image. The curve in the

demonstration of the mob makes sense: they are not heading to the visitor. The Royal soldiers are

frontal in front of the bench, however they stay at a safe distance. The horses and Community

procession offer no threat at all.

3.1 one of the pack horses – grand parade Tropenmuseum

3.2 Community procession, with hardly visible in the photograph, the Bishpoles - Tropenmuseum

3.4 Royal soldiers; the group left reminds of the War of Java installation – Tropenmuseum ←3.3 A mob of demonstrators, seen from the back side; to the lefts hardly visible one of the mopeds of this crowd – Tropenmuseum (Photographs: Irene de Groot, Tropenmuseum)

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4 – Seated at the bench, the theatrical element of this art installation can be fully experienced. The

four groups are animated with lights in the installations alternately flashing on; various figures carry

musical instruments that produce sound, like the beats of drums in different tones, force and speed

all over the place, and the repeating intervals at the metallophones in the Community procession.

Through their interlocking sounds, the parades produce a theatrical piece of music, strengthened by

the overall lightning programme that is created by means of the city lampposts in the centre of the

square and the spotlights with gobo’s at the ceiling of the light hall. The romantic white circle of light

under the lampposts and the beautifully diffused coloured light from the ceiling strengthen the

notion of an event that is happening before our eyes.

This overall audio-visual impression that only can be experienced by visitors (it is hardly visible in the

pictures), brought into my mind another exhibition at the Tropenmuseum, called Rhythm, a dance in

time (16 December 1999-14 January 2001). It was an exhibition about ‘what rhythm does with

people and what people do with rhythm.’ The museum presented a wide range of notions of time

and movement inherent in its collections, with the help of music and musical instruments, dances

and rhythmic decorations or extensions of the body, colour and geometrical motifs in architecture or

patterns in textiles, as well as the routine movements of daily work and ritual practices, speech and

poetry. Rhythm related to ebb and tide, the rising and setting of the sun or the cyclical time of the

seasons; to linear time and notions of progress, or to concepts of creation and destruction, of rise

and fall; it presented intergenerational multilayered notions of time in which the living and the dead

co-exist, and suggested that time is both slow and fast at once.5 Rhythm came with movement and

sound. As in the Jompet Grand Parade, listening to the exhibition, was great.

Rhythm was about time, and thus about history. However, the different notions of time on display

still more or less were ‘universalized’; they could apply to anyone everywhere. If the exhibition had a

historical dimension, this differed from ‘history’ as presented in Jomptes Grand Parade. History in

Rhythm implied a critical approach to the historical specificities of the museum collection, and

investigated the limitations of its legacy of ethnography.6 A dance-video-installation Rhythm of

Chance from the soul, with Milana Yalir from Israel dancing in all corners of the impressive building of

the museum,7 at the start of the exhibition, implicitly illustrated this focus. Rhythm was chosen as a

cross cutting concept to allow for an investigation of the power of the ethnographic canon, with its

fixed specializations concerning regions, techniques and materials. Its aim was to play with essential

images, without text.8 ‘Lay’ experts like musicians or visual artists were also invited to contribute to

the exhibition (resulting among others in a drum piece of music called ‘curators nightmare’ and

recorded in the depot of the museum). The museum’s historical focus on ‘non-Western’ cultures was

changed by including a display on the annual Baseler Fasnacht (Switzerland). The museum

experimented with the display of ‘intangible’ heritage (a term was not yet in use at the time) like the

daily drawing of a kolam in the sand in front of a house in South India. Among the educational

programmes was an event for deaf people. And for the first time the museum extended the

dynamics around an exhibition in cyberspace through a commissioned weblog, “hart.slag”, by Sandra

Küpfer (16 editions). Blogging was so new at the time, that the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst

supported this initiative with a special funding for the blogger.

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. 4.1- Milana Yalir, ‘Rhythm of Chance from the soul’ video still (2000) 4.2 – poster Rhythm, a dance in time, 1999. Exhibition design and graphic design Lies Ros →

4.3 ‘Ethnographic ‘display of a Community procession in the Baseler Fasnacht 1997, costumes, instruments and video on loan via drummer and Baseler Trommeln expert Edith Habraken.

4.4 The lead texts to the seven exhibition units, providing the only ‘mental map’ to the exhibition9

5 – Jompet’s Grand Parade addresses ‘history’ in another way than Rhythm: history is both a myth

and a chain of events and effects. The Royal soldiers provide the most explicit historical reference,

not only visually through the hybrid (‘syncretist’) costumes, but also in the speech that comes from

the megaphone and in the videos played at the small round screens attached to two drummers. It is

a feverish account, spoken in Dutch with an Indonesian accent. At some moments it seems like a

vision, predicting that people in strange clothes and with big ships will come ashore in South Java, it

refers to seventeenth-century events, to Adipati Karno (the warrior from the Hindu epic

Mahābhārata), and other leaders. But the speaker also most expressively warns against the machine

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that makes life so much easier and safe, but also is the enemy of Javanese culture which has

contributed to the loss of so much knowledge about this ancient culture. He warns that the enemy is

all around, and assures that the ghosts of those who defended Javanese culture in the past are still

with us. Drum beats accompany this speech. And the video shows a Javanese dancer, dancing with a

whip in between and in front of huge machines in a cotton factory, as if taming the machine, as well

as accommodating to it. The other video shows fragments of traditional culture, shadow plays, hardly

visible for the visitor. At a distance, sitting at the bench one can’t hear what the speaker says either.

Jompet Kuswidanado explains in the handout to the exhibition that his historical interest came with

the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998, which made him looking at the ways in which people dealt

with social change in the past: ‘from being colonized to independent nation, or from an agricultural

society to industrialization’. They always negotiate between different beliefs and values. In this

respect, and not unlike the Rhythm approach to history, the Grand Parade historical account has a

universalizing meaning as well: ‘I hope that when people see Grand Parade, they will not see Java as

a faraway place, but as a concept of humanity. How we balance different beliefs and values as a

society and as individuals is a global issue.’10 With this meaning attached to the work, the historical

effect of the installation, probably differs from the effect of the single installation ‘War of Java, do

you remember #3’ in the art historical exhibition Beyond the Dutch (Centraal Museum Utrecht 2009).

5 – Poster Beyond the Dutch, with drawing (2009) by Peter van Dongen after Raden Salehs (self) portrait c. 1840.

6 - In the Centraal Museum Jompet’s work was framed in a double historical frame: the story of the

War of Java, and art history. Dominant was the art historical account of the interaction between

Indonesian and Dutch artists, from Raden Saleh (1814-1880) to Wiyoga Muhardanto (1884) in

Indonesia and from Jan Toorop (1858-1928) to Hadassah Emmerich (1974) in the Netherlands.11

Beyond the Dutch was an exhibition of ‘modern and contemporary non-western art’ in an art

museum. The catalogue explains that this was special. Despite the globalization and the emergence

of a postmodern mosaic of local centres with strong global claims is this art in the West as a rule still

mainly exhibited in ethnographic museums.12

Starting from Edward Saids argument on orientalism, the exhibition investigated processes of

exchange, fusion, syncretism in the arts of Indonesia, as well as in Dutch art as it was or is related to

Indonesia. The exhibition title Beyond the Dutch met with criticism, both in Indonesia and in the

Netherlands. It suggested some sort of colonial determinism, with Indonesian artists now being

emancipated from Dutch influences. This unintended subtext was hard to escape since the exhibition

concept offered no space for Dutch art unrelated to Indonesia (one could argue that the surrounding

museum offered this in abundance to the visitor, as an implicit overall context), nor was ‘traditional

art’ as collected in ethnographic museums displayed as integral part of Indonesia’s art history

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preceding and parallel to the development of ‘autonomous art’. Another criticism mentioned that

the visual and discursive references to the colonial past were too benign (‘Reciprocity with no

dissonance’) but many also noted that while Indonesian artists in the revolutionary years after 1945

made highly political works, the Dutch at the time apparently did not come up with such art.13

Jompet’s work was one among others (like Heri Dono) in the section ‘Indonesia in the current

postcolonial time’. As such it was framed in a history of art history, with the explicit topic of his work,

the memory of the War of Java, as a secondary historical framing. As such it explicitly addressed a

political colonial history that showed that colonialism was not benign, and moreover a political

history that also explained why this specific selection of Dutch artists was on display. It is this political

history that is central to the Tropenmuseum’s Grand Parade again, however, here without any

reference to an art-historical framing. Does this imply that the Tropenmuseum is now ‘Beyond

Ethnography’, that we can do without explicit reflection on the relationship between ethnography

and art when visiting Grand Parade? Mirjam Shatanawi has argued that exploration of the

intersections and discrepancies between art, history and anthropology through exhibition and

collection acquisition policies remains crucial to strengthen the role of the museum as a discursive

space where the cultural canon is put to the test.14 The Tropenmuseum is still working at it, witness,

for instance, the exhibition Unexpected encounters. Hidden histories from the collection (30

November 2012 - 14 July 2013), that mixed and interrogated a broad variety of parallels between all

kind of genres.15 Grand Parade is another move in this direction, now with a Theatrical art installation

that speaks for itself. The museum does not provide here another historical argument about itself, its

institution and collections rooted in the colonial past. It just gives the floor to Jompet Kuswidananto.

As such it claims its meaning as one of those local centres with strong global claims which the

authors of Beyond the Dutch referred to in their argument in a strict art historical sense.

Endnotes

1 Peter Carey, ‘The Destruction of Java’s Old Order’ in David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), The

Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840, Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010:170. 2 Jompet, ‘Exposing Javanese troops as ghosts’; quote from War of Java, Do you remember? #3 in: Nafas, art

magazine, accessed 8-11-2009, at http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2009/jompet/images/06 3 Babad Dipanagara, written in exile between 1831-32 – in 2012 the manuscript of the Babad Diponegoro was

admitted to the Unesco memory of the World register, based on a Javanese manuscript version in the National Library in Jakarta, and a Dutch translation of 1857 in the KITLV collection in Leiden. http://www.unesco.nl/babad-diponegoro-autobiografische-kroniek-van-prins-diponegoro (accessed 1-1-2015) 4 Carey, ‘The Destruction of java’s Old order’, 171, 172, and 188.

5 The exhibition came with two publications, a catalogue: E. den Otter (red.), Ritme, dans van de tijd,

Amsterdam: Kit Publishers, 1999; and a publication with academic essays to each exhibition unit: E. den Otter (ed.), Rhythm: A Dance in Time, Amsterdam: PIT Publishers, 2001 [CD included]. 6 For a full overview of the objects on display (among which more than 100 drums) see:

http://collectie.tropenmuseum.nl/default.aspx?ccid=T107 (last accessed at 2-1-2015). 7 The installation was projected life size, on various screens at once. For a you tube linear version see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8q3TS0D1hl0 (last accessed at 2-1-2015). 8 Susan Legêne, ‘Rhythm, a dance in time. Reflections on an exhibition’ in : E. den Otter (ed.), Rhythm: A Dance

in Time, Amsterdam: PIT Publishers, 2001: 30. 9 The notion of ‘mental map’ refers to: Henrietta Lidchi, “The Poetics and the Politics of Exhibiting other

Cultures,” in: S. Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage, 2001 (1997). 10

‘In conversation with Jompet Kuswidananto’ – handout for Grand Parade, 20014.

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See the catalogue (in Dutch): Meta Knol, Remco Raben, and Kitty Zijlmans (eds.), Beyond the Dutch. Indonesië, Nederland en de beeldende kunsten van 1900 tot nu, Amsterdam/Utrecht: Kit Publishers-Centraal Museum, 2009. The artists are listed on p. 190-193. The title is a quote by xxxx. Invited to participate in the exhibition, he sighed that Indonesia art was already way beyond the Dutch. 12

Knol et al, Beyond the Dutch, p. 17. This argument is elaborated in the chapter by Hans Belting on contemporary art and the museum – a global perspective, with a plea for an active role for Art Museums, as independent institutions that also provide a platform for new political ideas. pp. 170-177. 13

The title, however, is a quote by xxxx. Invited to participate in the exhibition, he sighed that Indonesia art was already way beyond the Dutch. One example of a review: Marina de Vries, ‘Reciprocity with no dissonance. Exhibition on Dutch and Indonesian art would have benefitted from more confrontation’, De Volkskrant 5-11-2009. 14

Mirjam Shatanawi, ‘Contemporary Art in Ethnographic Museums’ in Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg and Peter Weibel (eds.), The Global Art World. Audiences, Markets and Museums, Ostfildern: Verlag, May 2009:381; see also: Shatanawi, Mirjam, 'Tropical Malaise', in: Bidoun. Arts and Culture from the Middle East 2007, nr. 10, p. 42-44. 15

Wayne Modest and Paul Faber, Onverwachte ontmoetingen. Verborgen verhalen uit eigen collectie. Amsterdam: Kit Publishers, 2012.