Entanglement: Individual and Participatory Art Practice in Indonesia

The arguments set out in the dissertation are the result of

research into primary and secondary written resources,

translations, field observations, interviews with artists and

with other experts in Indonesia. This is the first body of

research to address combined individual and participatory art in

Indonesia. Sanento Yuliman described the “artistic ideology”

of Indonesian modernism as simultaneously autonomous and

independent, and heteronomously tied to tradition and society’s

needs. This formed the foundations from which modern art

discourse in Indonesia involved artists in the lives of the

people (rakyat) while also defending artists’ individual

expression: a binding knot of the kind that Jacques Rancière

describes as the “aesthetic regime”. I draw attention to the

way participation consistently features alongside individuality

in discourses from those early artists; during art’s

instrumentalisation in development discourses; and when

contemporary artists begin involving the rakyat in participatory

art. Case studies addressing the work of five contemporary

artists (Arahmaiani Feisal, Made “Bayak” Muliana, I Wayan

“Suklu” Sujana, Tisna Sanjaya, and Elia Nurvista) show how

contemporary artists have extended this continuum to involve

people in the making of art, while still maintaining significant

individual practices. I demonstrate how particular contexts and

networks of production have continued to engage with the early

modernist concepts of autonomy and heteronomy, as well as

exogenous and originary endogenous discourses, to create

conditions which mandate the practice of both participatory and

individual art for many artists. In responding to these

conditions, the work by contemporary artists presented in this

research consciously engages with and reconstructs discourses

from Indonesian and global art histories.