Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future by Carlos Garrido Castellano

Author:Carlos Garrido Castellano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Taring Padi

The People Oriented Culture Taring Padi (Lembaga Budaya Kerakyatan Taring Padi in Bahasa), which is responsible for the poster that opened this chapter, was created in Yogyakarta months before President Soeharto gave up power.9 A few months later, Taring Padi gained national attention and received increasing requests to include woodcut and cardboard banners such as Multicultural State Hegemony in protest campaigns led by human rights, environmental, and anticorruption associations. The result of each of those collaborations is not only a physical piece of public art but also a collective process of production and decision making that includes the discussion of hot political issues and choosing the theme of each poster, as well as design, coloring, and polishing up the final work. Although some steps of this process are produced individually (such as design sketching in the most difficult cases), the outcome is collective. Taring Padi’s symbols—a rice sprig, a star, and a cogwheel—are the only marks of authorship the poster bears.10

Taring Padi is one of the most original collectives to emerge in late 1990s Indonesia. At the same time, its activity incorporates and redefines elements of the left and anticolonial tradition in Indonesia. This is evident at many ways, including the place Taring Padi uses as its hub. Soon after its creation, the collective occupied the headquarters of the Indonesian Academy of Fine Arts (Akademi Seni Rupa Indonesia, ASRI) in Yogyakarta. ASRI was widely known for being a cauldron of progressive politics and engagement with popular segments of the population. Taring Padi sought to continue this tradition not only through collective art but also by radically transforming the occupied academic campus into a productive pedagogical platform for radical popular democracy. Many of the original members of Taring Padi were young students connected to art and the creative disciplines. For many younger people inside and outside the university, Taring Padi’s move into the ASRI campus in Gampingan provided an alternative space for learning and socialization, “a gathering place, an area where one shares a living and forges friendship,” in the words of Dolorosa Sinaga (2011: 24). Those gatherings lasted for years, sometimes without a specific purpose, developing an informal and open-to-all dynamic of sharing and “thinking through doing” that attracted a community much larger than that of contemporary art-goers in Yogyakarta.

Heidi Leanne Arbuckle, who has examined the evolution of Taring Padi in detail, depicts the position of the collective within the art panorama of the post-Suharto era as a complex one. She warns about oversimplifying the Indonesian art scene by distinguishing between gallery-oriented and public art (2000: 59). Arbuckle points out that sometimes the collective was often intentionally curated out of exhibitions and cultural programs. In other cases, the reactions were more ambivalent, leading to the invitation of the collective to humanitarian or social events by virtue of its capacity to attract large sectors of the population and provoke massive, spectacular public mobilization. The position the collective occupies in the Indonesian contemporary art scene is thus permeated by the new

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