“Atap Langit” at Kiridesa Gallery, Singapore

Palguna on the Canopy of the Sky

By: Djuli Djatiprambudi*

Mt. Merapi, the most active volcano in Indonesia, showed some volcanic activities in May 2006. It sent down hot mud and dark hot clouds everyday. The mountain people call this phenomenon ‘wedhus gembel’ (‘lambs’). But it isn’t a mere physical activity of the volcano to them. They see it more like mystically. The mountain is seen as the center of a supernatural power that could maintain or disrupt the natural balance. Through such a point of view, the eruption isn’t a disaster to them. On the contrary, it’s taken as a part of a mystical cycle that the people count as a blessing.

Within the agrarian community’s frame of mind, Mt. Merapi is a cosmic symbol. In such a context, man (human) is a part of a cosmic unity, while the mountain is the center of it, or the place where gods dwell at. Therefore, the relation between the people of the mountain with the place doesn’t show a positivist relation or rational distance between them. Instead, a spiritual hierarchy takes its place, between patron and client, the blessing and the blessed, the supernatural and the material.

In the Javanese tradition, certain persons are believed to be the links between centers of supernatural powers and the people. In the case of Mt. Merapi, it is a man named Maridjan (‘Mbah Maridjan’). The person shows us the spiritual hierarchy. People believe that Maridjan is able to get through the material phenomenon and see the essence of Mt. Merapi. He has been known to be giving the most correct predictions of the volcanic activities. When people said Mt. Merapi erupted, Maridjan disagreed; to him, what happened there was a supernatural process.

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Mt. Merapi, therefore, is like an entity that could be interpreted in many ways, from a physical phenomenon to the spiritual dimension. It is this volcano that inspires a contemporary painter, I Made Arya Palguna, to create his latest works.

In early May 2006, when the volcanic activities of Mt. Merapi were at their worst, Palguna climbed up to see it closer. He wished to watch the volcano and the people around it. From a certain distance, he observed them, and tried to comprehend the relation between the mountain and the people. He also tried to interpret the Merapi phenomenon through his creative instinct based on perceptive, emotive, cultural and spiritual analysis. He used them to draw a line that connect himself (subject) to the mountain (object). He was awed by the volcano. But the amazing phenomenon was seen and understood within the modern individual’s frame of view, in which the subject exists in a distance from the object and perceives it critically. In such a position, the subject or individual (Palguna) is autonomous. Thus he was able to interpret what he saw and comprehended according to his own intellectual and cultural references.

Such a connection is very different from the mythical relation between the same volcano and the people around it, that is based on a myth or belief of the Merapi folks. In this frame of mind, the mountain is the subject while the man is the object. The man is not autonomous there. He is controlled by a set of values that are seen as the true values, and mythology is the source of the truth. We can easily see such a mode being applied in the tradition that connects Mt. Merapi, the Yogyanese Palace and the Indonesian Ocean (at the south of the island of Java). They are believed to be mythically interconnected and could affect each other.

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The name of the artist, I Made Arya Palguna, instantly conveys to us where he comes from. The socio-cultural context of an individual shows the ideal type (Max Weber’s term) of him, since he is to exist until he enters the process to be. To exist and to be are the abstractions of an individual. Here we can analyse his spiritual-cultural anatomy, in any context at all, including the context of the art of paiting, where the individual is to be a painter, like Palguna.

I Made Arya Palguna is a Balinese. He was born in Ubud Kelod, Gianyar District, Bali, in 1976. He used to live within the agrarian-traditional Balinese society and its distinct spiritual-cultural point of view. There, he was a part of a configuration of spiritual-cultural beliefs. He had to become a member of the traditional community, ‘banjar’, to acquire his place within the socio-cultural web of his people. He also must attend ceremonies at the temples to get into the spiritual side of the same people.

Yet Bali is evolving into a modern agrarian society. Palguna had the right to ‘get out’ of there and to search for new things for his intellectual and ideological growth. A great number of Balinese artists, especially painters, have done that before, by going to Java and enrolling into the Indonesian Institute of Arts in Yogyakarta. Palguna has done the same. The Institute showed him the modern (Western) and contemporary fine arts. He defined himself by keeping his ‘roots’ of Balinese origins, while at the same time he developed his ideology of modernity.

We could observe the traces in this exhibition that takes Mt. Merapi and its people as the theme. Palguna’s ‘roots’ could be seen in the way he presents the volcano; it manifests his basic culture. The Balinese profess a similar belief with that of the Javanese by seeing mountains as the cosmic symbol. Mahameru is seen as such, and within it the supernatural powers are at work to affect human lives. The conceptual image of mountains in their majestic existence is of a triangle, but metaphorically it can get manifested in a variety of ways.

However, Palguna’s mountain as we can see on his canvases is not a subject, but an object. It is always put at the background, while human figures are the centerpieces. See, for instance, “Anak-anak Lereng Gunung Bermain”, “At Siwaratri Night Eve”, “Berada di Ketinggian”, “Bermain”, “Coffee Morning”, “Keluarga Peternak”. You would behold Mt. Merapi in those paintings, that looks tranquil and embodies beauty. But we could also see white clouds coming out of the crater, hundreds of wild birds getting scattered, and other symptoms that serve as clues to the ‘wrath’ of the volcano, as in “Where do children play?” and “You Should Know”.

Such a depiction clearly shows us the modern view in which man (human) is the autonomous subject and center of cultural activities. It shows Palguna’s point of view as a contemporary artist adopting the inclusive sense and manifesting whatever he wants and needs to say consciously. This is actually the manifestation of Palguna’s personal ideology as a contemporary painter in which he wishes to synthesize the traditional and the modern, the communal and personal, the conventional and the progressive.

But there is a different manifestation, such as in “Feel So Small”. In this painting, the mountain (Merapi) is the subject, while the man is the object. The human figure is depicted as being small in size in the midst of the mountain’s cosmic existence. We can’t determine the human’s socio-cultural identity. He is a mere small part of the universe. His existence is to be seen within the frame of the mountain. Therefore he is not autonomous. It reminds us of the traditional Chinese paintings, which take humans as a small, inconspicuous object within an infinite universe. In such a context, man could be seen as the microcosm while the universe (nature) is the macrocosm.

The two ways of depicting the same mountain tell us that Palguna is within a tension between the trancendent and the immanent, traditional and modern, subject and object, and he is within the context of building his own identity and personal ideology. This is a creative tension that enables a painter to work on. Without such a tension, he would have been inside a harmony that might curb his critical views. Because Palguna is clearly within such a tension, his works seem to keep a critical meaning, and they show us creativity, authenticity and personality.

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Indonesian modern/contemporary artists have often taken mountains as their theme or metaphor. In one hand, mountains are seen as a spiritual metaphor, on the other hand as a social metaphor. Modern paintings of Ahmad Sadali, AD Pirous, Sunaryo, Tulus Warsito, Bagong Kussudiardjo, Amang Rahman, Umi Dahlan, and so on have shown us such a view. Their paintings are depictions of mountains as abstractions, namely as triangles. One horizontal line makes the basis, then two sloping lines meet it at the edges and together they form a space. The peak is seen as the meeting point of the material and spiritual dimensions, where the supernatural power controls the universe.

Long before the advent of modern painting, mountains have been depicted as the same spiritual and social metaphor by indigenous cultures of Indonesia. You could easily perceived it in the basic architectural forms of the Balinese palaces and temples, the Javanese traditional house, mosques, and so forth, which have been built with the thought of mountains as the cosmic center in mind. This concept divides the world or reality into the upper world (of gods and deities), the middle world (of human beings) and the lower world (of animals and nature). The three worlds exist in one vertical line, interconnected. If one of the worlds collapse, the entire worlds would. Hence we can see harmony there, even though a paradox is also there, in the belief that the three worlds are different from each other.

Palguna’s Merapi is within such layers of contexts. He still takes the mountain to be within the spiritual frame, by calling it the canopy of the sky. As an individual within the tension between the modern and the traditional, that view gives us the position of the artist as related to the mountain. We could also see Palguna’s orbit within the constellation of Indonesian painting or art world, by seeing it based on the mountain as a metaphor. There, Palguna shines in his own light among other Indonesian artists.

* Researcher and fine art curator.