ECONOMY CLASS

IVAA INTERNAL RESEARCH PROJECT June – December 2008

Research Summary
By Dave Lumenta, PhD and Farah Wardani, MA

The boundaries of social production of Indonesian art have shifted away:

Indonesian visual artists are now made and valued in far-away international
biennales, exhibitions and auction houses. Artists are no longer viewed as an
esoteric local ‘underclass’ nor are they expected, speaking of the Indonesian
context, to be local ‘discourse producers’, as they once were. Are these
merely signs of increasing international endorsement – or are there other
forces at play? What kind of disorientation and tensions do they create?

Background: Indonesian Contemporary Art and the Global-Regional

Matrix

The analysis of the development of the Indonesian contemporary art scene

can be situated between two broad interlocking contexts. The first context
would be the heritage of Indonesia’s post-colonial condition where imported
western modes of art production and institutionalization (e.g. art education
institutions, curators, museums, galleries, auction companies, funding
institutions, emphasis on individuality) finds itself deformed by the matrix of
local social, cultural, political and economic conditions.

The trajectory of the Indonesian art scene up to the 1990s has been
characterized by perceived tensions between traditions versus modernism,
social activism versus commercialism, hierarchical modes of apprenticeships
versus academic institutionalism.

The second context would be the globalization of capital and technology in the
years following the Asian economic miracle of the 1980s. Torrents of
investments in various industry sectors around Asia has not only effected the
increasing surplus of private as well as public funds made available for art
production. Technology has also brought about the instant and rapid
communication possibilities between artists, galleries and collectors on a
global scale. To summarize, the new injection of capital and technology
throughout Asia has helped to increase the circulation of art works, the
increasing turn-over rates of styles and discourses as part of new branding
strategies, the accelerated modes and instantaneity of production as well as
the shortened channels between art producers and markets.

This new economic transformation has also resulted in the increasing

appropriation of artists into the demand/supply logic of the creative industries
as art labourers. In addition, the increased concentration of capital in
metropolitan Asian cities has created ‘new rich’ social classes constituting an
emerging market for regional art works. With surplus capital to spend, these
social classes increasingly bring about the accelerated transformation art
works into hot commodities of transnational investments, very often bypassing
the significance of states as patrons of the arts.

This research sets out to map the interplay of all these interlocking contexts.
The central research question concerns the tensions generated by these
transformations:

Research Questions:

1. What is the structure of the new regional Asian art market and how is
this currently affecting local modes and relations of art production in
Indonesia?
2. What are the institutional transformations and kind of new value
systems emerge out of these transformations?
3. Who are the new mediating agencies and how do they intervene with
the modes of production?
4. How is this transformation affecting the role and status, as well as self-
identification of artists in society?
5. How the global crisis that burst out in the last quarter of 2008 affect this
sector and also the socio-economic structures of contemporary art?

The New Regional Asian Art Market

There is a strong tendency of a domination of a new world market

which shifts from the West (US-Europe) to new axis such as BRIC
(Brazil-Russia-India-China), which affects the structures of art
productions and also the orientations of the market and cultural
industry.

The recent global market crisis that is rooted in the US Stock Exchange
proves the inclination of bankruptcy of the Western economics, though
it is still debated whether this setback is directed to a real downfall or
only affecting the surfaces. A crucial thing is to investigate on how this
affects the sectors of private philanthropic funding agencies who have
been serving as one of the main sponsors of cultural productions, at
least in terms of policies and interests.

Some analyses indicate that the boom of the art scene in China is
strongly endorsed by its market combined with its ideological agenda of
being the new center of power structure in Asia. This is also supported
by the new growing populations of Asia’s ‘nouveau riche’ who adopt
the Western models of education, lifestyle and parameters of
sophistication. These ‘Nouveau riche’ forms a massive population of
new ‘collectors’, bagged with market value combined with references of
what they consider as ‘art’, and have also been acting as the mediating
agencies within the infrastructure in a regional and international scale,
which is mainly due to the absence of strong cultural institutions that
act as producers of cultural values and parameters within this region.
This new class is (intending) to be the new patrons of art. Auction
Houses are one of their main vehicles for this.

The Indonesian Context: Institutional Transformations

After the period of colonialism, a new breed of Indonesian artists, for example,
Affandi, Sudjojono, Basuki Abdullah, Hendra Gunawan – though markedly
disparate in styles, techniques, content and influences - were viewed as the
pioneers of a new self-conscious Indonesian national identity within the art
world. In a revolutionary political climate during the 1950s and 1960s, artists
were expected (and many did based on their own ideals) to fulfill the role as
visual chroniclers of revolutionary ideals, which included the depiction of
heroic anti-colonial battles, the idealization of the rural peasantry and
underclasses.

These nationalistic discourses merged with leftist social realism, a

mainstream discourse which not only attributed the arts with a nationalistic
(and class-defined) political and social agenda, but left also an indelible mark
– even three decades after the fall of the revolutionary regime of President
Sukarno 1966 - on the idealized role of visual artists as agents and
advocates for social change.

The consolidation of art education institutions since the 1950s1 simultaneously

incubated the spread of western discourses such as modernism among a new
generation of Indonesian art students. Modernist styles gained prominence in
the 1970s, and the collective agendas which dominated the previous two
decades had to give room to the new individualized praxis of art production.
Political endorsements of art works, whether from the state or political forces
which dominated the 1960s, gave way to the role of new institutions. Art was
institutionally decoupled from politics – and became increasingly
individualized and privatized - courted by capital, marked by the emergence of
new structures which gave prominence to the role of curators, galleries and
art collectors. In addition, the ‘proletarian’ image of artists underwent a
deconstruction with the arrival of artists coming from upper class
backgrounds.
1
The Indonesian Academy of Fine Arts (ASRI – the predecessor to ISI, the Indonesian Institute of Arts) was established in 1950,
while the Fine Arts Department of the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) was established in 1956.
The genesis of the contemporary Indonesian art market can be traced to the
early establishment of private galleries and collectors occurred around the late
1950 / early 1960s. The small art community, consisting only of about a
handful of artists and collectors, was a close-knit community.The group of art
collectors, dominated particularly by a class of Chinese plantation owners in
central Java, generally had close social relations with artists based on taste,
preferences, but also common interest. These collectors largely treated art
works as historical documents and viewed themselves as guardians and
preservers of pieces of Indonesian heritage. The majority of these collecters
were usually endowers of art works – and many private collections were
transformed into museums open to public viewing.

The New mediating Agencies

The rise of new urban upper classes, a result of three major domestic
economic booms (the oil boom of 1974, the introduction of economic
deregulations in 1988 and its peak in 1994) saw the emergence of a new
class of art collectors from a divergent range of business backgrounds –
namely the financial sectors. This research focuses on the latest emergence
of collectors that have sprung after 1994 (and during the post-1997 economic
recovery).

These new type of art collectors were more cosmopolitan in outlook, have
wide regional and global interconnections and had no qualms about merging
their art collection activities with private investment interests. A majority of
these collectors did not end up being end-owners of art works themselves, but
have positioned themselves in the middle of a more elaborate chain of art
commerce. With many owning galleries themselves, or acting as speculative
buyers, many collectors are competing in securing a steady supply of art
works – often through building financial patron-client relationships with young
and emerging artists.

Within the larger chain of art trade, these collectors often end up functioning
implicitly as middle men (‘kolekdol’). By branding and promoting their client
artists, and financing their presence at international exhibitions, biennales,
these collectors are able to, as many view, distort and inflate market prices.
Old processes of pricing artworks based on endorsements by local curators,
galleries and art critics (e.g. a consensus on the intrinsic value of an artwork),
can now be instantly bypassed.

It is comfortable to conclude that the importance of local endorsements,

whether by art institutions, critics or the public, is on the wane. However, there
is a strong trend that the international exposure of Indonesian artists is
increasingly used by Indonesian speculators and ‘kolekdols’ as an instant
method to inflate the prices of Indonesian artworks abroad – an irony since
many artworks auctioned abroad are purchased again by Indonesian
collectors.

As also indicated by studies and interviews upon market practitioners (see

Data Entry List), what is often used and commodified by the market is the
value system of art works that is still very much based on the ‘mystification’ of
art or the value of ‘myths’ of art as a signification of the elite, or the modern
conception of high culture and attributes of social hierarchies, in which is
transgressing now in reality. This part is also one of the most underlined by
this research and will be taken into further study in the completed final report.

The Transformation of Artists

SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS

As indicated from the interviews and data collecting, there is no

discriminating perspectives of this new market upon what they think as
‘commercial’ or ‘non-commercial’ art, as the market operates by
trendsetting. Painting now still dominates but as the trend shifts it will
look into another form of commodity, i.e another medium and the next.

That indicates the absence of State and public cultural institutions in

responding to this wave and also their dependencies to the
corporate/private sectors in terms of dealing with cultural development,
including its failure to see art both as an ‘industry’, ‘cultural production’
and also ‘public needs’ that is growing in Indonesia and Asia. The proof
is clear in the lack of support in the academic infrastructure.

The issues based on the dichotomy of art as ‘industrial commodity’ and

‘public needs’ is still underdeveloped in Indonesia in particular, the
market still operates on its own capitalistic mechanism while
responding to the reproductions of the symbolic values of art works as
significations of ‘cultural development’. Artists (or art workers) still hang
on to their position of creating things of ‘symbolic values’ that are
justified by the market and that affects how they value their art works,
i.e. pricing.

All that indicates how private sectors dominate the current

developments of social-economics, and how capitalism drives both the
commercial and non-commercial sectors, the question is who is
supposed to take the main role of endorsing or producing cultural
development? Is it the State, the Market, or Corporate Philanthropies,
each who has their own agenda? Or the Public?

It all leads to the real question: How art is supposed to be valued

today? When art is growingly entering deeper into the realm of public
commodity and being a part of the capital mechanism, does it still
deserve the symbolic values that are attached to it, and that also
means the soaring economic values that have been also driving its
production? Do artists/ art workers today still position as an exclusive
part of the society who can direct the orientation of the culture or create
new cultural innovations, or do they have to accept their position as
‘professionals’ as in a part of the working class, who in the other
professional sectors, have their own structures of labour divisions and
standards?

It is also important to prospect the continuity of art and cultural endorsement,

due to the dependency of art and cultural development (as evident from this
research), as currently affected by growing global economic recession.

All the assumptions are still subject to change or developments according to

the research data analysis progress. The detailed list of collected data and
summaries of findings that ground this research summary can be found in the
appendix of this document right in the next page (see Data Entry List).

The bottomline is, this research is directed to give an

understanding of how the art scene is operated today amidst the global
changes of social-economic structures, and that is in the end, hopefully can
serve as a means to give a broader perspectives for the practitioners in the art
scene, and then to help advocating the creation of new valuation standards in
the ‘contemporary’ art production within the contemporary culture.