Low by Sarah Mosca
October 8, 2024
Deconstructing Gazes Upon Darmawan’s Artworks
Curated by Made Susanta & Co-curated by Savitri Sastrawan
Exhibition
Liku, Laku – Cosmic Pavement
Artist
Nyoman Darmawan
Written by
Savitri Sastrawan
Deconstructing Gazes Upon Darmawan’s Artworks
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As a female curator and writer, it is hard for me not to notice the male gaze upon Nyoman Darmawan’s works. As a person who has put an effort to straighten the record of eroticism within Balinese paintings, especially through IGAK Murniasih’s Pengosekan style paintings, it seems hard not to notice the real images of sexuality in Darmawan’s paintings created by a male artist. Yet knowing Darmawan as an artist hailing from Pengosekan, Ubud, and inspired by the local Pengosekan maestro Dewa Putu Mokoh, I cannot help but to understand where his style comes from as well. Especially that Murni, who is an outsider to Pengosekan, learnt about the distinctive style from Mokoh as well.
Mokoh is known for his daily life and witty paintings, such as a person peeking other’s whereabouts or a naked person just relaxing in a room. He was out of the norm from the infamous flora fauna Pengosekan paintings. Through that wittiness we don’t explicitly see any direct male gaze happening. Murni, on the other hand, developed her own colourful daring surrealism style that depicts references to Lingga Yoni – the meeting of female and male vital parts – which is similar to Darmawan’s. Yet, Murni did it in an implicit way, while Darmawan does it almost explicitly.
With that Darmawan has his own surrealistic wittiness of female and male relationships or of other daily life habits served in metaphors. Still using the same methodology of a Pengosekan painting – bamboo brushes and black ink layering (read: mangsi) – like Mokoh and Murni, Darmawan never filled his canvas with many layers of people, flora or fauna. There are in between spaces to breathe, a cosmic-like point of view in Darmawan’s canvas.
“Geography and space are always gendered, always raced, always economical and always sexual. The textures that bind them together are daily re-written through a word, a gaze, a gesture (p. 28).”
Among the discussions, another gaze has to be avoided – the colonial then extended tourist gaze – towards Darmawan’s artworks. There were initial thoughts of titling the exhibition to be “primordial” or “primitive” to show the pureness of his artworks. Yet, this needs to be avoided as it will be a backward reading upon Darmawan’s works that are produced and situated in Bali. Visual culture lecturer, Irit Rogoff (2000) noted how geographical naming can be very problematic especially coming from the colonial/tourist gaze. If we were to note down to see Darmawan’s works “primordial” or “primitive”, it will reduce the expressions and positionings of the artworks. We know for a long time the colonial/tourist gaze has placed our arts and culture less developed when it’s actually growing together with any other side of the world. Rogoff explained that,
Still, the line of the male gaze and eroticism becomes blurry upon Darmawan’s artworks for me. His own surrealist and metaphorical approach of painting still shows sexual desire coming from a male perspective. To unsee seems unfair to my standing, however it is also unfair to judge such evolutive Pengosekan style artwork just through the male gaze. Darmawan’s artistic and aesthetic approaches can be discussed further. After conversations with Darmawan and Nonfrasa Gallery, there is more to be seen than meets the eye. Other than male gaze, there were other gazes to be attended. Through this curatorial writing, I try to deconstruct these gazes upon Darmawan’s artworks.
I learnt that through his paintings, Darmawan is actually “writing” his diary, which again is similar to Murni’s and Mokoh’s way of creating artworks. He says that these are recordings of journeys of his life which are some unknown of its next step, moreover its ending. He ended up choosing this style because it’s not too much, not too little, representing the amount of expressions he would like to reach out and talk about in a moment in time. He works on big artworks slowly, and in between pour his feelings in smaller canvases. Intriguingly, the cosmic-like space he created represents that space and time. It becomes the witness to the journeys he is writing and paving about. Hence, you are witnessing his Cosmic Pavement. Hence also, his artworks’ intentions are not far off from what Mokoh would create and that the male gaze seems not to be there. It was purely pouring his feelings metaphorically and surrealistically, similar to what Murni would mention when she was creating her artworks.
From trying to deconstruct these gazes, it brings me to the position of questioning: should there be any gaze to read upon an artwork by Nyoman Darmawan today? Could we just put aside any gaze we wanted to place upon these works and see it as a whole entity carefully?
One phrase that tickled me while seeing Darmawan’s artworks is “polycentric aesthetics”. It’s a phrase brought up by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1998) in their essay “Narrativizing Visual Culture: Towards a polycentric aesthetics” as part of the Visual Culture Reader. Shohat and Stam stated how there are “certain alternative aesthetics” that do exist outside the European aesthetics that we know publically through the art studies. In which,
“These aesthetics are often rooted in non-realist, often non-Western or para-Western cultural traditions featuring other historical rhythms, other narrative structures, other views of the body, sexuality, spirituality, and the collective life (p. 31).”
For Shohat and Stam, art is created “between individuals and communities and cultures in the process of dialogic interaction” and that there is a “historically grounded analysis of multicultural relationality” to be “read contrapuntally” (p. 46). This is the “polycentric approach” that lets “historical equity and lucidity” happen in the visual culture (p. 47). Acknowledging that Darmawan’s creations are a result of communal aesthetic development and that of a certain narrative of body, sexuality, spirituality, also collective life, therefore the polycentric aesthetics lense fits in looking through Dharmawan’s artworks.
Will that be another gaze, then? Not quite. As the polycentric aesthetics allow us to be contrapuntal, the approach lets us look at Dharmawan’s works from many points of narratives or stories – of certain time and space. You can look at it based on the Balinese belief upon body, sexuality and spirituality – the balance of Lingga and Yoni; another point of view would be the Dharmawan’s own historical background through Curator Susanta Dwitanaya’s writing; and another could be understanding the Pengosekan style’s possibilities and unlimited creativity that resulted Dharmawan’s own style; etc.
So, would you try the polycentric aesthetic lense towards Lika Laku – Nyoman Darmawan’s Cosmic Pavement?
