![Ar[t] chive yayat surya](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_9waUXQncoD4/S4lIkhqubfI/AAAAAAAAAbE/fKW7hzs404k/S660/logo+yayat+3.jpg)
REJECTING THE SWALLOWNESS
Yayat Surya Reviews Pop Heroes
By Arief Bagus Prasetyo
See, you have to listen. People are not used to listening. In class I make them listen, read texts, watch videos and through Elvis we actually pay attention to the seriousness of popular culture, pop music…and listening we learn to transform it….
- Peter Nazareth
Yayat Surya Reviews Pop Heroes
By Arief Bagus Prasetyo
See, you have to listen. People are not used to listening. In class I make them listen, read texts, watch videos and through Elvis we actually pay attention to the seriousness of popular culture, pop music…and listening we learn to transform it….
- Peter Nazareth
The quotation above was taken from an interview by Keith Morrison with Peter Nazareth in Canada AM on March 24th, 1993. Peter Nazareth is currently professor of English Literature and African-American World Studies, also staff of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, USA. The interview was conducted in relation with his unique field of study. Maybe in January 1992 he was the only academic in the whole world doing research on the legendary pop star Elvis Presley. His unusual subject took the public by surprise. More than 50 radio and TV stations interviewed Peter Nazareth and more than 400 million people listened to him.
Having researched in one of the best universities of the United States, Peter Nazareth practically rejected with his “Elvis Studies” the “shallow” and banal image that people generally associate with mass cultural phenomena and popular culture, - pop music in particular. His studies showed that pop music and culture are culturally significant and should be studied seriously. For Nazareth it was no self-contradiction that Elvis “was a rock and roll singer who wanted to sing like Dean Martin, but who also listened to and sang like Clyde McPhatter, Jackie Wilson, Little Richard, Mario Lanza, Lowell Fulson, Bill Monroe, Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Jerry Reed, Ivory Joe Hunter, Tony Joe White, LaVern Baker, and Mahalia Jackson.” Furthermore, Elvis was an inspiration: “He held the clue to open a door, directed to America, and he removed the obstacles that still existed for the struggle for racial equality which was then on the rise and heading for all corners of the world”.
Just like Peter Nazareth, Yayat Surya repudiates this assertion of the supposed shallowness and banality of pop music. Yayat's advanced artwork presents legendary pop artists, both local and foreign: Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Michael Jackson, Freddy Mercury, Kurt Cobain, Mick Jagger, Bono U2, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Prince, Marylin Manson, Miles Davis, Patti Smith, Iwan Fals, and the members of the rock band Slank. He wants to reject the label of “shallowness/banality” that is attached to pop music; this is clearly recognizable in the choice of the famous rock musicians he wants to represent. He did not choose them by chance. He only picked those who are known as “revolutionary” or “rebellious”. All of them are considered as musicians who are influential and charismatic because they represent the spirit of resistance, subversion, and of a certain rebellion, either with their music, song lyrics, verbal statements, appearance, and behavior, or with their life style as well.
A position that underestimates the value of pop music has been formulated by Theodor Adorno, a prominent philosopher of the Frankfurt school. He compared the “light” (pop) music, which he supposed as worthless, with the more “serious” (classical) music that he assumed to be highly valuable. Adorno believed that classical music perpetuated its quality without plummeting into manipulation. Pop music is abandoned and destined to be manipulated by the market and does not care about aesthetic quality. Because pop music is a slave of the market that only follows public taste and commercialism, pop music is supposed to be conformist only. So it could never be considered as potentially revolutionary. According to Adorno's judgment, revolutionary music belongs to the realm of composers like Schoenberg. Adorno believed that Schoenberg was “a prophet who calls lonely in the desert”, a composer who did not care about market concerns, creating music while being surrounded by musical commercialism.
It is true that the quality of pop music always was debatable. However, it is also clear that the pop music criticized by Adorno generates a strong mass of followers that has an immense potential to change the course of times. Unlike classical music, the revolutionary energy of pop music is not implied only in the music itself but also includes an integral possibility to unify the music and the artist with the masses of fans. Just by this conformity that diminishes the public taste, pop music is able to cause a critical, non-conformist attitude against the status quo and cultural domination, and the arrogant, corrupt and repressive hegemonial power.
Most of the personalities in Yayat's works are pop music icons who deal with the counter-culture. They were controversial superstars that rise up the power of counter-hegemonic pop. They were praised (or criticized) not only for their quality as musicians but also because they have become symbols of rebellion and of being anti-establishment, particularly among the young generation. According to Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, pop music represents “emotional realism” that can be utilized by the young generation to identify with, and to differentiate between their world and those of the adults. These are the reasons why pop music has a high potential as a medium to express rebellion and massive social non-conformity.
The potential of being a medium for rebellion, supported by strong base of people reinforces the political dimension of pop music. This political dimension was implied by Yayat's decision to choose two national music pop superstars: Iwan Fals and Slank. Those names were phenomenal in the nation's pop music history, thanks to their critical view of the repressive political culture under the military-backed New Order regime. Their humble and honest lyrics were seen as a challenge to the New Order political regime language. The New Order regime was polluted by euphemism and hypocrisy. Iwan criticized the ruler through his humble and stinging songs; he was very close to the common people. Slank protested through their “don't care much about” performances that upset the New Order stability and tyranny doctrine. The painting called “The Politician (Bono)” depicts Bono, the front man of the band U2, who is also political activist. This painting refers to their controversial song 'Sunday, Bloody Sunday', which at first was supposed to praise the separatist Irish Republican Army. In his concerts Bono was always concerned to criticize sharply what he regards as non-humanitarian politics, while the Irish–American fans continued to shout enthusiastically “War will come here again”.
Yayat rejects the view of Pop music that categorizes this music as “light-weight” or just considers pop music as pure “entertainment. Furthermore Yayat has picked superstars who are involved with pop music in a total and militant way. They live in and live from a world of pop music that has turned into their existential fighting arena where not only worldly pleasures are promised. It is also a world full of deceptions and dangers. They surrender completely to this world; they only strive for playing their music and indulging the sensations of their audiences with their creativity. Often they break social rules and norms, and enter the space of perversion and madness while being threatened with imprisonment and death. Some of them even paid a high price, even with the tragical loss of their life, becoming a victim of public hysteria and hedonistic illusion. John Lenon was shot to death by a fanatic fan. Kurt Cobain shot himself. Freddy Mercury was killed by HIV. “Maybe my audiences can enjoy my music more if they think I'm destroying myself ”, said Janis Joplin as quoted in the painting “White Woman Blues (Janis Joplin)”. It was a tragic, revolutionary statement that celebrated self-destruction as a common price to satisfy people's desire for entertainment.
Though popular musical creativity often is followed by eccentricity and criticism, the superstars painted by Yayat nevertheless inspire changes and emancipation or a cultural revolution. Their energy encourages the audiences to have the audacity to say “I have to change.” As it is printed boldly with that sentence in the painting “Kind of Black (Miles Davis)”. Revolutionary spirit leaves them adored as heroes by millions of fans. However at the same time they have to accept the risk to become the object of an untamed cult by the masses. Adorno could appreciate Schoenberg as a revolutionary musician, whose work “embraces all the darkness and sin of the world”. However, for the most people who listen to music, these pop music superstars are the true revolutionaries. They are the heroes who are ready to be crucified on the altar of the mass culture, to pay for the sins of the crowds, in a world that is so hard and cruel.
Words, Visual Word
Displaying texts is the most important strategy that was used by Yayat to renounce the categorization of pop music phenomena as shallow. Words are the most important visual element in most of Yayat paintings. In general the images in Yayat's canvas are divided into two main components. The image of the pop music superstar and words are conveyed by the musicians either with their lyrics or their statements, being written or spoken comments. In some paintings, the portraits and the words are supplemented with musical symbols that are relevant for the person that is being painted.
The words in Yayat's painting reveal a complex relation between the alleged “decadency” of pop music (or the musicians) and the “seriousness” of the problems they address. For sure, Yayat's paintings cannot reproduce the superstars' sound of music. However, just the absence of musical sound forces the beholder to focus the attention on the words in the paintings. It is a “curtain of texts” that reveals the emotion and intellectual depth. Those superstars with messy clothing, disorderly lifestyle, and abnormal behavior eventually appear as persons who are very concerned about serious issues and essential human values. Through song lyrics and personal statements they comment on freedom, eternity, politics and economy, existential loneliness, godliness, and others. In the painting called “The Notorious Bogeyman (Marilyn Manson)” the words of the brutal and satanic rock star Maryln Manson have strong spiritual vibes. His statements “I believe I am God” sounds similar with the controversial statement uttered by Al-Hallaj. The function of the words in Yayat's paintings works to deepen their meanings.
However the strategy of extracting meanings by exposing words in the painting is not without problems. Yayat's strategy demands double literacy from the audience. The beholder is expected to have visual and verbal awareness. They should know about the context of the superstar who is visualized on the canvas and they must be able and willing to read the text that is attached to it. The domination of words in Yayat's painting forces the viewers to be a reader at the same time. They are expected to be able to move between verbal and visual literacy. It can be assumed that the beholders are familiar with the musician painted by Yayat. However it is possible that the viewers do not like or understand the language that is used by Yayat to write the text fragments in his paintings.
Yayat overcomes these problems by applying a visual-artistic manipulation to the words he painted. The words are treated as visual elements and develop their own esthetic power so that everybody can enjoy them without the necessity to really understand the verbal meaning. Yayat adopted various kinds of techniques that are applied in advertising; such as lettering, choosing fonts, typography, positioning, coloring and others in painting the text. In general Yayat uses the principles of graphic design to a maximum extent, for compounding and fusing the words with the faces in his paintings.
In his paintings Yayat replaces the voice of the singer by using words and the music, which is not to possible to be heard, with the singers' shape. Yayat's painting presents words in the middle of dynamic play with shape and affective presentation. The shapes put the words into a scene of a visual field that animates the language, which makes it colorful and powerful. The words resonate and give a touch of fantasy to their meanings. Language suddenly appears more open. If the viewers can not understand the meaning of words, they could nevertheless enjoy the outward appearance of the words and feel the esthetic sensation that is arising on the stage of art.
Yayat created an art out of compounding a mixture of image and text. The paintings explore the flexible, experimental and “high-tension” connections between words and art. Through his paintings Yayat invites the viewer to signify meanings and in the same time to blend with the dynamics of a “music of form”. It is an invitation for understanding (insights) and pleasure (jouissance).
Image, Screen, I Ching, Pop Art
Most people never met the celebrities in person as a concrete and humanly individual, with all their human features. The public knows them from audio and audio-visual recording, stage show, cassette cover, interviews, news, and gossips in the media. The fans never met with the real Elvis, they have only consumed the image of Elvis. “Marilyn Manson did not want to be photographed without his eerie makeup”, said Yayat. In reality, what is known from artists is their image, the illusion, - a warped product of the image-making technology. People's fantasy is ruined by the cultural industry.
Yayat emphasizes the essential nature of the “celebrity as an image” by the way he painted the pop music heroes in his paintings. Most of the figures on his canvas are shaped as constructions from separate areas that are compounded by pixel formations. It reminds us strongly of the images resulting from the technology of digital imaging. With this approach Yayat wants to tell us that people have never seen directly the reality of a celebrity because there is always a technology in-between, there is no direct connection between the subject that views, and the object that is viewed. The public consumes only artificial images: practically the result of reproduction and digital manipulation, ready to be re-produced and manipulated continuously.
The illusive character from these celebrities appears clearly when Yayat's paintings are seen from another distance. Like a fata morgana, the face of the superstar can be seen clearly when the audience sees the paintings from the distance. However when the viewer approaches the painting, the faces will slowly “disappear” and change into an abstract configuration of various fields of dark-bright areas. Yayat isolates the pop music heroes in the virtual reality space. A quote by William Gibson says, it is “a hallucinatory space produced by computer graphic imaging”. Yayat's paintings mirror the words of Steve Aukstakalnis and David Blatner, “the way humans visualize, manipulate, and interact with computer and complex data.”
Yayat's paintings reflect an intensive interrogation towards contemporary culture ruled by images, stimulation, stereotype, illusion, reproduction, imitations, and fantasy. They explore the complexity of the practice of imaging, try the power of imaging in shaping, influence and manipulate the perception of reality. His paintings also perform a critical struggle with the problem of image-making. It also deals with some concepts like “cause and effect affect humans” or “the way we see” in the era of digital technology imaging.
Yayat's reflection about the culture of imaging suggests a parallel line between the field of the painting and the electronic screen. The characters on the electronic screen, television, narrate the world without to stop. Electronic screens awaken the desire to narrate, the desire to tell about everything - political maneuver, sex scandal, family matters, natural disaster, cooking, and more. As told by David Michel Levin, electronic screens are predators which consume greedily any reality to be narrated. The strong will to narrate was presented in Yayat's paintings by the aggressive text intervention into the pictorial space. It looks as if the words interrupt the viewer while exploring the painting.
Similar to the image on the electronic screen, the image in Yayat's painting portrays the hybridization of an image. The principle of interconnection builds a complex network of images where various visual entities (portrait, alphabet, symbol, line, space, color field, and more) touch each other, overlap and slice. Similar to the internet web character the image net in Yayat's image is open, enables the process of boundary penetration, mixing, blending, crossing, and merging. It creates heterogeneous spaces filled with crossings and diffusion: a multiplicity of images.
The electronic screen signifies a multiple image. Just like a computer or television screen, Yayat's canvas illustrates multiple visual image formed by changes and repetitions of visual elements such as lines, shape, field and color. The images look different from one canvas to another. However, they are formed from the same “pixels”. The same alphabets form different meanings and word presentations. The lines and colors are repeated with various ways.
The paradox of repetitions-changes or differences-similarities mark an impressive phase in Yayat's creative explorations about the I Ching, the Book of Change from ancient China. Already some years ago the I Ching became the source of Yayat's creative inspiration. It embodies ways of anticipating changes/differences by relying on repetition/similarity. The same lines are repeated in different ways, forming 64 hexagrams that are correlated with 64 potential changes which can be interpreted freely. In some of Yayat's new paintings the I Ching is visually still present. However, their presence is hidden and encoded in the configuration of various images depicted in the paintings, for example in texts or music partiture.
Unlike his early works, Yayat's new paintings lean towards the Pop Art trend. The celebrities he painted are similar to those of Andy Warhol's, for example Elvis. Lucy Lippard noted that the conjunction of words and images represents essentially the characteristics of Pop Art. Just like in Pop Art paintings, Yayat's paintings present only very little of images that results of his direct observation. Yayat did not re-create, he chose from the pictures of pop music stars which already exist. He did not paint Kurt Cobain. Instead he chose the picture of Kurt Cobain that could be found in the cover of a cassette, magazine, T-Shirt, Internet, and others.
Even though Yayat explores Pop Art, his attitude was different from the Pop Art artists. As quoted by Edward Lucie-Smith that said Pop Art artists celebrate shallowness. “… attack us instantly and declare the meaning out of the sudden. We do not have to look back because it was disposable”. Yayat, in the contrary, seeks deepness. His works continuously ask for attention and contemplation.
Arif Bagus Prasetyo, writer and curator, alumnus of International Writing Program, University of Iowa, USA
Having researched in one of the best universities of the United States, Peter Nazareth practically rejected with his “Elvis Studies” the “shallow” and banal image that people generally associate with mass cultural phenomena and popular culture, - pop music in particular. His studies showed that pop music and culture are culturally significant and should be studied seriously. For Nazareth it was no self-contradiction that Elvis “was a rock and roll singer who wanted to sing like Dean Martin, but who also listened to and sang like Clyde McPhatter, Jackie Wilson, Little Richard, Mario Lanza, Lowell Fulson, Bill Monroe, Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Jerry Reed, Ivory Joe Hunter, Tony Joe White, LaVern Baker, and Mahalia Jackson.” Furthermore, Elvis was an inspiration: “He held the clue to open a door, directed to America, and he removed the obstacles that still existed for the struggle for racial equality which was then on the rise and heading for all corners of the world”.
Just like Peter Nazareth, Yayat Surya repudiates this assertion of the supposed shallowness and banality of pop music. Yayat's advanced artwork presents legendary pop artists, both local and foreign: Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Michael Jackson, Freddy Mercury, Kurt Cobain, Mick Jagger, Bono U2, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Prince, Marylin Manson, Miles Davis, Patti Smith, Iwan Fals, and the members of the rock band Slank. He wants to reject the label of “shallowness/banality” that is attached to pop music; this is clearly recognizable in the choice of the famous rock musicians he wants to represent. He did not choose them by chance. He only picked those who are known as “revolutionary” or “rebellious”. All of them are considered as musicians who are influential and charismatic because they represent the spirit of resistance, subversion, and of a certain rebellion, either with their music, song lyrics, verbal statements, appearance, and behavior, or with their life style as well.
A position that underestimates the value of pop music has been formulated by Theodor Adorno, a prominent philosopher of the Frankfurt school. He compared the “light” (pop) music, which he supposed as worthless, with the more “serious” (classical) music that he assumed to be highly valuable. Adorno believed that classical music perpetuated its quality without plummeting into manipulation. Pop music is abandoned and destined to be manipulated by the market and does not care about aesthetic quality. Because pop music is a slave of the market that only follows public taste and commercialism, pop music is supposed to be conformist only. So it could never be considered as potentially revolutionary. According to Adorno's judgment, revolutionary music belongs to the realm of composers like Schoenberg. Adorno believed that Schoenberg was “a prophet who calls lonely in the desert”, a composer who did not care about market concerns, creating music while being surrounded by musical commercialism.
It is true that the quality of pop music always was debatable. However, it is also clear that the pop music criticized by Adorno generates a strong mass of followers that has an immense potential to change the course of times. Unlike classical music, the revolutionary energy of pop music is not implied only in the music itself but also includes an integral possibility to unify the music and the artist with the masses of fans. Just by this conformity that diminishes the public taste, pop music is able to cause a critical, non-conformist attitude against the status quo and cultural domination, and the arrogant, corrupt and repressive hegemonial power.
Most of the personalities in Yayat's works are pop music icons who deal with the counter-culture. They were controversial superstars that rise up the power of counter-hegemonic pop. They were praised (or criticized) not only for their quality as musicians but also because they have become symbols of rebellion and of being anti-establishment, particularly among the young generation. According to Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, pop music represents “emotional realism” that can be utilized by the young generation to identify with, and to differentiate between their world and those of the adults. These are the reasons why pop music has a high potential as a medium to express rebellion and massive social non-conformity.
The potential of being a medium for rebellion, supported by strong base of people reinforces the political dimension of pop music. This political dimension was implied by Yayat's decision to choose two national music pop superstars: Iwan Fals and Slank. Those names were phenomenal in the nation's pop music history, thanks to their critical view of the repressive political culture under the military-backed New Order regime. Their humble and honest lyrics were seen as a challenge to the New Order political regime language. The New Order regime was polluted by euphemism and hypocrisy. Iwan criticized the ruler through his humble and stinging songs; he was very close to the common people. Slank protested through their “don't care much about” performances that upset the New Order stability and tyranny doctrine. The painting called “The Politician (Bono)” depicts Bono, the front man of the band U2, who is also political activist. This painting refers to their controversial song 'Sunday, Bloody Sunday', which at first was supposed to praise the separatist Irish Republican Army. In his concerts Bono was always concerned to criticize sharply what he regards as non-humanitarian politics, while the Irish–American fans continued to shout enthusiastically “War will come here again”.
Yayat rejects the view of Pop music that categorizes this music as “light-weight” or just considers pop music as pure “entertainment. Furthermore Yayat has picked superstars who are involved with pop music in a total and militant way. They live in and live from a world of pop music that has turned into their existential fighting arena where not only worldly pleasures are promised. It is also a world full of deceptions and dangers. They surrender completely to this world; they only strive for playing their music and indulging the sensations of their audiences with their creativity. Often they break social rules and norms, and enter the space of perversion and madness while being threatened with imprisonment and death. Some of them even paid a high price, even with the tragical loss of their life, becoming a victim of public hysteria and hedonistic illusion. John Lenon was shot to death by a fanatic fan. Kurt Cobain shot himself. Freddy Mercury was killed by HIV. “Maybe my audiences can enjoy my music more if they think I'm destroying myself ”, said Janis Joplin as quoted in the painting “White Woman Blues (Janis Joplin)”. It was a tragic, revolutionary statement that celebrated self-destruction as a common price to satisfy people's desire for entertainment.
Though popular musical creativity often is followed by eccentricity and criticism, the superstars painted by Yayat nevertheless inspire changes and emancipation or a cultural revolution. Their energy encourages the audiences to have the audacity to say “I have to change.” As it is printed boldly with that sentence in the painting “Kind of Black (Miles Davis)”. Revolutionary spirit leaves them adored as heroes by millions of fans. However at the same time they have to accept the risk to become the object of an untamed cult by the masses. Adorno could appreciate Schoenberg as a revolutionary musician, whose work “embraces all the darkness and sin of the world”. However, for the most people who listen to music, these pop music superstars are the true revolutionaries. They are the heroes who are ready to be crucified on the altar of the mass culture, to pay for the sins of the crowds, in a world that is so hard and cruel.
Words, Visual Word
Displaying texts is the most important strategy that was used by Yayat to renounce the categorization of pop music phenomena as shallow. Words are the most important visual element in most of Yayat paintings. In general the images in Yayat's canvas are divided into two main components. The image of the pop music superstar and words are conveyed by the musicians either with their lyrics or their statements, being written or spoken comments. In some paintings, the portraits and the words are supplemented with musical symbols that are relevant for the person that is being painted.
The words in Yayat's painting reveal a complex relation between the alleged “decadency” of pop music (or the musicians) and the “seriousness” of the problems they address. For sure, Yayat's paintings cannot reproduce the superstars' sound of music. However, just the absence of musical sound forces the beholder to focus the attention on the words in the paintings. It is a “curtain of texts” that reveals the emotion and intellectual depth. Those superstars with messy clothing, disorderly lifestyle, and abnormal behavior eventually appear as persons who are very concerned about serious issues and essential human values. Through song lyrics and personal statements they comment on freedom, eternity, politics and economy, existential loneliness, godliness, and others. In the painting called “The Notorious Bogeyman (Marilyn Manson)” the words of the brutal and satanic rock star Maryln Manson have strong spiritual vibes. His statements “I believe I am God” sounds similar with the controversial statement uttered by Al-Hallaj. The function of the words in Yayat's paintings works to deepen their meanings.
However the strategy of extracting meanings by exposing words in the painting is not without problems. Yayat's strategy demands double literacy from the audience. The beholder is expected to have visual and verbal awareness. They should know about the context of the superstar who is visualized on the canvas and they must be able and willing to read the text that is attached to it. The domination of words in Yayat's painting forces the viewers to be a reader at the same time. They are expected to be able to move between verbal and visual literacy. It can be assumed that the beholders are familiar with the musician painted by Yayat. However it is possible that the viewers do not like or understand the language that is used by Yayat to write the text fragments in his paintings.
Yayat overcomes these problems by applying a visual-artistic manipulation to the words he painted. The words are treated as visual elements and develop their own esthetic power so that everybody can enjoy them without the necessity to really understand the verbal meaning. Yayat adopted various kinds of techniques that are applied in advertising; such as lettering, choosing fonts, typography, positioning, coloring and others in painting the text. In general Yayat uses the principles of graphic design to a maximum extent, for compounding and fusing the words with the faces in his paintings.
In his paintings Yayat replaces the voice of the singer by using words and the music, which is not to possible to be heard, with the singers' shape. Yayat's painting presents words in the middle of dynamic play with shape and affective presentation. The shapes put the words into a scene of a visual field that animates the language, which makes it colorful and powerful. The words resonate and give a touch of fantasy to their meanings. Language suddenly appears more open. If the viewers can not understand the meaning of words, they could nevertheless enjoy the outward appearance of the words and feel the esthetic sensation that is arising on the stage of art.
Yayat created an art out of compounding a mixture of image and text. The paintings explore the flexible, experimental and “high-tension” connections between words and art. Through his paintings Yayat invites the viewer to signify meanings and in the same time to blend with the dynamics of a “music of form”. It is an invitation for understanding (insights) and pleasure (jouissance).
Image, Screen, I Ching, Pop Art
Most people never met the celebrities in person as a concrete and humanly individual, with all their human features. The public knows them from audio and audio-visual recording, stage show, cassette cover, interviews, news, and gossips in the media. The fans never met with the real Elvis, they have only consumed the image of Elvis. “Marilyn Manson did not want to be photographed without his eerie makeup”, said Yayat. In reality, what is known from artists is their image, the illusion, - a warped product of the image-making technology. People's fantasy is ruined by the cultural industry.
Yayat emphasizes the essential nature of the “celebrity as an image” by the way he painted the pop music heroes in his paintings. Most of the figures on his canvas are shaped as constructions from separate areas that are compounded by pixel formations. It reminds us strongly of the images resulting from the technology of digital imaging. With this approach Yayat wants to tell us that people have never seen directly the reality of a celebrity because there is always a technology in-between, there is no direct connection between the subject that views, and the object that is viewed. The public consumes only artificial images: practically the result of reproduction and digital manipulation, ready to be re-produced and manipulated continuously.
The illusive character from these celebrities appears clearly when Yayat's paintings are seen from another distance. Like a fata morgana, the face of the superstar can be seen clearly when the audience sees the paintings from the distance. However when the viewer approaches the painting, the faces will slowly “disappear” and change into an abstract configuration of various fields of dark-bright areas. Yayat isolates the pop music heroes in the virtual reality space. A quote by William Gibson says, it is “a hallucinatory space produced by computer graphic imaging”. Yayat's paintings mirror the words of Steve Aukstakalnis and David Blatner, “the way humans visualize, manipulate, and interact with computer and complex data.”
Yayat's paintings reflect an intensive interrogation towards contemporary culture ruled by images, stimulation, stereotype, illusion, reproduction, imitations, and fantasy. They explore the complexity of the practice of imaging, try the power of imaging in shaping, influence and manipulate the perception of reality. His paintings also perform a critical struggle with the problem of image-making. It also deals with some concepts like “cause and effect affect humans” or “the way we see” in the era of digital technology imaging.
Yayat's reflection about the culture of imaging suggests a parallel line between the field of the painting and the electronic screen. The characters on the electronic screen, television, narrate the world without to stop. Electronic screens awaken the desire to narrate, the desire to tell about everything - political maneuver, sex scandal, family matters, natural disaster, cooking, and more. As told by David Michel Levin, electronic screens are predators which consume greedily any reality to be narrated. The strong will to narrate was presented in Yayat's paintings by the aggressive text intervention into the pictorial space. It looks as if the words interrupt the viewer while exploring the painting.
Similar to the image on the electronic screen, the image in Yayat's painting portrays the hybridization of an image. The principle of interconnection builds a complex network of images where various visual entities (portrait, alphabet, symbol, line, space, color field, and more) touch each other, overlap and slice. Similar to the internet web character the image net in Yayat's image is open, enables the process of boundary penetration, mixing, blending, crossing, and merging. It creates heterogeneous spaces filled with crossings and diffusion: a multiplicity of images.
The electronic screen signifies a multiple image. Just like a computer or television screen, Yayat's canvas illustrates multiple visual image formed by changes and repetitions of visual elements such as lines, shape, field and color. The images look different from one canvas to another. However, they are formed from the same “pixels”. The same alphabets form different meanings and word presentations. The lines and colors are repeated with various ways.
The paradox of repetitions-changes or differences-similarities mark an impressive phase in Yayat's creative explorations about the I Ching, the Book of Change from ancient China. Already some years ago the I Ching became the source of Yayat's creative inspiration. It embodies ways of anticipating changes/differences by relying on repetition/similarity. The same lines are repeated in different ways, forming 64 hexagrams that are correlated with 64 potential changes which can be interpreted freely. In some of Yayat's new paintings the I Ching is visually still present. However, their presence is hidden and encoded in the configuration of various images depicted in the paintings, for example in texts or music partiture.
Unlike his early works, Yayat's new paintings lean towards the Pop Art trend. The celebrities he painted are similar to those of Andy Warhol's, for example Elvis. Lucy Lippard noted that the conjunction of words and images represents essentially the characteristics of Pop Art. Just like in Pop Art paintings, Yayat's paintings present only very little of images that results of his direct observation. Yayat did not re-create, he chose from the pictures of pop music stars which already exist. He did not paint Kurt Cobain. Instead he chose the picture of Kurt Cobain that could be found in the cover of a cassette, magazine, T-Shirt, Internet, and others.
Even though Yayat explores Pop Art, his attitude was different from the Pop Art artists. As quoted by Edward Lucie-Smith that said Pop Art artists celebrate shallowness. “… attack us instantly and declare the meaning out of the sudden. We do not have to look back because it was disposable”. Yayat, in the contrary, seeks deepness. His works continuously ask for attention and contemplation.
Arif Bagus Prasetyo, writer and curator, alumnus of International Writing Program, University of Iowa, USA
+200x200cm,+Acrylic+On+Canvas++2009.jpg)
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar