Public Space, Murals and Community Building in Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Armed with paint brushes and a mission, students and community members mobilized in north Yogyakarta, Indonesia on August 30, 2008, to raise awareness about environmental issues by painting murals on the walls surrounding an elementary school. Mural competitions and political public art projects are increasingly common in the city, yet the walls of Yogyakarta were not always sites of artistic exploration and public debate. Censorship had developed from a component of Indonesia’s Guided Democracy into an omnipresent control system in the 1990’s (Lindsay 2008). The shift in national leadership away from the New Order in 1998 established a new leniency in public expression, as is exemplified symbolically with the removal of a government media censorship apparatus – the licenses required for media. This action directly affected traditional media, including television and print journalism, and extended symbolically into public expression written across bodies and surfaces constituting towns and cities. Although government permission to initiate a public mural project is still required from PEMDA, or the Pemerinta Daerah (“Regional Government”), the removal of the media censorship apparatus signaled a new potential for public discourse and debate. With the realization that public space was increasingly open to free speech, the mural as a tool for expression spread throughout Yogyakarta, popularized largely by the arts collective Apotik Komik (“Comic Pharmacy”).
Discussion of the recent history of mural-painting and censorship often follows a narrative of two forces: the government elite as the repressive body and the rakyat (the “people”) as the expressive body. Yet, as art historian Jennifer Lindsay writes in Inside Indonesia, the Indonesian government was never monolithic, with its “…maze of interlocking power structures that could be played off against each other”(2008). Beyond the complexity of the government’s power structures, the dualist approach to the history of murals in the city is further inadequate when considering the various forces – collaborative, competitive, and non-participatory – that come into play on a local level. The creators of the murals are not members of a monolithic rakyat, but, rather they include artists (both formally and informally trained), students, and individuals from all career and age groups. The creators represent diverse institutions, communities, and political beliefs, and they experience varying degrees of opportunity and privilege. Their projects are initiated and funded independently, by non-profit organizations, by the government, and by businesses and corporations. The variety of artists, institutions, and concepts leads to competition for space and materials, and divergent conceptualizations of public space itself.
Approaching the murals of Yogyakarta as a student of art and anthropology, my research is guided by three main questions. First, I ask whether the alleviation of oppression has a causal relationship to expression. Government censorship is often attributed with oppressing individual expression; an analysis of the current institutional involvement in mural production can challenge this reductive attribution with a thorough portrayal of social and economic forms of censorship. To extend my initial question of institutional oppression, my second question targets the relationship of institutional politics to aesthetics. Murals have been popularized within urban planning as a tool for counteracting graffiti, and the two are increasingly differentiated by their aesthetic. I hope to understand whether the emphasis on beautification depoliticizes the presence and the subject matter of murals. Lastly, by analyzing murals as a form of public art, I bring attention to two publics – the public as a space and the public as a group of people. I question whether the public nature of the project reinforces a democratic imperative of majority participation and discussion, or whether the passion of the individual artist overrides the concern and perspectives of the surrounding community. The three questions merge in my concern for the relationship of the power of an individual to the power of institutions.
With its dense concentration of universities and galleries, and its national reputation for the arts, the city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia is a distinctive site in for the study of public art. Students of urban planning in the city’s Gadjah Mada University, Ikaputra and Dyah Titisari write in 2005 that, as of that year, over 100 murals existed in the city. To best address the artistic and sociological components of this project, I have arranged affiliation with two institutions: the Center for History and Political Ethics (Pusat Sejarah dan Etika Politik, or PUSdEP) at Sanata Dharma University, in the north of the city and the Art Institute of Indonesia (Institut Seni Indonesia Yogyakarta, or ISI Jogja) to the south. At PUSdEP, I will have resources to strengthen my understanding of censorship and public expression through the political shift of 1998 to the present. At ISI Jogja, I will benefit from the support and experiences of various faculty members, including Nano Warsono – a former member of Apotik Komik.
Tracing the streets from ISI Jogja up through Sanata Dharma University, my methodology includes three main points of departure: formal interviews, informal discussions, and participant observation. To further specify the geographic constraints of my project in Yogyakarta, I rely on the locations of existing and future murals as my fieldwork sites, and I will arrange interviews and develop discussions with two groups of people: those who are active in the creation of murals, and those who live alongside of the murals. Through these discussions and interviews, I will gather information to map out the actors, networks, and institutions involved in the creation of the city’s murals. Additionally, to extend my understanding of participation in public art, I will gather responses to the murals, including the perceived ways they alter a space, a neighborhood, or a community.
To enhance my perspective on the function of murals in Yogyakarta, I will take advantage of opportunities to participate in the conceptualization and creation of murals in the city. This will provide a site for recording both my own experiences and the experiential narratives of those individuals with whom I am working. The addition of participant observation to my methodology is intended to develop my own perspective on the life of murals, in addition to the narratives that I will be gathering from the various local perspectives. My multifocal methodology will provide a thorough understanding of public art from a blank wall through the fruition of a concept into a mural that might inspire admiration, frustration, apathy, and even public dialogue.
This project is an attempt to map and understand the intricacies of mural projects in Yogyakarta in conjunction with a re-evaluation of the concepts of public space and urban democracy. If there is an accessible analysis of how the political nature of murals is neutralized in the framework of aesthetics, future members of the “public” can establish more effective modes of public expression; their art can be seen, understood, and questioned as a form of social or political critique, rather than stripped of its message for the sake of beauty. Additionally, in a post-New Order Yogyakarta, where public expression is growing and shifting to include new communities and mediums, it is important to consider who continues to be excluded from public space, whose voices continue to be censored, and how the presence of hierarchies and exclusion temper a universal term like “public”. It is with these concerns, and the questions that support them, that I ask for the support of the Fulbright Program in my pursuit of their answers.
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