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A Troubled Vernacular: Legibility and Presence in Indonesian Activist Art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2015

Doreen Lee
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Abstract

Activist art and political resistance became popular aesthetics in the work of Indonesian artists after the fall of the New Order in 1998. In subsequent years, more art alternatives have emerged in cities and small towns across Indonesia, including diverse and vernacular modes of artistry such as street art and community-based international festivals. Where artists formerly focused their energies on critiquing the state, present art initiatives have become far more diffuse, counter-establishment, and localized in their approach. Local artists started the Jogja mural movement to rebrand Yogyakarta as a city of murals, while Jatiwangi Art Factory, an arts collective founded in a semi-industrialized village in West Java, has become a haven for performance arts and community-based projects for Indonesians and foreign artists in residence. This article looks at such experiments of legibility and presence as a new means of redefining publics and broadening the domain of political participation in Indonesia.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 74 , Issue 2 , May 2015 , pp. 303 - 322
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2015 

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