As the biggest city in Indonesia, Jakarta could be considered an example of management failure for what it provides its more than 10 million inhabitants. Not to mention the daily traffic of 3 million informal migrant workers daily from the nearby towns. The chaotic contemporary Jakarta makes access difficult to its ever expanding and segregated districts. The development got even more disorganised during the economic recess resulting from the collapse of the New Order regime. Effective transportation, such as internal rail links, hasn't been developed, meaning streets are the sole means for public transportation. The number of private vehicles is rocketing compared to the building of parking lots and traffic management infrastructure.
In cultural life, Jakarta inherited a tradition of identity politics from the authoritarian era of Soeharto, establishing Jakarta as the primary cultural center of the diverse ethnic groups from Indonesia's 24 provinces, scattered over approximately 13,000 islands in the archipelago. Jakarta is also a major target of global cultural penetration in Indonesia. Centered in this city nowadays, are several private television station, radios, and hundreds of outlets marketing consumables from several foreign countries. Jakarta of Batavia, established in the 16th century by the VOC of the Netherlands, was meant to be a harbour city for trading. Jakarta had always been a melting pot: a rendezvous point for many nations and ethnicities, and also one of Asia's strongest markets.
Because of this heritage, of political and market power, many Indonesian artists come to compete for a space within Jakarta society. In the city you can find bona fide collectors, big dealers, private art and cultural foundations and state owned national and local organisations. Recently, however, many of the artists moved away, to live and work in cities like Bandung, Yogjakarta or Bali as a means of finding cheaper living and quiet space to enable them to work. This said Jakarta remains the Mecca for the Indonesian art world. It is still the city in which artists are 'baptised' and can gain attention from critics, curators, and news media.
Beginning in the colonial 1920s until post declaration era in the 1960s, Jakarta was a perfect living space for bohemians where poets like Chairil Anwar wrote his wildest and most passionate poems, and where the pioneers of modern art began to exhibit their work. Though they lived and worked without proper infra-structure, the colonial old buildings, narrow streets, impoverished slums and traditional markets were enough to provide friendly creative spaces for the artists. Countless of historical art events started here. The founding of PERSAGI (Persatuan Ahli Gambar Indonesia, or Indonesian Drawing Expert Association) the first association for modern painters headed by the pioneering S. Soedjojono, to the New Art Movement in the 1970s which initiated the conceptual art movement in Indonesia.
Imagine; it takes most people living in Jakarta between 35-60 minutes to travel 10 km across town in peak hours. Daytime has been shortened. To travel on foot is nearly impossible. On top of glaring sun and grime, air pollution as a result of motor vehicle fumes is dangerously high. The scarcity of decent footpaths is worsened by the presence of street vendors and 'creative' motorcycle riders. Jakarta is increasingly unfriendly to pedestrians, especially children and the disabled. Only a small part of the city is still friendly and comfortable to foot traffic. High streets have turned into highways, which has disabled the social element and feel of a 'city' culture. Even spaces holding cultural activities like the historical Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM) have lost their amiability and influence, fading beneath the crowded city streets and malls. Other unfortunate places have become extinct, changed their function or been lost altogether.
From June until August 2004, I joined several architect and visual artist friends; photographers, graphic designers, and composers, and held a series of workshops called 'Imagining Jakarta'. The follow up was an exhibition staged through September and October. It was the first collective project attempting to address the various cultural and social problems rising from Jakarta's architectural aspect. Many of the participating architects and artists deconstructed some of the city's principal icons such as the Bundaran H.I., National Monument area, and the business district in the Sudirman Street precinct. Some of the participants presented their opinions in relation to the grotesque, re-questioning city spaces through photography, sound compositions, drawings, data projection through videos and other objects. The rest tried to interact with the public by presenting game cards filled with activities within the city, or trying to offer alternatives transportation lines. Their responses were indicative of Jakarta experiencing a landscape crisis; that ultimately creates problematic changes in human value.
We might ask: What is wrong with the city plan of Jakarta? Doesn't this chaos show that there is something wrong somewhere in the mind-set of the people as they built their own city? Is the city a materialisation of its society?
What may be more terrifying is that the city has created a programmatic and pragmatic response inside every head, leaving no space for imagining a better and spirited life. Architect Dewi Susanti described a case of disjointedness caused by the city's transportation failures as she experienced difficulty getting out of her own neighborhood. An expatriate couple said that they seldom attend cultural events in Jakarta, although their home is only about 8 km away from the fancy Kemang area where I work in a gallery. And they always travel with a driver. They admitted the lack of access to other city areas had slowly created 'imaginary walls' and lessened their exploration capacity for city spaces. I can imagine how negative people whose work had forced them to move within the city spaces every day, such as public transportation drivers, couriers and salespersons feel.
It is understood how cars are turned into convenient spaces; air conditioned, equipped with audio sometimes even television sets, also with modern gadgets such as multimedia cellular phones and laptops - almost staple to Jakarta's middleclass society now. The fast growing communication media had exceeded the boundaries of the physical body that has ruptured temporal experience and spatial experience, breaking the relation between Jakarta inhabitants and the city's cultural and social spaces. It has also divided personal-realities and contexts. This has widened the gap between the economically prosperous and the economically impoverished classes; visually juxtaposed in everyday life.
One of the reasons for this, that is becoming increasingly obvious, is the privatising of every aspect of life. This underlines how the city authority has neglected ever-shrinking public space. Spaces for togetherness have moved out of the open realm into commercial and convenient malls. Meanwhile, museums are becoming public-values graveyards, only visited by a thinning number of tourists. Likewise, libraries are dull and boring, no longer emanating dreams of the future. The surviving city parks and monuments grow horrid, stiff and barren. Cultural spaces are shrinking, losing their public, and are fragmented. Unable to grow, this is creating small communities, which are disconnected in relation to each other.
Increasingly, one needs a strong exploration capacity to penetrate the city spaces and an egalitarian spirit to be artistically active in Jakarta. Many of the galleries are being built by big or medium investors aiming solely at profit, such as in Kemang, South Jakarta (a favorite residency area for expatriates) that is also equipped with trendy cafés. To get there one has to suffer long and heavy traffic (unleavened by public transportation). The narrow streets can no longer sustain the flood of private cars parking from the nearby buildings. The oddest thing about Kemang is the weekly exhibition openings crowded with collectors: where I seldom see any young artists. Perhaps exhibitions in Kemang galleries are far too commercial and no longer offer the freshness that accompanied shows of installation or new media.
Young artists prefer to gather in various communities founded by individuals or non-profit foundations, such as Utan Kayu Community, Oktagon, or Ruangrupa. Ruangrupa for example, is an art space initiated by a collective of Jakarta artists who since 2001 have regularly sponsored alternative art or exhibitions of video. There is always a party at the exhibition openings: drinking and DJs all night long - though they have to face the reality that Jakarta is very expensive. The shows are made in rented house with high operational costs despite the simplicity compared to the exhibitions in Kemang. Invitations and catalogues are self-made to cut down costs. Ruangrupa faces an uncertain future as foreign funding is running low. Their situation is contrasted by art scenes in smaller cities like Bandung and Yogjakarta where living costs are far cheaper and the art community is a lot larger.
In a conversation with senior artist FX Harsono, about the small amount of attention the Indonesian Government pays the art world, we agreed that the art world in Jakarta (and in Indonesia generally) must be developed and raised-up by individuals and their communities. Making strategies to face the fact of Jakarta is certainly a collective thought.
Translated by Mirna Adzania
Rifky Effendy is a curator and writer based in Jakarta. He is co-curator with Gregory Burke of the Transindonesia exhibition at the Govett-Brewster
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