Ketut Teja Astawa: Distinctive Expression Language A Curatorial Note by W. Seriyoga Parta*
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| Teja Astawa Penguasa Laut, 90 x 140 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2011 |
The word “animal” represents the theme in Teja’s works in this show, bringing up the stories of animals while “instinct” refers to the traits of animals that are more instinctive. Instinct is the nature of living creatures. It is also the basic human feature that comes from the desire and is subconscious drive, therefore it is spontaneous. The term is to accommodate Teja’s exploration that is full of spontaneity in playing with the puppet structure in terms of visuals and narratives. Far from being merely playful with the structure, Teja has restructured the forms taken from the puppets and their narrative structure.
This spontaneity is the foundation for the existence of his peculiar objects and at the same time, they signify uniqueness in his works. Teja’s creative performance at work is appealing to capture because the ideas of his works have not been fully designed before he works onto the canvases. It means that he does not work with a fixed design as the ideas are continuously progressing along with the work processes. Varied spontaneous concepts are materialized into these processes and he reveals them directly in his works. So, this is Teja’s mechanism at work.
Observing this mechanism, the writer thinks that Teja’s creative performance is of psychological impulses or explosions emerging from his subconscious perception. In other words, Teja exhibits the fragments of his subconscious experiences that are frequently spontaneous at work. As the subconscious experiences, the fragments of stories in Teja’s works appear to be piled up and overlayed one another. Visually, the narratives are seen in his works but they are not structured in the ties of causalities. These narratives are then transpired in the layered object composition. If scanned, those object layers expose different time and space dimensions. The narratives are occasionally of interrupted fragments, which are combined in the canvases. Therefore, the narratives of his works are also in layers. At this point, a question is raised about what inspires Teja to such exploration.
In the discussion upon Teja’s figure and creativity for his solo show introduction in 2010, the writer attempted to explore and recognize the background from which the works were created to process the visual language of puppets taken from his childhood memories. Subsequently, it was found out that his strong interest to puppets were of impulses of cultural memories settling in his subconscious perception and had given rise to the imagination room of his creative life as an artist in the future. This review was purely about the explanation of causal objects in his works in fact. In this show program, the writer identifies a specific issue that is Teja’s exploration in building up the language structure of conventional puppets that is recreated by restructuring it in the visual and narrative structures.
Moreover, based on several intense discussions in following to his creative process, Teja said that besides of his unfaded childhood memories, there was one experience of his adolescence when he was in Junior High School that was his deep interest in caricature. According to him, caricature was a medium giving him a new creativity room for varied visual ideas that was loaded with contextual values. It provided openness in exploring and restructuring forms. He played it as a humorous parody to make laugh; sometimes it was tragic, ironic, but filled with human values. As a medium, caricature had functioned such new-found color in Teja’s creativity phases to express a variety of things he felt and experienced as a high school student. In caricature, he discovered the spirit of playing with visual object structures.
Until one day, he decided to enter an art institute that facilitated him with a larger room to learn media and art media. In this institution, Teja began to incubate assorted past experiences in which his memory on puppets interacted with new experiences of art media especially the art of painting, which he intensively studied about. From the academic phase, he initiated to draw his past experience into his creative world intensely and methodically. He also employed his mastery in transforming caricatural forms as the exploration principle in his works. Actually, puppets are creations with distorted forms and he recreates their basic structures which have been standard. He restructured and processed them to be more unique, exposing Teja Astawa’s distinctive form exploration. In short, he accomplished to domesticate puppets from their collective habitus to be a way of personal style and language.
With such personal language, he can freely develop a variety of themes like animals as displayed in this show. Fables have been living in diverse folklores of different cultures in the world with some similarities as well as differences regarding to the local cultural conditions. In the Hindunese tradition in Bali, fables are known as Tantri, deriving from Panca Tantra and Jataka of India. Tantri was taken from the name of a beautiful girl who was very good at storytelling. It was about the girl whose stories managed to influence a tyrannous king’s temperament to be wise. The story she told him was of animals, which were the metaphors of human behaviors and composed with imaginations and affluent with moral messages to arouse consciousness.
Several aspects of Tantri were adopted as the guidance in Teja’s works, which display a series of fables. However, these stories are developed liberally and unattached to the epic referred. The narratives in the works were not intended to carry around the textual values of epic in Tantri or common folklores but he precisely creates new stories by adopting the animals’ deeds as metaphors. These stories are subjective narratives that are composed with distinctive visual expression; slightly humorous, seemingly light, and simple as the caricature’s characters he is fond of. The power of imagination and spontaneity has led Teja’s exploration to not simply stick to the existing patterns.
Looking closely at Teja’s works, the appreciators are taken to open as wide as possible the personal imagination room. As in the theme of animals, he prefers to make free interpretations in the composition series of animals showing stories and releasing varied interpretations based on the appreciators’ personal perceptions and experiences. For him, as an artist, he is not the one who holds the full authority upon the meaning constructions of his works but it is the appreciators who possess their own subjective authority in building a meaning from their perceptions toward the visual phenomena. Artworks are the visual canons with aesthetic potentials functioning to arouse imagination of the perceivers. Therefore, the task of an artist is to produce aesthetic phenomena with uniqueness so that they may attract the attention of appreciators.
Additionally, it is not a significant matter if the works are perceived as definitely aesthetic phenomena with the object uniqueness shown. Teja’s openness to a variety of interpretation pretensions and meanings reflects his authenticity to dissimilar matters even the spontaneous ones. An idea coming to his mind may be compositionally adjusted so that it does not interrupt him or is intentionally meant to be an aesthetic distraction that evokes attention. The writer believes that it is Teja’s potential to keep high imagination and lets it lead his creativity. His inclination to play with the standard objects can be identified as limitless creativity power which will always continue breaking the aesthetic dead-ends.
Teja always looks for the gaps of dissimilar phenomena in the visual culture of contemporary media like in the interactive toy of angry birds that has recently been fancied by the tablet users. Spontaneously, the figures of angry birds and the pigs, the enemies, invade his canvas along with his animal creations inspired by the forms of puppet animals in the Tantri. It seems to be easy for Teja to make parallel these two different characters; from the past and recent time, without anxiety if their images collide and spoil the existence of puppet characters he has created. Nonetheless, this is not a new issue in Teja who loves searching for possibilities. In early 2000, he had once worked on the theme of super heroes of children animations shown on televisions. He recreated Batman’s character in such a way and depicted a particular narrative in accordance to the theme. The new possibilities are supposed to exist but they should be conditioned in this fashion to avoid distortions.
When a play can be sensed philosophically so Teja’s inclination for diverse possibilities should not plainly present aesthetic phenomena. Furthermore, a value is perceived in the process he is in. The ability to perform continuous explorations is the reflection of an artist’s creativity power. However, it needs to be complemented with the efforts to understand the way of creativity life. It also indicates the essential goal of a creative searching and importance of comprehending the motivation behind this power.
The writer considers that those aspects have been living in Teja so far. The cultural experiences that are blended with restructuring power as well as enriched with spontaneity and openness to new phenomena are the potential power drawing his creativity passage. Teja is on the track he designs; a track that gives him diverse possibilities and these are the potentials taking him to other unique discoveries. These works of animal series are one of the visual possibilities coming out from his creativity. Understanding Teja is understanding his ability in driving himself to keep digging out possibilities that frequently come to light spontaneously from such wild imaginations.
Sanggulan, February 2013
* The writer is a lecturer at Gorontalo State University. At present, he is taking a Doctoral Program at Yogyakarta Indonesia Institute of The Arts. His writings are publicized in mass media, art magazines and journals, and proceedings of national and regional seminars. He writes in Arie Smit’s “A Living Legend” in 2011, Nyoman Erawan’s “Salvation of the Soul” with Rizki A. Zaelani, and is developing a book of sculptor I Ketut Muja now.
