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"With Every Breath, I Build the House":Marintan Sirait's Building a House and Its Performative Quality
In this paper, I will address the topic of identity in relation to performativity by looking across political histories and ritualistic practices as reflected in the artistic practice of Marintan Sirait, who is one of Indonesia's few pioneering female performance artists. I argue that her seminal installation/performance piece Building a House from the 1990s is an articulation of—but also resistance to—the experience of alienation during the regime of the New Order. By addressing the New Order's political histories and examining Marintan's implicit notion of the "body as tool", I will show how the artist envisions notions of naturalness and spirituality as embodied acts of resistance. I will conclude that Building a House reflects an artistic interest that is less concerned with the representation of identity and rather explores embodied practices to generate a performative aesthetic that builds on an ephemeral understanding of materiality and dynamic processes of embodiment.
In this paper, I focus on Building a House, a seminal installation/performance piece from the 1990s by the Indonesian artist Marintan Sirait.1 Having played a pioneering role as one of the very few female performance artists [End Page 69] from Indonesia,2 Marintan Sirait rose to national as well as international prominence in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, she interrupted her artistic career for some time and barely participated in exhibitions; since 2012 the artist has started to stage performances again. Building a House highlights existential questions surrounding the self and the body with their relations to the world, while also referring to conditions of oppression under the regime of the New Order—an approach that has been described as "non-political activism".3 I will argue that her piece can be understood as an artistic articulation of—but also resistance to—the experience of an alienated self and an alienated body. To counter the experience of alienation, the artist envisions notions of nature and naturalness in her practice and her approach to a ritualised body. These notions form the basis for the performative aesthetic of Building a House, in which processes of embodiment and presentness play pivotal roles.
Kami Sedang Membangun Rumah / Building a House
The art piece I am discussing here is known under slightly different names. It is mostly referred to as Kami Sedang Membangun Rumah, which literally translates to "We are Building a House", and in accordance with the artist, has been named Building a House in international exhibitions and publications. For ease of reference, I will use the shorter English title. Building a House varies in its use of materials and objects as well as in its length (from long durational performances to less than half an hour versions); sometimes Marintan collaborates with other artists from experimental music or other fields when staging this piece.4 Yet, despite its variations and processual character, Building a House has maintained a certain core by addressing the same issues.
I will focus on the version Marintan presented at the second Asia Pacific Triennial (APT 2) on 26 September 1996 at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, which lasted approximately 20 minutes.5 The Queensland Art Gallery filmed the performance with three cameras and edited the footage into a 15-minute video that functions as the main research material for my analysis.6 Building a House—as presented at the APT 2—consisted of an installation that Marintan had prepared in advance of her live performance. One main element of the installation were little cones or "mountains" of soil that Marintan had carefully formed. They were placed in a pattern-like manner on the white floor of the space that was concealed by a wall on the right and left side. Neon lamps were installed on the oblique side of a big mountain of soil; the lamps were covered with sheets of newspaper and the [End Page 70] mountain itself was in the right corner of the installation space. There were also torn pieces of newspaper on the walls in the opposite corner. During the performance, the recorded sounds of crickets and dripping water were played. Furthermore, slides showing pictures of the same little mountains and circles made of ash around them were projected.
Marintan forming circles with coconut shell ash around little mountains of soil. Kami Sedang Membangun Rumah/Building a House, installation/performance, Second Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 26 September 1996, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Courtesy of the artist and the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.
Marintan forming circles with coconut shell ash around little mountains of soil. Kami Sedang Membangun Rumah/Building a House, installation/performance, Second Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 26 September 1996, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Courtesy of the artist and the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.
Marintan forming circles with coconut shell ash around little mountains of soil. Kami Sedang Membangun Rumah/Building a House, installation/performance, Second Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 26 September 1996, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Courtesy of the artist and the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.
[End Page 71]
The artist slowly "washing" herself with coconut shell ash. Kami Sedang Membangun Rumah/Building a House, installation/performance, Second Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 26 September 1996, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Courtesy of the artist and the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.
The artist slowly "washing" herself with coconut shell ash. Kami Sedang Membangun Rumah/Building a House, installation/performance, Second Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 26 September 1996, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Courtesy of the artist and the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.
Wearing all black, Marintan started her performance by picking up a plate of coconut shell ash that she had specially brought from Indonesia for her piece. Slowly wandering from one little mountain to the next, the artist formed nearly perfect circles around each little mountain of soil (Figures 1–3). The cameras captured her slow and precise movements and the concentration the artist demonstrated in every gesture while repeating each movement meditatively. Once Marintan had carefully created circles out of ash around each little mountain of soil, she started to "wash" her body with ash (Figures 4–5). With slow movements, the artist rubbed her body with the ash while it flowed down in thin grey streams. She "washed" her arms, legs, face and head with sensitive care. After that, the performance altered its focus. The artist, hunched over, moved in small steps to the other side of the installation space, sometimes abruptly moving her head, touching her face and closing her eyes (Figures 6–8). Her movements seemed disoriented, her arms often holding her own body. The performance ended when Marintan invited people from the audience to join by offering soil or coconut shell ash. Some [End Page 72]
Marintan hunched over, eyes closed. Kami Sedang Membangun Rumah/Building a House, installation/performance, Second Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 26 September 1996, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Courtesy of the artist and the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.
Marintan hunched over, eyes closed. Kami Sedang Membangun Rumah/Building a House, installation/performance, Second Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 26 September 1996, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Courtesy of the artist and the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.
Marintan hunched over, eyes closed. Kami Sedang Membangun Rumah/Building a House, installation/performance, Second Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 26 September 1996, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Courtesy of the artist and the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.
followed by spreading the material across the floor of the installation to form visual connections between the little mountains and circles (Figure 9). Finally, the artist ignited an incense stick and slowly removed the sheets of newspaper from the neon lamps on the big mountain of soil in the corner to illuminate the room slowly. This last action by the artist marked the end of the performance. [End Page 73]
Members of the audience engaging with soil and coconut shell ash. Kami Sedang Membangun Rumah/Building a House, installation/performance, Second Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 26 September 1996, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Courtesy of the artist and the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.
Alienated Body, Alienated Self, Alienated Feelings: Alienation as Motif
Encountering Building a House, the viewer observes a contrast between elements that are meditative and soothing, and elements that convey a sense of struggle and vulnerability. For example, a calming and meditative atmosphere emerges through the artist's concentrated and repetitive gesture of forming nearly perfect circles with coconut shell ash, which is traditionally used for washing dishes in Indonesia (Figure 2). In contrast, other movements where her body is hunched over and writhing allows associations of impairment (Figures 6–8). The same contrast is indicated in her use of materials and objects: the fertility of the soil and the image of the mountain evoke visions of growth and spiritual power. At the same time, the cold light of neon lamps as well as torn newspapers recall that the press was under strict censorship during the regime of the New Order.7 These materials can thereby be associated with restriction, isolation and artificiality. Enin Supriyanto, who has written the essay for Marintan's piece in the APT 2 catalogue, understood the artist's use of neon lamps and newspapers as symbols for [End Page 74] "outside powers"8 that stand in stark contrast to natural, native elements like ash and soil. By addressing this contrast, he presents the experience of living in an alienated world as central to the understanding of Marintan's piece. By highlighting the topic of alienation, Supriyanto also echoes a poetic statement that the artist made about Building a House in 1995, in which she discussed an "alienated body, alienated self and alienated feelings" and also compared her body to an "occupied land".9 In this paper, I will use Supriyanto's suggestions as a springboard to show how Building a House is an artistic articulation of the experience of alienation during the regime of the New Order in Indonesia. I will show that Marintan's experience of alienation is informed by multiple discourses. Starting with a socio-political perspective on alienation due to living under an oppressive regime, I will also briefly discuss the experience of women, wives and mothers during the New Order regime that might have informed Building a House. Parallel is the question of whether the art piece's articulation of alienation is concurrently an act of resistance against these same experiences, as Supriyanto has also indicated.10 By discussing Building a House as an act of resistance, I will show that "activism" in art can invoke spiritual or meditative elements while resting upon processes of embodiment. Furthermore, I argue that Marintan's conception of her main "tool", her body, for overcoming an alienated self and body, correlate with specific local notions of the ritualised body in spiritual and mystical practices in Java.11
The phenomenon of alienation is usually defined as a process of distancing and separation. As a theoretical concept, alienation has been present in a variety of academic fields—and very prominently in the writings of Karl Marx.12 In his critique of the capitalist modes of production and class society, Marx has perceived the alienated worker as a product of alienated labour. In a recent publication about alienation, Rahel Jaeggi builds her argument on some ideas from Marx's critique, yet she coins specific elements as paternalistic, e.g., essentialist notions of mankind and ideas of the "proper" way of living.13 Jaeggi overcomes these restraints by focussing less on the "what" and more on the "how": she stresses the importance of the mode of an action.14 This stress creates a discursive shift away from a rather externalized analysis to a more internalized view of mind-states and the conception of willing. According to Jaeggi, the phenomenon of alienation is connected to related experiences like indifference, internal division and powerlessness:
Alienation is the inability to establish a relation to other human beings, to things, to social institutions and thereby also […] to oneself. An alienated world presents itself to individuals as insignificant [End Page 75] and meaningless, as rigidified or impoverished, as a world that is not one's own, which is to say, a world in which one is not "at home" and over which one can have no influence. The alienated subject becomes a stranger to itself; it no longer experiences itself as an "actively effective subject" but a "passive object" at the mercy of unknown forces.15
Jaeggi understands alienation not in the sense of an absent relation, but of a broken deficient one; an alienated relation is a "relation of relationlessness".16 Alienation is further connected to two differing yet connected diagnoses: the loss of power and the loss of meaning (as Marx had already pointed out).17 Hence, the experience of alienation can refer to conditions of domination in which the capacity for self-realization and self-determination is absent. Jaeggi, therefore, calls alienation a "special form of loss of freedom".18
In the light of the New Order's repressive regime and its strategic use of spreading terror and fear among its population,19 Marintan's piece can be read as an experience of alienation due to conditions of domination. The artist addresses domination as a form of intangible pressure: "Your whole body, your mind [were] occupied by this pressure",20 as Marintan described her state of mind and body in the 1990s. Building a House reflects this pressure in the above-mentioned contrast between a certain calmness/meditative atmosphere and struggle or distress. One can link this contrasting tension to John Pemberton's well-known description of the New Order's peculiar "appearance of quiet and order",21 which he found remarkable given the national trauma of the 1965–66 killings and oppressive conditions in the New Order's Indonesia.22 Although the New Order's military regime clearly employed forms of terror and oppression, Pemberton stresses "a far more ambiguous, interiorized form of repression"23 or "a relatively muted form of terror that may become culture: the repression of fear that customarily secures, over time, an appearance of normal life".24
It is within this ambiguous tension or intangible pressure of an authoritarian regime that Marintan seems to try to build her house over and over again. Life under conditions of domination in which alienation is related to the loss of the capacity for self-realization and self-determination is a life under pressure and not "natural". Marintan's slow and seemingly disoriented movements with her body partly hunched over and her eyes closed, seems to articulate the experience of this way of living. Marintan refers to these conditions of life as the "misplacement of beings",25 which is symbolized in other versions of Building a House by a bonsai tree or goldfish in an aquarium, presenting "dwarfed" creatures that are living under artificial [End Page 76] circumstances.26 Feelings of alienation in Marintan's life trajectory emerged from her early childhood. Born in Germany to an Indonesian father and a German mother in 1960, Marintan moved to Bandung as a young girl.27 The experience of an alienated body, as Supriyanto suggests in an another essay, might be particularly connected to Marintan's German-Indonesian descent, which visibly marked her as an outsider.28 The authors of Indonesian Women Artists also emphasize the centrality in Marintan's work of the relation between body and home due to her mixed background:
The analogy between the body and the home stemmed from her sense of alienation as a child who often wondered why she was not fully accepted by her playmates. Only when she grew up did she understand that her mixed German-Indonesian appearance set her aside. This had far-reaching implications on the development of her personal and artistic path. Body and home thus became an unfailing theme in her artistic preoccupations.29
As the title of Marintan's piece suggests, the "house", or the home, is central to the understanding of her piece. The home as the space for the family awakens ideas of intimacy and safety but also vulnerability. As a mother of two little children herself back then, Marintan's practice also seems to reflect the regime's structural attempt to exercise control on a micro-political level—the home, the last resort of privacy.30 Unlike practices of censorship, which can be clearly marked as oppressive, other forms of the exercise of power work in a more indirect way.31 Propagated notions of gender and their implicit hierarchies provide a perspective on the pressure the artist mentioned earlier, as conservative gender roles were integral to the New Order's conceptions of marriage and family. In the national vision, the family was seen as a site in which the regime's values could be internalized and reproduced to ensure the state formation process. In particular, the regime emphasized the husband's role as head of the family, and the wife's as the ibu rumah, the "mother of the household". By building on previously existing Javanese ideas of gender, women were meant to be obedient to their husbands and were defined by their duties as mothers and wives.32 In the words of political scientist Kate O'Shaughnessy: "In the New Order's vision, obedient citizens (ordered hierar-chically according to gender) were part of an eternal nation, led by Suharto as the head of the national 'family'."33
In a similar vein, the artist's reaction to the official marriage law demonstrates her resistance to governmental interference of the home. The official marriage law stated that all marriages must include a religious ceremony [End Page 77] in order to be registered by the state.34 As Marintan and her husband and former artist, Andar Manik, had different religions, they decided to resolve this issue in court, which was connected with high costs, as the artist did not want to forcefully change her religion to her husband's.35
"Natural Movement" and "Natural Body"
Having established that Building a House calls forth the experience of alienation in the context of the New Order's political histories, I will now turn to the question if Marintan's piece can also be seen as an act of resistance. By marking the above-mentioned conditions as artificial and unnatural, Marintan evokes opposing visions. In an interview in 2014, the artist referred to her practice as part of a "consistent resistance and independent movement"36 or as a "revolutionary act",37 especially in terms of empowering herself as well as her body. If Building a House is not only an articulation of feelings but a parallel act of resistance to these feelings, one might question how an alienated relation can be overcome. Following Jaeggi, overcoming an alienated relation is not returning to a former "oneness", but through an open process of appropriation, meaning "both the integration and transformation of what is given".38
An open process of appropriation is in Marintan's case closely related to her understanding of the body. Referring to the feeling of pressure and control, Marintan explains: "I used these subjects to describe how mankind developed a system which doesn't fit the 'natural body', which disturbs the 'natural constellation', which pushes us to flow into a direction we do not belong to."39 According to Supriyanto, in the mid-1990s the artist was intrigued by the book The Knowing Body by performer and director Louise Steinman, which might have pronounced the thoughts underlying her practice.40 In the first chapter, "The Body as Home", Steinman declares that the unity of mind and body is lost in the modern ("Western") world and that current performers seek to restore this by using a different awareness of the body in motion. She describes their movement as based on an inner awareness of the lived body, distancing it from practices like ballet, which depict the body as perfection. Steinman emphasizes that "each body speaks its own native language"41 and that everyone has to find his or her own movement source within oneself. She terms this as one's very own "natural movement".42
In Building a House, the notion of nature and naturalness remains closely linked to ideas of a spiritually informed balance between the world of nature and humanity. This balance seeks to reconnect with the creative and lifegiving power of nature and—rather indirectly—the female body. A main [End Page 78] element in Building a House here is soil that Marintan forms into little mountains. Mountains have been a common spiritual symbol in Indonesia since prehistoric times and perceived, among other things, as the source of life, while in the Hindu-Buddhist tradition they are viewed as a stabilizer between the sky and the earth.43 Marintan seems to have had since her childhood a special relation to soil, which she associates deeply with the feeling of being at home, as she describes in an interview.44 Furthermore, as a graduate in the study of ceramics at the Faculty of Art and Design at ITB (Institut Teknologi Bandung), Marintan connects her profound knowledge of the transformative quality of soil and, by extension, nature and women's life-giving power. The repetitive pattern of little mountains and circles arouse imaginations of cosmic orders, with the big mountain in the corner as a somewhat energetic centre. Her concern raises questions of mankind's relation to nature and the world, from a spiritual as well as a very real and concrete perspective. Following Marintan: "The movement was very slow and it left traces. [It was meant to create] awareness: How to deal with nature. How as humans we don't have the power over others and how we can cooperate with nature. How does it work with people, the public, the society—our specific society."45
The Trained Body as Tool
Marintan's understanding of the body goes beyond her notion of naturalness. It is also informed by ideas of a trained or ritualised body. As mentioned earlier, the artist compares her practice to an act of constant resistance that also mirrors a moment of empowerment for herself. The basis of this process has been developed by the notion of the "trained body"46 or the "body as a tool".47 At first sight, this might seem contradictory to Marintan's ideas of the "natural body" or "natural movement"; especially from a "Western" perspective, the "body as a tool" implies a machine-like, purely functional, maybe subordinate understanding of the body. Marintan explains that her body went through several stages of training, not only in terms of her education in classical Javanese dance and ballet but also in terms of other techniques like meditation or fasting. She reports, for example, that before doing a performance she would fast for about three days in order to summon a specific kind of "energy", but without connecting this ascetic practice to any specific mystical belief.48 However, it is intriguing to examine indigenous spiritual and mystical practices and especially their implicit understandings of the body, as they demonstrate how Marintan's individual artistic practice reflects similar ideas of the body. [End Page 79]
Before going further into the analysis of possible relations to locally informed conceptions of the body, it remains necessary to point to the tension that Marintan's notions of "natural movement" or "natural body" implicitly hold. These ideas can easily be seen as articulations of essentialist and orientalist conceptions of the (female) body. At the same time, articulating such locally bound notions in the sense of a revolutionary act by reclaiming her body mirrors the ambivalent tension many female artists in Southeast Asia reclaiming their heritage and bodies are confronted with. Emphasising this very point, Flaudette May V. Datuin argues that these artistic explorations reflect a postcolonial dilemma.49 Nonetheless, these practices do not necessarily represent the artists' search for a lost authenticity but, as Datuin explains, for strategies to regain independence and control. The same can be argued for Marintan's approach, however, without dissolving this undertone entirely.
Returning to the topic of locally informed conceptions of the body, it is helpful to look at certain spiritual and mystical practices in Java that might explain how Marintan's artistic practice and its implicit notions offer relations to these local practices.50 Javanese mystical kebatinan practices originated from Sufi mystical concepts and pietist traditions. Kebatinan represents the individual search for the "true self" by finding mystical truth, which is understood as highly subjective and mysterious.51 To reach this state, it is required to experience the process of the "perfection of man".52 This process requires self-control and balance of "'outer' and 'inner' modes of religiosity",53 meaning one should control the "outer" mode, lahir, that will refine the "inner" mode, batin. "Lair and batin refer to two different kinds of phenomena, lair to what is perceptible to the senses and/or susceptible of common-sense explanation, batin to what is generally imperceptible, mysterious, and resistant to obvious explanation."54 Following the division of lahir and batin, each person has two bodies: the physical and the spiritual body.55 The physical body is meant to be formed into a wadah or container for the spiritual body and the soul.56 Moulding the physical body into a container means training the physical body, which is considered as the first step in kebatinan.57 Training the physical body in classical Javanese dance (in which Marintan was trained for many years) or in martial arts as well as in ascetic practices like fasting is believed to set the condition for the development of a spiritual body. Marintan's notion of the "body as a tool" relates to the idea of training the (physical) body as the first step in reaching empowerment.
In a similar vein, Marintan's practice of meditation techniques (for example, Zazen, a sitting meditation technique that is used in Zen Buddhism) reflects a similar purpose. In his study of ritual practice in Zen Buddhism, [End Page 80] David Wright explains: "In the Zen tradition, ritual is a thoroughgoing disciplinary program, imposed at first upon the practitioner until such time as the discipline is internalized as a self-disciplinary, self-conscious formation of mind and character."58 Zen is "embodied understanding",59 meaning that the physical training cannot be separated from the mental state. Marintan's idea of the "body as a tool" therefore reflects the idea that disciplining the body by physical, repetitive acts not only empowers the body but also the mind, which are closely linked as reflected in Zen practices. Explaining the epistemologies of the body in the Javanese context that contrast with the Cartesian mind-body division, Felicia Hughes-Freeland quotes Kapila Vatsyayan's observation that in performance in India "'the body [is] … an essential prerequisite for transcending the body'".60 She adds: "Although the material body is not necessarily the seat of carnal weakness, it is not necessarily the delimiter of human aspiration either."61
Marintan's habit of summoning "energy" through fasting before a performance correlates with another important concept in Java. That is the concept of kesaktian (kesekten) or magical/spiritual power, which has its roots in the traditional pre-Islamic Hinduistic concept of spiritual power or divine presence62 and which was integrated into Javanese Islam.63 It is perceived as a morally ambiguous power and therefore potentially dangerous (most Javanese mystics think that the acquisition of power is distracting from the mystical path64). As a concrete power, it can be used to influence social, political or other domains of life. Drawing on Benedict Anderson, who analyses the close connection between power and spirituality in the Javanese context,65 Ward Keeler draws attention to the concept of the "potent self"66 that can be achieved through various ascetic practices, like fasting.67 Regarding this aspect, art historian Amanda K. Rath has called attention to kesaktian as specifically crucial for understanding performance art from Indonesia.68 Rath develops her argument from an essay by the anthropologist Jörgen Hellman, who analysed fasting practices in Java.69 Hellman also conceptualizes the body in the Javanese context as a cultural body that is imagined as a wadah, a container: by fasting the body is emptied of basic needs (or desire) to create space for named spiritual energy.70 Interesting to note, as Hellman emphasises, is the seeming paradox of subjugation and empowerment, or more specifically, the transformation of control and subjugation of the body to empowerment and agency as well as the transformation of power from the spiritual realm to other domains, like the social or political one. The interconnectedness of these various domains as well as the seeming paradox of subjugation/control of the body and agency are clearly reflected in Marintan's artistic practice as they explain her notion of the trained "body as a tool". [End Page 81]
"With Every Breath, I Build the House"
Having examined implicit notions of the ritualized body in Marintan's artistic practice, it is worthwhile to take a closer look at her artistic trajectory forming the basis of Building a House's performative aesthetic. Marintan perceives her concentrated gesture of circle-making as the essence of a long period of time trying out different body movements. Likewise, her concentrated gesture represents her "own native language"71 as Steinman describes it. The roots of her body movements developed from her earlier artistic practice in the 1980s in Bandung, when the artist joined several theatre, dance and experimental art groups.72 In informal study groups like Sumber Waras, the artists would experiment with their bodies in motion as well as collaborate with artists from other disciplines such as music and theatre.73 Its highly political and experimental approach echoed the "art rebellion" of the GSRB (Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru) that started in the mid-1970s.
Like other artists at that time in Bandung (e.g., Andar Manik, Arahmaiani, Isa Perkasa and Tisna Sanjaya), she was also interested in new approaches to the body and an interdisciplinary and experimental approach in art-making in general.74 Some of these artists were engaged in environmental issues and activism (some still are), which resonate with Marintan's focus on nature and spirituality. Worth noting is another remarkable relation regarding the topics of nature, spirituality and energy, but also the bodily engagement with natural materials and the combination with rhythmic sounds. Building a House shows similarities with Sardono W. Kusumo's Meta Ekologi from the late 1970s. Dancer and choreographer Sardono created this controversial piece at TIM (Taman Ismail Marzuki) in Jakarta in 1979, in which dancers immersed themselves in muddy soil in a rice field plot Sardono had created outside of TIM.75 By presenting Meta Ekologi, Sardono not only referred to a new aesthetic but also sought to articulate locally held notions of spiritual and natural energy. He specifically stressed that his idea of energy was meant to oppose a piece by then visiting choreographer Alwin Nikolais that was also performed at TIM at the same time and in which a variety of new technologies were used.76
In her analysis of Building a House, Rath emphasizes Marintan's performative approach without using this specific term: "Her [Marintan's] performance is one of actively constructing the space and the body/home in front of an audience. Instead of presenting ritualistic images of self-transcendence. Her work is akin to a rite in which the body/self is continuously remade or perhaps even reclaimed each time."77 In a similar vein, the artist's use of ash for "washing" herself surmounts mere symbolic reference to cleansing rituals. Watching her running her hand slowly and carefully over her body, we sense [End Page 82] that she is deeply connected to the materiality of the ash itself as well as her bodily engagement with it at the very moment. By finding her body's "own native language"—especially articulated in her gesture of circle-making—the artist is rebuilding her very own inner basis by rebuilding a relation to her body/self. The artist's carefully and concentrated gesture of circle-making also holds many symbolic meanings. Circling may depict a movement and form or shape in which one keeps returning to oneself: an "archaic" and "perfect" gesture that revokes itself by returning to its beginning.78 "With every breath," as she mentioned in her poetic statement, "I build the house."79 The same can be said for each circle she draws: it might be the same rhythm of inhaling and exhaling, of starting the circle and finishing the circle as a never-ending rhythm of breathing in and breathing out, of starting and ending, and of growing and dying. The artist once mentioned that she has been inspired by farmers planting each single young rice plant on the many sawah, the rice fields in Indonesia, and the fields' resemblance to installation art.80 Although this view reflects a rather romantic idea of the hardships of farming, likeness exists between these movements—bowing down, putting the plant into the earth, moving on and starting from anew—and Marintan's slow gesture. By observing Marintan's simple though highly perfected gesture, we sense her devotion for each moment, for every carefully crafted circle, her focus and presentness in every single iterated action.
Acknowledging Marintan's emphasis on the lived body in motion and her bodily engagement with natural materials, it might be interesting to investigate the processes of embodiment in her performance. Also given the processual character of Building a House, one might ask, what could be called the materiality of it? Embodiment and materiality of performances are basic components of Erika Fischer-Lichte's idea of a performative aesthetic.81 Fischer-Lichte's theoretical work provides useful concepts in grasping the complex materiality and processes of embodiment in Marintan's piece. Following Fischer-Lichte, a performative aesthetic derives from the idea of art as an event, which she identifies in performance art and specific theatre practices. By focusing on the processual and eventful character of performance, she emphasises that the performing body is not only perceived as a symbol but also as a phenomenal body that is brought forth by the performer through processes of embodiment. Hence, she understands embodiment as how performers generate their bodies during the performance and produce a specific kind of corporeality.
Fischer-Lichte's idea of the generation of corporeality through processes of embodiment may explain how Marintan asserts her body in Building a House, specifically in terms of presentness. Following her, presentness does [End Page 83] not merely refer to a body that is present in a room; it is a specific quality that is being generated through processes of embodiment that can differ in its intensity. In its most intense state, the performer brings forth his or her body as an energetic body through which the performer as well as the audience experience themselves as embodied minds—an experience that Fischer-Lichte calls transformative. It is interesting to note that Fischer-Lichte has drawn her initial ideas about presentness82 from theatre practitioner Eugenio Barba, whose work was highly informed by his studies of performance in different parts of the world, among them India and Bali.83 Marintan's slow and repetitive movements as well as her careful and conscious engagement with natural materials not only generate a meditative presentness, but also indicate its core performative quality: a momentum of (constant) transformation. Although the artist did not explicitly use the terms presentness or energetic body for her piece, she underlines the importance of an encounter or engagement, rooted in the present: "For me, it was [about] the encounter with yourself and with the energy of the earth or other people."84 Regarding the question of the character of materiality in Building a House, Fischer-Lichte's concept of a performative aesthetic could foster clarity. She understands the materiality of a performance as something that is not simply given, but emerging and, therefore, highly dynamic, fluid and ephemeral. "Materiality represents an emergent phenomenon: it emerges, is stabilized for varying periods of time, and vanishes again. Individual subjects contribute to its generation without being able to determine or control it. On the contrary, they must be willing to submit to it to a certain degree."85 In concrete terms, this means that the materiality of a performance consists of the (unstable and dynamic) generation of corporeality, spatiality, tonality and temporality (the latter being the condition of possibility for the performance as such).
Against the background of this definition, materiality in Building a House is carefully generated and involved in many aspects: not only by creating a specific presentness through processes of embodiment, as mentioned earlier, but also by bringing forth a gradually growing "landscape" of mountains and circles. Recorded sounds of crickets and water dripping (and in other versions of Building a House also experimental live music), which the artist had deliberately chosen to stimulate certain chakra, infuses her piece with a rhythmic tonality.86 Marintan generally explains her piece as a fusion of different dimensions of sensual experience87 to create an encounter of a specific kind: "The interaction was about a visual art/sound/body movement constellation, which brought us (the performer and the audience) into a different time and space frame, through the 'unhurried' development of the lights, installation, and body movement."88 Following this statement, the [End Page 84] projection of slides showing the same mountains and circles are meant to "enlarge" her movement through a relation to another time and space.89 It might be plausible to say that Building a House throughout the years has become a personal ritual that the artist primarily uses for articulating highly intimate and politically related issues. As a ritualistic performance, Building a House can also be read as a collective meditation that invites the audience at the end of each performance to enter the artist's space and leave traces of their own by spreading soil and forming visual relations with Marintan's carefully formed mountains and circles. Although the artist opens up her piece to the audience at the end of the performance, Building a House remains the artist's very personal pursuit of an "inner" revolution that demonstrates the strength and transformative quality of Marintan's performative practice. It asserts discipline, patience and the sensation of the lived body.90
Conclusion: Embodied Practices and Resistance
In this paper I have argued that Marintan's Building a House is an articulation of and resistance to feelings of an alienated self and alienated body that derived from her experience of an "intangible pressure" due to oppressive conditions of living under the New Order regime. This analysis has shown that by marking these conditions as "artificial" and "unnatural", Marintan evokes opposing notions of the "natural body" in connection to a spiritually informed balance between mankind and nature. I have also presented Marintan's approach to a trained and ritualised body as related to ascetic and spiritually informed practices in Java that understand the physical body as a container in which one can summon a specific "energy". The application of Fischer-Lichte's conception of a performative aesthetic shows that processes of embodiment, presentness, and a dynamic and ephemeral understanding of materiality manifest the meditative and intimate character of Building a House. In regards to performativity and artistic practices, Marintan's practice portrays an artistic approach that is less interested in (or even, one might say, resistant to) representing identity. Rather it is deeply concerned with the processual exploration of embodied practices that are manifold and informed by politics, as well as spiritual and ritualistic practices. The emphasis on embodied experiences in Building a House constitutes its distinctive performative quality and the artist's potential for agency. [End Page 85]
Dr des. Sally Oey is an art historian based in Germany. She studied art history, intercultural communication and psychology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU) and Leiden University. In 2021 she obtained her doctorate at LMU for her research on contemporary artistic practices from Indonesia that deploy performative strategies and relate to questions of otherness and/or alienness. The publication of her dissertation is planned for spring 2022.
NOTES
1. This paper reflects parts of a chapter about Marintan Sirait's art practice that I wrote for my PhD thesis. In my thesis, I focused on contemporary artistic practices from Indonesia (mainly from the 1990s) that deploy performative strategies and relate to questions of otherness and/or alienness.
2. In addition to Marintan Sirait, Arahmaiani Feisal is also one of the few pioneering female performance artists from Indonesia. Other artists active in the field of performance art in the early to mid-1990s included Dadang Christanto, Heri Dono, Isa Perkasa, Nandang Gawe, Tisna Sanjaya, Yoyo Yogasmana and others.
4. Marintan collaborated, for example, with musician Erik Yusuf or Margie Suanda, dancer and tai chi practitioner.
5. Marintan staged Building a House between 1994 and 1997 in Indonesia as well as abroad. The first time was probably in 1994 at Oncor Studio in Jakarta. Further stages were in 1994 at the French Cultural Center in Bandung, in 1995 at Cemeti Art House in Yogyakarta and at the exhibition Contemporary Art of the Non-Aligned Countries. Unity and Diversity in International Art at the National Gallery in Jakarta, in 1995 at the Zeebelt Teater in Den Haag, in 1996 at the Second Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane and in the same year at the 23rd International São Paulo Biennale. 2002 was the last time Marintan presented this piece at the Gwangju Biennale before taking a break from her artistic career. Recently, the artist created pieces that are closely linked to Building a House, for example, her contribution to the Jakarta Biennale 2017 (Wiyanto 2017, 92).
6. Two cameras were located on the left- and right-hand side of the installation space as well as a third camera filming from the top of the ceiling (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIHILLKkzgw, 14.09.2021).
7. Zurbuchen 2005, 4–5. The banning of the magazines TEMPO, Editor and Detik in 1994 ended the era of Keterbukaan or "openness" of the New Order regime (Bodden 2010, 278).
9. Sirait 1996, 220. The statement was written in 1995 and published in 1996.
10. I refer to this part of Supriyanto's text: "We may well ask whether the body moves in order to fight against outside constrictions, or simply to identify the constrictions." (Supriyanto 1996, 101)
11. I am drawing on Rath 2011 who argues that kesaktian is a relevant concept in Indonesian performance art.
12. Marx wrote about the concept of alienated labour in the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" of 1844.
14. Jaeggi refers to Tugendhat's conception of the functional capacity of willing: "My account of the problem of alienation can be linked up with this conception of willing in the following way: instances of alienation can be understood as obstructions of volition and thereby—formulated more generally—as obstructions in the relations individuals have to themselves and the world. With the help of Tugendhat's conception of having oneself at one's command, instances of alienation can be reconstructed in terms of disturbed ways of establishing relations to oneself and to the world. In this way the problem of alienation is tied to that of freedom." (Ibid., 34).
15. Ibid., 3.
16. Ibid., 1.
17. Ibid., 12.
18. Ibid., 35.
19. Heryanto 2006.
20. Marintan Sirait in an interview with the author on 16 June 2013, Bandung.
22. Pemberton understands the appearance of order as an effect of the regime's framing of politics through references to "traditional culture/values" and ritual.
24. Ibid., 8.
25. Marintan Sirait, email correspondence with the author, 15 October 2014.
26. Marintan used the bonsai tree and the fish in her version of Building a House that she staged in 1995 at Cemeti Art House in Yogyakarta.
27. Marintan's father is from Sumatra (Batak). Her mother worked for the Goethe Institut in Bandung, which gave Marintan from a very young age the opportunity to have close contact with visiting artists like Pina Bausch (Marintan supported Bausch's team as a translator), who performed in Bandung in the late 1970s (Marintan in an interview with the author on 9 May 2013, Bandung).
28. Supriyanto 2015, 37. This text was originally published in 1996 in the context of an exhibition.
30. I'm thankful to Enin Supriyanto for this observation.
31. Simon Philpott's publication Rethinking Indonesia: postcolonial theory, authoritarianism, and identity offers an insightful analysis of Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality in the context of the New Order. Philpott emphasizes the productive aspects of power as in the production of subjectivity through governmental strategies (Philpott 2000).
32. For a detailed analysis of this aspect, see Rath's chapter on Arahmaiani's artistic practice (especially Rath 2011, 308–13).
34. Ibid., 1.
35. They won the case (Marintan Sirait in an interview with the author on 9 May 2013, Bandung). Marintan is officially registered as Christian and her husband as Muslim.
36. Marintan Sirait, email correspondence, 15 October 2014.
37. Marintan Sirait in an interview with the author on 5 November 2014, Bandung.
39. Marintan Sirait, email correspondence on 15 October 2014.
41. Ibid., 14.
42. Ibid., 20.
43. Wright 1994, 35–44. Another spiritual symbol that is closely connected to the mountain is the tree. In her detailed analysis of Building a House, Rath pointed to the importance of the tree, especially in Marintan's statement, and the many connections between house, body and tree (Rath 2011, 253–61).
44. In an interview in 2013, Marintan vividly described a memory from the time shortly after moving from Germany to Indonesia as a little girl. She remembers the feeling of putting her bare feet in the soil, which made her immediately feel like being at home (Marintan Sirait in an interview with the author on 9 May 2013, Bandung).
45. Marintan Sirait in an interview with the author on 9 May 2013, Bandung.
46. Ibid.
47. Marintan Sirait in an interview with the author on 5 November 2014, Bandung.
48. Ibid.
49. Datuin 2012, especially 83–7. Datuin argues for "strategic essentialism" (Gayatri Spivak) in order to solve this dilemma.
53. Ibid.
54. Keeler 2017, 39.
56. To be precise, the body is imagined to consist of three components: the physical body, the spiritual body and the soul. The physical and spiritual body provide the container for the soul (Woodward 2011, 73).
57. Ibid., 76.
59. Ibid., 13.
60. Hughes-Freeland 2008, 21. Hughes-Freeland refers to Vatsyayan 1980, 8.
61. Ibid.
62. Sakti (Sanskrit) meaning the magical power of Hindu gods, especially Siva (Woodward 2011, 83).
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid., 84. In his study on kejawen and kebatinan, Ries Mulder also does not mention the acquisition of kesaktian, hence understanding it as irrelevant (Mulder 1990).
65. Anderson defines power as follows: "Power is that intangible, mysterious, and divine energy which animates the universe. In Javanese traditional thinking there is no sharp division between organic and inorganic matter, for everything is sustained by the same invisible power." (Anderson 1972, 7).
67. Keeler prefers the term "potency" over "power": "The word's associations, for English-speakers, with masculine sexuality, potentates, and dangerous substances are all thoroughly appropriate. In fact, they are to be fostered, because it is essential to recall that potency and instrumental power are not really opposite or mutually exclusive terms. Potency is the grounds for the possession or loss of political authority, sexual capacity, material wealth, and other forms of effectiveness, influence, or coercive control—in a word, power—in the world." (Ibid., 39).
70. Following Hellman, the wadah can be formed through learning processes and strengthened by different kinds of knowledge. It is a highly dynamic understanding of the body and its boundaries (Hellman 2009, S. 63–5).
72. Marintan was a member of the influential Studiklub Teater Bandung in the beginning of the 1980s (Supangkat 1996, 219), joined a dance theatre group under the direction of Endo Suanda in the mid-1980s, and was active in the performance art groups Sumber Waras and Jeprut (Marintan Sirait in an interview with the author on 29 July 2013, Bandung).
73. Sumber Waras was founded by art students from ITB in 1988 and dissolved a year later (Marintan Sirait, in interview with the author on 9 May 2013, Bandung). For a thorough analysis of Sumber Waras and other performance art groups from Bandung like Jeprut, Perengkel Jahé and Gerbong Bawah Tanah, see Rath 2011, 225–85.
74. Particularly Marintan's artistic cooperation with Andar Manik in the early 1990s was foundational for her later solo work.
75. Sal Murgiyanto, who worked very closely with Sardono, described the following: "In preparation for this piece [Meta Ekologi], Sardono conducted a workshop in the outskirts of Jakarta for two months. He 'trained' his IKJ dancers' sensitivity to the elements of nature by having them immerse themselves in a watered rice field in the dark almost every night. […] For the performance at TIM, Sardono built a rice field plot outdoors, transporting ten truckloads of soil from the countryside. […] The piece was accompanied by a recording of insects and other night animals, and sometimes also by a few gamelan instruments: a gender metallophone, one gong, and a rebab fiddle. He let his dancers slowly enter the mud, playing, running, and climbing the pole. […] By doing this, Sardono tried to free himself and his dancers from conventional aesthetics." (Murgiyanto 1991, 389, 392)
76. Sardono W. Kusumo in an interview with the author on 11 November 2014, Jakarta.
77. Rath 2011, 259–60. With "body/self", Rath refers to Amelia Jones' definition of body art as opposed to the term 'performance art': "I want to highlight the position of the body—as locus of a 'disintegrated' or dispersed 'self', as elusive marker of the subject's place in the social, as 'hinge' between nature and culture […]. The term 'body art' thus emphasizes the implication of the body (or what I call the 'body/self,' with all of its apparent racial, sexual, gender, class, and other apparent or unconscious identifications) in the work." (Jones 1998, 13)
80. Marintan Sirait in an interview with the author on 22 September 2014, Bandung.
83. See, for example, Turner 2004.
84. Marintan Sirait in an interview with the author on 05 November 2014, Bandung. It is interesting to note that Marintan also mentioned that her first encounter with Joseph Beuys' Actions (via videotapes at the Goethe Institut in Bandung in the 1980s), particularly I like America and America likes me, left a profound impression on her in terms of the bodily "energy" between the relation of Beuys and the coyote and its implications for humankind's relation to nature (Marintan Sirait in an interview with the author on 22 September 2014, Bandung).
86. Marintan Sirait in an interview with the author on 5 November 2014, Bandung.
87. Acknowledging that Building a House involves all senses encourages the perception of Marintan's piece in relation to classical Javanese (court) dance, in which she was trained and which employs dance movements, colourful costumes, gamelan music as well as different scents (Hughes-Freeland 2008, 21).
88. Marintan Sirait, email correspondence on 15 October 2014.
89. Marintan Sirait, email correspondence on 11 June 2019.
90. Marintan differentiated her kind of "inner" energy from other artists like members of Jeprut (which she had joined for a short period of time as well) and their notion of "explosive" energy (Marintan Sirait in an interview with the author on 5 November 2014, Bandung).
REFERENCES
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