BRIEF NOTES ON MATAHATI AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF MALAYSIAN ART IN THE 1980S London gave me a taste of tweed jackets but it gave my son a taste of overthrowing the shahs. And the Shah was always impeccably groomed. My son and I both live in Malaysia and yet we have nothing in common, but my grandson lives in Los Angeles and we’re best of friend. We’re all so different and mixed-up. Kam Raslan’s larger than life ‘old school’ fictional character Dato’ Hamid perhaps best describes the complex and often problematic notion of self, one that is intertwined with the circumstances of history and contingencies of the day. Bred with “impeccable manner and impeccable English”, Dato’ Hamid is the quintessential Malayan Anglophile, married to English wife whom he met as a student in post-War Britain. While he benefited immensely from the post-independence political status provisioned for the Malays, rising high up into the upper echelons of the civil service, he wary about the values and attitudes that shape the modern post-colonial perspectives, projected through his disdain of his polygamist son, a beneficiary of the Bumiputra policies that aimed to promote economic mobility among the Malays, whom he calls the Ayatollah. Contradictory and conflicting. Dato’ Hamid executes his affairs, official and personal, with a mix of stoic patriotism, naive idealism, and corrupt opportunism, often without a sense of irony or guilt. He holds on to his Malayan dream of “ equal chance and equal share”, a sense of cosmopolitanism that is lost among the present incumbents, but perhaps rekindled through the younger generation exemplified by his liberal LA-based animator grandson. Globalization for Dato’ Hamid means a Swiss bank account. The generational difference described by Dato’ Hamid is indeed highly caricatured, yet in its hyperbole, Kam Raslan has constructed more than a fictional account. He embeds into Confessions an uncanny reference to the status and issues of Malaysia’s postcolonial development and modernity, its relationship to the history of colonial experience, balancing questions of colonial experience, balancing questions of identity, post-independence idealism, ethnicity and political status, tensions between Islam and secularism, local and global contingencies. The MATAHATI group is widely regarded as the vanguard of new art, described as the ‘pulse of Malaysia contemporary art‘. Comprising Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) graduates Bayu Utomo Radjikin (b. 1969), Ahmad Fuad Osman (b. 1969), Ahmad Shukri Mohamed (b. 1969), Masnoor Ramli Mahmud (b. 1968) and Hamir Soib @ Mohamed (b. 1969), the group was created in 1989. They practice their art separately, independently developing their individual styles and themes, converging together occasionally in group exhibitions. As young ethnic Malays, they represent as part of a new generation as well as an urban class that emerged during a period of intensed economic and cultural transformation. Officially registered as a cooperative, MATAHATI aims as expressed in 1999 include: to enabled discussion and exchange of thoughts that would lead new and contemporary ideas; to motivate artists within and without to exhibit work together; to be a strong voice; to experiment and work with other form of art. Clearly these are formulated to address practical challenges of artistic practice characterized by the complexities of the marketplace, institutional and artistic networks and culvating inter-personal relations. Shukri clarifies the group’s motivation at his inception: The grouping actually started while we were in college itself. More than an ideology it represented a support group. A way for young artist who were just starting out, to rely on each other, both intellectually and emotionally. We wanted to have that when we didn’t have art school to fall back on anymore. A sense of camaraderie described by Ahmad Shukri, however, does not explain the conceptual intents and tenor in which these artists pursue their aesthetic interest. As a group MATAHATI do not articulate any particular conceptual positions. Yet, individual works produced by the various members, visually compelling and conceptually arresting, exemplify a collective coherence. A survey of works completed by the members during the early 1990s points towards a trajectory which values urgency of visual delivery and conceptual gravity. For Ahmad Shukri himself the early 1990s was a fertile period which saw the completion of the Target Series and the Cabinet Series. These two series deploy images and signs drawn from popular culture, transforming the banal into aesthetic curiosities that reveal a deeper reflection on the social and psychological impact of insidious commoditization ad consumption, complicated by the pervasiveness of media and technology as a capitalistic agency. Their impact on the environment and societal values are dramatized in ways that both delight and disturb. Shukri’s approach in this regard is unerring and clinical. Today, we regard MATAHATI’s significance in entrancing newer strategies of art-making including installation art, performance and frequently incorporating texts into the everyday vocabulary of contemporary art; we locate their practices in relation to critical discourses, and as such restating the significance of artistic activism and collectivism; and – although less frequently discussed today – we acknowledge their roll in (re)investing into mainstream artistic practice the potency of the figure as an expressive, symbolic and communicative force. These perspective may be rendered from the works of the MATAHATI artist, yet remained undeclared in any significant way in the form of collective statements. The socio-cultural and political context preceding MATAHATI’s mergence are indeed complex. This essay will attempt to provide a modest exploration into some of the issues and debates on contemporary art and culture that hopefully can be measured as a contextual frame to the practices of artists as well as the group. Here, I would like to attempt an oblique approach by considering reflections on ‘alterity’ during the formative years of the MATAHATI practice. By he term ‘alterity’, I am referring to practices that aimed at testing and challenging prevailing formal and conceptual values, typically enjoying institutional patronage and support. It may also be taken as radical critics of conceptions, attitudes that had shaped modern thinking in Malaysia, expressed through experimental approaches that recast relationships between artist, audience and artwork. In 1993, Wong Hoy Cheong curated an exhibition entitled ‘What About Converging Extremes?’. Bringing together a range of practitioners from painters to theatre performers, the project was initiated as a platform to generate engagements between various disciplines, inviting radical modes of production and displays. Among the artists included in the project was MATAHATI’s Bayu Utomo Radjikin. The exhibition was accompanied by a modest publication which aimed to prospect various positions and potentials. Of interest is an interview with Wong Hoy Cheong conducted by Krishen Jit. The interview was significant for its speculative yet productive discussion on abstract art, ‘new art’ and the local context, and the return of the figure as a away to reinitiate connections with a broader public discourse. Wong recalled his return from the United States in 1986: It was strange for me to see so many abstract artists in Malaysia. (…) I never imagined it could be so ingrained in the universal, cosmopolitan abstract tradition. (…) how does one represent injustice and the violation of rights through abstract art? (…) But abstract art is so nebulous that one can read almost anything into it – Zen. Pure energy and colours, Islam, love, nature. The only way to say something communicable, for me, is through text and figure. Figurative and textual art are more plebian. Accessible and not so caught up in the realm of rarefied aesthetics. The young artist (…) are challenging the institution and are challenged y it. They it difficult to be accepted because the hierarchies and the priorities in the institution are firmly set. In order to be recognized, they need to create a difference. The figure is one of the things that make the difference. (…) they want to assert themselves into the mainstream. (…) some are conducting a genuine rebellion, particularly the young artist from ITM. They are tired of doing art totally through the traditional and Islamic perspectives. They are not against Islam as much they as they are against the non-orthodoxy of the figure. For Wong, the figure embodies a resonance that makes ‘rebellion’ palpable. He pointed towards ‘genuine’ art collectives in Indonesia, Thailand and Philippines which reference their practices to a range of political and popular struggles. In Malaysia itself, he pointed towards the demise of rebellion art in the late 1970’s, attribute to society’s general intolerance against dissent, the narrowing political space and the practice of muafakat in Malay society, and tendencies for such ‘rebellion’ to be absorb by institutions. The lack of discursive vigor in the Malaysian scene for Wong can be also explained by the nature of modernism as experienced in Malaysia, a modern art that merely “absorbed a modernist form but not a modernist sensibility… a pastoral worldview without the anguish and contradiction of modernity.” Wong’s critic on the art developments of the 1970s and 1980s requires further explication. while there had been key attempts to generate new perspectives of artistic practice during the 1970s such as Redza Piyadasa’s and Sulaiman Esa’s project Towards A Mystical Reality (1974), by a large, arising from the National Cultural Congress 1971, art was called upon to served national objectives of uplifting the economic and social status of the Malays, as a form of ethno-nationalist struggle. Over the period of the 1970s, the question of artistic autonomy and the needs of a social programme became an important aspect of the Malaysian national discourse on culture. International pan-Islamist perspectives were in their ascendancy, helped by the events such as the Iranian revolution in 1979 and later the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Aesthetic emphasis based on the Malay ethnicity and Islam became increasing dominant, culminating the 1979 exhibition Rupa dan Jiwa identified as Prof. Ungku A. Aziz – who prompted the 1971 Congress debate for art to serve a wider social basis – as “a turning point as well as a catalyst to start the exploration and quest for meaning in Malay art forms which can be considered as a symbol of cultural identity and unifying factor for Malaysians, specifically the Malay society”. Zabas offers an operative principle that rationalized the broad move towards Malay/Islamic perspectives in art: …in the heady atmosphere of the Islamic resurgence of the late 1970s and the 1980s and the New Economic Policy’s aspiration of changing the economic lot of the Bumiputra (…), the ‘Islamicness’ of the Malay was a crucial identity factor. If Islam expressed Bumiputra, or more accurately Malay, identity in a manner that has no parallel, then art that sought to reveal and embody the Malay cultural identity could do no worse than to go by Islamic principles. If a projection of a Malaysian identity in art emphasized indigenous Malay culture, then Islam had to figure in it in a significant way. If Zabas’ reflection was restrained, where irony is concerned, Farish A. Noor’s observation is cutting: More than two decades of state-sponsored Islamisation has brought us no closer to realizing the Islamic. (…) Malaysia’s Muslim community feels even more disenfranchised, marginalized and alienated than ever before, (…) the other communities in Malaysia yet to find their place in the grand narrative of the nation’s history; and that official, state-sanctioned history remains a story written by the same closed community of (mostly) Malay Muslim middle-class men whose understanding of Malaysian identity reflects first and foremost their own particular and exclusive subjectivities. Despite the superficial appearance of a cosmopolitan urban society in the making, our city centres have become the battle-ground between dislocated liberals and an increasingly assertive moral police. Race, ethnicity and religious difference remain the internal frontiers that demarcate the contours of Malaysian social, cultural and political life and for the younger generation of Malaysians longing for change and a brave new world, the tyranny of the past and the mistakes of the previous generation remain as the chain that bind them. Zabas describes the period of 1980s as a period of continual search for a modern language rationalized in relation to prevailing discussion on culture, religion and tradition, real or imagined. He uses the term ‘alter-native” to described attempts to advance formal and conceptual articulations along the basis of engaging with modernity (and post-modernity) and at the same time securing the sense of rootedness so as to reflect a Malaysian identity. Farish identifies the communal simmering that impact upon society-State, inter-community, inter-generational as well as individual-collective relations. He suggests that change needs to be rooted in an authentic appreciation of the modern and emerging forces of global-cosmopolitanism, and accordingly Islam needs to be seen in relation to the plurality of experiences and conditions. Yet, institutional practice during the 1980s by and large had nurtured a mainstream modern art that was largely preoccupied with developing forms and a vocabulary that provide symbolic significance to the twin concept of Malayness and Islamicness. These development, albeit pervasive, did not take place to the exclusion of other counterpropositions, which too many practitioners and critics like Wong, had been inadvertently appropriated and neutralized as appendices to the meta-narrative of art-making that privilege specific notions of progressiveness, often referenced to forms of internationalism (read abstraction) and its mediation to local cultural forms. Events, collectives and practices of specific artists – such as Towards a Mystical Reality (1974) and its initiators Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa; the Anak Alam group including Zulkifly Dahlan; individual practices of Nirmala Shanmulingam and Wong Hoy Cheong – may be considered as form of resistance that foreshadow ‘alternative’ developments taking place in 1990s.Wong’s inclusion of Bayu Utomo Radjikin in the 1993 exhibition What About Converging Extremes? would have been strategic to reference against the prevailing institutional practices. Bayu precocious talent had been evident in his highly charge figurative works, to be seen in contradistinction against the conservatism of many abstract artists affiliated to ITM at that time. While his works utilize realism as a principal language, they are not undertaken by a singular conceptual interest. Bayu explores, and continues to explore various dimensions: psychological states and conditions using the body and self as sites of investigations as seen in his numerous self-potraits produced consistently throughout his practice; social and political commentary, often referencing photo-journalistic images of the victims of conflict in Afghanistan, Palestine, Bosnia, Somalia and others. In his pronouncements, Wong may have provided us with a series of signposts that mark the thoughts and attitudes of the “young artists from ITM”. The “angst” ad “rebellion” of their art making are held in tension with the need to correlate to a new artistic language that engages history and contemporary conditions. Wong’s 1993 criticism is uncompromising. Yet, while we may accept the contextual inflections that conditioned modern art and artists from the 1950s to the 1980s into producing and reproducing a brand of internationalism complicated by notions of identity, mainstream art – represented by the dominance of abstract art – did not possess the necessary attributes to engage popular struggles. Bayu’s Pray For Life, Pray For Survival (1993) may be mobilize to complicate the relationship between the contemporary and the modern. The painting features an Islamic fighter in prayer. Only his weathered and robust hands resting flat above his knees are seen. Placed on the ground, secured between his knees, is a rifle. Here, Bayu has given us a compelling image representing notions of jihad, not a grandiosement of aggression and violent power, but an act of submitting one’s life to a cause, in humility and reflection. By truncating the figure strategically, Bayu draws the viewer to the central question of religion and the individual’s struggle. Such subjects however remain popular in the art mainstream where the plight of Muslims in the conflict zones of Palestine., Afghanistan, and Bosnia are commonly explored. Yet, the effectiveness of Bayu in expressing their urgency may be explained by Bayu’s strategic appropriation of abstract art. The backdrop of the figurative image is flattened. The blue clothing of the figure is contrasted with the red and black of the backdrop, highlighted by the expressive brushwork and the painterly gesture. Projections of fear, anxiety and urgency are amplified. In identifying Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, Wong seeks into the invoke political virility of groups like Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (new Art Movement) and the Kaisahan Group in connecting with societal concerns and political conditions. Working in the 1970s, these groups operated in sites and context that were often entrenched in cycles of political unease – characterized by increased militarism, the lost of democratic space, and civil society activism. The cold war, overt American political patronage and events in Vietnam had also impacted on the ideas and perspectives of artist. Radical art groups were often oriented towards the political left in their attempts to address the struggles of masses. Such was the case of Kaisahan Group, which was formed in 1976, four years after President Ferdinand E. Marcos declared Martial Law and the establishment of “Bagong Lipunan (New Society)” to protect democracyand introduce ‘law and order’. Kaisahan was part of a protest movement in Philippines that drew from Social Realism as well as street art strategies. Similarly, the cycles of military coup and violent suppression of student movements in Thailand were criticalfactors contributing to the formation of adical artists groups. These situations of political urgency are largely absent in the Malay context. The country’s relative economic success and political stability – despite the many ethnic and class undercurrents – preempt the likeliness or at least the scale in which art maybe politicized. However, described by social critics like Farish, the fractious experience of urbanization and economic development also promotes a sense of disenfranchisement in particular among the young. As astute observers and participants of social change, the artists of MATAHATI are not impervious of these predicaments. And in this regard, figurative art provides a visual language like no other in emphasizing such conditions. For some of these artists, it translates into the urge to counter prevailing and dominant norms directly, at times in danger of soliciting responses that may be counter to the interests of the artists. Ahmad Fuad’s diptych The Blurring Echoes (1997) deserves a mention. The left panel of the diptych is a painted image of Tengku Abdul Rahman Putra, the first Minister of the Federation of Malaya. The image is obtained from the seminal photograph of the Prime Minister’s inaugural speech in 1957. Amidst the crowd in the background are raised krises, a potent symbol of Malay nationalism and sovereignty. The right panel features five nude males figures, faces buried in their hands crouching and stretching seemingly in postures of agony. Planted upright on the ground are the same krises from the left panel, this time their handles replace by flames. The use of the Malay kris, often referenced to the mythical weapon of the legendary Malay hero Hang Tuah called Taming Sari, in the composition supports notions of self-empowerment. The exuberance of Merdeka (Independence) in the left panel is contrasted against the scene of agony of the right panel. The figures are positioned in strident gestures of anguish and agony made more immediate by their nudity. The artist has proposed a reappraisal of the present optimism. How has the meaning of Merdeka shifted between 1957 and 1997? Dato’ Hamid, the Merdeka-generation fictional character in Kam Raslan’s Confession of an Old Boy lamented the lost of the Malayan sensibility, displaced by the flawed politics of the later generations of the Ayatollahs. In this regard, he may be in agreement with Farish, but would not place himself as a part of that incomplete modernity that is conditioned by the ‘pastoral worldview’ as described by Wong. Yet, as claimed by Kam Raslan himself, Dato’ Hamid is an embodiment of the real, he stands as a specter of history and the contemporary condition. It is there that we may site critical practices of artists such as those from MATAHATI. They do not claim to have a game plan, if indeed activism to be described through statement making. Figuration and references to the real are part of the embedded radicalism that critiques the dominant worldview that characterizes the Malaysian modernity, especially practices associated with prevailing public discourses on nation, society and culture. The observations made in this essay focus on issues and context in contemporary Malaysian art during the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is hoped that in doing so, we may identify a range of art historical issues significant to MATAHATI, its members and their works. In this regard, it is germane that we may reference investigations and readings on the MATAHATI group to the following: Critique on modernity and practices in Malaysian art, and the introduction of the figure/body as a site discourse; critique on ethnicity, ethno-nationalism and multiculturalism, and the socio-economic impact of urbanism in hyper consumption on the individual and society.
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