Ugly Blog

Hers, in C-Arts Magazine (Sept 2008)

The goal keeper’s leap is fantastic, with sheer joy emanating from every gesture in her body, her face rapturous. The goal keeper’s goal, the ball she’s jumping for-to save, to catch, to keep-is a pink handbag.

For her July 27^th solo show, as part of the exhibition titled His and Hers, Astari presents ten pieces in the long gallery space at Vanessa Art Link in Beijing. (In a separate space, Pintor Sirait presents his work.) Perhaps fittingly for an artist who has moved through and beyond issues like the role of women and traditional Javanese culture to a more general-but still personal-openness and questioning, Astari does not address just Hers. Rather, she deals with His too.

Simultaneously global woman and private lover here, she prefers to avoid pinpointing exact meanings. In the triptych Contestants, painted like the others with a soft palette but a sureness of stroke, there’s a sort of open symbolic mathematics at play: competition plus Asia plus art equals the market equals competition, and so on. Three women stand in front of Borobudur, in front of the market quotations of the day. Fluctuating investment performance charts have a shape that mirrors the silhouette of Borobudur. Finally, some benefit from the subprime pain: If all the mortgage-backed securities hadn’t collapsed, Borobudur would only have one side.

It is an iconic set up with each panel presenting a central figure, one arm up, gesturing with that Hollywood starlet point, the point of the helpless woman who knows she will get what she is pointing at, the languid post-coital hand pointing to that, that which I want that I will get, that I assume is mine as I am everywoman scanning the globe for the very thing I WANT. She is clever, Astari. With an understated air about her, you realize that the veneer of the genteel woman is simply useful. She has a sly flirty smile where the veneer thins and the work you realize must not be so innocent. And while she is reluctant to decode all the symbolism, the paintings speak for her. The center woman is a likeness of Astari herself, beautiful, as she is, dressed in traditional Indonesian kebaya and sarong; on either side are other Asian versions of Astari were she Chinese or Indian.

The women all wear the big Asian Updo (hairstyle) that inevitably only the wealthy wear well. It is a portrait of the Asian Superwoman surviving faith and the market, tongue-in-cheek, undeniably powerful in all the ways she is capable, power paid with the price of public respectability. She paints other women as herself because it is easier and she doesn’t want to offend, but don’t believe it. This work is personal. These women have dug into the dirt and richness of life, they have survived the crashes, and they have stories that are un-acted, overacted, scandalous, inspired. How fun to bad in a picture like this.

There is a symbolist’s surreal overlay in all of Astari’s pieces-a collapse of time, place, things and persona leading the viewer toward not an idea per se, but the thought-feeling she conjures in the image. I have heard of powerful lucid dreams where the dreamer feels she can jump into the clouds and back down in complete control of her spring, choosing the destination. There are these paintings of hers showing women (and men) leaping over Asian cities, over the Taj Mahal, in surreal perspective, taking the world in a single stride.

And then a triptych called Peace Makers shows Astari and Pintor Sirait posing to fight, backs to one another. Astari stands in a traditional man’s fighting pose. (In an earlier version of the piece, when its working title was Kung Fu Fighters, she also sported a crew cut and mustache). Clearly, she is struggling with whether or not to wear “his” body. How do they share themselves with one another and how do they share power? How does any couple share power? Carl Jung says, “It is a woman’s outstanding characteristic that she can do anything for the love of a man. But those women who can achieve something important for the love of a thing are most exceptional, because this does not really agree with their nature. Love for a thing is a man’s prerogative. But since masculine and feminine elements are united in our human nature, a man can live in the feminine part of himself, and a woman in her masculine part. Nonetheless, the feminine element in man is only something in the background, as is the masculine element in woman. If one lives out the opposite sex in oneself one is living in one’s own background, and one’s real individuality suffers. A man should live as a man and a woman as a woman.”

Interpreted generously this is a call to the liberated (post-gendered, post-cultured) individual. In women, animus refers to developing the kind of assertive, capable powers often attributed primarily to men. Astari’s background question might be “How do I do what I want to do as myself?” How does she liberate herself from a prescribed role, from a collective role? There is fantasy and there is reality and as we close the gap between these, we call it success. Astari is outwardly creating the myth of a great everywoman by privately closing the gap for herself. It is difficult for a woman in a male-dominated culture to do what she wants to do in her own skin, she wears the face of a man, meaning acts as a man, if only symbolically, to be herself, to achieve greatness. But I believe Astari is not just talking about herself here. If a person does not want to merely propel the status quo and fulfill her prescribed cultural and familial roles, but wants to accomplish things, to create new things and ideas, or if she wants to win, there is always a mould to be broken first, some other name to be defeated-whether it be gender, culture or any other label we acquire through socialization. In previous work there were masks: is this a mask for him or for her? Is she wearing him as a mask? Is she using her own power, but covering herself with a man’s face to avoid hassle? Unlike the social masks in her earlier work, here the mask feels almost inevitable, perhaps a reflection of Nietzsche’s comment that “Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.”

Maybe this is all in good fun, satire again, but you can see in the expression on the painting she is a little uncomfortable in this body, difficult to accept the creation even as she creates it herself. This is the most personal of the works in the show. She is completely nude here: in his body she exposes herself. In the Jungian model of the unconscious, “Anima and Animus figures personify the struggle between the culture-bound, collective images of masculine and feminine and the developmental urge to liberate one’s individuality from collective norms.”

But it is clear that she likes to have fun. For this show, for example, she makes a whopper of a statement with her biggest bag yet. Being well known for her commodity-critiquing handbags, she had to take a special one to the world’s biggest manufacturer of fancy fake bags: China. She calls it Home, because you can literally hang out in it, and swing on the swing inside. If fancy bags identify status and wealth, this bag is identity consummate. Instead of hanging the bag on your arm, it swings you. Like a cradle? Doesn’t it make you feel better, safer, to belong to yourself, your own image/status? Only a very big woman buys a bag like this.

Astari’s show will continue through the Beijing Olympics-a prime window that reveals how well respected she is by the gallery-and it reflects her integrationist approach to work: incorporating sport, competition, running, jumping, throwing javelins off the Great Wall, catching the bag, and scanning the globe. But, as Astari knows, symbols always mean something else.

So how does this womanly woman wield power? With a big ol’ bag on her arm until “it works.”

– by Alexander Boldizar and Michelle Swayne

Astari: Hers was originally published in C-Arts Magazine (September 2008). To read it in PDF format as it appeared, click here.