Photographs by Angki Purbandono
at Biasa Art Gallery, Jl. Raya Seminyak 34, Seminyak.
Tel: 7442902.
Much art practices from the 1960’s onwards has covered a wide range of experimental forms and approaches which have become increasingly main stream, including land and body art, performance work, multi-media installations, and the like. Of all the visual arts, photography is at present still in limbo. It is widely described as an ‘Art’, but it is not given the same level of critical attention as the other ‘new’ art practices.
In the catalogue accompanying Angki Purbandono’s exhibition, the critic Farah Wardani regrets that photography has, in the main, been excluded from the history of Indonesian art: “It is peculiar that in many historical analyses and references to modern art in Indonesia, the development of photography as an art medium has hardly been included. This fact indicates that there is a gap in the construction of the Indonesian contemporary art discourse in dealing with the issue of the relationship between aesthetical notions, medium exploration, and the cultural context in art practices. This gap is ironic, since the photo medium has become an integral part of urban society, and it is one of the elements that form the rapidly growing Indonesian visual culture”. Wardani also says “the wonders of technology help to elevate the value of reproducible art works, such as photography and digital art, by allowing them to be created and presented with a higher quality and durability, validating a class of their own in Indonesian contemporary art”. Perhaps the reason photography has been neglected is because of the dominance of a purist aesthetic, in which photography defines itself as a medium preoccupied with images from reality, and tends to shun abstraction, or ‘free’ images, created by the imagination. Most photos record events, or are aesthetic exercises in photojournalism. Angki Purbandono dares to be different.
Angki Purbandono was born in Semarang, Java, in 1971. He studied Photography in the Faculty of Multi-Media at the Indonesian Art Institute in Yogyakarta. Angki has always been more comfortable being called an artist rather than a photographer, and his work has always investigated the problems posed in the realms of photography as a discipline. Angki likes to ‘toy’ with photography. How people perceive, use, and redefine photographs in everyday life, is, for him, a challenge and a quest to find, invent, or create, brand new ways of exploring the photographic medium.
With his exhibition ‘Happy Scan’ Angki questions our perceptions of the photographic medium, by creating images with a flatbed scanner. The flatbed scanner provides an immediate method of appropriating an image. It is easy to use, capable of indefinite reproductions, and all the more attractive for its mechanical nature. Though commonly used, scanners are usually seen as a one-dimensional limited tool, which digitalizes images and text into the computer. Angki attempts to prove that the scanner can also be used to create a vast range of artistic expressions. He does it by enhancing the capabilities of the tool to capture the tiniest details, and the most accurate and vivid of colors, of the scanned objects. Giving them an unusual luminous effect, resulted from the manipulation of the lights and sensors of the scanner, which are less potent than those of the camera. Onto the scanner Angki places inventive objects which are a combination of collage and sculpture, and, even occasionally, appear like miniature theatrical sets. The resultant high resolution images are then reproduced on a large scale, and are back-lit by mounting them on light boxes, like those found in the waiting areas of airports, or in other public places.
Angki’s images, such as ‘Korean Candy’, ‘Swikee’, ‘Snake’, ‘Am Happy!’, ‘The Dog Roll The Tissue’, ‘When You’re in the Frame’, ‘Ultraman’ and ‘Sleep Walk’, are created from found objects, including mutated toys and figurines, disposable wrappings, household appliances, and industrial waste. The manipulated and collaged images which are scanned result in naughty, disturbing, and, most of all, ‘fun’ images, which tickle our visual senses and imaginations by juxtaposing the pretty and the grotesque with the sensual and the childlike. Perhaps the most interesting of all the images is ‘Andy Warhorse’, which reveals Angki’s Pop Art roots. By quoting Andy Warhol’s famous image of a banana, found on the cover of the first ‘Velvet Underground’ LP record, then combining it with one of his own playful figurines, Angki is making a very clear statement about his work processes, plus presenting a very amusing ‘play on words’. The Warhol, or Pop Art creed, of art created by mechanical means, and devoid of the artist’s ‘presence’, is further enhanced in the image ‘Handy’. Here, Angki’s hand, wearing what seem to be the cut-off fingers of a surgical glove, is placed on the scanner. The implication is that there will be no trace of the artist’s ‘presence’ in his images, not even his finger prints will appear on the glass of the scanner. A clear statement about ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.
With his playful and suggestive images, Angki Purbandono demonstrates the potentiality to be found in the flatbed scanner. ‘Happy Scan’ is a highly inventive and intelligent exhibition, which presents the range of creative possibilities offered by the photo media, in all its manifestations. The show reaffirms the need for the current Indonesian art scene to take photography, and all forms of emerging new media, more seriously.
