Jaded in Jakarta

Impressions from a week in smog city for Art Jakarta 2024 

Kuala Lumpur is something of a midway point between Jakarta and Singapore and I know I must be a patriot deep down because I realised that I want it to stay that way. Offering glimpses of chaos here and order there, but not leaning too much in either direction and generally not taking its organising logic too seriously or being an example of any particular standard for a city. 

Jakarta is too much what it is – a chaotic sloppy city with extreme divides between the classes. Either you’re paying RM 70 for a cocktail at a hotel with a high-ceilinged lobby, grand marble staircases, and metal detectors at the door, or you’re paying RM 7 for a full meal by some sewers and anticipating diarrhoea the next day. In Kuala Lumpur, the middle class exists. And although I inveigh against the middle class (and its manifestations, its malaises) all the time, even though middle class banality is the very thing I have spent my entire life running away from — have built my entire personality in avoidance of — I am still at the end of the day very solidly middle class, I am the product of a middle class, I know all of its frustrations, its ambitions, and its triumphs and this makes Kuala Lumpur, a city of the middle class, of utter averageness, the neither here-nor-there, home to me. Jakarta with its devil-may-care attitude is intolerable. It is the only other place, aside from China, where I have consciously felt my heart harden in the face of a living human being because I found them actually impeding my ability to live – such as, in this case, the many street urchins who come and hustle you for money, in some cases with guitar and song and who refuse to leave until you drop something into the plastic bag they shake in front of you. The people in Jakarta really do not matter, you could wipe out 3/4ths of the city and it wouldn’t make a difference; there is a strong sense of each person’s complete disposability and this depresses me. There is no individuality in Jakarta because how could there be, there are so many people packed in that country, individuality is a joke, that’s why they all work together so well but I resent that — I can only register people if they want to be registered, as individuals, and I resent being seen as part of “a group”, even though I am — and I didn’t enjoy Jakarta with all of its large teams of people working diligently but without leadership. 

The art fair was an art fair, let’s leave it at that — any attempt to elaborate on such a blatant exhibition of crude commercialism and tasteless consumerism will just sound like empty prattle. An artist that I met at the fair asked me, as a gallerist, how I avoid being jaded by all of it? My answer was something like, people only get depressed when they pretend they’re not jaded – the trick is to admit you’re jaded, that it’s all bullshit, and leave it at that. There is no education, there is no “teaching the masses”, there is no promotion of underrepresented talents – an art fair is nothing more than a highly condensed format to consume large amounts of art at once, an excuse to travel into a country and have a “whirlwind” of experiences, a way to shortcut yourself into some insight — it is not, in any event, a way of “discovering new talents in the region”, or whatever the marketing material will say. Sure, some conversations were had, some networks strengthened, some IG handles exchanged, but the art is just decoration for all that, the art is the backdrop, it’s the conversational starter before the rest of it devolves into aimless gossip. The art world is a neat little way to feel productive and cosmopolitan without having to engage much with anything or having to really be in a particular place for a long time. 

Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore are not really cities but rather highly urbanised “zones” where all modes of living are temporary and transitory. Life happens in a loop between anonymous flat - commute - bland workplace - crowded eatery - air conditioned mall. These are not where homes can take root or where any real personality is formed. These cities are just zones of toleration… where people brush up against each other, apologise, tolerate each other as best they can and hustle for their small sliver of space as best they can, and try to drown out the clouds of noise and anxiety… 

Will I be happy? I think this is a very important question to ask. It sounds like a very naive question, but it’s still important that you don’t forget this question. Could I be happy in Jakarta? Probably not. Will I be happy in Kuala Lumpur? I’m not sure, in some moments it seems possible to be happy, especially when I reflect on how good I have it compared to some other people, especially when the other options are war, extreme class division, or living with your family into middle age. Happiness should be a feeling greater than mere relief that you’ve escaped some death trap, I think. Will I be happy in the art world? This seems improbable too, with the amount of tastelessness and empty chatter that passes for business as usual here. Don’t get me wrong, it’s ok to meet new people and listen to someone else’s life story for a change. But there can be such a thing as being OVER-socialised. And that is when you start to imagine that you’re playing your ultimate role in society when you can anticipate other people’s needs before they even encounter an occasion to express them, or when you start to feel satisfaction in the realisation that people find you charming, that they enjoy talking to you, or when you find yourself extremely confident in your analysis of your relations to other people and your skill in navigating social situations. In short, you should start to smell danger when you start to notice yourself identifying yourself always in relation to other people. Being a good hostess, essentially a good entertainer at the circus. Yes, there is such a thing as being over-socialised and knowing too many people. And yes, there is such a thing as a place being over-populated. 

Now, a brief round-up of the only two exhibitions I saw while in Jakarta this time round:

Davy Linggar at ROH
… It wouldn’t really be fair of me to say much about this one, as I visited on a day when the gallery was pretty crowded and visitors taking photos precluded my engagement with the show. The phenomenon of there being so many people in a gallery was distracting enough, but then the amount of people – their physical presence – actually blocked me from really studying the works and giving them much thought. Most of the paintings were iterations of one image, referenced from a photograph of clasped hands shot by the artist himself, but painted with a variety of filters (black and white, sepia, cyano-toned, "glitchy", etc.) across canvasses and I didn’t see any convincing reason for how transforming the photograph into a painting in this way was supposed to add to the impact or intimacy of the images. The built house was fun and gave me some flashbacks to a little play-house I had as a child that I would spend hours in, even though it (my play-house) was just built with plastic pipes connected with each other in an essentially cuboid format, with a plastic printed house sheeting that you'd throw over it once you'd got the pipe structure up. The exhibition's built house (which had its own architect, was built of wood, and was decidedly not at all like my little plastic playhouse) was meant to evoke a scale of appreciating and living with paintings, and the paintings hung inside the house tried to reflect that intimate scale with subject matter revolving around domestic everyday things like birthdays, pets, a glass of water. But I couldn’t enter into the feelings the paintings were trying to evoke; the house mostly felt gimmicky and stuffy and the photographs that the paintings referenced, along with the design of the house, too staged, editorialised. Other than that, I really didn’t spend a lot of time in this show at all, definitely not enough to say anything meaningful about it. 

Julian Abraham, a.k.a. “Togar” at Rubanah Art Hub
… Many of the techniques the artist used to create sounds and rhythm were quite ingenious pieces of layering and sampling. I didn’t quite understand the text-based artworks, other than that a stage set-up needs a backdrop and these were sufficiently punk-looking to seem casual and festive, but also artistic enough to be contemplated. The more interesting of those pieces weren’t those of the aphorisms trying somewhat cornily to politicise sound in some way, but instead the vertical, totem-like ones of the artist’s name with the font jumbled about in a way that visualised sound’s vibration: tttttooooggggaaaarrr. A nice space to be in. The curatorial text accompanying it introduces the exhibition as a “space you can fall asleep in”, and by implication this should suggest the work’s “accessibility” because you’re more than welcome to fall asleep in the space, there are ample bean bags and the floor is thickly carpeted, but I found this irritating because it seemed like such a childish, whimsical thing to say, an unnecessary statement of the obvious. You can fall asleep here!! Siri, how to say I don’t know anything about sound engineering without actually having to say I don’t know anything about sound engineering?