Guyah* art and Rusnoto’s labyrinth world

Guyah* art and Rusnoto’s labyrinth world

By Bambang Asrini Widjanarko

Rusnoto seems to talk about a mental process via self-knowledge, in Husserl’s term. Words can’t describe consciousness; it could only be felt. Through the moving perspectives of Rusnoto, with cognitive and intuitive power, and objects that he symbolizes around him as an understood subjective reality that blends with his soul.

Today, it is so intriguing to peek at art practices and discourses’ traces of existence; whether to cynically laugh at it or to celebrate it? Since the existence of art is (now) considered guyah*. Artworks are now something that no longer need the ritual of “certain senses” to create and “consume” it. It absolutely is no longer sacred; it already let go the dreams of “depth”, which is considered in the earlier generation. What’s left is the dying effort of producing and giving means which leads to the state of: anything goes!

It’s been said that arts today are produced massively by a big construction (of taste) with the help of technology, imaging strategy and good marketing, just as creating television programs. We will be ticked; to cynically throw comments (on “funny” political debates on television) or happy as hell (if we are watching the game of our favorite team; say, MU scored a goal). Everything is instant, no stress, contemplation, or leftovers in our head.

One day, if out of boredom we zap the remote and travel around television channels we’ll find some totally different programs: dramas about the tragic of humans’ destiny which is so contemplative that it moves our soul. We no longer care. We consume everything. We don’t have to worry (about anything) in such programs. Whether such program gives essential contributions to a certain value or it just several banal moments passing by our lives? But is it true? At least, so according to Arthur Coleman Danto, through after the end of art, the “sacred” look of art or the rigid formalism out of Greenberg’s “single logic” and its modernism has fallen, helplessly lying down and dead.

What happened to Damien Hirst, the front man of English’ contemporary arts is that he created a thesis about today’s arts. If we look at Don Thompson’s The $12 million stuffed shark, he mentioned how The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living that used to be discoursed as a philosophical reflection of dead and alive is now replaced with a new “dead shark” which is injected with so many formalin in order the keep it longer.

The shark has a very long and historical story with it before it gets as popular as it is today. Moreover, if you care enough to look at its fantastic price (for a conceptual art)! Artifact of an artwork is now together constructed; together, consciously leaving authenticity and originality along with whatever aesthetic law that exists in the past. Plurality of means is the newest spell of the newborns.

Since 1991, Charles Saatchi, a popular art dealer, has been paying attentions to Damien Hirst with such intention: visual artworks are closely related to the commodification; a stage of spectacles society and the celebration of hyper-banality on the consumer society. Everything is being celebrated! Artworks are part of the Art World-Hype. The Dream Team (art dealers, auctions, popular galleries, critics, museum curators, exhibition organizers and all infrastructures of arts) is fighting for the contemporary art that accommodates the era; in creating such myth for that work of Damien’s.

This solo exhibition of Rusnoto, titled Virtual Displacement, seemed to poke our consciousness, interpreting Danto’s desire, which believes that in arts there are autonomous ways influenced by historical relations that leads to “the final point of narration”. Artists, freed in whatever spirit, build histories and narrate anything, regarding the artists’-subject. Even such “assigned-historical-construction” from the “public relation team of Damien Hirst: Charles Saathci and the guys” construct their own art world; a specified new history. We can read it as groups of fragments that constitute a new phenomenon in the world of art and the new existentialism is on their side.

From there on, Rusnoto, an artist, a subject, reads our art world by building signs in his works. Making visual codes that looks like a labyrinth of the art world. Layers and stratums caress’ each other, tunnels surrounds, opens, closes and comes at the same time. Rusnoto feels that the art world is as complex as a labyrinth.

Rusnoto seems to talk about a mental process via self-knowledge, borrowing Husserl’s term. Words can’t describe consciousness; it could only be felt. Through the moving perspectives of Rusnoto, with cognitive and intuitive power, and objects that he symbolizes around him as an understood subjective reality that blends with his soul.

The change of characters in contemporary society, which is significantly influenced by the fast-movements and time-foldings through the virtual world (virtual space), also affects the art world. The art world is also changed now. “Such change” is also considered as a “virtual” thing. Contemporary society, basically, doesn’t have the ability to comprehend, which one is real, and which one is virtual; not only because of the technology, but also because of the mental process –consciousness– no longer works well. As we can see, the virtual phenomenon happens even from the era of Plato. You do remember Plato’s allegory, right? Because everything that we face is fake, virtual. Since Plato wanted something “ideal” outside the cave that’s been stated as our reality; the ideal truth is in the absolute soul.

His paintings are full of signs, presented in cityscapes full of cubical buildings. There are some sort of senses that we are asked to sneak in to the circuits that are connected with cables and strange installations (plates and balls). Is this some kind of Rusnoto’s reflection of imaginations altogether with his sensitive spontaneity in form of a communicative act between subjects in the art world? Or, it is his belief that the art world is made out of several constructions that reconstructs each other.

On his other works, Rusnoto no longer paints buildings or cityscape of far-far away cities; but the surface of his canvases seems to be covered with walls, the top surface plays the role of a gate of an unknown city, serving cubical holes, some sort of a steel partition that allows us to peek inside. There’s another reality in it. The others, the different ones. This symbol might be Rusnoto’s mental observation on the act of understanding (verstehen). Maybe, all he’s trying to find in the art world are double-sided: singular-plural, virtual-real, commercial-noncomercial, transcendent-profound, and so on, not only causalities in between.

Or, the “hard and heavy” symbolic steel wall that Rusnoto drew is a description of art history in his current life. To find “the depth of the means” that reconstructs the reality that he apprehend. Even if the understanding of each means are taken (consciously and) intentionally by Rusnoto as an individual, yet “the accuracy” of truth depends on the intersubjective aspects. How far “the depth of the means” that he found is really reconstructed from the reality of art world society that involves so many subjects.

In other paintings, Rusnoto drew blue circular symbols that looks like connected molecules in physics. Inside the strong circles, appears another space that consists of buildings of several circuits of steel cables that is tightened each other, crosses and intersects each other. Nothing is for sure; relativity! Soon we remember: whether this is a blatant explanation of the relativity in duality that exists in the fields of energy and waves in quantum physics?

Overall, codes and visual signs that Rusnoto built, other than it follows Danto’s model, also highlights the concept of phenomenologist that puts the art phenomenon and its social structure as a symbol that needs to be understood in its socio-cultural context; thus who broaden them. Rusnoto is like a subject element (micro), seen form inseprabale parts of the process of creating the one and only art world (macro).

*Guyah can literary be translated as a dynamic phenomenon that opens so many probability of sporadic changes. Changes without any measured certainty.

Bambang Asrini Widjanarko Visual art writer