Babies and the symbol of violence. The two do not usually stand side by side harmoniously, and even cancel each other out in our minds. Through the figure of a baby we get the image of the tabula rasa, powerlessness and human’s submissiveness. We cuddle a baby with subjectivity that sides with the hope for a new world.

Reversely, doesn’t violence come forth as the bitterest antithesis to such human trait and hope? Violence renders goodness and hopes hollow seeds. Traumas and wounds get scattered along tracks of past violence. Violence is the reprise of the ancient story of the firstborn Cain smashing Habel, his younger sibling, to death.

Yet the two terms, the baby and the symbol of violence, do appear side by side in Haris Purnomo’s work. In “Menunggu Aba-Aba” (“Waiting for the Signal”) (2008-2009), Haris produces and reproduces in hundreds the object of a life size baby. The babies are hung, at different heights from the floor, as if they were flying and floating freely above our heads. Their heads are shaved, their faces cute and peaceful, popping out from white cloth wrapping each of their tiny bodies, the best points from which to peep into the world. Several barely visible scratches that remind us of tribal-motif tattoos mark the area of their temples.

The wrapped babies in Haris Purnomo’s works also suggest cocoons. Does the artist intend to allude to an in-between world, a world that is ever rendered shaky by the natural drive of every creature to transform itself into some improved level of its existence?

After surveying the whole figure of each of Purnomo’s entirely white babies, our gaze gets stuck on the most controversial sign on the object: The unsheathed sharp knife of steel by the end of the wrapping cloth that provides the cocoon’s in-between world.  The knife dramatically gives completion to the pointed form of the wrapping cloth. The cocoon-baby metamorphosis provides a form of instant, banal and obvious violence. The baby in the wrap of cloth suddenly transforms to an alert bayonet, a sharp object being pushed in and out as if putting one’s guts to test. Hundreds of bayonet babies or baby bayonets now dropping at the right angle toward the tops of our heads just like angels of death.

Haris Purnomo never gives any name to his objects of babies he composes into a huge installation. He is a mother-artist like Gandari of the Mahabharata epic giving birth to a hundred male children known as the Kurawa. Yes, a mother-artist experiencing most ironic happiness in seeing the birth of hundreds of his sexless and nameless babies with all their inborn unlikely identities.

We soon learn that this artist wants to feature a world all filled up with paradoxes. The paradoxical situation is generated by absurd relationships between two terms whose origins, identities and contexts are of opposite significances. Such paradoxes do not alter the physical identities of the objects or the meanings of the statements made. The place for paradoxes is in the world of meanings ready to overcome the pseudo-contradictions of identities and significations.

As Deleuze observes such paradoxes destroy what we regard as normality (common sense). Normality (or normalcy) prevails thanks to the backup from a number of fixed identities. A paradox just sinks common sense that upholds the rules and regulations of life in general. Contradictory to normalcy, a paradox is closer to everything homeless, things seemingly improbable in a world of the common sense. Such objects that stir up seemingly improbable paradoxes are  “extra-beings” or “homeless objects”. 1)

Borrowing from Deleuze’ terminology, those babies with unsheathed knives represent “homeless objects” as known to our daily common sense. Enthroned “outside the house” of our practical reasoning, hope and innocence seem like allying themselves with violence and the dark abysses of death. Violence is born together with a baby and wants to be wrapped as one with the baby; violence even frequently hides itself behind a holy angelic face. It looks serene, innocent, like the smile of a baby satisfied after a breast-feeding section, clasping at its mother.

As a paradox, the hundreds of babies with their unsheathed shiny knives by the tips of the cloth pieces wrapping those babies certainly shake our moral sensitivities. It feels as if the entire drive towards goodness, hope and compassion were stripped off and bereft of any rational basis. If plainness and innocence were born together with and necessarily attached to the marks of violence and the drive toward the realm of death, what is then the purpose and significance of hope?

‘Baby and knife’ also presumes an absurd and chaotic world. We cannot comprehend such world with our daily, common sense reasoning. Victims and casualties of war, women and innocent children for instance, represent realities we cannot comprehend with reason. Nietzsche even maintains that in itself reality has a chaotic nature, without any reason nor purpose. That is why Nietzsche renders the ever-playful baby the symbol of a creature unflinchingly facing reality and a vacant horizon. Without worrying about finding the reasons and goals babies are ready to sail the ocean that has no horizon. The baby, says Nietzsche who regards that deficiency and pain just create the impulse to philosophize things, does that all not only with their rational thinking but with its entire self. 2)

If children grow totally in a world of violence, all their lives they will be led to see the entire world as but a battlefield. Violence stuck to one’s life ever since infancy as if wanted to say: violence is nothing but darkness. The depth of the darkness disables us to see the bottom. In the world of violence we are like drowsy babies that can only half-open our eyes. Like babies we are creatures living in the dark bottom of the sea so we cannot see. In Haris’ work “Menunggu Aba-Aba” (“Waiting for the Signal”) (2009), violence and darkness is likened to the in-between world of a cocoon within which clusters of lactose transform to the deadly claws of the wolverine babies or the severe Pancanaka thumb nail of the Javanese wayang hero Werkudara. 3)

Java, contradiction, violence

Haris Purnomo was brought up in Javanese cultural setting. Through many centuries of its developments Javanese culture has become like a syncretic stream amalgamating multifarious religious spirits and artistic traditions.

The harmony and reciprocal mirroring between one’s external/outer and internal/inner worlds represent the essential tenet of Javanese culture. In such perspective a human being is the microcosm that mirrors the whole universe (the macrocosm). Javanese people are supposed to maintain the harmony between the two cosmos in order to live happily in the transient world.

The microcosm is rendered as important as the macrocosm. Exploring one’s outer world also means journeying into the inner world to find meaning. In the Javanese perspective as a microcosm a human is a reality essentially spiritual that materializes through concentric stages. Such concept is mesmerizingly conveyed through the wayang story of Dewaruci, one among the most loved wayang stories in Java. The hero of the story is Werkudara or Bima, the honest and sincere Pandawa figure who goes searching for the water of immortality. He dives to the bottom of the ocean where he meets with Dewaruci. The latter, being like the tiny miniature of Werkudara, asks the Pandawa hero to go inside him through his left ear. It is there, in a little world that can magically accommodate Werkudara’s human desires, the hero gets the water of immortality he’s been after. Yet Dewaruci is in fact not a reality encountered ‘out there’ but is actually Werkudara’s own inner self. The entire outside world is within the inner self because if “the spiritual contains the physical, the physical is just the manifestation of the spiritual”. 4)

Does Haris Purnomo live out or discard the Javanese spiritual cosmology as this famous story offers? His paradoxical and pessimistic view, expressed somewhat more crudely, still lends itself to be drawn to such cosmology. Haris Purnomo’s Javanese virtuousness always brings him near to a sort of symbol. In his world of symbols Haris always wants to arrive in a paradoxical world that offers profound meanings: the world of the infant that has to carry great messages far surpassing the infant’s existence and physicality. Does a baby represent a spiritual and essential inner world that contains the whole macrocosm of violence that is but the materialization of the spiritual?  The immanent is presumed to be accommodated in the transcendent, and vice versa.

The bayonet babies in the installation work and the babies with the tattoos of dragon in the paintings “Insomnia” (2009) and “Selamat Tidur” (2009), for example, remind us of how small things contain big ones. The big world of unlikely violence is already contained in the small world of the baby. It seems that what appear contradictory ought to be juxtaposed so as to depict some deeper reality of the inner life.

In the daily life of the Javanese the contradictory is also easily recognized for the sake of the ethics of social concord. Saying “yes” to express disagreement or to express disagreement by turning quiet is a Javanese habit. Javanese people do not express things frankly and openly. The other party in the conversation has to understand the meanings of certain gestures and utterances hinting at the real yet concealed message. Magnis Suseno writes, “…The appropriate response should be a polite inggih (“yes”) and should never be an immediate mboten (“no”). It is up to the sensitivity of the partner to infer whether the “yes” conveys an agreement, the confirmation that a proposal is heard but there is not any commitment to fulfill what is asked for, or even a concealed objection...”

The half-asleep babies unsheathing knives behind the wrapping blankets may remind us of subtle contradictions that apply in the Javanese ways, namely ethok-ethok or pretense. Javanese pretense is meant to be the means to say something indirectly. The trick is useful for avoiding rudeness and confrontation. Such is what is regarded as the Javanese high art that is positive. 5)

It doesn’t seem that the subtlety of Javanese artists doesn’t need to wear away in the modern world. The symbolical world Haris Purnomo favors will always produce new elements so as to invent new cocoons filled up with contradictions.

Meanwhile the face of violence Haris Purnomo’s works imply may refer to another social context that seems to ever fill the artist’s mind. In the past the artist already witnessed violent actions and killings done upon individuals taken as street gangsters. Young men with tattoos all over their bodies were easily suspected or even identified as ones. The New Order regime then (1966-1998) saw tattoos as deadly stigmas showing that the persons wearing them were criminals that disconcerted the people so they had to be obliterated. The policy of “maintaining order” and “security operation” the New Order was implementing then led to the so-called Operasi Petrus (“Mysterious Killing” or “Snipers’ Operation”) to make persons with tattoos thus taken as enemies that have to be “taken” or killed if necessary. 6) So celebrating the body in the “Miami Ink” fashion had to be despised by the regime that trod even people’s private realm in the effort to “maintain order”. 

But tattoo is of course first of all a cultural practice. In ancient times such practice used to have a profound symbolic meaning regarding the existence of a given community. That way tattoo was more than just a subculture’s celebration of the sensuality and contemporariness of the body presently. The male members of a community who in ancient times were fond of tattooing their bodies with the images of certain animals and certain totems, sending out a representation of “totemic religion” as Freud said.

But if now we ask Haris Purnomo we will be told that the artist doesn’t mean to refer to any specific social context of his work. Purnomo said he wants his work to convey universal issues around the origin and future of human life amidst prevailing violence in different parts of the world. Something like categorical imperative seems tagged on his babies, consistently challenging us to perform our human obligations. In the development of such universal and moralistic representation Purnomo seems to follow his intuitive impulse as an allegorical artist; and for sure he always wants to go beyond common sense realism.

His fondness of paradoxes finds its outlet here.

Craig Owens observes that the impulse toward allegory forms a prominent trend in the current postmodern art. Allegory represents an esthetic strategy of giving additional meaning, a sort of supplement, so as to be able to convey something different. An allegorical artist does not invent new images but just takes over what are already there, piling them, in order to be able to speak about something different than the subject matter already existent (allos = other + agoreuei = to speak). 7)

In Haris Purnomo’s works this allegorical impulse gets emphasis from repetitive expressions as seen in the installation “Menunggu Aba-Aba”  (“Waiting for the Signal”) and the line of sleeping babies in the painting “Selamat Tidur”. The repetition develops the imaginary world of  “the babies”. The babies equipped with bayonets or having tattoos of mythological animals seem to have transformed to new apparatuses. These visual subjects may have their roots in Haris Purnomo’s experience and observation dealing with the “floating mass” phenomenon, which again refers to the past, and the phenomenon of “mobs” these days. Perhaps the artist’s keen intuition regarding “politician census” has motivated him to work out messages his own way. Anywhere, politics desires to discipline the biological body and make it conform and obedient. This is notorious as “bio politics” or “bio power”. 8)

Briefly speaking, the baby that leaves the traces of tabula rasa fascinating to the artist has become a sort of the universal corner stone. With its unforgettable smile just before closing its eyes Haris Purnomo’s baby traps and catches us with the fine web of power and violence. The visual surprise offered here is akin to the Kafkaesque surreal atmosphere: one morning, Gregor Samsa the young man wakes up and finds himself remains in the bed as a cockroach...+++

Hendro Wiyanto

Exhibition Curator

Notes:

1. Quoted from Gilles Deleuze, “The Logic of Sense”, translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, edited by Constantin V. Boundas”, pp. 3 and 35.

2. I find this quotation on babies and philosophers from A. Setyo Wibowo, “Pencerahan di Mata Kant dan Nietzsche: Menjadi Dewasa dan Risikonya” (“Enlightenment as Seen by Kant and Nietzsche: Maturing and Its Risks”)  Jurnal Filsafat dan Teologi-Sekolah Tinggi Filsafat Driyarkara, and the website The Nietzsche Channel- The Gay Science, as read on 7 July 2009.

3. The thumbnail of Werkudara or Bima, famous as Kuku Pancanaka, is his deadly weapon. Werkudara or Bima is the second oldest among the five Pandawa brothers as told in the Mahabharata.

4. Nemburnawa in a deadly struggle in the ocean before obtaining the water of immortality.

5. Quoted from Franz Magnis-Suseno, “Etika Jawa Sebuah Analisa Falsafi tentang Kebijaksanaan Hidup Jawa, PT Gramedia, Jakarta, p. 119.

6. Franz Magnis-Suseno, ibid., pp. 42-43.

7. Curatorial introduction for alien: nation, Haris Purnomo Solo Exhibition, Galeri Nasional Indonesia, Jakarta (28 September- 7 October 2007), Langgeng Gallery, 2007.

8. Quoted from Craig Owens (1950-1990), “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism”, in Art in Theory 1900-1990, edited by Charles Harrison & Paul Wood’, Blackwell Publishers, 1995, p. 1053.

9. According to Foucault, beginning in the 17^th century the control of politics over the body has developed to two basic forms. They are not antithetical in nature; rather, they form two interconnected developmental poles. The first one deals with the view of the human body as a machine. The body is to be disciplined, its capacity optimized, its strength exploited, its use and obedience enhanced, while being integrated into efficient systems and economical controls. In short, this is a case of anatomy-politics of the human body.

The second one rests on the species body. The human body that is equipped with living mechanics is treated as the foundation for biological processes: procreation, birth and death, health, life expectancy, and old age. In this respect control is made effective through intervention and regulation. Here we have the case of biopolitics of the population. Around these two poles the organization of power and control over the body proceeds. Power no longer demonstrates its utmost function that is killing but investing life on and on...  If genocide forms the dream of modern power, it doesn’t mean the return of the right to kill as in the past, but because power is positioned and implemented on the level of life, species, race, and the phenomenon of large-scale population.

Various techniques to accomplish the conquest of the body and the control of the extent of population mark the beginning of the next era, namely “bio-power”. This development takes place around military institutions, schools, planning, apprenticeship, education, and the like. In turn “bio-power” provides an element badly needed in the development of capitalism. It is impossible for capitalism to develop if without the insertion of control over the body into production machinery while adjusting the phenomena of population to economic process. (Taken from “The Foucault Reader”, edited by Paul Rabinow, Pantheon Book, New York, 1984, pp. 261-263).