Page 8 - Made Mahendra Mangku

MEMORIAL PLAYING
Solo Exhibition of Made Mahendra Mangku

by I Made Susanta Dwitanaya

Abstraction as a form in modern Western art is identical
with formalism. Terry Barret in Why Is That Art says that ‘modernism’
and ‘formalism’ are often used as synonyms, and that the two
concepts overlap. In the principle of formalism, the issue of creating
form is the one of most important things in a work of art. Exploring
the realm of form, in the view of formalism is the essence of a work
of art. Abstract painting flourished in Europe in the early 20th century
with the work of such artists as Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Paul
Klee—or the abstract expressionist movement in America with such
figures as Jackson Pollock, William De Kooning, and others. The
development of abstract painting in the West was colored by the
psychological condition of Western artists after the world wars. The
nature of post-war European countries triggered the urbanization and
emigration of some artists to America. So in the history of painting,
Western abstract artists tended to explore themselves and situate
abstract art as a form of personal expression of artists about the
psychological conditions experienced after the war.
In the context of Indonesian art, abstract art and various
modern art concepts are not completely absorbed to become ‘copy-
paste’ of the development of abstract art and modern art in the
West. Many art theorists have expressed this; and among various
underlying analyses, one of them is because of the differences in the
cultural and historical background of Indonesian art. In the context
of Indonesian art, every ‘-ism’ in the history of Western art taught
in the academy was understood as not necessarily an ideological
movement of art itself but as a language revealed to present
statements outside of art, including abstract art. See for example
the works of Indonesian abstract artists of the generation of Sadali
and Pirous which held to Islamic religious values. Or the work of
Nyoman Tusan which presents a real exploration of abstraction of
the ‘cili’ figure tending toward cubism. Or works by Balinese artists
who are members of the Sanggar Dewata Indonesia generation of the
1970s to the 1990s, which tend to present a form of abstraction of
icons of Bali culture, which became a kind of style identified with this
community.

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