Page 26 - 57 X 76 - Hanafi • Goenawan Mohamad

composition that fills the paper field. But even more to a parlor game for the process of creating an image,
interesting in this picture is the encounter and glimpse
of a metaphor of visual objects with the image of
separation and sadness implicit in GM’s poetry.
We can immediately recognize the quite striking
artistic differences between the individual works of
Hanafi and GM. But it may be precisely because of
these differences that GM immediately welcomed
Hanafi’s invitation to collaborate. He considers it
not only a challenge but also an honor. GM esteems
Hanafi as a painter who, with total freedom, always
works with ‘the joy of creating.’ The excitement,
he writes, “... is none other than the absence of
compulsion in his creative work—something that can
happen when the artist must follow a reference to be
represented outside himself.”
13
I think the process of the 57 x 76 project is full of joy
and the freedom of creation. The procedure carried
out by Hanafi and GM for 57 x 76 reminds me of the
‘exquisite corpse’ experiment pioneered by Dadaists
/ Surrealists—Andre Breton, Yves Tanguy, and Marcel
Duchamp, to mention a few of them—in 1925. Similar
13 Goenawan Mohamad, Hanafi, Sejak di Depan Kanvas Kosong,
catalog of Hanafi solo exhibition, Of Space and Shadows, Jakarta,
Komunitas Salihara, 2011.
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this experiment sets rules: two or more artists must
draw alternately or sequentially on the same paper.
Each artist draws on a piece of paper and folds it
to conceal a part of the drawing, and then passes it
on to the next artist, who in turn sees only a part. It
is easy to imagine how this experiment produced a
final picture that was completely hybrid, irrational,
incoherent, often chaotic, and at an extreme level:
surreal.
For the Dadaists / Surrealists, this collaboration
procedure is basically a technique to allow antithesis
or subversion of the norms and conventions for
the creation of an artwork. The aim is to release
the method of creating art from systems that are
rational, rigid and planned with certainty. In the
same spirit as the surrealist series of experiments
such as automatic drawing, ‘exquisite corpse’
places creation as an aleatoric process (from the
Latin, aleator, meaning ‘dice thrower’) that relies on
random uncertainty or coincidence. Aleatoricism,
which was later also developed and formulated in
more detail as a method of musical composition,
considers unpredictability as something that is
able to overcome the determination of the subject’s
consciousness and will.