Agus Suwage : Review
By Carmen Nge


In the firmament of Indonesian art, the name Agus Suwage has become synonymous with self-portraiture. But conventional self-portraiture of the self-aggrandizing variety is not the mainstay of Suwage’s appeal.

The consummate self-critic, Suwage has a delightfully whimsical and occasionally acerbic penchant for poking fun and taking potshots at himself. He particularly enjoys visually attacking every part of his head—having darts thrown at his clownish grinning face (Teruskan, Semakin Sakit Semakin Baik), having fingers yanking hard on his right ear (Selingkuh Tak Sampai) or stuffing themselves into his nostrils (I Smell Therefore I Am), having a McDonalds garbage bag pulled tight over his head ala Iraqi tortures at Abu Ghraib (Sekadar Memperagakan Apa Yang Sedang Dilakukan Oleh Si Dia).

Perhaps he is a masochist; after all, masochists have no ego and are willing to subject themselves to the sadistic dictates of their oppressors. Many of Suwage’s self-portraits are precisely about divesting the artist of his ego by destabilizing the myth of the self as centre of the subject in portraiture.

For his solo show at Valentine Willie Art Gallery, curator Adeline Ooi notes that Suwage “introduces a number of works made specifically for the Malaysian context”. It would appear that Suwage has hit the nail on the head: masochism as an underlying tendency of our consciousness is not altogether a misleading way of characterizing our society. We allow ourselves to be suppressed, oppressed and silenced on many fronts—and we grin and call it economic stability.

Like most artists, Suwage, when pressed, is unwilling to explain himself. Yet, he does reveal a few things: as a Chinese Muslim convert (he is a former Catholic) who has no qualms about changing faiths for love and marriage, Suwage is perplexed by monotheistic religions’ fervour to demarcate clear boundaries amongst themselves. “It should not matter if one is a Muslim or Catholic. The important thing is the values underlying the two different religions. People have forgotten about that,” he muses.

Works like Madonna Baru and Holy Beer play with ubiquitous signifiers of Christianity, art and Islam. The famous image from Western art of Madonna and the Christ child is parlayed into a deeper reflection of religious symbolism itself. Here, Madonna is cloaked in a jilbab, her face lighted up, emanating a kind of hallowed glow. Positioning himself as the Madonna figure and using his own child as the Christ stand-in (Suwage tells me that his son is crying in the painting because he does not like his father dressed up as a woman!), Suwage appears to question the iconicity of the Madonna and Child image. Is it preposterous to imagine a Madonna wearing clothes most identified with Muslim women? Is it sacrilege to reimagine her as a man? Is it arrogant for the artist to paint himself in this role or does the gender, racial and religious reversal degrade the symbol itself? Does the source of Madonna’s value and iconicity reside in her identity as woman, Christian, Jew?

Holy Beer traverses a similar religious path, this time drawing on that tenuous link between teetotalling and religious piety. The Holy Beer logo fuses two icons from the Islamic and Christian faiths: the crescent moon and the crucifix. The former is a religion that necessitates abstinence from alcohol; the latter is one that ritualises wine drinking in church services. The artist—signifying both Muslim and Catholic—sits in the empty beer glass, gleefully shrugging and grinning at his fate: to drink or not to drink, does it matter? Will he burn in the fires of hell if he does? Are the two faiths more different than similar?

In another visually charged work, Suwage revisits a favourite animal: the pig. Suwage tells me that he feels for the pig, which is often a figure of vilification. Generally speaking, pigs are often symbolic of corruption, filth, greed, taboo and degeneracy; in the West, cops and riot police are pigs. For some reason, pigs have become universally reviled even though, as Suwage quips, “Piglets are really cute.”

Just as he strips the Madonna icon of its symbolic overtones of Christian sanctity, Suwage wants to redeem the pig from its sad, visually over-determined fate. Wearing bright pink pig masks in Paradiso-Inferno PP#2, Suwage is Saint Pig and Satanic Pig, both at once. Good Pig and Evil Pig share the canvas, Good Pig and Evil Pig playfully bare their bottoms—though the latter has flames shooting out of his underpants! In fairly typical Suwage style, he juxtaposes two opposites: good and bad, black and white, positive and negative, sacred and profane. The artist, the man behind the mask, does not preside over and control the definitions of any of these categories, instead, he inhabits them with his whole self. Pig, after all, is a facade for Man.

Self-portraiture, according to Rizki A. Zaelani (curator of Suwage’s “Ow…Oink!!” show at the National Gallery of Indonesia, 2003), is “also shaded by the atmosphere of discussions that assert the narrative of the death of the author.” It is therefore natural for someone like Suwage, who has eschewed the narcissistic tendencies of self-portraiture, to create a piece called Self Portrait As Banaspati. In this work, made up of a series of five canvasses connected to tell a tale, Suwage references Banaspati, who is a lord of omnipotent power in the Mahabharata and who later transforms into a flame.

It is possible to read the work as depicting a metamorphosis, but it is also entirely plausible to interpret it as the final act of self-destruction. The artist as corporeal is extinguished. What remains is the creative spirit, the energy that drives the artist—the impulse, which is abstract, and not the result, which is concrete. Suwage tells me that he is drawn to the image of fire because fire is life, not destruction, and he is unafraid of it.

At its most fundamental, Agus Suwage’s self-portraits are provocative, interesting, even controversial because in their disavowal of an idealized self, they embrace the kind of self-criticism, self-reflection and even self-loathing that is more often than not, a more accurate symptom of everyday human beings.

__________________________________________
This piece was published in the November 2004 issue of Options2, The Edge