The Total Art of Made Wianta-A Reflection on a Performance Art-by Urs Ramseyer

Art is an important area of communication. With their works artists create order in a world that's becoming more and more complex. As seismographers of the present, they register the cultural and social quakes shaping our future. With their work they create aesthetic models that sharpen our way of seeing and perceiving global as well as local developments. They appeal for beauty, harmony and peace, and they fight violence, destruction and hatred.

It's no longer the harmonic balance of the pyramids and the architectural ground plans of Javanese and Balinese temple courts that inspire Made Wianta's creations. This Balinese-born artist, who speaks of himself as an "urban citizen of the world", has turned into a socially committed abstractionist.

In December 1999, on the occasion of World Peace Day, he organized a monumental Millennium Performance. 2000 young dancers dressed in white danced against black sand a choreographic answer to the foaming waves of the sea. Eventually they unfurled a 2000m-long white banner with peace messages written in various languages from all over the world and with Wianta's own calligraphies and characters painted in black.

As a mature artist of international standing, naturally Wianta knows well that the value and meaning of his new, socially committed works is not to be sought in some exterior cause - in the sphere of politics or ideas - but rather in the artistic transmutation and realization of his ideas and concepts. In judging his work artistically it is important to see Wianta not only as a painter, but, in the Asian sense, as a total artist who expresses himself in installations, calligraphy, performances, music and dance; who has earned a reputation as a poet; and who therefore always includes himself in his works, as a whole person, physically, emotionally, morally, ethically and humanistically.

Today Wianta's works are an artistic manifesto against the all-too-simple, comfortable and opportunistic black-and-white thinking he criticizes in both Bali's conservative Hinduism and Indonesian politics. But Wianta's new paintings and his poems and performances are also a plea for truth, honesty and peace, and at the same time an attack on violence, destruction and hatred.

His recent performance art "Street" in Lodtunduh, Ubud was a conscious attempt to mount an artistic intervention in a public place - a busy street leading from Celuk to Ubud. The street, once a symbol of connecting people and places, of coming together in order to communicate, has become a non-place, a place of transit generating feelings of impatience, rage and hostility. With the "Street", Wianta wanted to show us that art can change a non-place into a stage suitable for propagating an artistic message about the state of consciousness in a changing society.

From the very beginning the "Street" turned from an artistic happening into a serious event, a drama in which reality and fiction merged, bringing new, unexpected actors into the arena and confirming Wianta's statements. Dozens of young men from the adjacent banjar or sub-village were arrayed on the "stage" like a theatre chorus singing songs of protest.

It was the protest of a rural society against the intrusion of urban culture by an unintelligible and therefore threatening art. Wianta's well-meaning, socially committed performance art had finally turned into a social drama revealing the difference between an open-minded urban elite, for whom culture is a dynamic process involving change, and a rural society in which adat (customs), agama (religion), and budaya (culture) are still sacred; eternal values, an inherited property to be defended against dangerous influences from the outside.

Of course Made Wianta is anything but representative of the kind of narrative, folkloristic, or spiritualistic art Bali has become famous for. Here we are dealing with a committed cosmopolitan artist from the new urban societies starting to manifest themselves culturally in the Asian metropolises. The multicultural cities ask their artists to demonstrate a new, differentiated way of seeing and thinking and asking questions. After 32 years of suppression, silence, and opportunism under Soeharto, for the first time reforms and democracy have become conceivable in Indonesia. In such a period, art has a genuine obligation to be more than "l'art pour l'art".