WIANTA'S INSTALLATIONS

There is another kind of work that has cropped up in the most recent years of Wianta's career :"installation art"-a spin-off from the Conceptual Art of the l960s and '70s, meant to awaken in the viewer not so much an aesthetic reaction as a questioning and reflection. Wianta's use of the genre, often preoccupied with social concerns, goes back to the early days of the Seni Rupa Baru Movement in 1975, but recently it has found a new breath of life. I remember a trip I made with Wianta a few years ago through a desolate part of Bali's north coast. We were driving quietly along by the sea when suddenly he slammed on the brakes, grabbed his camera, and ran down to the beach to a clump of dark basaltic rocks, to take a few pictures of their ragged surfece. Instant reaction. He had somehow seen meaning in what, to me, were the most ordinary rocks.

I understood what he meant a few months later, during a talk he was giving on the topic of his role as an artist. He had brought a slide projector and intended to explain his working technique. What the showed us was the making of his visual world. He presented not only paintings and sketches, as I had expected, but also a succession of nearly abstract photographic compositions made of ordinary objects or partial views of landscapes, among which were the pictures taken during aur trip together to north Bali. These photographs were presented side by side with similarly shaped or similarly humored drawings or paintings. Significantly, most of these photographs had been taken after the works had been completed. Thus he was not simply showing us "nature as seen by Wiant", he was revealing his visual archetypes. For Wianta, the shapes of natural objects araund him correspond to forms dwelling deep in his imagination. The connection is one of immediate empathy.

This empathy is best displayed in Wianta's installation works. This thee-dimensional art has gained particular favor in Indonesia where the wealth of traditional symbolism makes possible all sorts of meaningful encounters with objects. Wianta's installations are not so much intellectual constructions as immediate inerventions-or responses, as he puts it, to elements in his surroundings. They are the three-dimensional equivalent of his "action painting". A thread, a word, the news of a death, and Wianta reacts intuitively, immediately, gesturally, on the object closest to hand. Whatever the medium - paintings, poems or now installations-any seemingly ordinary object might become the seed - object of a visual message. This transmutation of the ordinary was most vividly played out in an installation that Wianta mounted at the Denpasar School of Arts ( STSI ) in Desember l993. He staged a Balinese procession-not the idealized sort of procession depicted in postcards, but the sort that occurs in real life, with all its modern contradictions: people carrying offerings with blaring taped music in the back of a mini - truck, and set in a surreal atmosphere of weirdly lighted triangular paintings. He was giving a new, modern meaning to the idea of change in Balinese culture. In l995, he literally set fire to a river with a set of tall, tarred wooden triangles; and for the year 2001 he is preparing a huge installation of 2001 sunari (bamboo wind-flutes) in the rice fields of central Bali. These hollow poles, decorated with colored cloths and moaning in the wind, are a traditional means of scaring off birds and other pests. In these works, Wianta recreates a process of life. In these installations, is Wianta merely following fashions? Not entirely. Avid for novelties, Wianta simply sees in installation art another possible language , similar to dance and painting. Through his installations, as in his poetry, the creative process remains the same action of elevating the ordinary to the iconic, whether the materials are bamboo poles, cooking utensils, or a modern Balinese procession complete with cars, loudspeakers and the noise of engines. What makes Wianta different from most other installation artists is the free affirmation of his intent. "When the Balinese set a row of offerings on a platform,"he says," their gesture has no aesthetic intention. They just fulfill a religious obligation whose result happens to be beautiful. That's all. But me, if I take offerings and make them into an installation, I give it a totally new meaning. It is my selection that makes them into art. I don't create an art object, becouse the object-the offerings-already exists. I just create aesthetics."Wianta 's installations are therefore simply another kind of"response" to the world of things around him-and, as always, it is not the result but the process that concerns him.