John Rossa and Alit Ambara (2001)

 EMBODIED SELVES: A Retrospective of the Sculptures of Dolorosa Sinaga

Curators : John Rossa and Alit Ambara

The exhibition of Dolorosa Sinaga’s sculpture at the National Gallery in October 2001 represents a rare historical moment for Indonesia’s art world. One of the country’s foremost sculptors at the top of her craft is holding her first solo exhibition and presenting a two-decade retrospective of her work. This is a valuable opportunity to gain a sense of both the teremendous diversity and overall coherency of an important artist’s oeuvre.

Dolorosa has, over the past twenty years developed a distinctive style. All her sculptures are recognizable representations of the human body and evoke emotions as universal as the body itself. Moving away from her earlier abstract art, she has exclusively focused upon the body as the ultimate, untranscendable grounding of the human experience. Her chosen medium, metal, allows a myriad of micro-textures and subtleties while simultaneously asserting a forceful permanence.

It is difficult to categorize her style since it seems to emerge from the very essence of sculpture. Her work is neither distinctly modern, nor traditional, neither Occidental nor Oriental. There is something so elemental in its representations of the body that one can easily imagine an ancient Incan appreciating it as much as a modern-day Jakartan. She has peeled off all layers of contrivance and artifice to reach the core language of visual communications. The viewer is not dazzled by elaborate forms or inticate designs, but captivated by the sheer honesty and directness. We know we are in the presence of a confident artist courageous enough to express profound truths with rare simplicity.

While her work achieves a kind of universal translatability, it refuses to descend into the generic and pedestrian. Dolorosa always knows how to create a sense of drama an tension. In her famous sculpture, the Dance of Joy (1994), the thin torso lunges to one side and the head stretches to its limits as the skirt billows up in a great mass below. There is a contrast of volumes that conveys quick motion and imparts a unique elegance.

Dolorosa’s art is an art of the body that speaks to our own bodies. As sculpture of the body, one does not view them so much as feel them in one’s own body. They are not aesthetic images held in the mind’s eye and contemplated by reason, nor abstract images that are stared at in wonder and bewilderment. They are expressive images that head straight for the heart and resonate empathetically there. One almost feels like pirouetting about when seeing her sculptures of dancers. Our own bodies respond in such a way that the viewer becomes no longer a viewer but an experience of art.

When one considers Sinaga’s work since her intensive two year study of the human form at the St.Martins School of Art in London in the early 1980s, one is struck by the variety of emotions she has explored. She has cast dancers reveling in the rich possibilities of movement, women wailing in grief, emaciated bodies constricted by iron wire and bars, and meditative monk-like figures sitting crosslegged in peaceful stillness. The wide range of her sculptures prevents one from latching onto any stereotype with which to comprehend her concerns. She can not be called ‘a sculptor of dancers’ (as Degas was known as ‘the painter of dancers’), nor can she be pigeon-holed as a sculptor of grief. To borrow an ancient Greek proverb, nothing human is alien to her.

One of her main concerns has been to find a way to depict the experience of women, many of her sculpture are specifically about the female body. We see female fugures shorn thin and angular by suffering, delicately holding a skirt end while dancing, consoling a child held to the breast, or defiantly locked arm-in-arm protesting together. Here we have a feminist art that is equally capable of celebrating the female body and depicting the oppressions under which it strives to persist. There is an honest recognition of the enormity of the barriers to women’s freedom as well as an optimism of women’s invincible determination to make the world beautiful, enjoyable, and caring.

Perhaps Dolorosa’s most subversive feminist work was the one that appeared the least so: her proposed design for an addition to the Indonesian national monument (Monas). At the four corners at the base of Monas, she proposed to add four hands stretching outward, thereby undermining the vertical orientation of the flame-topped power-symbolizing phallus, and pointing out to the elements that make for a viable community: justice, education, peace, and friendship.

The timeless quality of her sculptures derives precisely, though perhaps paradoxically, from her engagement with her immediate environment, with the particularity of her own time and space. She responded, for instance, to the women marching in the streets of Jakarta for affordable milk during the economic crisis with a sculpture, Solidarity (2000), that nowhere reveals the specificity of its own origins: the female figures standing in protest could be the women in the streets of Jakarta, or Santiago, or Bombay, or New York City. Any Indonesian would see her other sculptures of bodies distended and contorted in pain to be a representation of those tortured by the Suharto regime, but they could be of any tortured victims. Dolorosa responds to what her friends and fellow citizens experience by placing it in on a universal plane, by representing what is human in it, thereby acknowledging the commonalities between Indonesians and others around the world.

In representing the body. Dolorosa’s sculptures emerge neither from a forbidding asceticism nor from a decadent voluptuousness. They remind one of the Buddhist teachings of the Middle Way: there is neither the suggestion that we should transcend the body by ignoring or denying its needs, nor the suggestion that we should think only about bodily pleasure. Dolorosa constantly shows us our bodies as if to stay ‘here, you can not escape your body and live in a transcental world of the metaphysical’ while she simultaneously indicates that there is needed much more to life than the physical. One may notice in Solidarity the disproportionately large feet which suggest the rootedness of women in the material world, while the fists upraised to the sky indicate a longing for a transcendence to a world where women are not reduced to struggling for their basic needs.

Dolorosa’s sculptures live up to the aim of art, which is, as Paul Klee said, not to serve as a mirror to the world, but as a way to see it. In her case, however, this visual metaphor is inexact: her sculptures serve as a way for us to feel our own bodies in the world, to feel the ways in which external power confines and crushes us and to feel the great human potential for freedom.