Sarah Muray (2001)

 The Movement of Life

Sarah Murray

When I opened the digital file of photos on my computer of Dolorosa’s most recent sculptures and the images poured out, I laughed. I laughed because, out of the stiff folds of bronze, the fluid but relentless energy of Dolo’s own presence came streaming. How rare for pieces of bronze to so call up life!

Dolo has broadened her subjects in her most recent work – most notably, with the public sculpture. Themefor Us Today: The Crisis (2001) ; and the pieces Solidarity (2000), Resistante (1996); Life Cycle (1997); and The Grief (2001) – but her ultimate theme remains the same: how to translate the force of life into sculpture. Unlike her pematung peer Anusapati, however, Dolo has never been interested in the more mystical, unfocused and freefloating energies of the universe – which is perhaps why wood has never fascinated her as a medium. She has always use bronze, and always focused squarely on naturalistic renderings of the human body as the vehicle for focusing and translating the energies of life into recognizable material form.

Dolo’s best known works have involved figures of dancers or dancing women. She continues to explore dance in the works presented here, both directly (Two Dancers (1999), The Dance of Joy (1997) and indirectly, in the rendering of figures in works like At the Edge of Hope (1999) and Sister Take Me Dance with You (2001). However, she also extends her fascination with the body’s movement into pieces that explore emotions, community, and human connection – subjects that show her vision ripening and maturing.

In Solidarity, seven women – who could be sisters or could be versions of Dolo herself – link arms and talk and sing together. One flares out with a pregnant belly that lets us know solidarity carries across the generations. Another pokes the heavens open with her fist.

In The Grief, six figures hold a seventh shrouded figure. The three figures on the left lean at the same time they are part of the group, as if they are struggling with their conflicting reactions to the moment of their comrade’s death. One clutches at the body as if to gain rather than give support. One wonders what the relationship is between this group of seven and that portrayed in Solidarity. Is this the “after” snapshot of the same group? Or only an alternate imagined reality, what happens when solidarity is attacked?

To my American eye, the figure in At the Edge of Hope looks like a bashful suitor who has found the bravery to speak her love but bends backward with fear and the anticipation of rejection. The posture of the body is specific and evocative.

The piece that most significantly breaks with Dolo’s established themes and style is the piece og public art, Theme for Us Today: The Crisis. That sculpture stands at straight and solemn attention – establishing the seriousness of the space it occupies; stands encircled by rings of wire that imply barbed wire, imprisonment, political and personal shackling; stands small even with its height amidst tall rounds of rebar that tower over the encircled dummy. The aesthetic language Dolo uses in this piece is not the lyric and personal language she most often speaks in her works. She uses instead a common tongue, a harsher and more public style, that has been developed within a circle of politically aware artists over the past twenty years of struggle, including Tisna Sanjaya, Agung Kurniawan, Agus Suwage, Dadang Christianto, and Entang Wiharso. The only movement in this piece is in those circles of constraining wire that hold in the human being that stands at forced attention. To my eyes and heart, this is the piece that should have been entitled The Grief. It feels almost as if the figure is entombed in wire and space.

Dolo, as a person and as a sculptor, has never allowed herself – for good and for ill – to be constrained. It is as if she is speaking a foreign language in that piece. Because her real language of passionate movement, strokes of movement so large that they animate even bronze. Her mother tongue is not that of political statement, but of the lyric of life, the timeless movement of the body in the space of time. It is a language that needs to be spoken even in times when human events seen to clamor for political statement and portentous gesture – as Chairil Anwar testified. Looking at her work, I think of Shiva, the dancer and the destroyer, the One who dances the dance of creation, the dance of solace and liberation. What is it that the Hindus say? Energy, energy is her name.

Berkeley, California, September 19, 2001

In the eye of the storm