Artistic Ideologies: Individual and Society in Indonesian Art

Abstract

The title of this chapter, ‘Artistic Ideologies’, is one I have borrowed from the eminent Indonesian art critic and historian Sanento Yuliman. Yuliman, who died in 1992, looms large over Indonesian art history, not least because his perspicuous and prescient texts firmly place Indonesian modern art in continuity with what came before, ‘emerging in the midst of living art traditions’. Yuliman insisted that these living traditions emerged from the people, were widely understood and functionally crossed into many social practices. Those who demand a social function rather than esoteric individualism in modern art, Yuliman argued, are actually looking for art