Eleven theses on urban prints

I.

The first inaccuracy when considering urban printing is to regard it is as a post-modern cultural product. Yet urban printing – say for example, street stickers, cheap posters, humorous t-shirts, and pirated nick-nacks are the result of a process that is a modern journey – although unbalanced it may be. If examined from its origins, urban printing emerged in correspondence with the rise of cities and industrialization which later affirmed societies’ economic class structure. From the point of view of producers; they were created by a class of people in the afore mentioned economic structure for profit and livelihood. From the point of view of costumers; they are directed by a group of people in the afore mentioned economic classes who can identify themselves through their print products. From the point of view of the industry; it was created through modern printing techniques, although most were made with a perfunctorily attitude and level of accuracy.


II.

Post-modern analysis connects printing products which are crude, trivial, shallow and marginal although in Indonesia in reality they are mass with resistance to modernism which dominates the world view of art with its standard, lofty aesthetic criterion. Consequently, post-modern analysis celebrates this situation as pluralism without a center, without questioning any further: is it true that existence of the public here grasp the concept that rejects the existence of the center? In reality, their urban printing doesn’t illustrate that intention.

For example, look at their mobile kiosks: posters of Axl Rose, new wave, punk, rock, Kutch Kutch Hota Hay, Iwan Fals with the physiognomy of a grand macho Hollywood fighter, stickers of women with a single beauty standard, also jargon ‘motherfucker’ and other English swear words. The center: latent idealization of what is ‘foreign’ without realizing it continues to colonize every corner of our collective memory.


III.

In a country that for decades has insisted on forcing an all encompassing national culture – what’s more through the attack of capital and the cock of rifle – urban print products develop like they can’t be captured by formal logic. They appear to offer fresh impudence and crudity. Thus it seems they were never created with the intention to resist. Urban printing bows to the will of the market and the desires of the ages. To become stranger and “unintentionally discarded” is obviously not what is desired.


IV.

The one and image that can endure through the will of the market and the desires of the ages, whatever they may be, is the imagery of desire. Urban printing is not removed from this theme; thus if you will allow me, I will refer to it as ‘genre dream-realism’. This idiom can charge quickly in line with the reality of the masses, but it never shifts from communal desire, or it can also be a communal memento, which is reconstructed in the minds of the masses, from one generation to the next. This is the only way they are sold. Urban printing is a kind of realism that never speaks about right here – right now reality...


V.

The result of ‘dream-realism’ is that urban printing possesses mass generation, which alternately identifies itself through its products. It has a reserve supply of supporters that are never exhausted. With this, our modern ‘high’ art, from its emergence is tied to the “people”; it must acknowledge that it has a limited social base which in fact is not suited to these types of “low” culture.


VI.

Urban printing has never connected itself with traditionalism, which many postmodernist thinkers have turned to. Although it is mass, urban printing can’t exist in a situation where a communal living is still revered. Urban printing needs a “wary” public: it needs to express and identify itself, and the same time, may not possess the creative facilities purposes. Because, in an age where the speed of modernism is already too late to be refused, our cultural analysis should be directed towards how modernism works to create two opposing forms of aesthetic taste, and not the conflict between modern and traditional which continues to be exhorted in cultural analysis since the polemic between the infamous Sutan Takdir Alisyahbana and Sanusi Pane.


VII.

Conscious or not, post-modernism’s reputation as pluralism and the view that there is no longer an artistic aesthetic criteria, has created a kind of idealism in itself regarding the impossibility that the public can be wrong. How difficult it is nowadays to view an aesthetic product (of the public) as the potential for an acute untruth. On the other hand, bad emerges from a society which is degenerate, and to concur with bad taste is to agree with such a society. Indeed there is nothing to be proud of with its kind of frustrated attitude.


VIII.

The potential for public untruth is evident in the following examples. For instance we can easily obtain swastika emblems, military badges which are displayed on the side of the road; but why can’t we obtain emblems of the hammer and sickle, the Star of David, or even the morning star? Where did this selection originate? Is it natural? Nonsense! Urban printing is captured by the strength of the political economy which encompasses it; so that plurality becomes relative rhetoric and totally false. It always refers to the dominant ideology, which is followed by the people (Yes, it must be acknowledged that we still live in a fascist-militaristic society). The circulation of print products which reveal nuances of blasphemy toward the past regime, is not a sign of radicalism, or pluralism, but because the course of the age is indeed like that.


IX.

Although at a glance it appears friendly; communication that is developed through urban printing is dehumanizing, the same as the industrialization project itself, because both producers and consumers lose each of their personal identities and became an anonymous unity in buy-sell transaction and mass communication.


X.

Modern visual art in Indonesia should hold a strong potential to resist this form of bad taste; if it doesn’t fall into the industrialization trap which works go public (read: sell out). Or fall to the pretension to become the heroic voice in defense of the people, without seeing that the public that it defends is something that collapses quickly under critique. Modern Indonesian art is not just about simple matters, or the social base that it owns, but how it can return its intimate potential and originality (its own personal response) towards its own social narrative so that it can have meaning again, and develop a taste which is healthier and independent.


XI.

Finally, while borrowing Marx’s plea, I will close this essay with a plea also; cultural analysts and postmodernist maniacs only interpret urban culture in various ways; but in fact what is most important is to change it!
Ha...ha...




Ronny Agustinus is one of the founders of ruangrupa, and a writer and the editor of the Karbon journal to 2002. Besides working at the Brighten Institute, Bogor, West Java, he used to be the editor-in-chief in the publishing house Marjin Kiri (2005-2007). He focuses on the translation of literary works from Latin America as well as on neoliberalism studies.