Viewing the viewer

Audience, viewers or public of art are always an intriguing issue to be talked about. Especially when seeing that the analysis towards it has never been done really deeply. So far all the discussions of this matter in the media, under the theme of art appreciation, has only been making it as a rigid adjective. And just like word itself, it develops outside its own practitioner. Various discerning efforts then only become repeated continuously in the perspective of discourse. Thus, if then the quantity of the people who come to an event becomes the measure of the success, it will be no wonder. For the public opinion always tends to be outside the art discourse itself, speaking about their everyday realities. And it is surely not something that is expected to be a new discourse in art, to be talked about, so far as the art legitimacy in the society has never been involving the public directly, even to the smallest responses.

What is expected from the public is not a new vocabulary of art theories, since it is not a part of their everyday lives. It is an essential thing which is forgotten, indeed. For the everyday is actually what is captured artistically by the art world, for then condemning the public for their ignorance comparing to the formal artistic perception. This is a reverse irony since actually it is the public who conduct, and by itself understand more what everyday means. Thus, the meaning of appreciation here, seems necessary to be redefined.

In the case of contextual works, the closeness of appreciation process is supported, since it pays attention greatly to the element of public, especially when the public itself is an integral part of the work. Yet, the demand for the public to understand one work, or even its personal content, does not have to be the main issue, since it is the experience which is more important to be undertaken by the public.

For art works, apart from its external factors, have been potentialized to be multi-interpretive. The frozen and distant characteristics of something represented are well-suited to the way the art works turn out to be. Paintings and installations, for instance, as a medium they describe the meaning of appreciation based on the visual experience of their public. And painting can be the greatest example of the legitimacy of totalitarian interpretation which actually more refers to the artists’ personal statements.

Multi-interpretation of works is something that has to be explored layer by layer, through the personal phase in the level of quality as priority, before then being executed and presented to the public. For how important an art work should be since it needs to be displayed in its effort to reach a wider audience appreciation? And how does it matter conceptually to the work itself? This is an important question, before we articulate an idea of issues that have been intimately experienced by the public itself.

Such condition makes artists to be always in a dual position, between the art scene who regards the public as not appreciative, and facing the public who sees the artists as a crowd of machines producing weird things. This condition is added by the weakness of mediating elements, such as institutions, museums, galleries, critics, media and even art organizations who are supposed to take great concern of communications as the aspect of relationship with the public.


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ruangrupa by itself tries to see the public as a part of conceptual creative process, a thought coming from the awareness to erase the detachment with appreciators. Therefore, as an effort to eliminate the duality between the creator and the viewer, artists can also feel the difficulty of understanding like what have been felt by the public, and vice versa.

For four years, ruangrupa has been growing with a wider reach of audiences, like becoming a public space on its own: an interface where everyone can interact without distance. The visitors come from various disciplines, creating an awareness to focus more on diversity, as the projects have always been multi-dimensional and based on the Jakarta urban phenomena. With such condition, slowly we are able to open access to diverse audiences, along with the way reflective closeness is created.

Garbage Sale (27 January – 21 February 2003, ruangrupa, Jakarta), perhaps was one of the celebrations of that. When all the products are taken down from their sacred position, whether in the context of definition between art works and everyday goods, also in the nominal value context, pricing them with a range between 50 thousand to 1 million rupiahs. It was a situation that opened more access to the public to be able to own works by acclaimed artists. Redefinition, or demystification of the items (between art works, everyday goods, things owned by artists, or even just items that were put to be sold just like that), does not only change the public perception of the sinful history of art exaltation, but also can be able to make a renowned artist to offer his or her small-size art works, relating to the way price value standards are often determined by dimensions instead of quality.

The more openness to see the public actually was also started with the boredom of the stagnant growth of audiences in every organization or art institution, where its audiences only circle around the same line. It is very far from the initial intention to erase the exclusiveness of art Thus, ruangrupa tries to enter with various medium and information, even if it is firstly hard to be understood by the public. And the responses from a wide range of audiences at least prove that the public are actually interested, especially teenagers, or students as the biggest target of today’s media, who are frequent collaborators with ruangrupa. For they are actually the beginning of many changes that happen. Thus, the experience to describe the phenomena of graphic art, video art, or even public art to college and secondary school students and even a Mall manager is a concrete challenge that we have to face as artists.


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Public involvement with art is indeed multi-layered. Artists blame infrastructure and then followed with blaming the state mechanism that is unable to make art and culture just as important as other sectors. It is tiring to compare with what happens in the West, where the social system and economy have definitely been applied adequately in each aspect, and at the same time putting the artists and the society in a certain position. Institutional art projects are subsidized with public tax. And good information and communication strategies create a situation: where the public have important position in keeping the art scene going. It is surely different with what happens here, in which the public are made indifferent with art, for they regard that art has nothing to do with them. So we can see from here how Amsterdam could suddenly be riotous when Stedelijk bought Damien Hirst’s “rubbish”, for there exists responsibility, connections and certainly, involvement with public appreciation.



ruangrupa, jakarta, february 2004




Ade Darmawan is an artist, founder, and leader of ruangrupa, an artists’ initiative in Jakarta. He is a member of the Jakarta Art Board in 2006 – 2009. He now works and lives in Jakarta, Indonesia.


Ardi Yunanto was born in Jakarta, November 21, 1980. After graduating from the Department of Architecture at the National Institute of Technology in Malang, in 2003 he returned to Jakarta, the city where he grew up. In 2004, he joined ruangrupa and has been working as the editor in chief for www.karbonjournal.org since 2007. Besides writing tremendously unproductively about the city and art, he also works as a book editor, researcher for several cultural projects, and a graphic designer, while still trying hard to write fictions.