Along the Way with the Three Humane Show

By Karna Mustaqim

Perhaps, this is just another writing on art. What can we expect from a writing on a work of art in an art exhibition? Explaining the subject matter used by the artists, describing the artistry of the work of art, or pretending us as the implied viewer as the expert on interpreting the work of art. Yes, I am doing it, Im doing it my way. I met these three artists through their works of art. One who uses simply collage and usual painting media technique for its works; the other uses more mix-up techniques, and the other one uses even more complex medium for its works. Here I will just copy and paste the information that I have from them: Anisa Abdullah, magazine (paper) collage, oil pastel on paper, and acrylic on canvas, Hirzaq Harris, technical pen, bitumen, acrylic on canvas and some paper collage, and specialty uses burning techniquework on paper, and Najib Ahmad Bamadhaj, bitumen, turpentine, glitter, cement, silicone, charcoal, pencil color, acrylic, sands, and canvas collage and specialty uses monoprint technique. The work of art shows to us that when the artist as the instrument of art uses simpler media technique it seems their appearance were more complex. Take a careful look at the artworks of Anisa Abdullah. Let some moment come into us. I wish I have no need to explain what objects can be found in the paintings, spectator who attended the exhibition room where the works of art belongs should knew better than I. Here, I would like to share and I hope that we could meet at some horizons. Anisas works seem to contemplate with complexity of the objects, it seems to work with its materialitys of the objects he drew out. Some objects repeated by itself in his works, and in my mind the objects that repeatedly come to appear are the shining reflections. Reflections are almost everywhere, or maybe everywhere, our existence has a reflection on other peoples eyes. When we died, we have nothing, no more reflections. We close our eyes, therefore we made no reflection on others, and other people have no reflections on us through their eyes. No more. Nevertheless, Anisas works show to us that actually every object that can reflects some lights to us are reflecting on us. In this manner we should see the invisible of the visible in the work of art, there is in what Maurice Merleau-Ponty should tell us as a hyper-reflection that appear directly in the infrastructure of vision (as cited in Flynn, 2000, p. 12-14). It is to say that our bodily being in the world is at once seeing and being seen. Now, we have to leave Anisa with his works for a while and step in to the works of art by Hirzaq Harris and Najib Ahmad Bamadhaj, in contrast with Anisa and in spite of their nearly seem similar media technique, their works induce a sense of dark misty and veiled. According to Taylor Carman, we have a perceptual perspective on the world, but also have intellectual, social, personal, cultural, and historical perspective, which are themselves no less anchored in our bodies than sense experience itself. Sense, as in English word, the word sens in France can have meaning as direction or way which metaphorically like to think of understanding something as seeing or grasping (Carman, 2008, p. 23). Considerably, the work of art brought to us a mystery. The central of mysteries, according to Merlau-Ponty is the capacity of perception to disclose a world (Carman, 2008, p. 26). What is a world? A world is not just a collection of objects, but an environment or situation we inhabit, in which we find ourselves having to cope with possibilities and impossibilities, opportunities, obstacles in short, a space of meaning(Carman, 2008, p. 26).

Merleau-Ponty proposed in his preface of Phenomenology of Perception (1945, 2005) that philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being and phenomenology as a disclosure of the world. Then, if the works of art of this three exhibitors touch upon our sense, it means it has evoke the visibility of the visible, the disclosedness of the world, which is always bound to horizons of invisibility, horizons that make up the immemorial ground of the visible (Carman, 2008, p. 193). The visual representation of the things found in their works of art is never merely reproduce objects, its constitutive elements of painting are neither objective properties nor a subjective qualia, but a trace of disclosedness, a gesture marking out the visibility of things (Carman, 2008, p. 192). Our perceptual experience is not internal sensations, but external things: objects, places, events that is intentional and our perception is essentially interwoven with the world we perceive (Carman, 2008, p. 46). The language of art is a primary language which means, according to MerleauPonty, a pre-exist language before it become is. It is a language that the words we know by experiencing it as a true event, in spite of what the words mean definitively. Nigel Wentworth stated that: the understanding of primary painting occurs through the viewer trying to enter into the painting, searching for and grasping, the existential significance of the work, through the elements that make it up as an ensemble, their having as an ensemble a sense each lack individuality(Wentworth, 2004, p. 115). Paintings, as shown by the works of art by the three artists here, do not only express particular feeling, but also embodies a world. Both features of the work are correlated for the feeling that is expressed is the expression of a certain manner of being-in-the-world (Wentworth, 2004, p. 242). The practice of looking at paintings is like observation that the world is not given to human beings as a collection of discrete things, each in itself, but rather in the form of totalities of things, each the totality of a particular practice (p. 246). The understanding of meaning of an artwork is not lies in their descriptive explanation, but merely explicate within the meeting of the artist work and the spectator horizon through the unconcealment of truth in the work of art. Therefore, the truth of art is not about correctness explanation, but it is more on the manifold of meaning when people shared understanding among them. This mode of viewing the artworks as a phenomenon that experience directly to the people described by Antoon Van den Braembussche (2009) as the original, unfiltered, and pre-reflexive experience that creates an openness to the materiality of the artwork, its material appearances, and palpable presence (p. 198). The works of art by Anisa give an open interpretation not only by seeing the overlapping representational objects presented in the canvas surface, but too much to deny that the collage made from magazines paper give particular senses into our feeling of uncertainty. The similar sensation can be found in the gaze layering in the works of Hirzaq and Najib. Following the argument by Jonos Bekesi (1999), it is the fusion of the self and the world, which according to Merleau-Ponty, takes place in artistic creation, and not an imitation or subjective projection of the artists imagination. From the point of view of the spectator, Mikel Dufrenne aims at the correlativity of aesthetic object and aesthetic experience, which can be found in their mutual relations. He stressed at the aspect of recipient where the aesthetic object is the work of art accomplished by aesthetic perception. The meaning of the aesthetic object is given as a whole in the sensuous, the common act of the sensing and the sensed, and does not refer to something that lies outside the object as with action or knowledge (p. 60-61). In this way of thought, the complete understanding is neither achieved by the presence of a painting in an art institution such as at gallery, nor by the intelligent of the artist or the spectator, but it should be comprehend by the participation of the artist, the work of art, and the spectator to open each other potentialities of the

capacity to experience and to be experienced the meaning of art. Here, I would like to quote lengthily things that Wentworth (2004) explicates: Painting can, thus, be an education to us. It can teach us different mode of being. Through looking at paintings we can learn to step outside the mode of being that is ours and to open ourselves to modes of being that are other. Where the potential to experience the mode of being that is concretized in, and expressed through, a painting is lacking the work will be experienced in terms of the mode of being of the viewer. ... A painting can realize a certain potential that is within a viewer, but the capacity at the viewer to experience what is there to be experienced in the painting depends on the extent of that potential in the first place (p. 246).

Let us consider that the work of art by these three artists show us something of how we see and how we constitute our self image and the myriad, overlapping and co-existent images we negotiate to constitute our consciousness of objects in the world (Minissale, 2009, p. 86). Wolfgang Iser (1972) noted that during the process of reading, there is an active interweaving of anticipation and retrospection. Reading a visual is like a text that is potentially capable of several different realizations, and by chance the following painting has no tangible connection, there then comes a blockage in the stream of thought. This blockage must be overcome if the act of looking is to flow again and again. Each spectator will fill in the gaps on his own way, he will make his own decision as to how the gap is to be filled. In this very act the sequences of reading the visual are revealed. On appreciating art through the act of looking at the painting, it is the time to put aside the authoritarian determination and release our own perception. While looking to reach an understanding out of the work of art, such as the painting in this exhibition, we must have a kind of sincerity (ikhlas) in ourselves, and letting the artwork speak for itself. The sincerity here means the openness of the self as subject and at the same time awaiting for the givenness, which I refer to guidance(hidayah), of the work of art. Each and every time we manage to understand an artwork it is the moment we unfolding the meaning of ourselves. For I who could not be standing side by side to the paintings as closer as you are, the attendance of the exhibition, I wish upon the presence of the work of art would give us monet of sharing horizon.

References Flynn, B. (2000). Merleau-Ponty and Nietzsche on the Visible and the Invisible. In Veronique M. Fti (Ed.) (2000), Difference, Materiality, Painting, pp. 2 15. New York: Humanity Books. Minissale, G. (2009). Framing Consciousness in Art: Transcultural Perspectives. Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi B.V. Wentworth, N. (2004). Phenomenology of Painting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van den Braembussche, A. (2009). Thinking Art. Trans.: Krassilovsky, M., Cornets de Groot, R. H., & van Spronsen, D. Brussels: Springer Sciences + Business Media B.V. Carman, T. (2008). Merleau-Ponty. London & New York: Routledge. Iser, W. (1972). The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Process. In D. Lodge and N. Wood (Eds.) (1998, 2000), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 2nd Ed., pp. 188-205. Essex, UK: Pearson Education Ltd.