2023-08-23 13:44
Equal parts exhausting and enthralling, Passionate Pilgrim looks back on the career of performance artist Melati Suryodarmo
A woman wearing a cocktail dress and heels steps onto a plinth made of blocks of butter. Enchanting drum music begins to play, and she begins to dance: her hips swaying side to side, her feet twisting back and forth. Inevitably she slips on the butter and falls, her body whacking against the ground. She gets up and starts to move again; she dances, she falls, she gets up on repeat. This is Exergie - Butter Dance, the iconic performance work by Melati Suryodarmo and the first work you encounter in her current solo performance art exhibition Passionate Pilgrim at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham (17th May – 3rd September 2023).
Melati Suryodarmo (b.1969) was born in Indonesia to parents who were both performers: her mother was a practitioner of traditional Javanese dance and her father was a dance artist and choreographer, who taught dance for over five decades, developing his own method of freeform movement called Amerta. Melati’s own journey to performance wasn’t direct; she studied International Relations at university before a chance meeting with the Butoh dancer Anzu Furukawa in Germany in 1994 led her to study under Furukawa and the artist Marina Abramovic at the Braunschweig University of Art. Suryodarmo is best known for her durational performances that test the limits of the human mind and body and explore time’s passing and the changes that come with it. She engages critically with themes of tradition, belonging and connection throughout her practice, which encompasses performance, installation and films, and draws from the cultural heritage of her homeland as well as her experiences of displacement having lived in Germany for 20 years.
There are two filmed performances of Exergie – Butter Dance to watch here (the first from 2000 and the other from 2021), demonstrating the lasting impact and appeal of this work. The performance is very simple in structure and form, essentially consisting of Suryodarmo dancing and falling until her physical exhaustion prevents her from continuing, but it is a succinct and provocative meditation on failure and resistance. Watching her utterly helpless and repeating attempts to dance before crashing down is a funny and disheartening experience. The work offers a reflection on how we define and experience failure and success in life, and rightly suggests you cannot experience one without the other.
Butter Dance is a great example of how Suryodarmo engages with tradition: the music originates from rituals and shamanistic ceremonies on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Fittingly, it was designed to send listeners into a trance. The durational repetition of the dancing and falling and the beating drum create the sense that Suryodarmo has no escape from this cycle of action. Butter Dance can be read as reflection on the reception and perpetuation of tradition. Suryodarmo’s ‘attempts’ to recreate a traditional Javanese performance are inevitably disrupted by her falling, or more specifically the presence of butter, a distinctly Western food. Suryodarmo has even previously shared that her body also changed very quickly after moving to Germany because she consumed ‘a lot of butter’, supposedly affecting her movement in the dance. She has observed that ‘to see tradition as a solid form is not correct’ and that in reality ‘tradition has a quality of change and exchange’. Specifically looking at Javanese dance: many of the traditional dances have no author. They have no original creator and therefore change over time. Thus, Butter Dance is Suryodarmo’s contribution to this lineage of change and transformation: the traditional Javanese dance is reworked, with the help of her training in Europe, into a new ‘Butter Dance’.
Suryodarmo is very conscious of how her identity and work is perceived in different geographies: in Western countries she’s given the label ‘Indonesian’, whereas in Indonesia she is often seen as a more Western artist. Her performance practice does appear distinguished from the history of performance art in Europe and North America: she doesn’t shy away from wearing beautifully designed clothes for her performances or creating character through costume. In one video Memory of Water (2022) she dons a haunting hooded outfit fashioned from paper. Her performance style is also characterful; in Butter Dance her facial expressions are very animated, distinct from the often minimal design and muted performances of artists from Western countries, including her teacher Abramovic.
On the day of my visit, Suryodarmo herself was performing her longest and most arduous work I’m a Ghost in My Own House (2012). For twelve hours, she grinds charcoal blocks with a rolling pin and mortar, turning them into dust. The design of the performance is again impactful: the floor is covered in charcoal lumps, an unnecessary amount that creates a haunting Martian landscape, with Suryodarmo dressed in a floor length white smock and her hair cut in a crisp black bob. As the hours go by, her dress darkens from white to grey, grey to black; when she leans against the walls to rest, her charcoal-covered body creates scratchy markings on the white. The use of sound is integral throughout Suryodarmo’s practice and here the gentle rhythmic noise of her grinding creates a meditative atmosphere, to be replaced only by the rhythm of her heavy breath when she breaks.
I’m a Ghost in My Own House is another exploration of resistance - the resistance of her physical and mental strength against exhaustion. It is an alarming undertaking for an artist and is not without tangible risks: there is a sign for visitors on entering the space to beware of the potential impact of the dust. Melati, however, is coated in it and I only heard her cough once. Staged in the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, one thinks of the gruelling labour conditions of the coal mining industry of England past. Abramovic is known for her performances that involved some physical risk to her body and it feels like the influence of Suryodarmo’s teacher is present here. However, Suryodarmo has said that ‘performance of self-healing is not my thing’. This stands in contrast to the way Abramovic has often spoken about her practice in terms of self-discovery or betterment. There is a futility to the charcoal grinding, as with her attempts to dance on butter, that evokes the boulder-rolling of Sisyphus, the character from Greek mythology. Suryodarmo has mused on Sisyphus’ existence: ‘Sisyphean tasks are often seen as futile or stupid…but what if he liked it?’. This reframes the durational performance not as one of self-punishment as a means of self-improvement, but as something to find a meditative pleasure in the repetition of.
Time’s passing is made visually evident in the very gradual blackening of Suryodarmo’s dress and body, and the almost silent, focused atmosphere in the room certainly makes for meditative viewing. Watching block after block reduced to dust which then disperses out, drifting back into the charcoal floor, you are made to focus on the futility and ephemerality of her actions, and indeed life itself: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Despite the length and minimalist nature of the performance, Suryodarmo commands the attention of the room; she is a very charismatic performer, her focus is very clear. Although this performance is subtle, and in some ways feels unremarkable due to its similarity to durational performances in history (notably Francis Alys’ The Paradox of Praxis 1), it was made far more memorable by being a live recreation as opposed to filmic documentation.
In fact, the rest of the exhibition is mainly filmic documentation, and perhaps too much of it. Some of the performances documented are certainly interesting works, such as Sweet Dreams Sweet showing in the entrance hall, but there is also a notable absence of some of Suryodarmo’s other impactful pieces such as I Love You or Transaction of Hollows. Given that this is Suryodarmo’s first UK exhibition, it seems a shame that there aren't more of her performances to see.
On the second floor, space is given to an installation evoking Suryodarmo’s artist-run space in Indonesia. This feels like an unengaging use of space, however it does remind the viewer that Suryodarmo is also notable for her role in developing performance art in her home country; she organises Undisclosed Territory, an annual festival of performance art and hosts ‘laboratories’ for performers and dancers on her own site. She has continued her role in fostering creativity during Passionate Pilgrim; Present to Presence was a laboratory hosted at Ikon gallery for performance artists during the first weeks of the exhibition. However, the display of numerous filmed performances relating to this laboratory is overwhelming and hard to engage with. Fortunately, there are other live performances throughout the exhibition run: each week there are performances of Kleidungsaffe (Clothes Ape), where a performer clings to the trunk of a tree formed from donated garments and in July there is a recreation of Sweet Dreams Sweet. It seems long overdue for Suryodarmo’s work to be given a suitable platform in the UK, let alone the rest of Europe (her first major solo exhibition in the continent only took place last year), and it is similarly disappointing that you leave Passionate Pilgrim wanting to have seen more. That said, for both those familiar and unfamiliar with her practice, there is certainly enough to warrant a visit.
Related Artists: MELATI SURYODARMO 麦拉蒂·苏若道默
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