p.

[p. 86: Image: 10 Secret boxes [For illustrations, see end of document.]
p. 87:
Astri Wright, “Heri Dono, Indonesia: A Rebel’s Playground,“ in Valentine Willie, Ed.,
12 ASEAN Artists, Kuala Lumpur: Balai Seni Lukis Negara, 2000, pp.86-95.

Heri Dono is among the most experimentally minded of the mid-life generation of
Indonesian artists today.1 For many reasons, and even if he lives to be a 110, Heri will probably
always be thought of as a ‘young artist’. For humour, perhaps more than any other quality,
characterises Heri Dono’s life and work. His sense of humour -- the fundamental wiring pattern
of a broadly visioned, acutely alert and empathetic mind -- is firmly rooted both in the fun and
the seriousness of the message; in the soil of his own cultures (tilled soil and ‘night soil’) and
those of the world at large. Categories, rules, and normative expectations cannot contain him;
laughter, like the oil on ducks’ feathers, makes any would-be fetters slip right off. This attitude
of playful, sharpsighted wisdom is evident in Heri Dono’s art and in his self-presentation, even
down to his choice of email moniker (hmmdonut).
Heri Dono is also one of the most free individuals I know, inside and outside of the
contemporary Indonesian art world. With this, I mean freedom from constrictions while at the
same time, being centered and morally/ethically informed by a philosophy all his own. This is
what allows him both freedom and connections across conventional categorices and boundaries.
Heri’s freedom from being tied down in his personal and professional life-style, vis-a-vis both
tradition and the machinations of contemporary art institutions, is evident also in his art. If his
figures are not flying, in any number of contortionist positions, their sitting or walking is not
bound or

p. 88:
hampered by gravity. Feet - whether of the mythological lion-yak beast Heri calls a Barong in
“The King who is Scared of the Approaching Barong” (2000) or the spiked boots in “Flower
Diplomacy” (2000), barely even touch the ground.
Heri Dono’s imaginary world seems to be the offspring of a community of madly
inspired monks who have imbibed Piacasso’s Guernica, Monty Python’s absurd-surreal movies,
New York subways and tenement buildings’ graffiti and murals, and western-style cartoons that

1 My essay on Heri in my book was among the first internationally published essays on him and I have
 p.2

traverse the globe, the political discourse of New Order Indonesia, and Heri’s own nightmares
and laughter. Over the last thirteen years, elements of Javanese tradition have increasingly
entered into his work, and Heri’s long-standing, living relationship to his own cultural practices
has become ever more conscious. Elements of traditional Javanese arts have been married, in
new, odd and outrageous couplings, to low-grade technologies, western-derived avant-garde
installation art discourses, and populist internationalist networkings.
In recent years, Heri has also liberated his canvases. Now the cloth is no longer stretched
and nailed to wood, but is ‘free’ to exist as painted cloth and to resonate with the malleable,
scrollable, unrollable forms of painted cloth like batik, like the story-scrolls of Java and Bali
(wayang beber). This tradition fascinated Heri while in art school, when he also began to
immerse himself in the world of the shadow puppet drama (wayang kulit). Heri Dono, then, is an
artist with no need to reject his own heritage to be actively involved in creating dia-, tria-,
quadra-logues, within the new cultures of today and tomorrow.

Born in Jakarta in 1960, Heri was raised in a military family in Semarang, north-coast
capital of Central Java. Wanting to be an artist since first grade, and painting since he was
seventeen, Heri Dono attended the art academy in Yogyakarta (ASRI) from 1980 to 1987.
Despite his artistic aspirations since childhood and the attention given to children's art in
Indonesia, with annual competitions both locally and nationally, Heri never joined in these.
Instead, he watched a TV program featuring the drawing teacher Pak Ooq, where children who
had won drawing contests appeared as guests. When Pak Ooq asked what they wanted to be
when they grew up, some answered "I want to be an engineer" or "I want to be a professor." One
girl said she wanted to be a model. "I felt really sad," he said; "Why didn't anyone want to be an
artist?" (Heri Dono 1988-89)2
This early vignette shows Heri already ‘different’ from other drawing- and painting-
happy children and youth. In the ensuing years, Heri continued to follow his apparently
eccentric path, but somehow a path of difference trod without ego-based fanfare or aggression.
On the matter of ego, so often a drivingly negative force within the art and performance world,
but observable in all arenas, Heri says:

2 In this and the ensuing quotes by the artist originated in interviews with myself or with Larry Polansky,
the translations from Indonesian are my own.
 p.3

We need ego, actually -- we don’t need to destroy our ego. But sometimes, like in
Balinese ceremonies, if we look at the ceremony, the procession, there is a distance
between us and the ceremony itself. But if we participate in the ceremony, our ego unites
with it. We don’t know who we are in that case. Collaboration is sometimes like that
(Heri Dono 1997).

Collaboration is a key idea Heri Dono practices in his work. It is a particular way of
working together that has longstanding resonance in Javanese neighbourhood culture. It is also
one way that individual ego and accomplishment is deflected and reforged in a communal idiom.
Frequently collaborating with others, both Indonesians and foreigners from the late 1980s on,
Heri began in the 1990s to involve also non-artists as collaborators -- radio- and TV repairmen
who helped him add simple mechanical movement or electric action to his installations, and he
invited young men with no connection to the art world to perform and work on the installation
performance “Kuda Binal (Rebellious Horse)” performed at the alternative ‘biennale’ (the Binal)
in Yogyakarta in 1992:3

[p.89: Image: Three Pistols in the Back]

[p.90: Image: Flower Diplomacy]

p.91:
I want to use the concept of communal systems in my art work. -- I think that all
people are artists. And also that all the members of the audience are artists, if they can
participate, and not only look at the work (Heri Dono1997).

Heri Dono’s rejection of the elitism and specialization of the established art world is
evident in many aspects of his thought and work.

[I’ve observed] how people become afraid of what is labelled art/culture because of
the existence of cultural categories and barriers that are too strong and too exclusive. At
this time, artists are making inroads, freely, gaining access to areas that are not their
specialties; many cross-overs between media/modes of expression occur, where a
musician is welcome to exhibit paintings, or an interior designer does dance
choreography, or a ceramicist makes video art. This idea, I believe, points to a pluralistic

3 This alternative arts festival, which Heri organized with other artists like Dadang Christanto, Harry
Wahyu, and Eddie Hara, came into being in reaction to the Third Painting Biennial of Yogyakarta, which
was limited to the medium of painting and to artists over 35. See Virgo 1992.
 p.4

understanding of truth, or a way of arriving at truth via an experimental process in which

one breaks the rules of the older/conservative theories of art, which are still held to be
true (Heri Dono 2000).

In a very real sense, Heri Dono’s art is about liberation. Picasso and the cubists liberated
the elements of the face and body from realism, pioneering new expressive possibilities for later
generations of artists. In art school, Heri Dono enjoyed their daring visual play. But he himself
comes from a culture where western realism’s claims to have perfected the objective recording of
reality, impressionism’s claims to visual ‘accuracy’, and modernism’s claims to pure form being
the superior approach to art making and appreciation, did not dominate artistic expectations.
Indonesian arts of all islands, ethnic groups and media, have always abstracted and stylized
easily from the forms of material reality into patterns and forms which in each instance was
venerated for its power and presence.4 To Javanese people, and artists in particular, classical
wayang figures have been powerful models of inspiration, also on the formal level. For example,
wayang depicts the characters of the epics in profile, and with a great degree of stylization of the
human form; usually only one large eye is depicted. In Solo, however, the convention was to
show a part of the second eye on the other side of the nose-bridge. As a modern artist, Heri Dono
has felt free to draw on all of these traditions: in his puppets and in his paintings, he blithely
places two or even three eyes on one side of a nose seen in profile, when he feels like it, thereby
adding more expressive power to the face.
Javanese expressive culture in all forms, many of them labeled and preserved as
Tradition, occupies Heri Dono in his art and thought. Caring about it, however, does not to Heri
mean engaging in a process that resembles pickling.

I am not worried about Javanese culture disappearing because of the influence of Western
culture.... In my opinion it is not possible for a culture to fade or disappear, as long as
there are people there who are actively creating. If there are no such people, why then the
culture is already dead! (Heri Dono 1988-89)

In March 2000, musing over the fact that he still agrees with the ideas he expressed in our
interview of more than a decade ago, Heri wrote:

4 Deformation (Deformasi) is the term usually used by Indonesian artists for what Western art writers
call stylization.
 p.5

The traditional arts are like a tree: the roots are so long, that if the branches are felled,
that tree will still be able to go on living, because it can get its nurturance from the earth
(it doesn’t depend on oxygen and sunshine above the soil). -- On campus at ASRI, talking
about modern art meant the Western arts orientation. Many Indonesian artists say that
‘we’re way behind the West’. This view is only possible because people are more
oriented towards something that belongs to other people. They do not look closely at the
discourse concerning what it is they own themselves. -- I believe that not a single person
would say we were “left behind” if they were not oriented towards other people’s ideas
(Heri Dono 2000).
p.92:
One of Heri Dono’s main achievements, in a rapidly changing nation in a highly diverse,
complex and sometimes contested region, is his ability to remain so remarkably open and
explorative without losing himself or his balance. He is a border crosser with good ballast. He
crosses boundaries between art forms and media, at times infuriating the traditionalists. This
intellectual/visual/multi-media shuttling and conversing is also translated into geographical
movement. Beginning in the early 1990s, Heri has had artist residencies and exhibitions in Basel,
Switzerland, Holland and Germany, followed by Japan, Australia, England and most recently,
New Zealand and the USA. And yet, as much as he travels, Heri manages to remain committed
and involved at home in Yogyakarta, with artists, intellectuals, activists and people from many
walks of life. His travels also afford him the data and the opportunity to reflect. And his
reflections on difference and belonging keep bringing him back home.

From the formal perspective, contemporary Indonesian art appears chaotic, but its
concepts/realm of thought are fairly clear. Like when you see many people crowding
together in the market/on the street, and yet everyone is aware and relaxed in their lives.
In Europe, sometimes I see how very neat and orderly people are when they’re walking
or working, but so many people are in fact quite confused in their lives.

At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, and at a time when modern
and contemporary Asian artists are finally catching the eye of international, also western-based
art worlds, Heri Dono is one of a handful of Indonesian artists known internationally. But it is
less for his paintings than for his installations and performance art work that he is invited to work
and exhibit locally, in country after country. While Heri’s paintings of the late 1980s contrasted
common human activities with outrageous monster forms, often in the process of metamorphosis
or violent dismemberment, threatening each other with guns, teeth and claws, his current
paintings exhibited at the National Gallery of Malaysia are more coherent allegories on particular
topics. The use of language is important to the full 'reading' of Heri Dono's paintings. With his
 p.6

titles Heri Dono seeks to add an important perspective to the reading of the work. Otherwise, he
says, the work might be perceived as only expressing his own feelings and not to be speaking
about something. "An artist is someone who wants to serve art - but more important to me is,
how can art serve humanity! That's what drove me to become an artist" (Heri Dono 1988-89).
Today, after a decade of developing his philosophies around installation and performance
art, Heri has come to see painting as his more personal art form, with installation as his more
public and often shared form (Heri Dono 1997). While the colours of his paintings in the late
1980s were bright, presented in vivid contrast, the colours of his more recent paintings are muted
play between a few earthen tones, like ochres, pale yellows, and browns, with a few highlights of
red and black, and perhaps a bit of green.
Life is essentially serious to Heri Dono. He is never interested in taking a break from his
preoccupations. Unlike his friends who, when bored with art, want to see a movie, go for a walk,
or do something which has nothing to do with their work, Heri claims he is never bored. Instead,
everything he does can be analyzed as located somewhere between the extremes of "active and
passive expression." If he takes a break from his painting, it is to turn his obsession with creative
expression to a new medium, or to read about other people's art. If he does go to see a movie, he
says, it is not to run away from his obsessions, but to look at them from another angle.
One of Heri's concerns is about the need to see both sides of reality. It is his insistence on
not glossing over the ugly that caused him to identify with Durna, a wayang character with
whom people usually shun identification.5 "Durna is so important in the stories," Heri Dono said
in 1988, "because he is a problem-maker; it is his figure that

[p.93: Image: The Guard Keeping…]

p.94:
creates the story. Just like Judas, without whom there would have been no Christ. It is not that
they are simply negative characters, they both play an essential role - they make things happen."
At the same time, Heri Dono identifies with the punakawan figures, the clown-servants,
in the wayang plays. (One wouldn’t expect him, of all people, to have just a single personal
archetype). In one of his most recent works, Heri focuses on the ultimate punakawan, Semar,

5 Durna is the brahmanic teacher and magic adept in the Kurawa kingdom, who originally taught the arts
of war to both Kurawa and Pandawa. Originally he was seen as the adversary of Kresna, but in recent
decades the tendency is to depict him as a "half-sinister, half-comic figure" (Anderson 1965:19).
 p.7

whose ultimate status resonates in many and complex ways, making him the most enigmatic and
contradiction-mediating figure in Javanese wayang. With its characteristically irreverent title,
“Semar Kentut” (1999), meaning “Semar Farts” but rendered in English as “Phartty Semar,” is
celebrated in the text accompanying the exhibition as the author of the “Millenial Fart.” Heri
Dono creates yet another meditation on chaos and order, magic and social realities.6
Some artists in Indonesia have tried to copy him. But, as observed by a Japanese art
writer: “Dono has never given in to unfounded self-indulgence” (Mizusawa 1996). Puppeteer of
a rarely multi-faceted art career, Heri is not worried about copyright or about being copied.
“Some people call this “Heri Dono-ism,” like “He-donism” in English,” Heri laughs. -- To me
this is good, this is culture -- we have to share. I don’t want to claim things, and say that other
people cannot express themsevles through this style. It belongs to everyone” (Heri Dono 1997).
Please join Heri in his playground any time day or night. There are no set times or
requirements for participation. I will see you there.

PS: You may have to hold your nose.

PPS: Laughter and Mind-Growth are considered highly contagious.

6 The playful English version of the title was coined by Saut Sitomorang, an Indonesian poet living in
New Zealand. Tim Behrend gives a detailed description of this performance as the basis for his
fascinating and humorous analysis of this performance in Auckland in April 1999 (see Behrend 1999).
 p.8

p.94:
Bibliography:

Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. 1965. Mythology and the Tolerance of the Javanese, Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, Monograph Series No. 37.

Barrett, Richard. 1999. “ELISION: transmission (a program of performance events)”

Queensland Art Gallery, Beyond the Future: The Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of
Contemporary Art, p. 202.

Behrend, Timothy. 1999. "The Millennial Esc(h)atology of Heri Dono:"Semar Farts" first in
Auckland, New Zealand". Indonesia and the Malay World, No. 27 (November 1999).

Heri Dono. 1988-89. Personal Interviews with Astri Wright, Yogyakarta, Jakarta.

______. 1997. Interview with Larry Polansky, October 7th, 1997, on the Shinkansen Train from
Harima to Kobe. http://www.geocities.com/bananaworks/heri_dono_frm.htm

______. 2000. Personal Correspondence with Astri Wright, March 2000.

Mizusawa, Tsutomu. 1996. “Heri Dono, “ Essay on the artist for the XXIII Bienal Internacional
de Sao Paulo, Brazil, Oct-Dec 1996.
http://www.uol.com.br/23bienal/universa/iuashd.htm

Virgo, Anne. 1992. “Report from Yogyakarta,” Art Monthly Australia (October 1992), p. 2

Wright, Astri. 1994. Soul, Spirit and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian
Painters, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press.
 p.9

Heri Dono’s Art works in show:

[1] Heri Dono, “10 Secret Boxes,” 1991; m/m; 26 x 12 x 7.5; SAM. (On p.86 in printed essay).
 p.10

[2] Heri Dono, “Help Me God,” 1989 (On p.87 in printed essay)
 p.11

[3] Heri Dono, “Three Pistols on the Back,” 1992, 150 x 150cm; acrylic/collage on canvas. (On
p.89 in printed essay).
 p.12

[4] Heri Dono, “Flower Diplomacy,” 2000; acr/coll on canvas; 200 x 150 cm; Collection of the
artist. (On p.90 in printed essay).
 p.13

[5] Heri Dono, “Agenda In Bali,” 1989 (On p.91 in printed catalogue).
 p.14

[6] Heri Dono, “The Suppressor,” 1989 (On p.92 in printed catalogue).
 p.15

[7] Heri Dono, “The Guard keeping the Bank's key,” 2000; acr/coll on canvas; 200 x 150cm;
artist. (On p.93 in printed essay).
 p.16

[5] The King who is scared to come to the barong ;2000;acr/coll on canvas; 200 x 150cm; artist.
(On p.95 in printed essay).