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Discussion: MJ Kjarr with Sriwhana Spong

Artist Sriwhana Spong’s conceptual visual practice embodies a spirit of exploration into relatively uncharted waters. Spong’s recent video Muttnik for example is an investigation into her Balinese heritage, which is to some extent a foreign quantity as she was raised outside of Bali. There is a deliberately fragile and subjective form of indexicality in Spong’s practice which for me brings to mind the museological aspect of possible antecedents such as Marcel Broodthaers Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, among others. In keeping with the nature of her artistic practice we agreed it was more appropriate to attempt a critical discourse as an explorative process rather than trying to create a series of ‘answers.’ The following discussion was conducted via email early in June 2005.

MJ Kjarr: A decorative, museological and personal experience of individual heritage appears to be an ongoing concern within your practice. For instance, the outcome of your Muttnik investigations originates from somewhat unknown traditions within your Balinese history/culture. I am interested in how your findings per se are retrieved in order to accommodate your position as a “cultural stray” from Balinese history and traditions.

Sriwhana Spong: As I understand it Balinese Offerings are necessary and daily gifts made to express gratitude to gods, or help placate demons. These unseen inhabitants are honored guests to the Balinese and therefore all gifts must be both beautiful and symbolic. In Muttnik I deliberately took these offerings out of context, mimicking the Balinese use of everyday materials, to determine their final forms. Their original symbolic meaning or function was not my intent, so they became shadows harking back to an original source. Located in the fog somewhere between being lost and found.

MJ Kjarr: I recently read the following quote from Charles Harrison’s ‘Further Essay’s on Art and Language’ in which Art and Language described a view that may apply to your practice: “The decorative in our sense absconds from the meaningful. . . There is nothing of course that is incapable of being meaningful in some sense, and of course one person’s or perspective’s decoration is another’s votive object. So there are no absolutely decorative items.” The impossibility of definite meaning that Art and Language describe seems corollary to your Muttnik series. In some regards you are allowing viewers to interact with content purely by engaging their own syntactical viewpoint and personal experience?

Sriwhana Spong: In his 1877 talk The Decorative Arts Their Relation To Modern Life And Progress, William Morris describes all decorative forms which seem to serve a purely aesthetic function as having once had a ‘meaningful’ symbolic origin, much like the models in Muttnik. Morris writes: “I do not think it is too much to say that no man, however original he may be, can sit down to-day and draw the ornament of a cloth, or the form of an ordinary vessel or piece of furniture, that will be other than a development or a degradation of forms used hundreds of years ago; and these, too, very often, forms that once had a serious meaning, though they are now become little more than a habit of the hand.” An object or form never looses its original meaning: history just misplaces it. It seems that our perception of an ordered, progressive time finds nothing, and loses just about everything.

MJ Kjarr: With regard to the “stray” position of your practice I am interested to know how you view the exploration of Balinese traditions inherent with the Muttnik series. For instance are the unknown areas of your exploration relative to particular Western art ideas such as The Sublime?

Sriwhana Spong: One vivid memory I have of Bali, is being present at a Hindu ceremony when a spirit entered the body of someone present. It was the strangest sound somewhere between a baby crying, and a dog barking. It was an event completely normal and everyday to the Balinese present, but it made me understand my place as an outsider where surface is privileged. It was one of those ‘moments’ where the world becomes a much bigger, more irrational, and slightly scary place. I read Balinese offerings as a physical point of mediation between the Balinese and their gods, much like doorways/portals to the unknown, and reminiscent of Cape Kennedy launch pads to other planets and beyond. To take these forms out of context could be read like polite plundering; to add humour, such as strings of cigarettes, could be seen as sacrilege. But for me the forms in Muttnik have a sincerity and reverence similar to McCahon’s use of words, or Caspar David Friedrich’s depiction of nature as an altar.

MJ Kjarr: Given that diluted traditions continue to a point, most 4 th or 5th generation Kiwi European’s and postcolonial Maori however are now somewhat heterogeneous to their ancestry. In the old (hierarchical) societies this would probably be apostactic, as witnessed whenever there is a fresh uproar over the (mis)use of traditions. The employment of Balinese concepts in your work seems to embrace a similarly ambiguous visual relationship, through focusing more on traditional beliefs than a specific physical/material aesthetic. Among possible analogies a philosophical description of your practice, from your position of dual nationality etc, could be Derrida’s ‘Differance’ (very simply put, like viewing two patterns simultaneously). With your non-portentious differance in mind and coming from a distanced upbringing as a New Zealander, I’m interested in responses you may have encountered from Balinese communities?

Sriwhana Spong: In my final year at art school I tried collaborating with my father who lives in Bali. I wanted to get text woven in the traditional ikat style. We have never had the chance to really get to know each other, so it was a very interesting exercise in miscommunication. My Father could not grasp the concept of making art simply to be displayed, and kept trying to turn the work into a form of production which would validate an importing and exporting business relationship. The idea that these were to be put in a gallery was new territory for him, as much as accessing my Balinese heritage was new territory for me. Nothing came of the project, we both stood at the threshold of our own borders, and even though I had a nice ‘bi-cultural’ thread going through the work the reality is that in this instant there was no middle ground.