Your correspondent took himself off to the opening of a group art exhibition recently. It was in Kemang (somewhere selatan or south of the White Monkey Palace) and since any trip into that bule-and-middle-class-Indonesian-fantasy-of-the-future-of-Indonesia means lots of traffic and no parking, I thought it best to take an amusing companion on the back of the motorbike in order to pass the hours as I waited to squeeze through an opening in the aforementioned, so to speak.
Accordingly, I put one (art) and one (amusing) together and got two = Homosexual Friend. In the West, which, as everyone knows is decadent and full of devils, this is a natural combination, but you can’t assume that the same is true in Holy Tanah Air, as was pointed out to me by said Homosexual Friend.
“In this country, the opposite is true,” “That Homo” claimed, rather wistfully.
“What? You mean all these effeminate, well-groomed, groovily dressed young men milling about kissing each other, taking photographs of the art, giggling and ignoring the women aren’t homosexual?” I asked, somewhat shocked.
As any woman in the West knows, 99 percent of men who attend art exhibitions are homosexuals or might as well be, an opinion that has been under-researched in studies on migration from the West.
“Nope, you have to assume the opposite — unlike in the West, where every art opening is a pick-up joint for homosexuals,” the friend confirmed.
This story, recounted as we sat at a table drinking beer amid the art and milling non-homosexuals, reminded me of an apocryphal tale about Singapore, which aspired to become the “global city of the arts.” It probably still does, bless its little cotton socks. To this end, the government allegedly hired a consultant, as governments do, to advise them how to become “creative.”
The consultant reported, after much expensive leg work, that if you wanted to be creative you had to be homosexual: that is, the government should recognize and, indeed, celebrate and encourage homosexuality if they wanted Singapore to be a real city of the arts.
The story goes that the guardians of the Lee Family Depot apparently decided that creativity came at too great a cost (probably they meant “honesty”) and it would be better to import creative homosexual entertainers at vast expense. They could then be swiftly exported after the gig, thereby, presumably, sparing the population their advances (said population might as well have been homosexual, anyway, insomuch as they had to be paid to reproduce, similar to our southern neighbor, Australia).
This story could have had a happy ending if the Depot had decided to decree that all citizens had to be homosexual for at least, say, 25 percent of their time in order to enhance “creativity,” which is shorthand these days for economic growth. Perhaps even tourists, homosexual or otherwise, would have had to devote a designated proportion of their time to clearly homosexual activity, whatever that might mean.
But I digress. Back at the art show there was a band (singing mournfully in English with that cute Indonesian accent), a cafe, a shop and lots of traders with stalls selling design stuff and even some art dotted about the late-Modernist gallery cum-home-cum-whatever. It was just like the West (except for the reversal of sexuality): wealth, consumerism and some art. Indonesia was really well on the way to “joining the club.”
Be that as it may, That Homo and I agreed that the most impressive art was a work by Ritchie Ned Hansel, which featured a couple of mosquito-killing devices emitting words in English (“trap” and “kill”) separated by an installation of fluorescent tubes spelling out “kill, kill.”
That Homo and I took this to be a metaphor for the soulless marriages many heterosexual couples found themselves in, not to mention the problems we all face with “nyamuk” or mosquitoes of various kinds. Quite a mirror, as art is alleged to be.
Salam
White Monkey News Bureau 