Writings
Entang Wiharso, Black Goat Is My Last Defense
5 Traverse Gallery, Providence; for Visual Arts Magazine, 2008
The nature of identity is something
that most artists, if not most people, wrestle with, often to the point
that it approaches banality. Background, gender, class,
family, and appearance are concepts we all fight despite not really
being able to do much about any of them. However, the duality
of identity can be as beautiful as it is oppressive, and as frightening
as it is ordinary.
In the Black Goat Is My Last Defense exhibition at
Providence’s 5 Traverse Gallery, Javanese-American artist
Entang Wiharso approaches many of these themes with a tangible urgency,
reminding viewers that personal identity itself should be fought as
much as it is embraced. His large acrylic paintings depict
tranquil-looking four-eyed people, thoughtfully studying or knowingly
winking at the viewer, sometimes in the same image. In Threatened
(2008), for instance, a man who resembles a bald version of the artist
looks straight ahead, his lips taut like someone waiting for you to
finish your thoughts before offering his own opinion. These
paintings focus on Wiharso’s dual identity as an
Indonesian-American, viewing the world with two pairs of
eyes. They are calm pieces with large heads and oversized
necks, seemingly oblivious to the vines and objects that attempt to
torment them; in Melting Family Portrait (2008), a piece not included
in the show, Wiharso paints his own wife and children this way.
The rest of the show is not nearly so serene, however, and a majority
of the gallery’s wall space is devoted to bloody scenes of
violence. The triptych Upside Down Landscape (2008) is over
eight feet high and almost fifteen feet wide, taking up an entire wall
of the gallery. In it, monstrously large shadow-creatures
loom over smaller, violent scenes where arms, legs, tongues and penises
menacingly snake around like invasive vines. A huge, slightly
nebulous figure on the left holds a dog, while a clawed penis longer
than the figure’s legs snakes upward. To the right,
figures attack and dance on one another. At the top of the
painting, a different scene is taking place, with characters moving
along a black hill like a parade of medieval flagellants. But
though the landscape is presumably the central part of the piece, its
small size and proximity to the ceiling negate the viewer’s
ability to fully understand what’s going on.
It’s a little overwhelming, despite large swaths of blank
canvas, but the style seems to indicate that Wiharso works in a frenzy
of feeling.
Black Goat Is My Last Defense, the show’s title piece, is
composed of aluminum plates depicting life-sized superheros.
Words are written across the bodies like graffiti, and it’s
hard to tell whether the words are supposed to represent the feelings
of the figures or the artist’s own hatred of them.
It’s not really clear what to make of a Batman with animal
ears whose leg taunts “LICK ME!” On the
other hand, this ambiguity is essential to keeping the work
interesting.
Unfortunately, due to an unfortunate mix-up, the title piece was held
up in customs until after the show ended, as was the goat sculpture
that was to occupy the inner gallery. Though a lamentable
loss for the gallery and the exhibition, the absence of certain key
pieces also, in its way, highlights the jarring clash of dualities that
Wiharso approaches in his work. As a man living between two
cultures (and dividing his time between the two countries), it is
significant that one country would prevent him from showing his work on
the grounds that the work might be suspicious.
The second, smaller room of the gallery was composed of one large
piece, as well as a video projection presenting the pieces that
didn’t make it to the gallery in time. The
three-wall mural, Unspeakable Victim: The Story Behind Super Hero and
Black Goat, uses a comic-like format to show a Batman-like hero
fighting a goat who we see at various points chasing the hero,
hammering his head, and swallowing him.
The goat imagery is somewhat poetic; black goat is sort of like a black
sheep, an outcast in one’s own town or family. It
also reminds viewers of a scapegoat, one who can be blamed and
persecuted for a larger social ill.
But the key image, I think, is a small one towards the corner of one
wall. A black goat drawn with a body inside, as well as some
eyes and other body parts, and a house. It’s
impossible to tell whether the goat ate the hero, or whether the hero
has created a Trojan horse, a means of attacking by pretending to be
something else. Either way, the man has been swallowed, and
the angry-looking drawing implies that hiding one’s identity
as an offensive strategy is something akin to suicide.
(Perhaps it is poignant, then, that the United States government
refused to allow Wiharso’s goat sculpture to enter the
country.)
The figures in this piece are bloody, and they taunt one another with
their bodies, licking each other’s blood and stabbing
themselves. Genitalia are prominent; penises take various
lumpy forms, all of them massively oversized and completely devoid of
eroticism, save perhaps one in which a headless Super Hero is endowed
with a high-heeled woman.
Super Hero, the athletic black figure who appears repeatedly throughout
the work, looks a lot like Batman, which is notable since the Caped
Crusader has himself undergone many identity shifts since first
appearing in 1939. He has gone from pulpy comic book hero to
colorful, kitschy TV star, before returning in much darker form as a
Hollywood action hero. He has appeared in radio dramas and at
least two animated television series. Even recent Hollywood
films have used four different actors to portray him.
Batman is, of course, also a man; Bruce Wayne is a well-loved
millionaire philanthropist, but no one in Gotham City ever suspects him
of being the dark, muscled superhero. Like Wiharso, Batman
must juggle a great many identities; perhaps it is surprising, then,
that in interviews the artist aligns himself with the black
goat.
The style of this piece is rough and urgent; on one wall a penciled
note saying ‘STABBING HIMSELF’ appears above an
image of someone doing just that. While the sense of urgency
might have been tempered somewhat by the detained goat sculptures, the
work nevertheless stands as an interesting portrait of a man haunted by
the meanings of identity.
|