Once in awhile, it’s nice and healthy to be reminded how insipidly and painfully middle class KL is. That’s one big reason to travel.

Eva and I have just returned from Jogja, promising some updates in the coming weeks on the vibrant scene that makes up what is arguably Indonesia’s creative capital! :)

Amidst the unhurried life of Jogja’s urban-kampung environ, we managed to visit Eko Nugroho’s funky new establishment, the Daging Tumbuh shop, located near the backpackers district, south of the Kraton (Royal Palace).

Daging Tumbuh is roughly translated as a ‘tumour’ or a ‘growth’ and describes the bizarre throng of cartoon mutants that populate Eko’s comic series of the same name. Self-published twice a year since 2000, it also stands for the kind of D.I.Y. independent comic aesthetic and attitude that have extended into a creative cottage industry of its own.

The shop is only a logical expansion of this vocabulary and includes within its catalogue of goods the Daging Tumbuh comic series, an awesome selection of scouts/military badges (reminiscent of the artist’s extensive use of embroidery in his works), Eko’s spaceman dolls (which was given to a number of Malaysian artists in his 2007 solo exhibition in KL to be interpreted in a number of ways), as well as farcical accouterments such as a series of wrestler’s masks, alongside the usual t-shirts and what-nots.

Wrestling has never looked sexier than this!

Military ambitions for encounters of the third kind

Spaced-out

While it’s all good sport, these works reveal a deliciously play that is typical of Javanese irony, treating heavy subjects  such as violence, struggle, and cultural invasion with mischievous humour. As nonsensical as they appear to be, the ‘tumour’ as a growth is a cancerous artistic strategy that designs a way of looking at life on different terms, terms that refuse to fall into the kind of polemical diatribe about our socio-cultural issues yet able to take it seriously at the same time.

Its take on product design is rather refreshing, creating objects such as military badges, masks and toys that are light-hearted enough. Yet as collectibles, these objects and products do not quite fit into the bill of everyday utilitarian things, spruced up for our middle class wants.

In the lead up to KL Design Week 09 where programmes are tailored towards supporting and promoting a putative ‘creative industry’ couched in terms of economic growth and expansion with vaguely utopian communicative strategies, programming a cool aesthetic of conviviality and slickness simply to affirm our wants and desires (and designed for the modern day slacktivist in us), independent art + design collectives in Jogja, plugged into different currents, operating on off-kilter platforms, are great reminders of the imaginative possibilities of art + design falling outside the glib exhortation for ‘creativity’ that has emerged as the buzzword and currency in design world today.

If Design Weeks/Fairs are to take themselves seriously, they really need to look harder and think harder.

Daging Tumbuh is located at

115A, Jalan Parangtritis
Yogyakarta, Indonesia

http://dgtmb.blogspot.com/

(SS)