Terror/Beauty Pintor Sirait

 

Hendro Wiyanto

 

In the midst of the darkness in the night, a bomb exploded at Paddy’s Pub in Kuta, Bali, in October 2002. The bomb exploded as if saying that the paradise is no longer exists. People have lost their paradise here on earth. Hijackers and suicide bombers believe that they would turn into bright stars after carrying their sacred mission. But we all know that stars originated from ancient times. Their light would only seen by our eyes after years of light years. Isn't their messages absurd and estrange to us who would only want to live our daily life on earth.

Pintor Sirait witnessed hundreds of Balinese bomb's victims turned into pieces of corpse. The beauty is no longer existed, when lives faded away to radical believes of a group of people who were willing to die only to be turn into small spots shinning in the sky. While alive, human body is as frail as doughnuts. The explosion immediately turned the frail dough into cremated flesh, rough and horrendous. Yes, the bomb birthed some sort of horror-realism, the “realism of cremated flesh”.

The realism of human-body horror is none that we could ever experience even as we watched a piece of chicken meat being grilled or a fat pig being broiled in fire. Experiencing death in people has triggered our deepest awareness with the vanishing of the subject along side with the experience of our very “’existence”. “Being” in the subject has intention toward the awareness itself, none as we have encountered before. We don’t believe that our humane beauty and rationalization will in the future turned into ancient artefact, lasts and shines as the stars in the mind of terrorists. Death pronounced realization of living only after destruct it.

Violence has been an eminent pattern in our lives within this century. Two world wars from previous century, holocaust tragedy, and hundreds of local and national war in the name of freedom and liberty, has taken lives of two millions people each years as casualties of wars and violence. Only people who would kill their fellow human more than any possible death causes. “After holocaust, poetry is impossible”, the famous word of Ardono is often quoted with ache. If poetry is no longer able to write about our lives, how could terror and genocide in the name of fundamentalist’s sacred cause and belief would ever replace it?

Johan Grimonprez created a new media art work combining fact and fiction on absurdity of violence through hijacking drama recently. He presumed our history is a structured of drama-fiction, and every time we witness one, we actually replaying the same drama; a “dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y”. What is the meaning of producing beauty for artists nowadays? Would beauty, created by artists in their artworks, coexisted with the potent threat of terror? Could the production of donuts walked before the piece of cremated flesh realism unravelled?

The echo of terror and violence has representatively illustrated by Pintor Sirait through steel plats penetrated by bullets. The holes in the steel plats would only remind us with anonymous bodies of victims, killed by fellow human beings. The bullet holes coming from the Colt 38, AK 47 and M16 on the steel plat would not only create texture but also an absurd sense of violence and the banality of violence itself. The artist takes a closer stand to a condition in which violence operated as a killer machine. You could refer this as abstract element of