The Painting of Prostitutes in Indonesian Modern Art

In addressing the issues of class and gender within the Indonesian modern canon, the comfort found in the postcolonial mythology of the heroic and authentic anti-colonial modern artist is disrupted. In the cracks, a discomforting matrix of relationships between modern painters and the women they painted is revealed. In Heidi Arbuckle’s terms, the modern project as pursued by Sudjojono and cohort was a deeply sexualised activity and can be likened to the male fantasy of sexual conquest.1 However, it might be asked if their acts of sexual fantasy carried out through painterly gesture are to be perceived exclusively as asserting dominance, or might they also be imagined as desperate acts to restabilise a fragile male self.2 This article argues that Indonesian modern artists were reclaiming a sense of self not only through myths of indigeneity but also through myths of masculinity found in European modernism. In Europe, one of the ways that modernists explored their masculinity was through paintings that teased out contemporaneous ideas about the relationship between sexuality and “other” or “primitive” states of being.3 Their art, like Freud’s analysis of the subconscious, was built on an assumption of difference that confirmed as much as it challenged contemporaneous ideas about race, gender and sexuality.4 Nonetheless they set out to make art that was challenging and uncomfortable