EXHIBITION ESSAY

wtfing it then omging it

A solo exhibition by Galih Johar 

11 — 26 May 2024

View the exhibition here.


Material World

by Ellen Lee

Everywhere we are surrounded and hemmed in by products. Everything makes reference to some product; all of modern life is driven by products. Most average people’s paychecks go toward products that they believe will improve their lives; most people aspire towards products. You could just be talking to someone and they’ll suddenly interrupt you to ask where you got your phone case, or you could be complaining about some domestic woe and they’ll start enthusiastically telling you about this product on Shopee that you should buy to fix it. A literacy with products, their functions, and their variations across brands and models is more common than literacy with art or any other aspect of culture. People can list the specifications of a new iPhone before it’s released — your NPC co-worker will start talking to you using words like “Retina display” and “bionic chip” — but seldom do they have the vocabulary to express how they feel about a painting. 

For the youth of today, largely raised on mass-produced, widely-available and cheaply-bought products and on-demand shopping, it is the language of the product that they intuitively understand best. The children of Pop Art have arrived — step aside Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, the kids these days are born knowing that everything and anything can be art because art, like the movies, music, books, architecture, and fashion that they were raised on, can also be made on the factory line, or made out of objects made on the factory line. Throw in the Internet’s glut of images and information, and you also have actual spoken/written language that is as formless and meaningless as the endless varieties that line supermarket shelves and Shopee front pages. Chopped up, processed, mixed in with additives, packaged with lurid designs, the language of memes is the second intuitive language possessed by youths all around the world. It is against such a lively environment that Galih Johar makes his art. 

Initially starting out as a major in ceramics during his college days in Yogyakarta, Galih has evidently found his voice through the medium of readymade consumer products instead. His works are created with the blithe, absurd ingenuity particular to young people, smooshing objects together and creating something so common but absurd that it provokes a sort of knee-jerk response of “what’s wrong with you? Why would you do this?” (Similar to memes: as consumers, we may laugh at them, but all meme-producers are anonymous for a reason, i.e. that there must be something really wrong with you to be spending your time doing this.) Some of the works are satiric, like a tabletop globe where the globe has been replaced with a government-subsidised gas cylinder stencilled with the words, Hanya untuk masyarakat miskin (tr. “For poor people only”), words that are stencilled by the agency giving out the gas cylinders and not, as one might expect, by the artist; others are abject, like a baby’s pacifier pierced with a septum ring, evoking a nipple piercing; some are plays on words, like the quadruple-framed spectacles in the show, “1000% sus”, which evokes the idiom “four-eyed”; many have a visceral element in that they activate a sense other than seeing, like headphones with nails hammered into the ear pads or a pair of lightbulbs that have been deep-fried to appear like crackers. Most of them are just plain funny.*

In the way he curates his exhibitions and his own persona, he cultivates an element of offhand jocularity. The title of the present exhibition was his idea; his explanation is that he hopes audiences will react in a progress from “wtf?” to “omg!”. Hence he has selected what he believes are his “most simple, bold, durable, and hopefully irritating” artworks for presentation. Prior to this, his last solo exhibition was held at Cemeti Institute for Art and Society in Yogyakarta, in 2023, and was titled Manunggal, meaning “oneness” in Bahasa Indonesia but in this context doubling as an abbreviation of “Manis Unggulan [tr. “Featured Sweets”] by Galih Johar”. In the two most circulated artist profile photos of himself, one has him laid far back in a chair — practically horizontal — with his chin up so that he’s looking at the viewer down his nose, legs man-spread, chain around his neck and cigarette in hand, and on the whole appearing more like a rapper than an artist, and the other has him in a “slav squat” pose (or what in Yogyakarta is called a jongkok hardcore, a “hardcore pose”), decked out smartly in chinos and a dress shirt, but with sleeves rolled up so you can see the tattoos up and down his arms, as far as the knuckles. The “packaging” of his product is clearly as important as the product itself, if not inseparable from it — and it is no wonder that his work often goes viral on Instagram. 

Working with common readymade objects allows for Galih’s sense of humour and playful, easygoing personality to show itself in a way that ceramics, built from scratch, might not. These objects are more legible to younger audiences who were brought up in an age of instant accessibility, including those who may not have been brought up with any art historical teaching at all. They are built from the ephemera of the every day, in terms of their actual objects but also in terms of jokes as a form, more ephemeral than serious contemplation. And they speak to that quick-grasping, ephemeral sense of perception that is the current habit for consuming objects and images. These works are global, amorphous, endless, transcending language and geographical boundaries just like the found objects that they are derived from. As for their artist, he marks a shift in the perception of the artist as interpreter of history, tradition, and present times, to the artist as fellow consumer — and as friend, as equal to the viewer. At the museum setting of Museum MACAN’s Voice of Reason group show earlier this year, the appearance of Galih’s objects amid heftier works by more senior artists was like the appearance of an insider friend at an art opening, going “hey… pretty boring, huh?” The works are also a departure from the mythological and heritage traditions that Indonesian art, and especially Javanese art, is often associated with. (But for those who still like their art to have a trace of where their artists come from, there are some local flavours in Galih’s work. The present exhibition features a pair of Indonesian army boots and a bird in a cage, the latter a reference to the Javanese culture of klangenan, a hobby of rearing birds as domestic pets common among adult men.) 

Galih’s sculpting background prevails in that all of the works are hand-made by the artist himself. He breaks open objects and tinkers around with them, creates additions for them, cuts them open and seals them back with their new appendages, sandpapering the glue spots until they appear seamless. His daily art practice consists of the same routine of chipping away and sanding-down as any other sculptor, only his medium is the cheap kitsch that comprises our everyday lives. Maybe the idea of him spending hours bent over at his studio, crafting and refining with — not marble, or clay, but cheap plastic, is part of the joke, the packaging, the persona, the product. The exhibition invites us to rethink the function and meaning of the everyday objects we take for granted, along with the art that is created (consciously or not) as a counterweight to the general mass of cheap indistinct things that fill our lives, and enter into a space where the lines of distinction are blurred. These objects are probably more effective than advertising campaigns though not for the reasons that their original manufacturers might think.

ELLEN LEE, May 2024

NOTES

* To view the all the artworks referenced in this essay, you may visit Galih’s Instagram at @galihjohar or download the illustrated catalogue made for his third solo exhibition, Manunggal at Cemeti Institute for Art and Society in Yogyakarta, 2023 here.