The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Angels caught in a trap (detail) 1996 Mixed media 60 x 135 x 19cm each Courtesy: Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta 48 The chair 1993 Performance, September 1993 The First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery Mandalas are also firmly located in the present. Heri's assemblies suggest mass organisations - the bureaucracy, the army, modern classrooms - prompting questions about the powerlessness of individuals and the power of those directing them . In Ceremony of the soul 1995, for instance, we recognise the predicament of modern humanity, experienced in Indonesia during the 32 years of Suharto's dictatorial 'New Order', as an extreme form of powerlessness. As many commentators on Heri Dona's work have noted, the 'New Order' was a topsy-turvy world in which the normal logic of events was overturned.Thus education became a technology of mis-education, journalism was a technology of propaganda, and nothing was as it appeared to be. APT2002 Makan pe!or (Eating bullets) 1992 Synthetic polymer paint and collage on cardboard Purchased 1995 Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery These questions of individual agency are sharply focused by Heri Dona's fascination with mechanical, especially clockwork, devices. Each of his personae is part human, part doll: human in form but with mechanical components. Mechanical devices from clockwork to bicycles to sewing machines are still the principal signifiers of modernity in Indonesia. Even by the 1990s, when Heri Dono made these works, the digital revolution had not overtaken Indonesia, either in the daily life of the great mass of Indonesian people or in the Indonesian imagination. In fact, the immediate accessibility of Heri Dona's work to Indonesian audiences is a major factor in his choice of images and materials. His dolls are stand-ins or doppelgangers, evidently cousins of the puppets of the wayang theatres, and it is well-known that Heri is extremely knowledgeable about Indonesian wayang traditions, from wayang ku/it, which is most familiar to Westerners, to wayang benda and wayang orang. Like other wayang characters, Heri Dona's figures explore potentially explosive contemporary issues through richly allusive and indirect means. This licence to range broadly over contemporary issues is still a key social role of the wayang, where sensitive and scandalous issues are regularly canvassed as comic asides from the great classical narratives of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. However, in the 1990s wayang pantjasila and wayang revo!usi also explicitly promoted specific political agendas, as their respective names suggest. Thus Heri Dona's art must be understood in the context of these proliferating appeals to Indonesian popular opinion, aspects of both control and resistance. 3 There are also rich Western sources for Heri Dona's quasi-human dolls, in narratives since the eighteenth century about automata and robots. (Apinan Poshyananda's description of Heri's Yogyakarta studio compares it to the workshop of a nineteenth– century mechanical wizard.)• The role of the automaton is always to radically question the status and actions of human beings. 'Standing in' for human protagonists, Heri Dono's dolls embody the key issue in modern science fiction posed by robots and androids: what is the relationship between mechanical and human consciousness, or, in the title of a famous science– fiction novel, 'Do androids dream of electric sheep ?' 5