This talk by Karen Strassler is part of the Findley History of Art Lecture Series.

Abstract: In September 2005, members of the Islamic Defenders Front descended upon a gallery in Jakarta and demanded the removal of Pinkswing Park, an artwork by a prominent Indonesian artist, on the grounds that it was pornographic. This paper charts the “image-event” of Pinkswing Park, arguing that the controversy around the artwork was both a product of, and a referendum on, the ease of circulation of images in Indonesia’s complexly mediated, loosely regulated post-authoritarian public sphere. As the artwork traveled from the rarefied atmosphere of the art gallery into the mainstream and tabloid media, it became embroiled in debates then underway about a proposed pornography law. My analysis of this case forms part of a broader argument about why and how we might attend to the eventfulness of images within contemporary political processes. As images move and mutate ever more rapidly across media channels, becoming focal points of attention among divergent publics, they become the material ground for political struggles increasingly taking place in the messy arena of the public sphere.

Karen Strassler is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research centers on questions of visuality, mediation, politics, and memory in Indonesia. Her first book, Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (Duke UP, 2010), traced the history and social life of popular photography in late and postcolonial Java, asking how photography participated in the making of Indonesian subjects. Her new book, Demanding Images: Transparency, Mediation and the Image-Event in Indonesia (Duke UP, 2020), examines the political work of images in the new media ecology and political climate that followed the Reformasi movement of 1998.  Other recent projects include the visual mediation and political currency of Ratu Kidul, a legendary spirit queen (in Comparative Studies in Society and History2014) and the politics of memory and violence against ethnic Chinese as addressed in the work of artist FX Harsono (History of the Present 2018)

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