Jim supangkat biography net worth

An appreciation of the role of curators was developing as the result of contact with international exhibitions of Asian art and the transition of Indonesian contemporary art from the local to the global was facilitated by the development of curatorial practice in Indonesia. It was the curator that physically and intellectually made the transition from the local art scene to the global exhibition and it was the curator who defined the artwork and attempted to insert Indonesian contemporary art into international art debates.

Yet once again the Indonesian version of a curator was conditioned by the lack of state infrastructure and public support for modern and contemporary art.

Jim Supangkat is an Indonesian Asian

There were no institutions to provide regular employment so that few Indonesian curators have been sufficiently secure to function independently from the art market. The distinctive category of kurator independen emerged: an independent curator who was not attached to any particular gallery or institution and who developed a career by a variety of art — related activities, ranging from organising festivals to writing art reviews on demand.

Curatorial practice emerged in Indonesia more or less at the same time as contemporary art was breaking from the constraints of the modern. Contemporary art, with its emphasis on content rather than aesthetics, required research to place a work in context. Yet although most curators began as academy — educated artists, there was no training in curatorial practice and barely any art history or theory in the curriculum.

The majority were, therefore, self taught. The first Indonesian art curator with an international profile and still the best known is Jim Supangkat who, like most Indonesian curators, began as an artist but gravitated towards art activism and art writing. Supangkat initially was alone in theorizing the concept of an Indonesian Modernism as distinct from a universal and Western — based Modernism.

He proposed, for example, a theory of multimodernism that would allow space for a distinctive Indonesian form of Modernism. His curatorial career expanded in the s and he was increasingly invited to represent Indonesian art overseas. He effectively became the public face of Indonesian contemporary art curatorship in an international context.

In the West the role of curator had grown significantly in the course of the 20th century and was recognised as one of a number of elements that could influence value and meaning in a work of art. The dominance of the author as the sole source of meaning in a text, or in the case of art, the artist as the source of meaning in an artwork, was challenged by the French school of philosophy and in particular, Roland Barthes in his essay, Death of the Author.