Wearing a white smock, a woman stands on a field of charcoal lumps. All day, Indonesian artist Melati Suryodarmo has been crushing charcoal to dust with a heavy, stone rolling pin, leaning over a stone block mounted on an iron table. The whole scene is black and white and grey under the gallery lights. She’s made no discernible inroads, though the black dust soils her smock and hangs in the air as it spills to the floor. The residue has blackened her hands and arms. It smears her face and clogs her hair. Thin black rivulets run from her nostrils. The artist began performing – if performance it is – at 10am, and continues for 12 hours, with no intermissions, no toilet breaks, no water, as she goes about her task. She doesn’t wear a mask. Suryodarmo’s I’m a Ghost in My Own House, which she has been performing since 2012, is compelling, though the work she’s doing is horrible and hazardous.
The audience comes and goes through the long day. Some stay, willing Suryodarmo on, or waiting for her to drop. We watch in silence, to the sound of crushing and sifting, the noise of her feet crunching over the charcoal, the repeated stamp of the roller as she breaks up the bigger, fist-sized lumps. I’m struck by how close it is to hard labour, the futile, soul-breaking punishment tasks given to Victorian prisoners – climbing the treadmill, turning the crank, moving rocks from one side of a room to the other, then back again. I feel like a voyeur.
Sometimes Suryodarmo walks away from the block, bending to select the lumps and gather them up in her smock before returning to her task. She also spends periods standing facing her audience, though she doesn’t seem to see us, like a field worker snatching a second while trying to get through another interminable day. She’s only midway through her shift but she’s teetering and looks stunned. Why would anyone put themselves through this?
Suryodarmo is not the first and certainly won’t be the last artist to submit to the rigours of an extreme, self-inflicted regime. We are told that the performance symbolises “the expenditure of life’s energy and the potential for renewal”. Tell that to the cleaner at the Ikon, the road sweeper, the zero-hours contract worker, to the millions who toil unacknowledged. Her work strikes me as an exercise in futility and the waste of human potential. All pain, no gain. After that single performance, visitors to Ikon will see only the charcoal, the bench and the block, greyed smears on the white wall and an accompanying video of the artist’s action.
Suryodarmo’s show here mixes a series of live solo and collective performances from her repertoire (one is performed by members of a union of south-east Asian domestic workers), video, photography and a whole gallery dedicated to Studio Plesungan, the artist-run space she has founded in the Javanese countryside. With the walls covered in images of the studio’s verdant surroundings, and soundtracked by evocative birdsong and rain, Ikon’s top floor space is decked out with furniture, and numerous desktop videos of workshops and performances. Several videos of the artist’s own elaborate performances – including one set in the ruins of her late father’s house ‑ are also screened around the Ikon. Most don’t do the best of her work justice. Their production and editing feels mannered and somehow a bit arty. The best of Suryodarmo’s art is found in her live performances, or in videos that document her performances without jazzing them up for the camera.
In 2000, the artist was filmed at a theatre in Germany performing Exergie – Butter Dance, then filmed again performing in Jakarta in 2021. Wearing a fitted black dress and high heels, Suryodarmo mounts a spotlit platform in a darkened theatre, and stands on a little plinth made from blocks of butter. Javanese percussion starts to play, and she begins to sway to the rhythm. At first sinuous and expressive, her gestures soon lose their coordination as the butter squidges under her feet. Struggling to maintain her balance and her dignity, her eyes bulge and her arms pinwheel as her feet slide away from her. She slithers and skates, flails and falls. Again and again she finds her feet and takes pratfall after pratfall, her dress getting more and more smeared and slicked with butter as we watch, her hair slathered and awry. All the while, Suryodarmo attempts to maintain a deadpan expression, until, thoroughly winded, bewildered and besmirched, she crawls off the stage, her composure entirely lost.
In 2012, a YouTube user found a video of Exergie – Butter Dance online, and replaced the original soundtrack with Adele’s 2011 song Someone Like You. The video mashup has had almost 2m views, and has also redirected viewers to Suryodarmo’s original performance.
Now 53, Suryodarmo was born in central Java, where she studied international relations and politics, while also pursuing her interest in theatre and dance. Her mother had been a traditional Javanese dancer. While her father, Suprapto Suryodarmo, was the founder of a movement practice called Amerta. We see him slowly moving around on the rocks and foreshore of a beach in Devon in one accompanying video.
Moving to Germany in 1994, Suryodarmo was taught by Japanese butoh choreographer Anzo Furukawa and by Marina Abramović, eventually becoming her assistant. While Abramović has her own history of arduous durational performances, fellow Indonesian artist Reza Afisina of Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa, which directed the last Documenta in Kassel once staged a video performance in which he slapped himself over and over again, in a ritual of self-admonishment.
Suryodarmo’s Butter Dance originated as a student project. Partly a response to living in a western culture (Indonesia is the largest Muslim nation, as well as having its own indigenous social values), and also a response to a western diet, Butter Dance is a parodic exorcism. Body image, vulnerability and fortitude are at its core. Both funny and abject, it remains wonderfully accessible. The two iterations of this performance, staged more than 20 years apart alternate on the screens. We get a sense of the artist’s body ageing, and also of her persistence. The work and the grind goes on, for as long as it lasts.
