Krack Studio’s ongoing Tanah / Impian (Dream / Land) project is a series of exhibitions of screenprinted images exploring advertising in Indonesia. The images are drawn from a database of several thousand advertising images, collected from magazines and newspapers and organised chronologically. It’s true that advertisers often provoke and manipulate the desires of consumers, but it is not a one-way street; in order to successfully sell a product, advertisements must also align themselves with the values and aspirations of their consumers. So, advertising images can tell an interesting story about how Indonesian values and aspirations have changed over the twentieth century.

Krack Studio is a printmaking collective in Yogyakarta, of which I’m a member. We undertake a range of projects to sustain ourselves such as artisanal printing, workshops, solo shows, as well as ongoing, research-driven projects like Tanah / Impian. It is an open-ended project; our database of images continues to grow but we will never be able to draw rigorous, quantitative conclusions from it. Rather, it provides a window to how Indonesian cultural imaginaries have evolved since the early twentieth century until now. In some ways these imaginaries are parallel to canonical art-historical perspectives, but often they provide alternative perspectives.

In this essay I provide a broad description of the Tanah / Impian project since its first iteration in 2014, then look in more detail at the last exhibition; Kelas Menengah (Middle Class), in 2023. This research examines not only how Indonesian cultural values have shifted over the past one hundred years, but also how cultural studies has shifted from Marxist readings in the first half of the twentieth century to identitarian perspectives in the later twentieth century, and to more recent new materialist approaches since the 2000s. None of these are right or wrong, rather they provide different ways of understanding images and the role they play in the formation of communities and subjectivities.

Whereas Art History is traditionally focused on how people produce images, this essay is more about how images produce people. I write from the premise that every community must have a dynamic image ecology, or collective imaginary, or worldview.¹ Through these images community members can imagine their world in similar ways: how they imagine ‘us’ and who is ‘not us’; what we look like, how we behave, and so on. Some of these images may come from the art world, but they equally come from other sources, including advertising.

As a foreigner who has lived mostly in Indonesia for the last fifteen years, my interest in these images is more than just academic. As well as continuing to learn the language here I have also had to learn the customs, manners and practices from different places and communities around Indonesia. I have also had to learn the Indonesian imagination so that I could see the world as if through the eyes of people here. This has meant not only visiting museums, but also looking at the books people read as children, the TV shows they grew up with, packaging from supermarkets, or advertisements in print, tv and digital media. As I begin to map out these ‘webs of significance’ the Indonesian imaginary begins to reveal itself to me.² The Tanah / Impian project was for me a way to begin to unpack that process. 

Tanah / Impian: Our Dream, Their Dream, One Hundred Years

Our first Tanah / Impian exhibition opened at Krack Studio in 2014 and included twenty-four screenprinted images of advertisements reproduced from Indonesian newspapers from the early twentieth century through to the present day. For this project, we were interested in the often stark differences between the Indonesian dream, and its divergent realities. We collected advertising images that imagined Indonesia according to the grand nationalist narratives or consumer aspirations, and contrasted these with the harsh realities of life in the Archipelago. Tanah / Impian was Krack’s first foray into historiography. We followed the idea that a nation’s history cannot simply be told through a single national narrative rather it must be understood as multiple, intersecting and sometimes conflicting narratives.

Obat Kuat: Hegemony and Libido in Yogyakarta

The second project in the Tanah/Impian series (2016) was titled Obat Kuat (Strong Medicine). In this iteration we delved deeper into the psychology of advertising and consumerism. We began by researching advertisements for ‘Obat Kuat’, which are strength tonics or miracle cures that have appeared in Indonesian newspapers almost daily since the late nineteenth century. For the exhibition at Krack Studio we screenprinted 100 of these advertisements and displayed them in a way that mirrored the small stores that sell these “medicines” in side streets in Indonesia.

Obat Kuat is a vague term. It generally refers to a tonic to increase "drive", however, definitions of drive and how Obat Kuat products claim to treat it has certainly changed over 100 years. The medicines themselves were often ineffective, but their marketing was revealing. Even in the nineteenth century, some advertisements promised increased productivity, while others promised pleasure. This reflects the dilemma of the modern subject; always torn between the productive demands of the hegemony, and individual libidinal pleasure. The more these ads aggravated this tension, the better the products sold. By the 1980s, arguably, every product in the marketplace was being marketed like Obat Kuat. Suitcases, watches, cars… They not only promised to make you more productive, but also to make you the object of another’s desire, or give you the confidence to obtain the object of your own desire.

Obat Kuat began as a Krack Studio exhibition, but as our collection of Obat Kuat images grew, I realised they deserved deeper analysis, and decided to use the data as the basis for my Masters Research in the Cultural Studies department (IRB) at Universitas Sanata Dharma, Yogyakarta.³ As part of this research I visited libraries in Australia and Thailand to compare similar ads in their newspapers. It is fair to say that this was a global trend in the twentieth century. These advertisements produced a new kind of subject, one who understood their body and desires differently from the imperial subject, the industrial worker or the political citizen. These ads laid the foundations of the consumer subject. 

Kelas Menengah: Fitting In, Standing Out

Kelas Menengah (Middle Class) presented in 2023, was the third exhibition in Krack’s Tanah / Impian series. According to World Bank 40% of Indonesians are middle class or aspiring-middle class. That’s approximately 150 million consumers. This classification is based on metrics such as income, education, access to health services. However, middle class is more than just demographics. When we started working on this project, we did not have a firm definition of what middle class was. We just started collecting advertising images that seemed to reference or represent the idea of class. As the project evolved we started to see middle-class as a worldview shaped by an ever-changing set of aesthetic codes. These codes regulate how we dress, eat, talk, the kind of car we drive, the watch we wear. How we conform to, resist, or transgress these codes of consumption defines our status, or ‘habitus’ in the middle class, and how we fit in or stand out.

The project also traced how middle-class aspirations have changed. In the decade after independence (the 1950s) the middle class was depicted in advertising as a suburban utopia in which all Indonesians, from rich or poor backgrounds, would finally meet in the middle. But utopian dreams, while appealing, are too monolithic to encompass the diverse aspirations of a new republic with hundreds of languages, thousands of islands, and millions of citizens.

By the 1970s the utopian dream of middle class had been replaced by a more normative, disciplinary version, as the Soeharto government tightened its grip on the people, seeking to control population growth, gender roles, and public obedience, all in the name of national development. Julia Suryakusuma has explored how those who did not conform to the normative ideal were portrayed as letting down the development of the state, and this was used to justify their ostracism, incarceration or even violence against them.⁴

The problem with totalitarianism is that the more you try to force people to conform, the more they will seek to transgress. Since the 1980s, markets have segmented and magazines targeting women, or teenagers, or music fans have proliferated. These segmented markets have created multiple, often conflicting visions of Middle-class-ness. For example, the poster for Wa’alaikumsalaam Paris below describes the ambivalence many middle-class Indonesians experience as they are caught between local and Western values; navigating a Muslim identity but also a globalised, cosmopolitan life; between wanting to belong but not wanting to make the compromises associated with belonging.

Old Left, New Left, New Materialists

On the day the Kelas Menengah exhibition launched, we hosted a discussion at Krack titled ‘Can the Kelas Menengah speak?’ The audience were mostly artists and cultural studies graduates and students. I’d say they all came from the ‘left’ of the political spectrum, and yet held quite divergent views on the meaning of middle class.

From the feedback in that discussion, there were three groups in the audience who each had a different perspective on ‘middle class’. The first group I call the Old Left who had a humanist, Marxist, mid-century socialist view. They saw middle class consumerism as a ‘carrot on a stick’ to distract citizens from the class struggle. In a country like Indonesia, where there is massive inequality, they have a point. But I also think to reduce all of a nation’s problems down to a single issue like class struggle oversimplifies the multiple vectors in which power is exercised in any community.

The second group in our discussion I’d call the New Left. They approached the idea of middle class from the perspective of identity politics. While identity politics is often associated with movements like feminism, black rights or queer politics, what becomes clear in our Tanah Impian research is how it was also driven by market segmentation in the mass media. From the 1970s onwards, newspapers and magazines catered to ‘segments’ like middle-class housewives, or heavy metal fans, or religious groups. These publications positioned themselves as alternatives to the mainstream, middle class newspapers. Someone in our discussion asked ‘Is Kelas Menengah an Identity?’ But it’s actually the opposite of an identity. By the 1970s, middle class had become the normative, conservative and conformist ‘mainstream’ that identity politics sought to decentralise and deconstruct.

Both of these groups tended to see middle class as a problem that needed to be fixed. Overall, I would say the Old Left placed too much emphasis on the needs of the commons, at the expense of the individual. But on the other hand, the New Left placed too much emphasis on the needs of the individual, at the expense of the commons. 

In our discussion, the Old Left and the New Left conceptualised power in very monolithic terms. They used words like ‘Indonesia’, ‘advertising’, ‘capitalism’ or ‘middle class’ as if they were hierarchical institutions with centralised agendas. There was a third group in the audience that I’d call the New Materialists. From their perspective, terms like ‘middle class’, ‘capitalism’, or even ‘Indonesia’ are not institutions, but are better understood as master signifiers; the organising principles around which a bunch of people, images, objects and ideas form a productive relation. Within these relations, power always acts in multiple directions. For example, when we talk about class boundaries, some gain pleasure by enforcing power, others gain pleasure through the transgression of power.

From a New Materialist perspective, subjects are produced in relational systems that are intersecting, fragile, often conflicting and constantly evolving. The Old and New Left tended to be humanists, and place human rights, and human agency at the centre of their discourse. But in New Materialist thinking, knowledge is no longer top down, linear and epistemological, but rather rhizomatic, de-centered and ecological. There are no individual agents, rather there are only relations of objects that have reasonably predictable outcomes.

Agency

The big question in new materialist (often referred to as ‘post-humanist’) thinking is how human agency can be understood. If humans are not the agents of relational systems, how do we make sense of institutional discourses such as the law, human rights or art history, for which individual human agency is axiomatic? Karen Barad argues that agency is not something that we have; it is something that is produced within a relation. Agency is always conditional; to gain agency, we surrender our individual freedom.

So that brings me back to the images in our Tanah Impian project. A recurring theme in our research was the tension between the individual and their communities. With Obat Kuat, we saw how advertisers aggravated the tension between libido and hegemony, or pleasure and productivity, in order to increase their sales. In our Kelas Menengah project, the tension was always between fitting in and standing out. All of these images play to our conflicting desires on the one hand to gain agency by building relations, but on the other hand to be free of the limitations set on our agency by those relations.

While individual agency is a key principle of humanism, modernist philosophers also agree it is illusory, or at best conditional. But I’m not sure anyone reading this essay is ready to give up on the delusion that they make choices, or that they are the agents of their own destiny. I think it is exactly this dilemma that the advertisements in our Tanah Impian project address. People want agency, and they want to believe that they have agency over their own lives. But absolute agency is always just beyond our grasp. 

We read stories and watch movies where good people prosper and bad people are brought to justice, but our real lives never really play out like that. Random things happen to us every day, over which we have very little agency. But imagine if there was a pill you could take that guaranteed you the body of Adonis, the confidence to make decisions quickly and easily, and that you’d be amazingly productive, rich, good-looking and popular. Wouldn’t you buy it?

Conclusion

Whereas traditional art history is concerned with how people create images, this research is concerned with how images create people. More specifically, how every community must have its own imaginarium—a collection of images, practices, stories and rituals through which community members come to imagine their world in the same way. In this sense, I have argued that images produce subjects.

Krack’s ongoing Tanah / Impian project explores how advertisers targeted Indonesian consumers with products that at once exploited anxieties about their lack of agency and then offered a ‘magic bullet’ that promised to relieve these anxieties. This strategy ultimately led to the formation of consumer subjectivities.

I have taken a New Materialist approach in my analysis of these practices. Subjectivities are produced in multiple systems, that often intersect and conflict. I do not propose a monolithic, utopian solution that we should all be working towards to resolve these conflicts. Nor do I propose that we can ever be free of the way power is unevenly distributed within these systems. We can resist, transgress or dispute them, by using the agencies granted conditionally to us by other symbolic systems. In doing so, we form a sense of our ‘self’; how we fit in, but also how we stand out.