An artist’s spiritual journey
It’s easy to exploit circumstance. The artist who either by chance or determination is privileged for the moment to inspiring surroundings must confront the temptation of simply reporting what he or she sees.
A graduate of the Jakarta Arts Institute, sculptor-painter Bernauli Pulungan remains true to principle: Art in its truest and purest form is not merely this mediated transmission of sensation. It is rather the outcome of negotiation between man and medium.
Years ago, he confided in independent art curator Jim Supangkat after an exhibition of his work in wood that he often felt afraid “touching the wood would corrupt the vision it communicated”. For Bernauli, the medium acts as participant, not object, in the creative process. Or, as Supangkat believes, it “chooses which memory Bernauli uses as his source, not the other way around”.
This method does not reflect reverence for nature reminiscent of the Barbizon school or any of its stylistic heirs in subsequent art movements. Nor does it follow in the tradition of the “truth-to-materials” doctrine. It escapes such regulating confines.
Bernauli takes no sides in the competition for dominance between various art ideologies for he expresses no interest in them; his chief interest is art, principally its ability to offer glimpses into the essence of life and the larger design of what comes after it ends. For his art to reveal such insight, Bernauli strives for honesty in feeling, not form, by developing an affinity over time with the medium, a talent acquired during a humble upbringing in a village beyond the reach of modernity, long before his years of academic training.
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
Born in 1950 in Padang Sidempuan, Northern Sumatra, an area of Indonesia exalted for its breathtaking landscape, Bernauli quite naturally grew to love the outdoors. The eighth child in a family of ten children, he divided his time between helping his mother with the housekeeping and, most importantly, studying to maintain competitive grades at school.
Bernauli’s father was an educator who taught mathematics and English at the high school and university levels. His mother was educated in Dutch colonial schools. Both parents not surprisingly impressed upon their children the importance of education; their modest income was stretched in imaginative ways to ensure that each child received one.
Whenever Bernauli fulfilled his responsibilities ahead of time, he would always spend his leisure exploring with enthusiasm and curiosity the vast countryside all around him. The appeal of hiking steep mountain trails, scaling tall coconut trees or groping through dark caverns was never to appear more daring than his peers. It in fact presented the opposite: these excursions posed a personal challenge that demanded effort, dedication and open-mindedness so that he could perceive kauniyah, which in Islam means knowledge of God through nature.
At the age of twelve Bernauli left his village and resettled with his family in Jakarta, the sprawling and bustling cosmopolitan capital of Indonesia. But his love of the outdoors only grew stronger and his soul-searching adventures in nature continued despite the distance. Every two or three months Bernauli returned to his village at the behest of his parents to oversee family matters there. Traveling from his urban neighborhood to rural birthplace sharpened what he calls his “spiritual intuition”, a sensibility which serves as both his moral and artistic compass.
ACADEMIC DOGMATISM
The young nature enthusiast developed into the celebrated artist almost unintentionally. In 1970 Bernauli studied architecture at Jakarta University mainly because his parents expected their children to become professionals. Nearly all his siblings worked towards degrees in engineering, medicine, law and business. This careerist mindset was the example set before him.
But after attending three years, Bernauli dropped out. Two years short of a diploma, he left voluntarily because the prospect of professionalism, with all its emphasis on material possession and occupational prestige, failed to impassion him. To confirm his suspicions, Bernauli spent the next two years reflecting and experimenting, taking several art courses while working as a freelance journalist.
Finally, in 1975, Bernauli was sure of his calling. Despite not knowing any sculptors and despite his unfamiliarity with art in general, he took up sculpture at the newly established Jakarta Arts Institute in part because it echoes architecture with its preoccupations with mass, form and space, but mostly because, as with all fine arts, it encourages free reign of creative impulse without any regard to aesthetic, functional or commercial value.
Much to his surprise, however, the Jakarta Arts Institute inculcated a narrow definition of art. The curriculum touted modern art, as is understood in the Western world, and favored either realistic or abstract sculptural depictions—both of which sought perfection in form.
Bernauli objected to, and does still, this predilection. Art critic Chandra Johan observes that Bernauli “thinks that these two major streams [i.e., realism and abstractionism] have put too much emphasis on the aspect of forms… His works… cannot be tamed by the rationality of forms or by the strict codes and norms of modern art”.
At this early phase, however, his disagreement in principle with the bifurcation of art into realism and abstractionism was not omitted from his work. “I have resisted these biases,” Bernauli admits, “but at the time I was still searching for my own aesthetic.” In 1981, his senior year, he interned at a foundry in Tulung Agung, East Java, where he found subject matter interesting enough for him to finally explore art without reliance on an imposed or preset sculptural grammar.
Studying the lost-wax method under artisans who produced replicas of Buddhist temples in Indonesia, Bernauli developed an interest in mudra, Buddhist hand gestures. Unlike in Islam, in which orientation for worship in Indonesia faces toward the west, mudra points in multiple directions, suggesting in turn a multiplicity of spatial-spiritual alignments.
Deeply intrigued by this conceptual difference, Bernauli set out to further investigate the interplay between space and spirituality in the context of Buddhism. The outcome was The Tree of Life, a mythological figure which is formalistic for its preoccupations with space but experimental for its blending of iconography from Buddhism, Hinduism and the three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
The tree of life itself, as cited in the texts of the Abrahamic religions, bears the fruit of immortality; but here it also represents the linga, a stylized phallus associated with the Hindu god Shiva. Pointing both upward and downward, it suggests fertility, as in the agency through which life is created, and permanence, as in the immovability of a deeply rooted foothold. Lastly, it uses Buddhist symbols. The mudra in various meditative positions faces mostly to the right and left but it also concentrates at the center, cupping an unseen force near the heart. A four-directional compass, this piece suggests not only harmonious compositional balance but also a peaceful balance among the predominant religions known to mankind.
The Tree of Life signaled Bernauli’s first artwork created for personal artistic demands, as opposed to course credit. Perhaps fittingly, it has become the precursor to his later works, characterizing his sculptural style and thematic interests. In short, the entirety of his work more or less bases its visual appeal on a combination of familiarity in its manipulation of space, mass and form and yet novelty for the unique effect this classic sculptural concern produces on his interpretation and expression of subject matter. Loaded with symbols and allusions, his expanding oeuvre also appears unlike anything the most discriminating eye in the fine arts has ever seen before.
Ray Zulfirman
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