Can you hear the image speak? Primitivism, imagespeech, and audienceship

Abstract

This paper proposes ‘imagespeech’ as a conceptual framework to discuss the political relationship between visual representation and distribution of voices that produce structures of (in)visibility and (in)audibility within the art historical legacies of colonialism, modernism, and nationalism. In particular, it explores the biography, materiality, and audienceship of Citra Irian (Image of Irian) – a series of artworks made between 1975 and 1985 by Sunaryo, who claims that his work resembles ‘primitive lines’ of Papuan material cultures and conveys the spiritual forces of Indonesian nationalism. In 1981, an art student named Semsar Siahaan burned down one of Sunaryo’s Citra Irian sculptures as an iconoclastic happening art act. Beyond a story of dispute between two Indonesian male artists, this paper employs imagespeech to listen to the various conflicting historical voices that resound from Citra Irian to identify by whom, how, and what Citra Irian was made to say. By asking ‘who has made an image speak?’ (a historical inquiry) and ‘what can an image say?’ (a speculative inquiry), this paper aims to understand primitive images, particularly those inflected with histories of silencing and speaking out, as a multimodal field that contains the possibility of practicing democratic audienceship and the ethics of representation in the way we engage with art history.