Art: Cultural Studies

Mendisiplinkan Sikap Korupsi dari Sejak Dini

2011-12-24T03:03:00.001-08:00

Deni S. Jusmani

Kebencian masyarakat sosial kepada para koruptor ini bukan main tingginya, sehingga ketika mendengar kata “koruptor” ini, mungkin terlintas beberapa nama koruptor dan hukuman apa yang pantas diberikan. Kerugian negara akibat korupsi untuk kepentingan pribadi atau pun golongan tertentu, sudah tak terhitung jumlahnya, bahkan jika tak ada korupsi ini, saya yakin masyarakat Indonesia akan sejahtera, damai, dan tak ada peperangan, serta kejahatan HAM lainnya. Berpangkal dari tindakan korupsi inilah, segala macam persoalan di Indonesia dimulai, ibarat benang kusut, dan seolah tak ada yang mampu untuk mengurainya. Rumit, pelik, dan serba abstrak untuk dibenahi. Begitu kuat jalinan dan ikatan kerja para koruptor, sehingga mampu merontokkan sendi-sendi kebenaran dan hukum di Indonesia. Hukum ibarat sebuah pisau tumpul dan berkarat, saat berhadapan dengan koruptor.

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Korupsi ini, saya kira ada hubungannya dengan sistem pendidikan yang dijalankan di Indonesia. Dalam wilayah kecil, pendidikan pada kelas atau kelompok tertentu, akan mengajarkan sikap korupsi, jika tak ditangani dan dijalankan dengan benar. Seperti: membenarkan tugas Pekerjaan Rumah (PR) yang dikerjakan orang lain, toleransi pemberian nilai karena kenal atau kasihan, tolerasi waktu terhadap pengumpulan tugas dan kewajiban, mengulur dan memperlambat kehadiran dikelas untuk mengajar, serta membiarkan peserta tidak menjaga kebersihan. Korupsi ini hanya bisa diberantas dengan penegakan disiplin bagi peserta didik, termasuk didalamnya mendisiplinkan moral dan etika, karena korupsi juga disebabkan lemahnya moral, etika, dan tanggung jawab, serta membina rasa peduli terhadap penderitaan orang sekitarnya.

Saya sebagai Anggota DPD akan bertindak tegas dalam menjalankan program kerja berikut ini.

Mengkaji kurikulum pendidikan yang sudah ada dengan dibantu oleh beberapa pakar pendidikan, agama, etika, dan pertimbangan lainnya, untuk menentukan program kerja efektif dalam menciptakan peserta didik yang anti korupsi.

Dengan beberapa pakar, saya akan membuat kurikulum yang bersumber dari hasil evaluasi, sehingga mampu menyentuh persoalan pendisiplinan beberapa pihak, termasuk pendisiplinan guru dan peserta didik, sehingga mampu menempatkan masing-masing peran dengan benar. Membuat instrumen pendeteksi untuk mendeteksi kecurangan dan ketimpangan dalam proses belajar mengajar di kelas atau sekolah.

Tentu, akan ada kebijakan hukum yang dihasilkan untuk mengawasi dan mengontrol pola kerja pemberlakukan kurikulum pendidikan, sekaligus menentukan indikator keberhasilan dan kegagalan kebijakan yang telah dihasilkan.

Dilakukan evaluasi berkala, yang berguna untuk pengawasan mutu pendidikan anti korupsi.

Memberlakukan kebijakan dan kurikulum pendidikan anti korupsi dengan sistematis pada satu wilayah tertentu, bahkan jika memungkinkan dalam kawasan nasional Indonesia.

Pendidikan karakter dan penanaman rasa tanggung jawab, akan secara perlahan mengikis sifat-sifat korupsi pada diri seseorang. Korupsi muncul pada saat seseorang terlepas dari rasa peduli terhadap penderitaan orang sekitar, korupsi muncul saat moral dan etika telah rusak atas kepetingan pribadi. Masa pendidikan sejak dini, dimulai saat Pendidikan Anak Usia Dini, Taman Kanak-kanak, sampai pada pendidikan jenjang tertinggi, memiliki peran penting dalam pembentukan karakter-karakter individu yang bertanggung jawab. Pendidikan itu tak melulu tentang prestasi gemilang saja, tapi bagaimana menanamkan prestasi yang beretika dan berwawasan tanggung jawab, dengan demikian korupsi bukan masalah lagi!.

Melindungi dan Melestarikan Produk Seni dan Budaya

2011-12-23T19:02:00.000-08:00

Deni S. Jusmani

Warisan masa lampau yang berwujud pada produk seni dan budaya, hendaknya diperhatikan, selain sebagai sumber referensi dan sejarah, juga memberikan khazanah dan wawasan untuk generasi selanjutnya. Pendaftaran Hak Paten (Hak Kekayaan Intelektual), bukanlah satu-satunya upaya yang dapat dilakukan oleh pemerhati, penikmat, dan masyarakat yang mencintai tradisi dan produk-produk budaya, tetapi lebih penting bagaimana menanamkan kecintaan terhadap warisan tersebut. Ketika masyarakat sudah menjadikan warisan tradisi sebagai bagian penting dalam kehidupan sosial dan budaya, maka produk-produk ini akan senantiasa terjaga, walaupun memang sifat dari kebudayaan senantiasa dinamis.

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Pada beberapa kasus di Sumatera Selatan, di wilayah Ogan Ilir, terdapat produk seni turun temurun berupa musik tradisi dan sastra lisan (legenda, dongeng). Keberadaan produk seni dan budaya ini terkesan diabaikan, bahkan tidak terdokumentasi dengan baik. Hampir setiap desa di wilayah Ogan Ilir memiliki cerita-cerita lampau yang sebetulnya dapat dilacak melalui sesepuh dan para orang tua yang ada, tetapi sampai saat ini belum ada tindakan yang dilakukan oleh pemerintah setempat. Ada kekhawatiran, sumber referensi hidup yang tersirat dalam produk sastra lisan akan terputus, sehingga terputus pula sumber filosofis kehidupan masa lalu, yang penuh dengan nasihat dan bimbingan kebaikan. Bahkan, sepertinya peneltian dan pendokumentasian sastra lisan ini tidak dilakuka secara serius di propinsi Sumatera Selatan. Tradisi, mitos, dan legenda yang ada pada satu tempat tertentu, merupakan cerminan masa lampau, untuk mempertahankan ini diperlukan dukungan seluruh elemen kehidupan sosial.

Jika, saya anggota DPD di Sumatera Selatan, ada beberapa hal yang akan saya lakukan, yaitu:

Mulai membuat pemetaan lokasi dan wilayah penelitian produk-produk seni dan budaya, termasuk didalamnya adalah sastra lisan tersebut. Termasuk didalamnya adalah kebijakan penggunaan anggaran dan biaya yang digunakan untuk menyelesaikan persoalan.

Membentuk tim peneliti yang kompeten dan profesional untuk menangani dan menyelesaikan persoalan-persoalan yang telah ditentukan.

Menerjunkan para peneliti, dalam rangka menggali dan menyelesaikan persoalan-persoalan yang telah ditentukan.

Membuat kebijakan yang menopang kebutuhan dan keberlangsungan proses penelitian dan hasil penelitian, dengan melibatkan beberapa stakeholder, seperti: Dinas Pendidikan, Dinas Kebudayaan dan Pariwisata, Dewan Kesenian, dan struktur-struktur lain yang berkenaan dengan kepentingan produk-produk seni dan budaya. Termasuk didalamnya adalah pembuatan buku-buku dokumentasi hasil penelitian dan pendaftaran Hak Kekayaan Intelektual.

Memberlakukan dan menjalankan kebijakan yang telah mengakomodasi kepentingan dan kebaikan, sesuai dengan apa yang telah disepakati.

Selalu mengontrol dan mengawal hasil kegiatan yang telah dilakukan, termasuk untuk memberikan dan meneruskan program ini pada anggota DPD selanjutnya.

Pembentukan karakter menghargai produk-produk seni dan budaya memang harus dilakukan, baik secara terstruktur (melalui pendidikan), mau pun dilakukan diluar wilayah pendidikan resmi. Sikap menghargai kekayaan tradisi inilah yang mulai memudar, hanya pada saat ada klaim dari bangsa (kelompok) lain pada produk tertentu, barulah masyarakat ramai-ramai peduli dan membela produk budaya tersebut. Seharusnya, lebih baik dapat mencegah dan menjaga produk-produk seni dan budaya, sebelum diklaim oleh bangsa lain. Pembentukan sanggar, kelompok belajar, masyarakat peduli produk seni dan budaya, merupakan proses penting dalam mempertahankan warisan tradisi yang ada.

Art Power

2011-10-26T07:33:00.000-07:00

The fi rst thing one learns by reading the majority of texts on modern and
contemporary art is this: both modern and—even to a greater extent—
contemporary art are radically pluralistic. This fact seems to preclude once
and for all the possibility of writing on modern art as a specifi c phenomenon,
as a result of the collective work of several generations of artists, curators,
and theoreticians—for example, in the same manner in which one would
write on Renaissance or Baroque art. At the same time it also precludes the
description of any particular modern artwork (and here by modern art I also
mean contemporary art) as exemplary of the whole of modern art. Every such
attempt can be immediately confronted with a counterexample. So the
art theoretician seems to be condemned from the beginning to narrow his or
her fi eld of interest and to concentrate on specifi c art movements, schools,
and trends, or, even better, on the work of individual artists. The assertion
that modern art escapes any generalization is the only generalization that is
still allowed. There are nothing but differences as far as the eye can see.
So one must make a choice, take sides, be committed—and accept the inevitability
of being accused of one-sidedness, of merely advertising for one’s
favorite artists at the expense of others with the goal of advancing their commercial
success on the art market. In other words: The alleged pluralism of
modern and contemporary art makes any discourse on it ultimately futile and
frustrating. This fact alone is reason enough to put the dogma of pluralism
in question......
Of course, it is true that every modern art movement has provoked a
countermovement, every attempt to formulate a theoretical defi nition of art
has provoked an attempt by the artists to produce an artwork that would
escape this defi nition, and so on. When some artists and art critics found the
true source of art in the subjective self-expression of an individual artist, other
artists and art critics required that art thematize the objective, material conditions
of its production and distribution. When some artists insisted on the
autonomy of art, others practiced political engagement. And on a more triviallevel: When some artists started to make abstract art, other artists began to
be ultra-realistic. So one can say that every modern artwork was conceived
with the goal of contradicting all other modern artworks in one way or
another. But this, of course, does not mean that modern art thereby became
pluralistic, for those artworks that did not contradict others were not recognized
as relevant or truly modern. Modern art operated not only as a machine
of inclusion of everything that was not regarded as art before its emergence
but also as a machine of exclusion of everything that imitated already existing
art patterns in a naive, unrefl ective, unsophisticated—nonpolemical—manner,
and also of everything that was not somehow controversial, provocative, challenging.
But this means: The fi eld of modern art is not a pluralistic fi eld but a
fi eld strictly structured according to the logic of contradiction. It is a fi eld where
every thesis is supposed to be confronted with its antithesis. In the ideal case
the representation of thesis and antithesis should be perfectly balanced so that
they sum to zero. Modern art is a product of the Enlightenment, and of
enlightened atheism and humanism. The death of God means that there is
no power in the world that could be perceived as being infi nitely more powerful
than any other. Thus the atheistic, humanistic, enlightened, modern world
believes in the balance of power—and modern art is an expression of this
belief. The belief in the balance of power has a regulatory character—and
hence modern art has its own power, its own stance: It favors anything that
establishes or maintains the balance of power and tends to exclude or try to
outweigh anything that distorts this balance.
In fact, art always attempted to represent the greatest possible power,
the power that ruled the world in its totality—be it divine or natural power.
Thus, as its representation, art traditionally drew its own authority from this
power. In this sense art has always been directly or indirectly critical because
it confronts fi nite, political power with images of the infi nite—God, nature,
fate, life, death. Now the modern state also proclaims the balance of power
to be its ultimate goal—but, of course, never truly achieves it. So one can say
that modern art in its totality tries to offer an image of the utopian balance
of power that exceeds the imperfect balancing power of the state. Hegel, who
was the fi rst to celebrate the force of the balance of power embodied by the
modern state, believed that in modernity art had become a thing of the past.
That is, he couldn’t imagine that the balance of power could be shown, could
be presented as an image. He believed that the true balance of power, having zero as its sum, could only be thought, not seen. But modern art has shown
that is also possible to visualize the zero, the perfect balance of power.
If there is no image that could function as a representation of an infi nite
power, then all images are equal. And, indeed, contemporary art has the
equality of all the images as its telos. But the equality of all images exceeds
the pluralistic, democratic equality of aesthetic taste. There is always an infi -
nite surplus of possible images that do not correspond to any specifi c taste,
be it an individual taste, “high” taste, marginal taste, or the taste of the masses.
Therefore, it is also always possible to refer to this surplus of unwanted,
unliked images—and that is what contemporary art continually does. Already
Malevich said that he was struggling against the sincerity of the artist. And
Broodthaers said—when he started to do art—that he wanted to do something
insincere. To be insincere means in this context to make art beyond all
taste—even beyond one’s own taste. Contemporary art is an excess of taste,
including the pluralistic taste. In this sense it is an excess of pluralistic democracy,
an excess of democratic equality. This excess both stabilizes and destabilizes
the democratic balance of taste and power at the same time. This
paradox is, actually, what characterizes contemporary art in its totality.
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THERESIA DAN HARAPANNYA

2011-10-26T07:21:00.000-07:00

Theresia berlatarbelakang pendidikan seni di Jurusan Seni Grafis Institut Seni Indonesia Yogyakarta, meneruskan kelas Magister di Penciptaan Seni Insitut Snei Indonesia Yogyakarta. Memiliki pengalaman berkesenian, tak hanya lingkupan lokal, nasional, bahkan sampai dibeberapa belahan dunia. Isu-isu yang pernah digarap dalam karyanya adalah menangkap rutinitas dan perkembangan tubuh anaknya dalam wilayah domestik, persoalan pengrusakan linkungan, dan religiusitas. Karya seni Theresia memang belum terlalu lama mengetengahkan persoalan religiusitas, konsep mendasar dan pembicaraan hal religius, berarti bicara tentang tema-tema yang bersumber dari Al Kitab. Walaupun masih tergolong baru, tetapi kompleksitas persoalan religi yang diketengahkan, menunjukkan karya ciptaan Tere memiliki latar belakang dan konsep yang matang. Religius ini muncul melalui Simbol-simbol yang bermuara pada harapan mendapatkan kehidupan yang tenteram dan damai. Harapan ini bukan tak mendasar, Tere yang memiliki latar belakang kehidupan religius, selalu berharap akan tercapainya suatu bentuk kehidupan yang lebih baik, nyaman dan tenteram bagi semua manusia. .....

Harapan dalam tataran luas menyangkut persoalan kedamaian dan ketentraman kehidupan segala makhluk hidup yang ada di alam ini. Pencerminan karya Tere, memberikan keseimbangan pada berbagai kehidupan yang ada. Isu yang dibawa adalah masalah kerusakan lingkungan dan penyelesaiannya, anarkisme kelompok radikal, dan beberapa problematika lainnya. Seharusnya manusia dalam tatanan makhluk hidup, memiliki rasa peduli, saling menghargai, termasuk menjaga perilaku dan perbuatan yang dapat merusak kelangsungan dan keharmonisan hubungan satu dengan lainnya. Konflik-konflik yang terjadi di wilayah Indonesia merupakan wujud pemaksaan terhadap satu hak, memaksakan kehendak diatas pembelaan diri yang belum tentu berlandaskan kebenaran. Konflik ini dapat diselesaikan setelah pemahaman dan toleransi itu dipahami secara benar dan tak berlandaskan kepentingan kelompok atau pun rasa emosional saja. Setidaknya, inilah gagasan utama yang muncul dalam karya Tera pada Jogja Biennale XI 2011.

Kesibukan berkesenian yang sedang dilakukan oleh Tere saat ini, tak membuat ia melepaskan diri dari kehidupan sosial disekitarnya. Salah satu pararel event dalam Jogja Biennale XI yang di bawah koordinasi Tere adalah memberikan pelatihan menciptakan karya seni bagi golongan orang cacat. Suatu kerja besar yang dilakukan, dengan segala keterbatasan, terutama dalam hal pembiayaan. Konsep kegiatan ini adalah bagaimana memberi kesempatan yang sama bagi orang-orang cacat dalam wilayah umum, karena hak mereka juga sama seperti orang lain. Tere dan komunitas berkeseniannya, memberikan pelatihan bagi kelompok orang-orang cacat dibawah naungan Sekolah Luar Biasa Negeri Bantul 1. Tak hanya bidang seni rupa saja, tari, teater, dan beberapa jenis keterampilan lainnya akan diberikan dalam pelatihan tersebut. Hasil yang diharapkan adalah bagaimana membuat masyarakat mengerti dan peduli pada orang-orang yang kurang beruntung, tetapi bukan dalam bentuk iba dan kasihan saja. Bentuk empati terhadap kelompok difabel, akan memberikan dukungan bagi mereka untuk lebih mengasah dan mengembangkan potensi diri masing-masing.

Selain melakukan kegiatan berupa pelatihan, menurut Tere, ia bekerja sama dengan beberapa kelompok arsitektur untuk menciptakan sebuah struktur bangunan yang ramah dan tepat digunakan oleh orang-orang difabel. Karena, pada bangunan dan fasilitas umum, termasuk sekolah, rumah sakit, tempat ibadah yang sudah ada, kurang mendukung keberadaan orang-orang cacat. Tere dan komunitasnya mencoba membuat bangunan skala 1:1, yand tujuannya untuk fasilitas orang-orang difabel. Rencananya, akan dibuat tiga buah bangunan yang difungsikan untuk tempat pelatihan berkarya seni, ruang pamer, dan ruang pentas. Ketiga bangunan ini akan diperkenalkan pada khalayak umum dalam kegiatan Jogja Biennale XI, bertempat di Alun-alun Kidul Yogyakarta. Jika telah usai masa kegiatan, ketiga bangunan ini akan diserahkan kepada SLBN Bantul 1, yang digunakan untuk bahan percontohan bagi sekolah lain, baik di Yogyakarta, mau pun untuk tingkat nasional. .....

WIMO: Religiusitas Fotografi

2011-10-25T06:48:00.001-07:00

Kecintaan Wimo Ambala Bayang pada dunia seni, sudah dimulai dari masa anak-anak. Masa kecil ia senang menggambar, dan beberapa aktifitas berkesenian lainnya. Wimo yang dilahirkan dan menghabiskan masa anak-anak di Kabupaten Magelang, sampai masa sekolah lanjutan tingkat atas. Saat jenjang perguruan tinggi, ia merantau ke Yogyakarta, untuk melanjutkan kecintaannya pada dunia seni. Mendaftar pada Minat Desain Interior Fakultas Seni Rupa Institut Seni Indonesia, tapi tak langsung di terima. Gagal, tak membuat Wimo putus asa, ia mendaftar di Modern School Design. Saat bergabung dengan lembaga pendidikan ini, bertempat tinggal pada komunitas fotografer. Saling interaksi dengan sesama fotografer, membuat Wimo mulai menyenangi dunia ini. Walaupun, dunia fotografi bukanlah hal baru baginya. Secara perlahan, informasi mengenai bidang ini dipelajari secara otodidak dari komunitas yang ada, sampai akhirnya Wimo memutuskan untuk mendalami fotografi secara profesional di bangku perkuliahan.

Setelah setahun di Modern School Design, Wimo kembali mendaftar dan diterima di Institut Seni Indonesia Jurusan Fotografi. Mulai saat itu juga pengalaman dan pemahaman dunia fotografi semakin dipahami. Sejarah berkeseniannya di fotografi, tak mendalami objek-objek khusus, tetapi lebih mengangkat pada persoalan keunikan, kejanggalan, dan keanehan. Unik dalam tampilan visual, keunikan objek tertentu, yang sering luput diamati dan ada disekitar kehidupan sehari-hari. Fenomena unik dan aneh ini juga muncul pada karya fotografi untuk Biennale XI.

Karya fotografi Wimo acara Biennale Jogja XI masuk persoalan religius, saat ia menampilkan salah satu ikon Agama Islam, yaitu: replika Ka’bah dari beberapa daerah yang ada di Indonesia. Karya seni fotografi kali ini memiliki konsep yang cukup sederhana, yaitu berdasarkan pada keunikan dan keanehan. Keunikan ini dapat diterjemahkan sebagai sebuah tampilan visual aneh dalam gagasan Wimo. Pada Biennale ini, salah satu karya ditekankan pada aspek visual berupa penggambaran fenomena awan dengan bentuk burung garuda, tepat berada di atas Ka’bah. Suatu fenomena alam yang unik dan jarang terjadi, berhasil direkam dan ditampilkan menjadi karya seni. Selain persoalan visual, latar belakang karya fotografi Wimo memang tak terlepas dari kejadian, tempat, gambar, dan tempat yang unik.

Ketertarikan terhadap objek Ka’bah, bukannya tak beralaskan. Situasi keberagaman agama di Indonesia dipandang tak lagi kondusif, anarkisme terjadi dimana-mana, dan terjadi pencideraan toleransi antar umat beragama. Wimo memandang perkara kekerasan dan pelanggaran Hak Asasi Manusia dalam konteks kepercayaan dikarenakan kurangnya komunikasi pada masing-masing. Pembenaran yang dilakukan bertolak pada pemikiran benar dan salah dalam persepsi kelompok tertentu, sehingga menyalahkan pemikiran orang lain. Radikalisme sebagai upaya mempertahankan keutuhan kekuasaan tertentu, sehingga mengabaikan aspek-aspek mufakat, toleransi, dan kemanusiaan. Karya fotografi Wimo, memang tidak mengisyaratkan secara langsung persoalan konflik agama akhir-akhir ini, tetapi menampilkan sisi religiusitas dengan menggunakan objek Ka’bah.

Dalam wilayah keberagaman, seringkali dilihat melalui paradigma yang sempit dan emosional. Religiusitas merupakan wilayah kepercayaan dan keyakinan, yang tak dapat dipaksakan, pada saat keyakinan dinistai dengan pembenaran pada pandangan tertentu, dengan mengabaikan kepercayaan kelompok, yang muncul adalah kekerasan dan anarkisme. Situasi seperti inilah yang disoroti oleh Wimo melalui karyanya. Ia berandai-andai, kerukunan umat beragama di Indonesia tak dikotori oleh politik adu domba, atau pun manipulasi politik lainnya, dapat dipastikan tak ada lagi kekerasan menyangkut keyakinan. Isu terorisme yang mendiskreditkan kelompok tertentu, terlalu dimanipulasi kepentingan-kepentingan pemerintah, sehingga persoalan utama dalam kekerasan terhadap agama, mengalami distorsi dan dipermainkan dengan sedemikian rupa. Terorisme tak pernah disukai oleh siapa pun, selain membawa ideologi pemaksaan, tak terlepas dari penghujatan keyakinan beragama. Keberagaman hendaknya dipahami sebagai perbedaan yang saling menyatukan, bukan untuk saling serang dan saling menjatuhkan demi mencapai kebenaran personal atau pun kelompok.

Ideologi agama tak dapat dilepaskan dari persoalan sosial dan budaya. Dalam khazanah keberagaman, masyarakat sosial turut menopang eksistensi kerukunan umat beragama, sehingga ideologi yang terbangun memang sangat kompleks. Kompleksitas agama dan sosial memiliki relasi-relasi dominan dengan keberlangsungan kepercayaan tertentu. Pembentukan moral, sebagai bagian kehidupan beragama, juga ditentukan oleh kode etika yang berlaku dan dijalankan sebagian besar masyarakat sosial.

SETU LEGI: Religiusitas dan Problematikanya

2011-10-19T14:52:00.001-07:00

Deni S. Jusmani

Persoalan pokok yang dibicarakan Setu Legi dalam karya instalasinya pada Jogja Biennale XI 2011 adalah manipulasi dan korupsi di bidang agama. Religiusitas bukan perkara benar atau salah, tapi bagaimana nilai religi tersebut mampu memberikan ketentraman dalam kehidupan sosial. Toleransi antara umat-umat beragama di Indonesia, semakin memprihatinkan. Ketika permasalahan individu masuk pada ranah lembaga, muncul ketidakadilan dalam penyelesaiannya. Ketegangan dan konflik antar-agama adalah wujud tak ada lagi saling toleransi didalamnya. Hal ini dikarenakan sudah ada penkultusan kelompok “paling benar”, sehingga yang lain menjadi kelompok “yang salah”. Konflik ini, tak serta merta diselesaikan dengan tuntas oleh lembaga-lembaga yang berkenaan langsung, bahkan pemerintah dan aparat penegak hukum, seolah tak berdaya meredakan ketegangan umat beragama.......

Karya instalasi Setu Legi, dengan tema “berhala”, sebetulnya bercerita mengenai sistemisasi rumit peristiwa berhaji, yang sudah masuk pada wilayah industri. Keberadaan industri berkedok religiusitas membuat ongkos naik haji semakin mahal, langka, dan cenderung ekslusif, padahal di sisi lain masyarakat tetap dihimbau untuk melakukan perjalanan haji melalui pemerintah. Peristiwa ini dilihat Setu Legi sebagai bentuk manipulasi pemerintah terhadap masyarakat. Sumbangan devisa yang diberikan kepada pemerintah Indonesia dan Arab, di olah, dan di bawa kembali oleh para tenaga kerja Indonesia, sebetulnya menunjukkan kemunduran dalam soal ekonomi. Ratusan juta, bahkan miliaran rupiah, yang digunakan masyarakat untuk “tamasya religi” di Mekkah tak pernah secara transparan dijelaskan oleh pemerintah, dan dari tahun ke tahun ongkos tersebut terus naik.

Simbol-simbol pada karya instalasi Setu Legi, juga menyinggung anarkisme dalam kehidupan religiusitas di Indonesia akhir-akhir ini. Berhala dari waktu ke waktu mengalami demikian banyak peristiwa. Jika di masa lalu sempat disembah dan dihancurkan, juga terjadi saat ini. Berhala-berhala dalam konteks kebendaan, tak saja dibebankan tanggung jawab dan tumpuan pelampiasan kemarahan. Disalahkan atas dasar “keraguan” dan klaim benar atau salah berdasarkan keputusan lembaga-lembaga yang kurang memahami fungsi kebendaan dari sebuah berhala. Secara tak sadar, keraguan ini merongrong nilai toleransi dalam kehidupan sosial, tak terkecuali konteks keagamaan. Toleransi tak ada dan sangat dibutuhkan, manakala perbedaan pandangan dan cara pandang dalam keyakinan, akibatnya muncul sikap otoriter, mau menang sendiri, dan anarkisme semakin menjadi. Setu Legi menggarisbawahi, bahwa hal ini karena kurang komunikasi atau salah komunikasi yang terjadi dalam rantai kehidupan beragama di Indonesia. Selain memang, tak dapat dipungkiri adanya pihak-pihak yang mempolitisir dan memperkeruh situasi religiusitas saat ini.

Pada wacana nasional, simbol-simbol dari karya Setu Legi memiliki konsep, bagaimana menyikapi perbedaan-perbedaan dengan cara-cara yang manusiawi, tak main hakim sendiri, dan mengedepankan musyawarah. Hak Asasi Manusia seharusnya dipandang secara utuh, sekaligus menempatkan Pancasila sebagai dasar negara yang dijadikan sebagai pedoman untuk bermasyarakat. Berhala seharusnya tak ditempatkan sebagai sebuah benda yang menjadi sumber permasalahan. Berhala dapat dimaknai sebagai dinamika kehidupan religius yang ada dikehidupan masyarakat, sehingga menjadi entitas kebudayaan yang perlu di apresiasi.

Pada ranah Internasional, simbol berhala ini menggambarkan menara kembar di Amerika Serikat (World Trade Center), yang dihancurkan dan diduga merupakan “kambing hitam”, serta dijadikan alasan untuk invansi kekerasan tentara Amerika untuk menjajah wilayah Arab. Kebanggaan, sekaligus politisir pemerintah Amerika terhadap kehancuran “berhala”, membutakan nurani, dan pada akhirnya menjatuhkan ribuan korban tak bersalah, sebagai bentuk penistaan terhadap nilai-nilai kemanusiaan. Persoalan ini tak selesai disini saja, efek kehancuran “berhala” Amerika Serikat, meluas ke seluruh dunia, termasuk di Indonesia. Kerusuhan saling bersahutan, muncul di hampir pelosok wilayah Indonesia, penistaan agama, pelanggaran hak asasi manusia, pembunuhan, pelecehan, dan saling serang sesama pemimpin, menunjukkan betapa dangkal cara berpikir dan nilai religiusitas. Pada akhirnya, hanya orang-orang lemah yang selalu menjadi korban.

Isu lainnya adalah persoalan nasionalisme yang semakin memudar, juga muncul dalam karya instalasi Setu Legi. Tidak mengakui hak-hak orang banyak dan mementingkan kepentingan pribadi, merupakan awal dari runtuh dan pecahnya rasa nasionalisme pada masyarakat. Burung Garuda sebagai lambang negara yang mengisyaratkan perbedaan tapi tetap menjadi satu kesatuan, seakan menjadi sebuah berhala usang, mati, dan tak lagi dijadikan pedoman. Perbedaan yang ada hendaknya disikapi dengan mengedepankan mufakat bersama, bukan pada rasa emosional. Dengan demikian, kerukunan umat beragama dapat tercapai dengan baik.

ARAHMAIANI: Nilai Keberagaman dan Religiusitas di Indonesia

2011-10-17T23:49:00.000-07:00

Deni S. Jusmani

Arahmaiani, lahir di Bandung tahun 1961, dilahirkan dan dibesarkan dalam keluarga seniman, sehingga praktis memiliki kecintaan pada bidang seni. Masa kecil hingga remaja dihabiskan dengan belajar tari pada bapaknya, sampai kemudian mendalami ilmu seni di beberapa perguruan tinggi. Selain mendalami seni rupa di Institut Teknologi Bandung tahun 1979, juga belajar seni di Paddington Art School, Sydney, Australia dari tahun 1985-1986, serta Akademie voor Beeldende Kunst en Vormgeving, Enschede, Netherlands, tahun 1991-1992. Kiprah berkesenian Arahmaiani tak hanya di Indonesia, tetapi menjangkau dibeberapa belahan dunia.
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Karya seni yang dihasilkan Arahmaiani memang tak terbatas pada medium tertentu, sebagai bentuk kebebasan ekspresi seni dan gagasan yang ingin disampaikan pada publik. Demikian juga halnya dalam perhelatan Biennale Jogja 2011 tahun ini, karya yang dikemas dalam bentuk seni instalasi, mengusung soal pencitraan konstitusi muslim pada media Barat dan ilmu Antropologi Barat. Kelompok Barat memandang Islam sebagai agama kekerasan, yang mengesampingkan toleransi beragama. Label “teroris”, menurut Arahmaiani lebih melekat pada kelompok muslim, daripada kelompok lainnya. Religiusitas dan keberagaman (pluralitas) di Asia Tenggara (khususnya Indonesia) mengalami distorsi dan manipulasi dari pemaknaan sesungguhnya. Kereligiusan yang ada saat ini, lebih melihat pada aspek “benar dan salah” dan mengabaikan sikap toleransi. Religius dipandang sebagai wilayah pembenaran faham ideologi kelompok tertentu, dan menyalahkan faham ideologi agama lain. Pada akhirnya, religiusitas menjadi sebuah mesin pembentuk karakter individualisme fanatik, dengan mengabaikan nilai-nilai toleransi yang seharusnya mampu menjembatani segala bentuk perbedaan.

Pemerintah di Indonesia, dianggap Arahmaiani telah gagal dalam menjamin keselamatan dan hak asasi penduduknya dalam hal beragama. Undang-undang Penodaan Agama telah dipolitisasi, untuk mendiskriminasi kelompok-kelompok tertentu, yang akhirnya meniadakan rasa aman. Ada sesuatu yang salah dengan pemahaman beragama pada kelompok tertentu, yang sebetulnya bentuk provokasi para penguasa. Faham sekulerisme justru membayangi kehidupan religiusitas masyarakat; pada ranah lain, persoalan religiusitas dijadikan alat untuk mempolitisir kasus-kasus korupsi, lambatnya pertumbuhan ekonomi, dan buruknya pendidikan di Indonesia. Pemerintah Indonesia tak pernah bisa tegas menjadi penengah dalam menyelesaikan kasus-kasus pelecehan agama, pelanggaran HAM, dan pembalakan liar. Beberapa isu inilah yang muncul pada karya seni intalasi Arahmaiani.

Selain menghadirkan karya seni instalasi, Arahmaiani akan memberikan satu bentuk presentasi kepada masyarakat, dalam pembicaraan mengenai religiusitas, diskriminasi agama, diskriminasi terhadap kaum perempuan, dan penggugatan budaya patriarki. Presentasi ini juga akan menyentuh persoalan pengrusakan dan pencemaran lingkungan hidup yang semakin marak. Gagasan presentasi merupakan hasil akumulasi dari aktifitas berkelompok, menampilkan foto-foto perjalanan dan penelitian Arahmaiani pada beberapa negara. Kekagumannya kepada kelompok Budhisme Tibet, yang tak hanya memiliki ideologi anti kekerasan, tetapi mengaplikasikan ideologi secara utuh dalam kehidupan sehari-hari. Tekanan-tekanan luar biasa kerasnya yang dilakukan Pemerintah dan Militer pada kelompok Budhisme Tibet, tak dijadikan sebagai alasan untuk membalas dengan perbuatan anarkis. Sikap, kesadaran, dan toleransi pada kelompok Budhisme Tibet, memberikan penggambaran pada Arahmaiani, bagaimana sikap-sikap yang muncul dalam toleransi kelompok agama di Indonesia, sangat bertolak belakang dari pemahaman kelompok Budhisme Tibet. Seharusnya, panutan sikap kelompok Budhisme dapat diterima pada kelompok beragama di Indonesia, sehingga tak terjadi penistaan terhadap kepercayaan dan keyakinan kelompok lain.

Arahmaiani memberikan batasan pada kedua sajiannya dalam Biennale Jogja 2011 dalam konteks religi, politik, dan ekonomi; yang tak dapat dipisahkan dalam kehidupan sosial. Ketiga unsur ini saling mempengaruhi keberadaannya di Indonesia. Persoalan pasar, modal, dan perekonomian, berperan aktif dalam menentukan kestabilan hukum dan kehidupan beragama. Pembaratan yang dilakukan oleh kelompok kolonial, merefleksi pada kehidupan beragama, sosial, dan budaya, termasuk pada penciptaan karya seni. Seharusnya, hentikan politisasi terhadap religiusitas, pluralitas, dan penindasan terhadap kelompok......

Prinsip Estetika Busana Cosplay: Realisasi Fantasi dan Ekspresi Gaya Hidup(1)

2011-07-26T05:07:00.000-07:00

Deni S. Jusmani
Abstrak

Pakaian, dress code, animasi, dan manga, merupakan unsur yang tidak terpisahkan dalam cosplay. Unsur-unsur tersebut mewacanakan promosi dunia digital dan serba fantasi pada dunia pakaian sesungguhnya. Ranah spiritualnya berpijak pada kebudayaan Jepang yang dibudayakan melalui industri pakaian, industri elektronik, dan industri cetak. Ideologi cosplay salah satunya menggambarkan pencitraan diri pada komunitas sosial tertentu, sebagai usaha untuk beradaptasi dan diakui. Sisi lain cosplay, bagaimana konteks fantasi dan dunia imajinasi, berevolusi menjadi nyata dan diterima oleh masyarakat sosial. Entitas cosplay mampu menjembatani dunia fantasi dan realita, yang membelenggu keinginan manusia untuk bergaya. Kepungan media dan iklannya, membuat epidemi gaya hidup semakin menjadi, sehingga cosplay-pun menjadi bagian penting untuk disoroti. Tulisan ini akan dianalisis dengan teori pokok berdasarkan pandangan Dewitt H. Parker, dalam The Principles of Aesthetics, yang membagi prinsip estetika menjadi tiga, yaitu: prinsip kesatuan organik, prinsip unsur dominan, dan prinsip keseimbangan. (2) Beberapa teori lain, digunakan untuk “memperindah” hasil analisis mengenai eksistensi busana cosplay.

Kata kunci: busana cosplay, cosplayer, ideologi, pencitraan, dan animasi.
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Pengantar

Perbincangan busana cosplay bukan perkara baru dalam dunia peragaan busana, dan sebagai wujud seni kontemporer, cosplay adalah perwajahan seni rupa yang saling berbaur antara ekspresi, desain, rumus form follow function, budaya popular, dan konsumerisme, bahkan posmodernisme. Cosplay adalah seni bermain peran menggunakan media busana, dengan konsep, ruang, waktu, tempat, dan tujuan tertentu. Perkembangan dan eksistensi cosplay teradobsi dengan sempurna, manakala keinginan bergaya dalam berbusana muncul pada salah seorang pelaku budaya. Perihal busana ini juga merupakan persoalan yang paling banyak berpengaruh pada dimensi sosial dari sejak zaman renaisans. Dengan melihat cara berbusana, maka akan diketahui sejarah dan latar belakang kebudayaan yang melekat pada busana yang digunakan seseorang. (3)

Gagasan tentang Cosplay muncul sekitar tahun 1960-an di Stasiun Harajuku, Distrik Shibuya, Tokyo, dan telah mengalami perkembangan yang luar biasa, selain sebagai produk budaya, juga merupakan pembentukan seni dengan misi kebudayaan dan iklan. Cosplay ini akrab (boleh jadi sama) dalam hal ideologi dengan Harajuku style, memberikan nuansa perdebatan wacana mengenai transformasi ide-ide berbusana yang bersumber pada tokoh-tokoh film animasi dan manga Jepang. Ide tersebut divisualisasikan dalam wujud busana (kontemporer) yang bertema tokoh atau kondisi tertentu, dengan melakukan akulturasi berbagai jenis budaya, menghasilkan kostum-kostum yang ekspresif. Cosplay, yang secara harfiah dipahami cos/costume= busana/kostum, play= bermain atau melakukan kegiatan mengisi waktu luang, merupakan suatu wadah yang disiapkan bagi kelompok-kelompok yang ingin berekpsresi melalui media busana.

Ideologi cosplay adalah menampilkan identitas “saduran” melalui busana, memiliki tema, dan akrab dengan budaya konsumerisme. Jika di Harajuku, gaya ini merupakan wujud kecintaan para penggemarnya terhadap tokoh-tokoh kartun tertentu, yang divisualkan dalam busana dan asesoris yang digunakan. Gaya Harajuku dan cosplay, merupakan perpanjangan budaya Jepang, yang dikenal dengan negara pencipta film animasi terbaik. Dukungan terhadap film-film animasi, sebagai wujud kecintaan terhadap produk Jepang, ditunjukkan melalui media busana cosplay. Sekaligus, dalam usaha mempromosikan dan mempengaruhi masyarakat dunia tentang keberadaan film-film animasi Jepang, tentunya juga cosplay. Pengaruh ini dapat diketahui jejaknya, dengan kemunculan cosplayer di beberapa negara, seperti: Amerika, Singapura, Spanyol, Italia, dan termasuk Indonesia.

Prinsip Kesatuan Organik

Seorang desainer pakaian, Elsa Schiaparelli, mengatakan bahwa bukan pakaian yang beradaptasi dengan tubuh manusia, melainkan sebaliknya, tubuhlah yang beradaptasi dengan pakaian. (4) Terjadi semacam dialog antara tubuh dan pakaian, pakaian dan konteks sosial, keduanya saling beradaptasi untuk kepentingan-kepentingan tertentu. Tahapan selanjutnya tentu tidak terlepas dengan persoalan identitas keduanya, identitas tubuh dan identitas pakaian. Sebuah wujud dan tema pakaian melabelkan hal baru pada tubuh, memberikan perbedaan karakter, tempat, waktu, dan persoalan ideologis antara tubuh satu dengan yang lainnya. Seperti yang digambarkan oleh ahli Sosiologi, Anthony Giddens, bahwa bagaimana tubuh menjadi sebuah benda refleksif yang identitasnya terbentuk dikarenakan oleh identitas pakaian.

Cosplay pada dimensi kultural adalah mengelompoknya hasrat-hasrat bergaya, yang terwadah dalam komunitas pecinta kebudayaan animasi (dominannya Jepang) dan manga. Pada dimensi berkesenian, ia adalah ekspansi besar-besaran ekspresi yang terwujud dalam desain dan seni bermain peran. Karena cosplay memiliki dimensi spesial, dimana seseorang melalui busana ini, juga “wajib” memahami karakter “pemilik” busana yang digunakan. Misalkan busana cosplay dengan tokoh Naruto, harus dipahami betul keidentikan dominan yang melekat pada Naruto, demikian pun pada tokoh idola lainnya. Pada dimensi kultural lainnya, cosplay tidak saja berimplikasi pada wilayah personal, tetapi terjadi massifikasi ideologi animasi terhadap wilayah publik. Ke-kontemporan seni dan ideologi, sepertinya melegalkan cosplay untuk berakumulasi menjadi budaya lokal. Pada akhirnya, lahirnya busana cosplay dengan idola tokoh Indonesia semacam Si Buta dari Gua Hantu dan Wiro Sableng, merupakan bukti nyata, bahwa cosplay dibesarkan dengan bersumber pada tokoh fiksi.

Eksistensi kecintaan pada cosplay, menambah daftar panjang terjadinya pembauran kebudayaan asing dan lokal. Cosplay pada tataran tertentu mampu memberikan kepuasan berbusana, tidak saja dalam hal hasrat dan ekspresi, tetapi juga persoalan bagaimana memerankan karakter penjiwaan suatu tokoh tertentu secara total. Dimensi play (cos and play) yang memberikan penekanan dan betapa spesialnya karakter busana ini. Kekhususan dalam hal play, membatasi busana ini untuk direduksi dalam busana kasual (sehari-hari), membedakannya dari peragaan busana umumnya, dan tentu, keidentikan busana cosplay merupakan wujud identitas busana yang digunakan.

Ada hal yang menarik untuk diketengahkan dalam ranah berbusana dalam konteks cosplay. Dalam wujud busana cosplay merupakan perkembangan nilai-nilai “tradisi” yang menjadi kultur dunia animasi, dikemas dalam persoalan mode. Pada ranah lain, terjadi distorsi makna terhadap nilai-nilai berbusana; dimana, berbusana menjadi alat untuk mempersatukan tujuan dalam mencapai apa yang disebut bergaya. Istilah bergaya, dalam konteks berbusana, terpahami sebagai aplikasi luar yang digunakan untuk memanipulasi orang lain, sehingga memiliki kesan sosial yang terkonsep, terbentuk sebagai persoalan hasrat-hasrat individu.

Hasrat-hasrat berbusana inilah yang mengarahkan seseorang individu, atau pun sekelompok orang, untuk mengkonsumsi produk-produk industri (busana) sebagai perpanjangan tangan kultur animasi. Sebagai sebuah kultur, domain ide cosplay merujuk pada era digital yang diterjemahkan dalam wujud visual busana. Pada akhirnya, kesamaan para cosplayer di beberapa daerah (bahkan negara), adalah tentang mengelompoknya hobi yang sama (cinta budaya animasi), kepopuleran tokoh, persoalan ranah bergaya, dan pengakuan identitas terhadap kelompok masyarakat.

Prinsip Unsur Dominan

Pada kehidupan sosial sehari-hari sangat akrab dengan komersialisasi, begitu banyak komoditi yang bersirkulasi, memanjakan manusia dengan hasrat-hasrat untuk mengkonsumsi. Di dalam kebiasaan mengkonsumsi, logikanya bukan lagi kebutuhan (needs), melainkan logika hasrat (desires). Menurut Gilles Deleuze dan Felix Guattari, hasrat tidak akan pernah habis dan terpenuhi, karena terdapat mesin hasrat, selalu terjadi reproduksi hasrat secara terus menerus. (5) Hasrat untuk mendapatkan pengakuan sosial yang muncul pada setiap personal, merupakan wujud pencarian identitas dalam masyarakat. Identitas ini jugalah yang membedakan setiap manusia, lingkungan sosial, termasuk juga landasan berpikir untuk bergaya. Persoalan identitas adalah mutlak dan menjadi konsep utama dalam fungsi berpakaian. (6) Pakaian memberikan kontribusi terhadap pembentukan identitas. Identitas ini menjadi hal penting saat bertemu dengan komunitas sosial tertentu, gaya hidup setiap individual yang divisualkan melalui gaya berbusana, mencerminkan gaya hidup komunal yang dicitrakan melalui simbol-simbol manusia tradisional dan postradisional. Dalam pemahaman Giddens, masyarakat sosial modern memiliki karakter pencitraan diri personal yang individual dan kuat, dimana rujukannya tetap bernuansa tradisional. (7)

Kesepakatan bergaya dalam cosplay merupakan “aturan” yang disepakati komunitas penggunanya, yang disadari atau tidak, membentuk tanda-tanda yang berkomunikasi dalam konteks. Sekumpulan tanda yang terorganisir dinamakan sebagai kode dan aturan kesepakatan tersebut yang kemudian “dikodekan”. (8) Tidak ada kode pertandaan yang dapat dipisahkan dari praktek sosial penggunanya. Sifat dasar kode, yaitu: (1) memiliki dimensi paradigmatik (terdiri sejumlah unit kode) dan sintagmatik (sejumlah unit kode dapat disatukan); (2) menyampaikan makna; (3) bergantung pada kesepakatan pengguna dan latar belakang budaya yang sama. Kode dan budaya saling berinterelasi secara dinamis; (4) menunjukkan fungsi sosial; (5) dapat ditransmisikan melalui media. (9) Susunan tanda yang berupa kode, sangat dilandasi ideologi mendasar dari apa yang hendak dikodekan. Dalam busana cosplay dan apa yang dipikirkan oleh cosplayer, merupakan hal atau ide pokok dari persoalan yang dinamakan konsep berpikir dari rancangan busana cosplay itu sendiri. Tentu, tidak terlepas dari sumber-sumber pemikiran yang terkait dalam pembentukan busana cosplay. Ada sesuatu makna yang ingin disampaikan; dengan kata lain, cosplay adalah menunjuk tatanan ide personal dengan segala macam kerumitannya. Pada saat lain, cosplay berevolusi menjadi teks-teks yang saling berhubungan antara desainer, pengguna (penggaya), dan lingkungan sosial. Ada sesuatu yang disistemasikan, kesepakatan yang muncul adalah dalam konteks fungsi sosial, dalam hal ini pengakuan identitas. Pada akhirnya, kepentingan desainer cosplay dan cosplayer sangat ditentukan oleh media.

Sebetulnya, letak pokok persoalan dalam bergaya adalah bagaimana mengemas tampilan, atau berpenampilan yang mampu membedakan atau menyamakan (mengikuti mode, bermode) diri dengan lingkungannya. Cosplay merupakan persoalan penampilan, sekaligus menunjuk komunikasi nonverbal yang saling berkorelasi antara desainer, individu, dan lingkungan atau komunitas bergaya. Oleh karena itu, dalam hal berpenampilan, Argyle membagi menjadi dua, yaitu: berdasarkan aspek sukarela (rambut, pakaian, kulit, warna kulit, dan perhiasan); berdasarkan aspek yang tidak dapat dikontrol (tinggi badan, berat badan). Penampilan digunakan untuk mengirimkan pesan tentang kepribadian, status sosial, dan konformitas. (10) Secara sukarela cosplayer (dengan segala keterbatasan dan kelebihan) menjadi agen-agen budaya berbusana, dengan bergaya cosplay. Sukarela tidak semata-mata terbentuk atas keinginan normal, melainkan terbentuk oleh peran dan pengaruh lingkungan sosial, termasuk iklan. Di dalam iklan, tanda digunakan secara aktif dan dinamis, sehingga orang membeli produk untuk (bergaya), bukan atas kebutuhan, melainkan membeli makna-makna simbolik; konsumer diposisikan terpesona makna simbolik, daripada fungsi kegunaan pada benda yang dibelinya. (11) Pada sisi lain, personal-personal yang menjadi komunitas pecinta cosplay, wujud dari aktualisasi diri terhadap komunitas lingkungan sosial.

Menurut pandangan Rogers, aktualisasi diri adalah proses menjadi diri sendiri dan mengembangkan sifat-sifat dan potensi potensi psikologis yang unik. Aktualisasi diri akan dibantu atau dihalangi oleh pengalaman belajar khususnya dalam masa kanak-kanak. Aktualisasi diri akan berubah sejalan dengan perkembangan hidup seseorang. Ketika mencapai usia tertentu (adolensi) seseorang akan mengalami pergeseran aktualisasi diri dari fisiologis ke psikologis. Aktualisasi diri ini disebabkan untuk memenuhi kebutuhan, diantaranya: kebutuhan fisiologis, kebutuhan rasa aman, kebutuhan cinta, dan kebutuhan untuk mendapat penghargaan. (12) Abraham Maslow, menyimpulkan bahwa seseorang melakukan aktualisasi diri, apabila kebutuhan fisiologis (kebutuhan makan dan minum), rasa aman, kebutuhan sosial, dan kebutuhan akan harga diri belum terpenuhi dengan baik. Kebutuhan fisiologis, rasa aman, dan kebutuhan cinta muncul sebagai perkembangan jiwa dan raga seseorang, berkembang secara alamiah atau pun dikondisikan dalam kondisi tertentu. (13)

Beberapa tanda pada cosplay mengindikasikan pada kebutuhan rasa aman, cinta, diterima, dan mencari penghargaan pada konteks lingkungan tertentu. Cosplay menjadi media ungkapan untuk berkomunikasi dengan lingkungan sosial, sehingga didapatkan prestige dan kepuasan hati manakala tujuan tercapai dan tersampaikan dengan baik. Selain itu, cosplay menjadi media untuk saling berkomunikasi bagi cosplayer dan bertukar karakter, ide, dan saling meminjamkan hasrat untuk saling beraktualisasi diri.

Prinsip Keseimbangan

Jika melihat konsep pikir Nanang Rizali, maka menurut jenisnya mode (fashion) dibagi menjadi empat macam, yaitu: Special Fashion, High Fashion, Medium Fashion, dan Standard Fashion. Dalam perkembangannya empat fashion terbagi lagi menjadi delapan aliran yang menjadi ciri khas tersendiri, yaitu: Aliran Classic dan New Classic, Aliran Houte Couture dan Trendy, Aliran New Waves dan Cycle, serta aliran Fads dan Ready to Wear. (14) Berdasarkan pada konsep tersebut, busana cosplay menjadi bagian dari special fashion. Special fashion dapat diterjemahkan sebagai pakaian yang penggunaannya hanya dalam konteks waktu, tempat, dan situasi tertentu saja. Selain, memang dapat ditarik benang merah dengan dress code, yang membatasi konteks tempat dan waktu saat berpakaian.

Prinsip mendasar pada penciptaan busana adalah bagaimana cara membuat pakaian lama (agar tampak kuno), segera digantikan dengan pakaian baru. (15) Eksistensi pakaian saling berinteraksi antara masa lalu dengan saat ini, pada beberapa rentang zaman, mengalami perulangan bentuk. Bentuk masa kini tidak dapat dikatakan sebagai bentuk “saat ini”, melainkan refleksi wajah pakaian masa lalu. Roland Barthes mengklaim, bahwa pakaian adalah suatu wacana perbincangan masa lalu. (16) Bentuk pakaian selalu berotasi dalam putaran yang tetap, dimana perputaran tersebut hanya persoalan waktu dan tempat, saat pakaian digantikan dengan bentuk baru. Pakaian mengalami dekontekstualitas dan rekontekstualitas dari pembentukan tradisi yang lain, sehingga hampir tidak ada bentuk pakaian yang sifatnya original.

Hal yang berlaku pada cosplay, dalam perulangan bentuk dan perbicangan masa lalu, ditampilkan melalui transformasi busana animasi digital ke busana pakai. Istilah masa lalu merujuk pada ide-ide mendasar dalam khazanah desain busana yang digunakan dalam gaya cosplay. Wacana dimensi waktu adalah persoalan yang dalam upayanya untuk membedakan beberapa persoalan, seperti: klasifikasi, tema, tempat, material, komunitas, dan fenomena kultural dalam cosplay. Pelembagaan dan klasifikasi cosplay dilakukan untuk memberikan gambaran anatomi setiap bagiannya. Ini juga membatasi ranah cosplay dan bukan cosplay, sekaligus penanda perbedaan kemasan, baik hal gaya, atau pun penjiwaan terhadap suatu busana yang digunakan. Pada dimensi umum, cosplay merupakan sebuah produk dengan tujuan untuk dipamerkan pada masyarakat umum. Konsep teori yang melekat pada cosplay, sebetulnya masih sejalan dengan apa yang dicetuskan oleh Desmond Morris mengenai fungsi pokok pakaian, yaitu: pakaian untuk kenyamanan, pakaian untuk kesopanan, dan pakaian sebagai benda pameran. (17) Busana cosplay dan segala aksesori yang melekat, masuk pada bagian pakaian sebagai benda pameran.

Pada sumber buku yang sama, fungsi kenyamanan merupakan hal pokok dan paling penting, bukan persoalan sosial, dan masuk wilayah pribadi. (18) Sejak awal, pakaian diciptakan untuk melindungi tubuh dari berbagai macam masalah, termasuk menjaga dari penyakit. Pada cosplay, pakaian mengalami dekonstruksi pemaknaan dan tujuan penggunaan, yang berbeda dengan pakaian umum. Jika menurut Richard Corson, cosplay ini masuk pada kategori busana fantasi, yang hanya dapat diterima oleh kelompok, disajikan dalam konteks waktu, tempat, dan wacana tertentu saja. (19) Busana cosplay melalui dimensi personal, merupakan ekspresi jiwa melalui media busana, dengan tujuan utama untuk mencari nilai popularitas dan pencitraan. Pencitraan di wacana iklan, membentuk masyarakat konsumer menjadi kelompok-kelompok gaya hidup, yang pola kehidupannya diatur berdasarkan tema, citra, dan makna simbolik tertentu. (20) Setiap kelompok gaya hidup menciptakan ruang sosial, yang didalamnya gaya hidup dikonstruksi.

Persoalan lain dari cosplay adalah pakaian sebagai bentuk ekspresi individualistik. Gagasan Malcolm Barnard menyoroti persoalan pakaian sebagai penanda untuk membedakan dirinya sendiri sebagai individu dan menyatakan bentuk keunikannya. (21) Busana cosplay digunakan sebagai media untuk mengekspresikan keunikan individu atau komunitas terhadap kecintaan budaya animasi dan manga. Sebagai media ekspresi, cosplay tidak dapat lepas dari tema-tema busana yang ditampilkan atau diciptakan, tetap terikat pada konsekuensi dan aturan dalam menciptakan busana cosplay. Dress code atau tema busana memberikan batasan dan kemudahan bagi desainer dan cosplayer dalam menciptakan busana dan tokoh tertentu. Aturan tema adalah mutlak ada pada busana cosplay.

Pencitraan dan ekspresi individualistik merupakan persoalan mendiskursuskan keseimbangan gagasan konsep tentang busana cosplay dan makna yang menyertainya. Kode sosial busana cosplay merefleksikan kebudayaan populer dan serbuan dimensi digital pada kehidupan kesenian tradisional. Ada dua unsur saling terkait dalam praktek industri mode yang merupakan kunci untuk godaan konsumen: merk dan fantasi. Merk adalah alat untuk penciptaan fantasi. Sebagai catatan McRobbie dalam contoh di atas, merk melampaui visual untuk mewakili fantastis gambar atau pengalaman suatu produk. (22) Busana cosplay mencitrakan tentang merk atau label, yang memang diciptakan untuk “menggiring” imajinasi konsumen untuk menyukai dunia busana dan animasi.

Penutup

Pada akhirnya, busana cosplay (sama halnya dengan jenis busana lainnya) merupakan perwujudan dinamis dalam perkembangan teknologi mencipta dan budaya pakaian. Dinamis dalam hal ide-ide, tema, dan mengalami perkembangan penerimaan dan pencitraan pada dimensi sosiokultural, serta membentuk pola pikir baru terhadap cara dan alasan berpakaian. Dunia fantasi dan pakaian yang tercipta bersumber dari ide tersebut, memiliki beberapa isi dan komunikasi untuk masyarakat sosial. Misalnya pada busana cosplay, ia berkomunikasi terhadap lingkungannya melalui media busana, dengan tema-tema fiksi, digital, dan pencampuran beragam ideologi didalamnya. Pencampuran ideologi ini membentuk pola pikir baru, yang menghasilkan kesimpulan adanya suatu faham ideologi yang berbeda dengan rujukannya. Setidaknya, cosplay merupakan ide-ide kebudayaan Jepang, saat berevolusi pada tatanan lokal, budaya tersebut saling mempengaruhi dengan kultur Indonesia, menghasilkan perwajahan baru busana cosplay.

Tidak saja berdampak signifikan pada lingkungan masyarakat sosial pendukung gaya cosplay, lebih luas memiliki pengaruh terhadap perkembangan perekonomian dan industri pakaian di Indonesia. Gaya dan pencitraan adalah pertalian erat yang tidak dapat dipisahkan dari kultur sosial kehidupan manusia diseluruh belahan dunia, sehingga mampu dijadikan sebagai mesin untuk memuaskan hasrat-hasrat. Cosplay adalah penjara gaya hidup, dan pakaian adalah medianya.

Catatan Kaki:

(1) Kasus ini pernah diteliti dan diobservasi di Yogyakarta, 2009-2011.
(2) Dosen Universitas Negeri Semarang, Mahasiswa Prodi S-3 Pengkajian Seni Pertunjukan dan Seni Rupa, Sekolah Pascasarjana, Universitas Gadjah Mada.
(3) Dewitt H. Parker, The Principles of Aesthetics (New York: Dodo Press, 2007).
(4) Lars Svendsen, Fashion: a philosophy (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2006), 7.
(5) Lars Svendsen, 77.
(6) Yasraf Amir Piliang, Hipersemiotika: Tafsir Cultural Studies atas Matinya Makna (Yogyakarta: Penerbit Jalasutra, 2003), 150.
(7) Lars Svendsen, 137.
(8) Lars Svendsen, 140.
(9) John Fiske, Cultural and Communication Studies: Sebuah Pengantar paling Komprehensif (Yogyakarta: Penerbit Jalasutra, 2007), 91.
(10) John Fiske, 92.
(11) John Fiske, 96.
(12) Yasraf Amir Piliang, 287.
(13) Suane Schultz. Psikologi Pertumbuhan: Model-model Kepribadian Sehat, Terjemahan Yustinus (Yogyakarta: Kanisius, 1997).
(14) Suane Schultz.
(15) Nanang Rizali, “Kecenderungan Pasar dan Perkembangan Mode Sebagai Alternatif Pendekatan dalam Perancangan Tekstil Cetak”, dalam Jurnal Seni Rupa dan Desain, Volume 1, 1, Agustus 2000 (Bandung: Pusat Penelitian dan Pengembangan Masyarakat (P3M) Sekolah Tinggi Seni Rupa dan Desain Indonesia).
(16) Lars Svendsen, 28.
(17) Dalam Lars Svendsen, 31.
(18) Desmond Morris, Peoplewatching: The Desmond Morris Guide to Body Language (London: Vintage Books, 2002), 320.
(19) Desmond Morris, 320.
(20) Richard Corson, Stage Makeup (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1981.
(21) Yasraf Amir Piliang, Hipersemiotika: Tafsir Cultural Studies Atas Matinya Makna (Yogyakarta: Penerbit Jalasutra, 2003), 290.
(22) Malcolm Barnard, Fashion sebagai Komunikasi: Cara Mengkomunikasikan Identitas Sosial, Seksual, Kelas, dan Gender (Yogyakarta: Penerbit Jalasutra, 2009), 85.
(23) Linda Leung dan Sara Goldstein, “You Are What You Wear: The Ideal and Real Consumer/User”, dalam Linda Leung, ed., Digital Experience Design: Ideas, Industries, Interaction (Chicago: Intelect Bristol, 2008), 27.

KEPUSTAKAAN

Barnard, Malcolm. Fashion sebagai Komunikasi: Cara Mengkomunikasikan Identitas Sosial, Seksual, Kelas, dan Gender. Yogyakarta: Penerbit Jalasutra, 2009.

Chuang, Ejen. Cosplay in America. USA: Optik Nerve, 2010.

Corson, Richard. Stage Makeup. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1981.

Craik, Jennifer. The Face Of Fashion: Cultural Studies In Fashion, New York: Routledge, 1993.

Fortunati, Leopoldina, et al. Mediating the human body : technology, communication, and fashion. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers
Lehmann, Ulrich. Tigersprung: fashion in modernity, USA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000.

Leung, Linda, ed. Digital Experience Design: Ideas, Industries, Interaction. Chicago: Intellect Bristol, 2008.

Morris, Desmond. Peoplewatching: The Desmond Morris Guide to Body Language. London: Vintage Books, 2002.

Piliang, Yasraf Amir. Hipersemiotika: Tafsir Cultural Studies Atas Matinya Makna. Yogyakarta: Penerbit Jalasutra, 2003.

Rizali, Nanang. “Kecenderungan Pasar dan Perkembangan Mode Sebagai Alternatif Pendekatan dalam Perancangan Tekstil Cetak”, dalam Jurnal Seni Rupa dan Desain, Volume 1, 1, Agustus 2000 (Bandung: Pusat Penelitian dan Pengembangan Masyarakat (P3M) Sekolah Tinggi Seni Rupa dan Desain Indonesia).

Schultz, Suane. Psikologi Pertumbuhan: Model-model Kepribadian Sehat, Terjemahan Yustinus. Yogyakarta: Kanisius, 1997.

Troy, Nancy J. Couture culture : a study in modern art and fashion, USA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003.

Vinken, Barbara. Fashion Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System, New York: Berg Oxford International Publishers Ltd., 2005.

Deni Setiawan Jusmani, S.Sn, M.Hum, dosen Universitas Negeri Semarang, mahasiswa Program Studi S-3 Pengkajian Seni Pertunjukan dan Seni Rupa, Sekolah Pascasarjana, Universitas Gadjah Mada Yogyakarta, 2009-sekarang.

20 Mei 2011-10 Juni 2011_Free Art Ebooks

2011-05-22T06:35:00.000-07:00

100 Great Artists: A Visual Journey for Fra Angelico to Andy Warhol
Handbook of Research on Agent-Base Societies: Social and Cultural Interactions
Consumer Culture
A Dictionary of Symbols
Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion
Encyclopedia of Food and Culture
Arts and Humanities: Throug the Eras
Understanding Art

Koleksi tersebut dapat di Miliki secara Gratis, Silahkan!
selain itu tersedia ribuan Ebook Seni dan Kajian Budaya, Kunjungi!
..... .....

Mempornokan Perfilman Indonesia

2011-05-11T19:36:00.000-07:00

Deni S. Jusmani

Pengantar

Sepertinya, kebijakan pemerintah untuk membatasi ruang gerak film Hollywood di Indonesia, tidak diimbangi dengan pembatasan ruang gerak impor aktris asing. Kenapa? Apakah aktris lokal tidak mampu “menjual” dan tidak se”erotis” artis impor? Atau, memang menyangkut kualitas yang masih perlu banyak belajar kepada artis impor? Persoalannya, apakah dengan artis impor yang makin gencar dilakukan, akan berdampak pada perbaikan kualitas film yang mendidik di Indonesia? Lebih jauh lagi, impor artis erotis lebih mengesankan pemasaran dan pencitraan tubuh daripada persoalan kualitas berakting. Pada akhirnya, pencitraan erotis tetap menjadi ujung tombak wajah dan perkembangan film di Indonesia.

..... .....

Ditengah serbuan film-film asing di Indonesia, membuat kreator film Indonesia harus berjuang ekstra keras, agar film yang diciptakan mampu diterima oleh penonton. Berbagai cara dilakukan untuk menciptakan film-film yang dianggap mampu dan dapat diterima orang banyak, termasuk salah satunya dengan menggunakan aktris asing (porno). Langkah yang sebetulnya salah besar, mengingat potensi aktor dan aktris lokal masih tersedia. Kebijakan pembatasan film asing juga tidak diimbangi dengan serius oleh pemerintah dalam banyak aspek. Seharusnya, (jika mau serius) pada media televisi atau pun media lainnya, juga dibatasi untuk memutar dan menayangkan film asing.

Impor Kualitas atau Popularitas?

Masuknya teknologi semacam televisi di Indonesia, juga diiringi dengan munculnya kebudayaan asing didalamnya, termasuk film. Tahun 1980-an, film asing telah ada diperputaran film Indonesia, mulai film anak-anak sampai film untuk remaja dan golongan dewasa. Ditengah sepinya produksi film Indonesia pada tahun 1990-an, film impor seakan memberikan warna dan tentu saja kemudian membentuk komunitasnya. Secara daya khayal dan ide cerita, film lokal tidak kalah dengan film asing, tetapi secara teknik animasi, efek visual, dan pengemasan akhir, memang perlu banyak belajar. Asrul Sani pernah mengatakan, bahwa film Indonesia itu lebih populer karena keburukannya.

Artis asing Maria Ozawa (Miyabi), pada awal karirnya dikenal sebagai seorang aktris film dewasa Jepang (Adult Video), muncul pada Rumah Produksi Maxima Pictures dalam film komedi Indonesia berjudul Menculik Miyabidan film Hantu Tanah Kusir. Selain Miyabi, muncul Terra Patrick (film Rintihan Kuntilanak Perawan), Rin Sakuragi (film Suster Keramas), Sora Aoi (film Suster Keramas 2), selanjutnya giliran pemain film dewasa asal Amerika Serikat, Sasha Grey yang akan dikontrak oleh produser K2K Production, KK Dheraj, untuk bermain dalam film horor komedi terbarunya. Beberapa nama tersebut adalah aktris-aktris yang populer dalam film porno, tidak saja mereka “dipasarkan” kepopulerannya, lebih dari itu, merupakan bentuk ketidakmampuan kreator film lokal untuk membendung ideologi “porno” berkembang di Indonesia. Persoalan pokok bukan terletak pada aktris asing atau lokal, tetapi pada kualitas film itu sendiri, yang terkadang mengangkat tema-tema dangkal, umum, monoton, bahkan membosankan. Tema horor (berbau erotis), percintaan (yang naif), dan pencitraan terbalik dari realita sosial, membentuk persepsi masyarakat mengenai film Indonesia. Karena, film merupakan pencerminan sebuah masyarakat, ideologi kreator, dan wujud mentalitas bangsa. Tentu, bangsa ini tidak ingin, jika citra porno yang melekat pada aktris asing, juga melekat pada perfilman dan mentalitas masyarakat Indonesia.

Film Indonesia belum memiliki identitas dan ideologi yang mapan, tidak seperti film Hollywood yang telah lebih dulu memilikinya. Film (termasuk FTV) dan sinetron di Indonesia menganut azas musiman. Tayangan-tayangan yang seringkali meniru dan mencontoh, mengabaikan potensi lokal yang sebetulnya juga layak dipasarkan. Oleh karena ideologi film yang masih samar, menghasilkan film-film lokal yang serba absurd dan mengada-ada.

Ideologi yang Menjemukan?

Kenapa menjemukan? Karena terjadinya pergeseran selera dan budaya menonton; terbatasnya daya cipta kreator film, efek visual dan animasi terlalu sederhana, serta alur cerita dan tema film yang monoton. Pada aspek lain, film Indonesia terlalu mudah di tebak plot ceritanya, super hiperbolis, mengangkat hal-hal yang tidak penting, dan erotisme terkadang lebih dominan. Para penonton telah dibentuk berdasarkan tontonan erotis, sehingga melupakan, bahkan mengabaikan pesan-pesan positif yang (mungkin) tersirat dalam film.

Film Indonesia adalah bentuk mimpi produser yang menjemukan dan sekaligus menjerumuskan. Mimpi-mimpi yang masih harus dibenahi dan disadarkan, betapa film mistik dan horor erotis sangat membosankan dan terkadang terlalu mengada-ada. Tidaklah heran, jika minat penonton terhadap film Indonesia belum memuaskan. Lemahnya minat masyarakat terhadap film Indonesia, dapat dirumuskan karena tiga hal, yaitu: (1) pergeseran selera dan budaya anak muda; (2) rendahnya apresiasi terhadap film festival dan serius; (3) kurang dukungan pemerintah untuk perbaikan kualitas. Memang, kelompok pecinta film horor erotis tersebut masih ada, tetapi tidak sebanding dengan kelompok pecinta film asing. Masyarakat perlu tontonan yang berkualitas.

Ideologi pasar dengan mengabaikan pesan moral muncul pada beberapa film di Indonesia. Orientasi pasar dan mencari keuntungan (dengan meminjam kepopuleran) yang telah melekat pada aktris asing, menjadi tanda kemunduran film-film di Indonesia. Aktris (atau pun mantan) film porno, akan membentuk persepsi negatif terhadap pencitraan film Indonesia, yang dikhawatirkan, merefleksi dan membaur pada konteks masyarakat sosial. Mungkin, impor artis asing (porno) ini akan berdampak lakunya film yang dibintangi, tetapi tidak serta merta membuat penonton menyukai kualitas film yang dihasilkan. Aromanya lebih kental pornografi, daripada persoalan etika dan pesan moral.

Penutup

Masih ada kesempatan untuk berbenah, jika memang ingin memperbaiki film di Indonesia pada masa mendatang. Tentu, tidak semua kreator atau pun produser film di Indonesia mengabaikan aspek moral dan etika. Persoalan pokok, bagaimana membentuk pemahaman positif pada masyarakat terhadap perkembangan film. Impor aktris (apalagi porno) tidak akan menyelesaikan dan lebih memperkeruh suasana perfilman Indonesia. Menggali dan memperbaiki ide cerita film, merupakan hal mutlak untuk dilakukan, sehingga masyarakat tidak memandang film Indonesia atau pun tontonan yang ada adalah replika, saduran, atau pun duplikasi dari yang sudah ada.

Idi Subandy Ibrahim, Budaya Populer sebagai Komunikasi: Dinamika Popscape dan Mediascape di Indonesia Kontemporer (Yogyakarta: Penerbit Jalasutra, 2007), 171.

Lihat, http://entertainment.kompas.com/read/2011/04/12/18150855/Bintang.Porno.Serbu.Film.Nasional

Idi Subandy Ibrahim, 173.

Idi Subandy Ibrahim, 177-178.

The Hat

2011-05-10T07:09:00.000-07:00

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

IN NO one article of dress is the ultra-feminine psychology more apparent than in the hat.

For man or woman, the head covering has always been used far more for symbolism than for any of the other basic motives. As a head covering the natural one, hair, has for the most part remained to women. Men, having decided to curtail their hair, demand more of their hats in the way of covering.

..... .....

It may be as a protection from sun and wind, and it may be as a lingering rudiment of that ancient psychology of sex which gave to the man his distinctive head-dress, and, owing to which, he still feels less a man when hatless. “Where’s my hat?” is the frantic demand of the small boy. Be he never so much in a hurry he does not feel truly himself unless that inconspicuous, small, often ugly and shabby, but indispensable mark of masculinity, is on his head.

Boys in their continuous scuffling “play,” that innocuous infantile survival of the ancient sex-combat, are particularly merry with one another’s hats. To snatch off the other boy’s hat; to hold it, hide it, trample it; is a favorite form of amusement. The boy thus rudely unhatted must fight for his lost distinction, and does so cheerfully. In the attitude of children toward their clothes we may all too plainly see the proof of the long dominance of the sex motive in our attire; the girl child, trained, flattered, and punished into a premature care of and pride in her over-feminine apparel; and the boy child, needing neither praise nor blame to develop his perfectly natural masculine vanity in the garments which proclaim him Man. His are, to be sure, of a far ruder and more serviceable sort than hers; but his joy in them, his irrepressible pride, is not based on their practicality so much as on their proof of what he fondly imagines to be sexsuperiority.

In the matter of hats, the scope of masculine expression is not large. A hat he must have, of severe and simple outline. In it he may express, (a) sex; and (b) wealth; also, to a very limited extent, personal taste. Those who dwell in detailed admiration on the dress of men speak mainly of the cut and line of their garments, the taste shown in those minor accessories of socks, ties, and a man’s scanty but impressive jewelry.

When they refer to his hat there is nothing to gloat upon but its newness, both in style and recent purchase. The top-hat has always its clear distinction; the crisp straw in summer, the hard hat with the latest roll brim—there is little to boast of. The man, in selecting, tries to choose one suited to his particular style of feature, and sometimes succeeds. So choosing, he generally remains constant to that choice.

We must remember that a man’s sex-value does not lie in his beauty so much as in his purchasing power and in the general qualities pertaining to masculinity—or supposed so to pertain. With the woman it is widely different. While every article of her attire, from the innermost to the outermost, is modified not only by sex-distinction but by the constant fret of change in order to please and hold the varying taste of the male; the hat more than any other article shows this double pressure.

With our naive effort to preserve by force the artificial distinctions with which we have fenced off one sex from the other, we consider it quite incorrect for a woman to wear a man’s hat; for her merely to try one on is supposed to give him the right to kiss her. But still, though for riding costume, yachting costume, and such limited purposes, we do find women wearing men’s hats, or hats frankly mannish in style, we do not, for any purpose whatever save those of roaring farce and coarsest circus humor, find men wearing women’s—to make themselves look ridiculous.

When a woman puts on her husband’s silk hat or “derby,” soft felt or stiff straw, she may look “mannish,” but she does not become a laughing stock. When a man puts on his wife’s “Easter bonnet,” big hat with flowers and ribbons, or small hat with some out-squirt of stiff or waggling decoration, he looks contemptible or foolish. There is real reason for this. The man’s hat, whatever its fault, has a certain racial dignity. It is, primarily, a covering for the human head. It is designed to fit that head. It is simple and distinct in outline, restrained in ornament. None of these things are true of the woman’s hat, which, whatever its attractions, is utterly lacking in that main attribute of racial dignity. It is not, primarily, a covering for the human head. It is not in the

least designed to fit that head. It is not simple and distinct in outline; and—need it be said?—it is not restrained in ornament. A woman’s hat may be anything—anything in size, in shape, in substance, in decoration. Its desirability is based on three necessities; first, it must be “stylish”; second, it must be new; third, it must be “different”; not only different from the previous one, but different, as far as is compatible with style, from the hats of other women. We might add, as a remote fourth, a faint preference for a hat which is “becoming.”

To discover a hat which suits the face of the wearer, which is light and easy on the head, and to wear the same sort of hat as long as one has the same sort of face, would surely be a reasonable thing to do. That is it would if the purpose of a woman’s hat was to make the wearer comfortable and to express personality. Nothing is farther from its purpose. The first, last, and ever dominant necessity is to express as loudly as possible, not the “eternal feminine,” but that abnormal pitiful femininity of ours, a femininity which has surrendered its solemn grandeur of womanhood, and put on, jackdaw-like, the ostentatious plumage of an alien creature.

Study the grave sweet face of some eternally beautiful womanstatue, as of our so familiar “Mother of the Gods,” miscalled the Venus of Melos. Put upon that nobly feminine head some “cute,” “too sweet,” “charming,” “latest thing,” and see how utterly out of place is such monkeyish display on real womanhood. “Yes,” we admit, “but women don’t look like that now. I’m sure Dolly Varden looks just too sweet for anything in that hat.”

A pretty child—of either sex—looks pretty in almost anything. Some fresh-cheeked, curly-headed boy may look as well as his sister with a frill of lace and roses around his face. But a grown woman, a woman fit for motherhood, is no longer a child. Her place in life is as gravely important as her husband’s. Even a young girl, with wifehood and motherhood before her, has a potential dignity, a high responsibility awaiting her, beside which all this capering and fluttering of gay signals is pathetically ignominious. We have enough instances before us, in marble and canvas, in tender madonnas, brave-eyed saints, great goddesses, to show this truth. We have behind that the whole long story of unfolding life on earth, the female earnest and plain, the male skipping and strutting in gay adornment. Even the male mosquito has feathers on his head—not the female.

In ordinary life we have the well-known fact of the lasting beauty that shines in such severe simplicity as the white face-bands of the nun, or in many of the neat and unchanging caps worn by Puritans, Quakers and others. We even know, in that remote shut-off compartment of the mind wherein we keep our articles of faith, that “Beauty unadorned is adorned the most.”

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Explorations in the hermeneutics of vision

2011-05-10T06:58:00.000-07:00

Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell

Many of the most creative debates and research programmes in contemporary critical theory, postmodern philosophy, aesthetic theory, deconstruction and cultural studies converge and intersect upon the field of ‘visuality’ as one of the central, if contested, terrains of modern critical thought. Over the past decade or so we have witnessed a veritable explosion of interest in the phenomenological, semiotic and hermeneutic investigation of the textures of visual experience, and, more broadly in a new appreciation of the historical, political, cultural, and technological mediations of human visual perception in the context of a more ‘holistic’ and ‘reflexive’ theory of the human condition. Recently the whole area has received an additional impetus from the impact of a wide range of semiotic theories of representation drawing upon largely continental social and philosophical thought. Indeed we have to speak in the plural of ‘hermeneutics of vision’ when defining the field of visual culture today. From these different sources it appears that the place of perception and visuality in our understandings of human reality and the ‘fate of the visual’ in contemporary society and culture have merged to form the context for new alignments, critical projects, and interdisciplinary research in the arts, humanities and critical sciences.

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arts of observation and the technologies of visual culture. Indeed an adequate hermeneutics of the scopic regimes of modern European culture needs to ‘triangulate’ all three of these themes and to invent new forms of interpretative inquiry that advance this understanding on several fronts.

The field of visuality: the approach of this volume

The emergent research field of visuality outlined above may be analysed in terms of four ‘levels’ or ‘orders’ of visual phenomena. First, the level of meaningful practices in the life-worlds of everyday life or the routine visual categories at work in organising the structures of practical experience, especially in the takenfor-granted political and ethical practices of envisioning others, of routinised perception and day-to-day social experience, but also the role of visual idioms in those practices which take an analytical interest in the organisations and events of everyday life—the arts, journalism, the human sciences, and so on. Second, the emergence of recent interpretative problematics (theoretical narratives which advocate different ‘ways of seeing’) with an empirical commitment to exploring the detailed sociology and politics of the visual order—including a range of novel sciences with a commitment to recovering and grounding their work in the perceptual realms of the life-world. Third, the historical formation of the theoretical sciences and the role of critical thought in reflecting upon the social construction of their problems and practices. And finally, at a more metatheoretical level, the emergence of critical discourses concerned to question and deconstruct the history and implications of visually organised paradigms and the practices, institutions, and technologies these have legitimated. These different types of concern redirect research away from visuality narrowly conceived and focus attention upon the textual and ideological analysis of ‘the hegemony of vision’ in contemporary culture (Levin, 1993; Lowe, 1982). At this point the phenomenology and hermeneutics of vision are transcended by wider contextual concerns with the problems of the authority and power vested in the dominant visual technologies of Western culture, the role of excluded groups in these systems, particularly the struggles of non-European colonial peoples, women, and working classes in relation to the dominant forms of visual ideology. But ‘hegemony’ here should not be understood in a one-dimensional and mechanical fashion. As with other social changes, we see the contemporary situation in terms of differential, heterogeneous, and transformational social practices.

In many respects the increasing centrality of visual culture—especially as this is now mediated through the image technologies of advanced communication in modern societies—has irreversibly encroached upon all other forms of social and cultural debate. Following the work of Richard Rorly, Martin Jay, David Levin, Hubert Dreyfus, D.M.Lowe, David Lyon, and others, we believe that there is a growing recognition of the need to differentiate between different ‘ways of

seeing’ (‘scopic regimes’, ‘discourses and practices of visuality’) and cultural forms, and to interrogate critically the problematics of anti- and postocularcentric positions in the field of visual experience.

It is necessary to be as clear as possible about where this particular collection fits into this large, emerging research field. We make no claim that the field as a whole is systematically and synoptically represented, or that the full range of issues and problems within the field is systematically addressed. Contributors are only too well aware of the enormous scope of the field, and of the existence of radically different approaches to it. Yet the collection is concerned to open a dialogue within and between some of these diverse positions by exploring some of the consequences of this moment in the developing field of visuality. This is not only from the point of view of theoretical and conceptual concerns but also more specifically with regard to questions arising from the ongoing practice of those concerned with the life of visual experience: including practices of writing, of art, aesthetic criticism, and critical pedagogy.

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Etymology of Fashion

2011-04-30T05:42:00.000-07:00

Yuniya Kawamura

The terms ‘fashion’ and ‘clothing’ tend to be used synonymously, but while fashion conveys a number of different social meanings, clothing is the generic raw materials of what a person wears. The term ‘fashion’ in English, or ‘la mode’ in French, stands out from the other words, such as clothes, garment, attire, garb, apparel and costume, which are often referred to in relation to fashion.

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According to The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology (1988), it was probably about 1300 that a sense of style, fashion, manner of dress was first recorded. The Dictionnaire de la mode au XXe siècle3 (Remaury 1996) indicates more specifically that the French word for fashion, which

meant the collective manner of dressing, first appeared in 1482. The word originally comes from the word modus which means manner in English or manière in French. As for the etymology of the English word ‘fashion,’ it comes originally from the Latin facio or factio which means making or doing (Barnard 1996; Brenninkmeyer 1963: 2). In Old French it became fazon; in Middle French facon; then façon and façonner in French led to the Middle English word ‘fashion,’ meaning to make or a particular make or shape. By 1489, fashion had the meaning of a current usage, or a conventional usage in dress or lifestyle especially as observed in upper circles of society. The predominant social notion of of fashion arose early in the sixteenth century via the sense ‘a special manner of making clothes’ (Brenninkmeyer 1963: 2).

The New Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles published in 1901 defines the word ‘fashion’ primarily as the action/process of making, manner, a prevailing custom, a current usage, conventional usage in dress and mode of life. As ‘the fashion,’ it is defined as the mode of dress, etiquette, furniture and style of speech adopted in society for the time being. As synonyms of the word ‘fashion,’ words such as mode, style, vogue, trend, look, taste, fad, rage and craze are mentioned although there are slight differences in their meanings. ‘Style’ is sometimes the equivalent of fashion but also denotes conformity to a prevalent standard while ‘vogue’ suggests the temporary popularity of a certain fashion. Therefore, it seems agreed that fashion is never stationary, never fixed and everchanging.

Barnard’s study (1996) on fashion and clothing is one of the few studies that brings the two terms side by side trying to differentiate one from the other. Barnard makes an attempt to distinguish clothing from fashion and observes respective definitions, functions and meanings, but often treats the two simultaneously. Fashion and dress are used interchangeably because fashion is associated primarily with dress. Brenninkmeyer (1963: 5) also defines the words mode, clothing, dress, costume, custom and style among others (1963): ‘Mode’ is a synonym of fashion; ‘clothing’ originates from ‘cloth’ meaning a piece of woven or felted material made of wool, hair or cotton, suitable for wrapping or wearing, and in 1823, ‘clothing’ meant the distinctive dress worn by members of any profession. ‘Dress’ comes from the Middle French ‘dresser’ to English ‘dress’ meaning to arrange, and in general, it means the principal outergarments worn by women or the visible part of clothing. ‘Costume’ means mode of personal attire or dress belonging to a nation, class or period. As fashion has many interrelated aspects with these concepts (Brenninkmeyer 1963), it becomes impossible to demystify fashion as long as the focus is on the material objects.

Connecting Creativity

2011-04-30T05:32:00.000-07:00

Luigi Maramotti

What is creativity? How are ideas generated? How do we define a creative person? Such questions have probably crossed our minds more than once, but rarely do we realise how much we depend on this very special output of human intelligence. If we look at the products around us, most of which today are manufactured industrially rather than handmade, we can appreciate how their design is related to creative thought and to the necessity for innovation and change. As the Chairman of the MaxMara group, with an annual turnover of £600 million, more than twenty separate collections and 600 stores situated around the globe, I have been confronted quite forcefully with this thought. I have devoted this chapter to discussing creativity, ideas of what it is, and how, in my experience it can be organized in order to originate some of the remarkable results that industry is capable of achieving, particularly in the world of fashion.

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The first personal intuition I had about the importance of creativity was through the Disney character, Archimedes; the light bulb that appeared every time he had a good idea fascinated me. It may seem an unintellectual approach, but I have always liked the idea of invention as sudden intuition, and the magic behind it. The abstract concept of creativity can be linked to the selection, from thoughts and things, of those which lead to innovation, change or improvement. Creativity can be formatively defined as behaviour which includes such activities as origination, organisation, composition and planning. Any definition we may try will not be fully satisfying because, in order to make creativity distinguishable from mere arbitrariness, there must be a sort of legislation. We are perfectly aware, in the world of fashion, for instance, odd does not mean fashionable. There are plenty of examples, from the past and in the present. George Brummel was a fashionable trendsetter, while Liberace was an eccentric oddity; Chanel was a priestess of style whilst Mae West was provocative, amusing or comic.

Creativity is often associated with irrationality or pure intuition, but this, in my view, is an erroneous belief. I believe that creativity has to be part of a system or structure, if we want it to be a useful instrument in helping us to understand or improve our social and physical environment. That creativity flourishes through being subjected to constraint may sound like a contradiction in terms, but I believe that it is not. Perhaps as a consequence of an overall attitude to the world based on daily experience, many today regard creativity as being linked to disorder; abstract expressionism is evidence of this. Yet as recently as the eighteenth century, Pascal asserted that order was sufficient (and necessary) to define creativity, though I find myself doubting this when I find myself in the chaos of our design department.

In my opinion we tend nowadays to rarely abstract the idea of creativity. We tend instead to regard it as an attribute of certain individuals. ‘That is a creative person’, we are used to saying. What do we mean? Do we judge outward appearance, the image we are offered, someone’s behaviour or maybe new ideas, something done in a certain way, a project or performance with a particular style? Any of these would show us to perceive creativity as ‘something different’. We tend to believe that normality does not favour a creative attitude, or if you like, that human beings are not ‘normally’ creative.

A great and fascinating debate on creativity and genius enlivened the psychoanalytical studies of Freud and Jung. The former thought creativity to be the artist’s tool, by means of which he could express the contents of his unconscious. In the writings on Leonardo and Michelangelo he analysed the two great masterpieces St Anne and Moses in which he could see turned into art, the nature and the inner secrets of the artists’ souls as individuals. For Jung, on the contrary, the creative person was one, who, through his or her work, is able to emancipate the self from his or her own individuality to become an interpreter of the universal themes of mankind which he, unconsciously, activates.3 Jung’s model seems to be the one which most accurately defines creativity in the context of fashion,4 where the creative challenge is to divine unconscious collective desires, as I shall discuss.

The Italian writer, Italo Calvino, in connection with some lectures he was to give at Harvard University within the prestigious Charles Elliot Norton Poetry Lecture Series, wrote some very interesting papers entitled ‘Six Memos for the Next Millennium’. They list the essential literary qualities for writers of the future as being lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency. Unfortunately, his sudden death prevented him from giving the lectures, but his texts help us to identify some of the peculiarities of creative thought. When he writes about imagination, for instance, Calvino defines it as a list of potentialities, of hypotheses, of what was not and may never, but might have been. What is important to him is to draw from this gulf of possibilities, to recreate all the possible combinations, and to pick the ones which best fit the purpose.

As I have suggested, many who have dealt with the concept of creativity have used it as a label or accolade for individuals whose output is different in a striking, even obvious way. In my view, it is erroneous to make such evaluations without taking the context into consideration. Take, for example, Renaissance artists and their works. We would be obliged to regard their creative value as slight, to consider them as minor artists, if we did not judge their work in the context of the strict patronage; the political, social and religious reality they were commissioned to represent. By extension, products that vary only slightly from the established norm, contrary to their immediate appearance, may in fact be the result of great creative thought. In fashion, a ‘commercial’ product can be as much the result of creative ‘genius’ as an extravagant catwalk creation.

Fashion and Glamour

2011-04-30T05:22:00.000-07:00

Réka C.V. Buckley and Stephen Gundle

Few words are as ubiquitous in the contemporary mass media as glamour. ‘The new glamour burns bright’ headlined Interview in March 1997, while Elle of December 1996 tempted readers with the following cover title: ‘Glamour! The people who live it – the clothes that scream it – the make-up that makes it’. Yet quite what glamour is frequently remains unclear. When fashion and women’s magazines from time to time conduct enquiries into the meaning of glamour, they invariably seek opinions from a range of experts and celebrities, whose views are strikingly contradictory. Confusion arises over the gender connotations of glamour, whether it is an intrinsic (charismatic) phenomenon or a manufactured one, and whether it is permanent or temporary. In addition there is disagreement over its application to age ranges, places and situations. Such is the lack of common ground that it is tempting to agree with lexicographer Eric Partridge who, as long ago as 1947, included glamour in his list of ‘vogue words’ which had gained a momentum of their own whatever the original impulse had been. For Partridge, glamour was a word without meaning that had been invested with high status and picturesque connotations by authors and journalists.

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One enduring feature of glamour is its identification with fashion. In a recent analysis of fashion photography, Clive Scott contrasted ‘glamour’ with ‘sophistication’. He found that in the fashion press glamour was: youthful, dynamic, pleasure-seeking, extrovert, voluble, short-term, gregarious, uncultured, volatile, public (and thus downmarket). On the other hand sophistication was seen as: mature, poised, restrained, introvert, taciturn, long-term, solitary, cultured, controlled/severe (and thus upmarket). In other accounts fashion and glamour are taken to be synonymous. Jeanine Basinger takes this view in her analysis of classical Hollywood cinema and its female audiences. However, she also states that ‘Glamour goes beyond mere fashion. Although the concept of glamour includes fashion, it ultimately involves more than what a woman puts on her body. It deals with the lady herself.’ The movie stars she refers to usually occupied a median position between the two poles identified by Scott, thus rendering his differentiation meaningless.

In the context of such confusion, an attempt to identify what glamour is, where it comes from and how it works is surely timely. In this chapter three moments of glamour will be explored. In keeping with glamour’s associations with the immediate and the commercial, the first of these will be the present. Older meanings will be considered in relation to contemporary uses in the press and advertising. Second, the root of many of the gestures and stereotypes of modern glamour – Hollywood cinema of the middle decades of the twentieth century – will be examined. In the final section, consideration will be given to the transformation of the nineteenth-century city which, it will be argued, was the original site of glamour as it is used and understood today.

Fashioning the Street: Images of the Street in the Fashion Media

2011-04-23T15:12:00.000-07:00

Agnès Rocamora and Alistair O’Neill

INTRODUCTION

In the media, the street has become as conspicuous a context for fashion as the space of the photographer’s studio or that of the catwalk. No longer simply occupied, in fashion images, by the glamorous figures of professional models, it is the everyday setting of ordinary people whose fashionable looks feed the content of numerous fashion reports. The status of the street as a setting for the articulation of fashion in Taking the consecration of the ‘straight-up’ fashion portrait in 1980 in i-D magazine as a starting point, we first chart the appearance of street fashion photography, from the emergence of the street as a visual background to fashion shoots, to the institutionalization of vox-pop fashion images, on which the present paper focuses.We interrogate the values conveyed by such images, looking at the idea of the street as a site for the creative performance of ‘real’ people. Commenting on the role of journalists in the selection of ordinary subjects and city streets, we then question the status of straight-up images as evidencing what is ‘real’ about ordinary people. Finally we argue that in many fashion images, detached from the representation of actual cityscapes, ‘the street’ has lost its characteristic as a situated place to become a blank canvas ready to be filled by the imagination of the reader.

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FASHION AND THE STREET

Representations of fashion within the context of the street can be charted across the twentieth-century history of the fashion media. However, the headto-toe documentary portrait of a fashionable individual captured in the street – known as the straight-up – remains the central definition of this visual reporting on fashion.

In early issues of i-D (Fig. 17) the straight-up was established as the magazine’s visual signature: a style of dress worn by ordinary people as opposed to professional models, combined in apparent disregard of dominant fashion codes and celebrated in the streets rather than in the rarefied spaces in which fashion was usually found (see also Smedley 2000: 147). The straight-up style of photography deployed by London-based Derek Ridgers and Steve Johnson in i-D typically captured fashionable subjects against a brick wall in the street rather than in front of the white backdrop of the studio, lending an immediacy and vitality to what was then becoming known as ‘street fashion’.Twenty years on, street-fashion photography has become so commonplace that representational strategies now involve bringing the subjects back into the studio. Furthering this air of unmediated integrity was the inclusion of snatches of conversation with the subject and a detailed list of each item of apparel worn, where it was purchased and how much it cost. This approach documented street style as formed from incongruous juxtapositions – the cheap and the expensive, the old and the new, the beautiful and the vulgar.

The pairing of style and the street has earlier precedents in twentiethcentury fashion magazines, where the street was used as a transgressive foil to the representation of fashionable women in cityscapes. However, many of these photographs re-created such spaces in the photographer’s studio, often so that the dirt of the street would not soil the clothes, or in order that everything could remain still enough for it to be captured. An example of this is a 1926 photograph by Edward Steichen for American Vogue, which depicts the details of a women’s outfit centring upon the base of her evening coat, her legs and shoes (see Devlin 1979: 39 for a reproduction of the photograph).

With an usher’s spotlight casting a circular frame around the shoes, and a theatre programme held by a male companion, the image suggests late arrivals being shown to their seats. What is foremost though, is the purpose of the women’s outfit in making an entrance and exit, in defining those moments being whisked between streetcar and theatre stalls, in momentarily being seen

as a feature of the street.

Although the unaccompanied figure of the woman in the street was seen increasingly frequently in fashion photographs in the first half of the twentieth century, she often remained bound by the feminine pursuits of a bourgeois existence, with the reality of the street a beautifying prop to the unreal fantasy of high-end fashion. As an object of the gaze, her position contrasted with that of the flâneur and the male privileged code of visual spectatorship.

It was not until the post-war period, with the emergence of style-conscious magazines aimed at men that the image of the flâneur, somewhat melded with the more modern notion of the ‘man about town’, began to be visualized in fashion photography. Metropolitan masculinity was shown to be influenced by the industrial atmosphere of the metropolis. This is well illustrated by Terence

Donovan’s grainy black-and-white photographs of sharply suited men in ‘Spy Drama’ for the October 1962 issue of Town, which became famous as the visual influence for the filmic interpretation of James Bond. In this same period, the representation of the woman in the street was radicalized by the emergence of youth as a social category and its claiming of street culture as its primary context.

Many of the British fashion photographers who in the 1960s would go on to offer a new and confident definition of a woman in the street, which Radner (2000) identified in the figure of ‘the single girl’ or the ‘dolly bird’ in new magazines such as Nova, are an interesting case in point. As Harrison (1998) argues, much of the fashion photography that made them famous then was predicated on the social-documentary photography of youth cultures and street life they published in the 1950s, with much of it appearing in the new men’s titles of the period. David Bailey’s photograph of Jean Shrimpton for a Vogue ‘Young Ideas’ story in 1962 is an iconic image of the 1960s single girl.

It draws upon a number of visual tropes: in its pop-art use of signs and street furniture to indicate a navigation of the city it injects movement into the image, in its inclusion of passers-by and street traffic it sets vitality into the image, and in the confident but androgynous figure of Shrimpton, who carries a teddy bear in her hand, youth is valorized.

The newly identified social category of youth, and its claim of the street as its terrain, marked a new development in fashion photography’s use of this urban space, forcing it to modify its own practices. It was no longer enough to claim the street as the site where fashionable commodities were radicalized, rather it was now the site where style was constructed prior to the processes of commodification. The straight-up allowed the fashion media to document the fashionable styles displayed on city streets in a format informed by the tradition of the vox pop – documenting the opinion of ‘the man on the street’. Such an approach informed Nova magazine’s innovative fashion stories in the late 1960s and early 1970s (see also Williams 1998) before it was more systematically capitalized on by Terry Jones in i-D in the 1980s with the magazine’s consecration of the straight-up as a legitimate form of fashion photography.

The straight-up is now a staple of fashion journalism from the British Independent on Sunday to the French Jalouse or the aptly titled Japanese Street (Plate 17). Until March 2004, for instance, the Independent on Sunday featured a section called ‘You’ve Got the Look’ – then renamed ‘On the Street’. It read, ‘Our experts take to the streets to find out what real people are wearing, and show you how to recreate their style’. Featuring a large straight-up of a ‘real’ person in a format reminiscent of i-D’s fashion portraits, on the right-hand side of the picture is a visual breakdown of items similar to those in the photograph, with their price and a stockist’s phone number. In the bottom left-hand corner a small column quotes the subject on their own style. Readers are shown ‘how to recreate their style’ in a departure from the media’s many pages devoted to emulating the style of celebrities and catwalk models. Similarly, Elle announces that for its London Street Style Look competition it will be ‘starring the hippest girls on the high street. And where better,’ the magazine asks, ‘to look for inspiration than on the streets of dear Blighty?’ (August 2003). ‘British street style,’ Elle continues, ‘is renowned for its influence on the catwalk…We’ll be looking for real girls’ (August 2003).

The unabated popularity of the straight-up is due to its supposed ability to evidence the ‘real’ and the ‘ordinary’ in the context of written and visual speculation about the nature of metropolitan fashion. As Smedley observes, images of street fashion in i-D in the 1980s ‘took as their point of reference and basis of style the notion of the “ordinary person”’ (2000: 147), an idea we now turn to.

A Shop of Images and Signs

2011-04-23T14:23:00.000-07:00

Caroline Evans

‘Fashion doesn’t have to be something people wear, fashion is also an image,’said the designers Viktor & Rolf in 1999 (Gan 1999). That year, their third couture collection, made entirely in black and white, was shown on the catwalk twice: first in black light that picked out the white elements of the clothes and concealed the black, so that the audience saw only a frill, a trailing ribbon, a disembodied white ruff, or a dancing skeleton with hips of white bows; and then in white light that revealed the collection to be a series of variations on the theme of the black tuxedo. At that point it became clear to the audience that the skeleton ‘bones’ it had seen earlier were stitched onto a black suit; and the plain white trouser suit turned out to be outlined by a huge black ruffle projecting from its side seams. At once macabre, whimsical and spectacular, the ghostly presentation evoked the double meaning of the term vision: it was quite literally a vision on the catwalk, and one which embodied the designers’ vision. At the same time, it suggested the other meaning of the term: a ghost, shade or apparition. Viktor & Rolf ’s presentation was also spectral in terms of manufacturing and selling: the clothes were not intended to go into production but were made as a series of ideas. This black-and-whitecollection was an inventory of the shapes that Viktor & Rolf had been working on since the start of their career, and they intended it to be their last spectral collection before they launched themselves in the real world of embodied fashion and commerce, making clothes to go into production and be sold in the shops. As such, the collection, and its presentation, typified the spectacular nature of modern fashion and marketing. The word spectacle designates a sight, or show; the spectre a ghost, or a vision. Etymologically they have the same root, both coming from specere, the Latin verb ‘to see’. The spectacle of fashion is the subject of this article, which is concerned with fashion as image rather than as photograph. It looks at the catwalk show as a key medium through which fashion images were created and then disseminated via new electronic and print media at the end of the twentieth century.

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In the 1850s Baudelaire wrote that ‘all the visible universe is nothing but a shop of images and signs’ (Buck-Morss 1991: 177). A hundred and fifty years later, in the 1990s, new communications produced mutations in consumer culture that transmogrified the fashion object into image and sign. In the altered visual economy of fast-changing information technology and global markets, media images were, for most people, their first and only point of contact with top-end fashion. Fashion shows became characterized by dramatic showpieces – implausible garments made of feathers and shells, or resin and metal, that were galvanized by electricity or consumed by fire in a spectacular finale. Showpieces never went into production, and after the show disappeared into the designers’ archives, only occasionally to reappear in the occasional museum exhibition. Their brief appearance on the catwalk would, however, be fixed in the amber of the press photograph, and would circulate in both digital and print media as an image and memory of a fleeting moment in an

evanescent spectacle. More pragmatically, the showpiece would have done its job for the designer if it had attracted the requisite press coverage and, in the early stages of a designer’s career, potential backers. As the catalogue for a British Council touring exhibition of cutting-edge design, Lost and Found, stated in 1999,

Fashion designers work in a world whose currency is the magazine front cover; the editorial spread; the styled photo shoot…Successful designers are under extraordinary pressure from hundreds of magazines all over the world, wanting photographs or clothing samples to fill their editorial pages. As a result, a network of support teams has grown up to serve thefashion industry, consisting of press and public relations people, publicity co-ordinators, editorial stylists and fashion photographers. For most people, the media provides the only contact with experimental or couture fashion. These garments are either too expensive or unsuitable for mainstream retail distribution, and we are left to consume fantasy images of magazine photo shoots. (1999: 97).

Thus the fantasy images of the elaborate and spectacular fashion shows of

the late 1990s, in which the fashion object mutated into image, increasingly echoed Baudelaire’s observation, from the heart of mid-nineteenth-century Paris with its specialist shops full of luxury goods, that the entire ‘visible universe’ consisted of no more than a vast emporium of signs and images. In 1967, in The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord (1994) anatomized that visible universe and its relation to capital; he saw it as a world colonized by false desires and illusions, epitomized by the ubiquity of the commodity form. In many respects the fashion show is the paradigm of Debord’s notion of spectacle, which he described as narcissistic, self-absorbed and self-referential. So too is the catwalk fashion show, sealed into a hermetic world of its own with its attendant protocols and hierarchies. Like the spectacle, it spatializes time and destroys memory (Debord 1994: para. 19). It is ‘the triumph of ontemplation over action’ ( Jay 1993: 428) and the quintessential form of commercial seduction through theatrical novelty and innovation. Its spectacular displays are calculated to obscure its financial heart. Only the gilt hairs in the show, each with a journalist’s name on it, and the banks of photographers, hint at the complex professional networks to which the spectacle is tied and through which its imagery is disseminated worldwide.

Towards a Sociology of Art Collections: Irish Intellectuals, Modernity and the Making of a Modern Art Collection

2011-04-15T08:15:00.000-07:00

Marta Herrero

abstract: This article draws on Zygmunt Bauman’s concept ‘legislator’ – the intellectual practice of modernity – to explore the relationship between Irish intellectuals and modernity. The case study selected for this purpose is the intellectual debate that took place around the making of Dublin’s first modern art collection, which led to the opening of the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in 1908. Its premise is that art collections are the outcome of intellectual practices, which legitimate and define their role. Overall, this example is used to investigate the complex ways in which Irish intellectuals sought to renegotiate Ireland’s relation to modernity, a discourse that positioned it as a ‘peripheral’ country. The article concludes by saying that the making of a modern art collection was used as a means to renegotiate a more constructive view of Ireland, and suggests ‘modernities’ as a term that captures the various intellectual practices of modernity

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Introduction

The aim of this article is to examine the relationship between intellectuals, modernity and the making of art collections. The case study selected for this purpose is the intellectual debate around the making of Ireland’s first modern art collection, that led to the foundation of Dublin’s Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in 1908. My main concern here is to use this debate to assess the possibilities of the concept ‘legislator’ – the ideal type of intellectual of modernity – as presented by Zygmunt Bauman (1987, 1992, 1995). Hence, rather than taking for granted the explanatory power of the category, I want to question its usefulness for a study of intellectual practices in one of the so-called ‘peripheries’ of modernity.

Bauman uses the term ‘legislator’ to designate the intellectual practice of modernity. It was through the practices of legislators that the worldview and social order of modernity came into being. In turn, their knowledge-making activities legitimated their role ‘as spokesmen and guardians of society as a whole, as carriers/practitioners of society’s supreme values and destiny’ (Bauman, 1995: 227). Intellectuals cooperated with the modern state to create a body of knowledge that would produce and support a theory of social order: culture. This theory was based on the premise that men and women were unprepared to meet the demands of social life, and that these demands could only be met through education.

To put this theory into practice, legislators classified and divided the world into an ordered totality (Bauman, 1987: 4). One of their projects was to render practices into superior – those that could be objectively classified – and inferior – those that resisted classification. In this way they articulated a hierarchy of knowledge with its own categories that established what was the ‘norm’ and what was ‘different’ from it. Legislators applied their knowledge in areas such as ethics, history and the arts, but the field of art and the practice of artistic judgement was the area in which their authority, power and control remained most ubiquitous and unchallenged (Bauman, 1987: 140). As Bauman explains:

Being in control meant operating, without much challenge, the mechanisms transforming uncertainty into certainty; making decisions, pronouncing authoritative statements, segregating and classifying, imposing binding definitions upon reality. . . . In the case of aesthetics the power of intellectuals seemed particularly unchallenged, virtually monopolistic. In the West, at least, no other sites of power attempted to interfere with the verdicts proffered by those ‘in the know’. (Bauman, 1987: 134)

This quote gives us an idea of the close relationship between the making of aesthetic judgements and the definition and classification of ‘reality’ through the grid of modernity’s worldview. Even definitions that helped segregate ‘art’ from ‘non-deserving’, ‘non-art’ were built upon the division of social groups as superior/inferior, which corresponds to the opposition ‘noble’ (and hence with good taste) vs ‘vulgar’ (lacking in good taste). This article is based on the premise that the making of art collections was one of the ways whereby legislators carried out their tastemaking judgements, classifying some works as ‘art’ and hence acceptable as part of a public collection.

Bauman’s ideas provide a useful springboard for understanding the knowledge-constituting activities of the intellectuals of modernity and the creation of concepts through which to understand this particular worldview. However, the term ‘legislator’ applies to those intellectuals situated in ‘the West’, in the ‘ “leading” countries’ of modernity (Bauman, 1995: 229). This becomes clear if we think that one of the tasks of legislators was the creation of a theory of history, which presented as ‘natural’ an ordered hierarchy of nations ranking from those most ‘civilised’ to those ‘uncivilised’ or ‘lagging behind’ (Bauman, 1987: 11). If a theory of history classified countries as more or less modern, arguably, intellectuals operating within these countries were positioned within asymmetrical relationships of power. Following from that, if intellectuals in ‘core’ countries such as Britain and France legislated a modernity that favoured their nations as the apex of western civilization, how can we situate and explain the activities of those intellectuals who were articulating value judgementsoutside these legislating centres of modernity? Were they able to legislate their own modernity? In Life in Fragments, Bauman (1995) argues that it was in the ‘periphery’ of civilization that the conditions for the estrangement of legislators from the ruling state and the ‘self-assertion of intellectuals’ (Bauman, 1995: 228) first appeared. In this new self-asserting position intellectuals became critics of their own society – as opposed to supporting the prevalent status quo. What we have here is an argument about where and how the legislator role came to its end, which still leaves unexplained their role in the making of modernity, while the legislating practice was still being carried out.

A study of the activities of Irish intellectuals in the field of visual arts is particularly relevant for a number of reasons. At the time, Ireland was in the paradoxical circumstance of being a European country and a British colony since the 17th century. Moreover, a number of sociologists and art historians have investigated the changing power relations that legitimated and authorized new ways of consumption and production of the arts in the so-called modern era (see Bourdieu, 1993; Lorente, 1998); however, in the Irish context a sociological approach to the arts, both in its historically and contemporary context, is practically absent.2 Added to this is the scarcity of sociological investigations of Irish intellectuals (O’Dowd, 1985: 6) and a need to redress the emphasis given to the study of literary, nationalist and clerical intellectuals (O’Dowd, 1988: 8).

I want to situate this discussion in the context of a sociology of arts. Although the term does not describe a clearly defined discipline or unitary methodology (Outhwaite and Bottomore, 1993: 28), sociologists justify their contribution to this field by treating the arts as a social construction (Wolff, 1981; Zolberg, 1990; Zolberg and Cherbo, 1997). This means investigating the relationship between the meanings and motivations involved in the production of art objects, and wider social processes and structures (Eyerman, 1998: 280). My specific purpose and contribution here are to present a sociological approach to the making of art collections that places the definition and role of collections as the outcome of intellectual debate. In this case, Dublin’s collection took place in a debate in which two visions emerged – introspective and internationalist. Drawing on Bauman’s argument, the specific questions that I want to address are: how do the practices of Irish intellectuals relate to the making of modernity’s worldview? How do Irish intellectuals legislate a particular definition of Irish art? Are they legislating a distinctive Irish modernity?

Structure of Art, Structure of Mind

2011-04-15T07:49:00.000-07:00

Emmanuel Anati

The context

For over four million years hunting has shaped humanity and has left profound marks on the intellectual nature of the species. The fundamental process of association and ‘logic’ of the human mind came into existence and developed throughout a long series of millennia during which the species acquired its basic behavioural patterns. These millennia are characterized by hunting bands which shared activities and refined communication; team work enhanced socialization.

This way of life reached a high level of perfection and efficiency in the last 200,000 years with the appearance of our direct forefather, Homo sapiens. He acquired developed technological skills and mental abilities, he was capable of producing precise and efficient implements and was responsible for creating an ideology whose matrix is still present at the core of modern man’s conceptual thought. Our ancestor developed the capacity for synthesis and abstraction which, among other things, led him to produce art. Visual art as a common pattern is documented only in the last 50,000 years, that is the latest 1% of the age of humankind.

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So far as we know, artistic manifestations are exclusive to the human species. Graphic art has multiple functions including communication, memorization, interpretation, commemoration and self-expression. Art is the mirror of mind, and constitutes a precious record of man’s conceptual and psychological matrix. Graphic art is a cultural pattern, like writing, dancing or singing. It implies specific abilities of synthesis, abstraction, mental associations and logic.

A few cases of early graphic expressions are recorded in various parts of the world. These predecessors of figurative graphic art appear to be of two main kinds: abstract markings; and collections of natural shapes that attracted the human mind. Abstract markings are known from Africa, going back, at Blombos Cave, South Africa, some 75,000 years. In Europe, at Bacho Kiro, Bulgaria and at Tata, Hungary, they may be as old. According to a current debate, these finds may have been produced by Neanderthaloid people or by archaic Homo sapiens. The collection of natural shapes is documented from excavations and surface finds in layers of both sapiens and pre-sapiens humans. As a cultural pattern, figurative art that includes images is first documented as a production of Homo sapiens. The evidence concerns finds executed on durable materials. Art objects in wood, on animal skins or other organic supports have not survived.

Populations whose livelihood is based on hunting and gathering are today almost extinct and are confined to the most inhospitable parts of the planet, such as the deserts of Australia and of southern Africa, the Congo basin, the tropical forests of the Amazon river, southeast Asia, the Arctic tundra of Lapland, Siberia, Alaska and the great Canadian north. They have been pushed to ‘marginal’ areas, and although they occupy territories that constitute more than 20% of the Earth’s surface, account for less than 1% of the world population. Only 500 years ago, when America became known to Europeans, 70% of the Earth’s surface was populated by hunting people, who then may have accounted for more than 20% of the world population. At the end of the Pleistocene, some 12,000 years ago, the entire population of Earth pursued this means of subsistence, which was gradually replaced by economies based on food production. Since then other ways of life have developed and patterns of visual arts have become broadly differentiated.

Tribal societies around the world have the common habit of producing art and in particular rock art, i.e. paintings and engravings on rock surfaces. Rock art is recorded in thousands of zones distributed over more than 100 countries. It is a widespread means of expression and of communication, and over 45 million prehistoric images from about 70,000 sites are known today. More than 70% of all known rock art was produced by hunting and gathering societies, while less than 30% is the work of pastoralists and of agriculturalists.

Rock art is the product of pre-literate societies. Until the communities that practised it acquired a ‘written’ form of communication it includes the earliest preserved visual art. It thus constitutes by far the most relevant record we possess of human history before the invention of what is officially recognized as writing. It also provides invaluable source material for the study of human cognitive development.

Almost all prehistoric art focuses on three basic themes: sex, food and territory. These themes expressed directly or indirectly, realistically or metaphorically, display the focus of interest of the human mind. Humans’ main concerns do not seem to have changed much down the ages, as these remain the dominant themes faced by the literate societies, in their visual arts and in literature, in dance and in music. From the earliest historical documentation they appear to have been a source of inspiration for ideology and religion, and to have represented the principal causes of war.

Similarly, they are the main causes of conflict among other species. Broad comparative studies are possible when the pertinent documentation is available. Until recently, cataloguing and making inventories of rock art has been predominantly the work of students and amateurs, occasionally supported by universities and museums. It is only in the last few years that some governments have become aware of the importance of this documentation as an immense cultural and historical heritage, and are now embarking on systematic inventories.

Mobiliary art, objects, figurines, plaques and decorated objects, on the other hand, have received different treatment. Once discovered they are usually acquired by museums and collections where inventories are produced in order to evaluate the patrimony of the institution. A whole-world inventory would be of significant value in the sector of mobiliary art. However, both in terms of the volume of existing documentation and of world distribution, rock art appears to be a global phenomenon that constitutes more than 90% of known prehistoric art. It is found on all continents and has remained in situ where early man produced it. Despite this accessibility, it has received only minimal academic attention and still less public attention and recognition.

Perceptographic code in visual culture

2011-03-26T13:09:00.000-07:00

Leonid Tchertov

Abstract.

Visual culture can be considered from semiotic point of view as a system of visual codes. Several of them have natural routs. So the perceptual code is formed already on biological level mediating translation of sensory data into perceptual images of the spatial world. The means of natural perceptual code are transformed in culture, where they are involved in communication by depictions. The depiction on the flat performs the function of a “perceptogram”, which, on one hand, is an external record of an internal perceptual image or an idea, and, on the other hand, serves as a program for a spectator’s visual perception. The means of this “perceptography” form an artificial code, which is, on the contrary to the perceptual code, communicative, deliberately used and transformed in various ways at different periods of time in diverse kinds of practical and artistic activity. Not all perceptograms become pieces of art, but all history of pictorial arts can be considered as a process of development and mastering with the different versions of this perceptographic code. The changes of this code in visual culture are connected with the intrinsic development of “vision forms” as well with invention of external means of communication.

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Evolutionary Visual Art and Design

2011-03-26T12:52:00.000-07:00

Matthew Lewis
ACCAD, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA mlewis@accad.osu.edu

Summary.
This chapter presents an introduction to the different artistic design domains that make use of interactive evolutionary design approaches, the techniques they use, and many of the challenges arising. After a brief introduction to concepts and terminology common to most artificial genetic design, there is a survey of artistic evolutionary systems and related research for evolving images and forms. While the focus is primarily on purely aesthetic fitness landscapes, the survey also ventures into areas such as product design and architecture. The overview shifts from technique to application as organizational strategies, as appropriate. After briefly surveying additional information sources, the chapter concludes with a discussion of major topics of relevance to evolutionary system designers, providing context for the following chapters. It is hoped that this snapshot of the state of the field will increase exposure to projects and issues, discussion amongst participants, and ultimately the accessibility of these techniques and approaches.

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SUBCULTURES OR NEO-TRIBES? RETHINKING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN YOUTH, STYLE AND MUSICAL TASTE

2011-02-23T19:50:00.000-08:00

Despite the criticisms of subcultural theory as a framework for the sociological study of the relationship between youth, music, style and identity, the term ‘subculture’ continues to be widely used in such work. It is a central contention of this article that, as with subcultural theory, the concept of ‘subculture’ is unworkable as an objective analytical tool in sociological work on youth, music and style – that the musical tastes and stylistic preferences of youth, rather than being tied to issues of social class, as subculture maintains, are in fact examples of the late modern lifestyles in which notions of identity are ‘constructed’ rather than ‘given’, and ‘fluid’ rather than ‘fixed’. Such fluidity, I maintain, is also a characteristic of the forms of collective association which are built around musical and stylistic preference. Using Maffesoli’s concept of tribus (tribes) and applying this to an empirical study of the contemporary dance music in Britain, I argue that the musical and stylistic sensibilities exhibited by the young people involved in the dance music scene are clear examples of a form of late modern ‘sociality’ rather than a fixed subcultural group.

Key words: lifestyle, neo-tribalism, style, subculture, urban dance music, youth.

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During the 1970s and early 1980s, sociological explanations of the relationship between youth, style and musical taste relied heavily upon the subcultural theory developed by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). In more recent years there has been increasing criticism of the CCCS approach from theorists who have argued, among other things, that the Centre’s use of structuralist accounts to explain what are in effect examples of consumer autonomy and creativity results in a number of problems.

Interestingly, however, the term subculture survives in such counteranalytical discourse. Indeed, such is the variety of analytical perspectives in which subculture is now used as a theoretical underpinning, that it has arguably become little more than a convenient ‘catch-all’ term for any aspect of social life in which young people, style and music intersect. In this article I want to examine some of the problems which can be identified with the concept of ‘subculture’ and to argue that an alternative theoretical framework needs to be developed which allows for the pluralistic and shifting sensibilities of style that have increasingly characterised youth ‘culture’ since the post-Second World War period.

Drawing upon Maffesoli’s (1996) concept of tribus (tribes), I will argue that those groupings which have traditionally been theorised as coherent subcultures are better understood as a series of temporal gatherings characterised by fluid boundaries and floating memberships. This argument will be supported with empirical evidence drawn from an ethnographic study of the urban dance music scene in Newcastle upon Tyne in north-east England. The term urban dance music refers to contemporary forms of DJ (disc-jockey) orientated music, such as house and techno (see Redhead 1993a), which, since the late 1980s have broadened the sphere of dance music culture considerably, removing its ‘disco’ and ‘mainstream’ connotations and elevating it to the status of a ‘serious’ music in which debates concerning issues of authenticity (Thornton 1995) are comparable with those which characterised the progressive rock and punk scenes of the 1970s (see Frith 1983; Laing 1985). It will be my contention that the musical and visual style mixing observed at urban dance music events exemplifies the essential eclecticism of post-war

youth culture and thus forces a revision of our understanding of the way in which young people have characteristically perceived the relationship between style, musical taste and collective association.

The Birmingham CCCS

As in the United States, early British studies of youth focused on the connection between the ‘deviant’ sensibilities of youth ‘gangs’ and the localities from which such gangs emerged. Thus, for example, in a study of juvenile delinquency in Liverpool, Mays (1954) echoed Whyte’s (1943) synopsis of the Cornerville gangs in Chicago by suggesting that such delinquency was part of a local tradition as young males received and put into practice the deviant norms which were a part of everyday life in many underprivileged neighbourhoods of Liverpool. With the publication of the CCCS research, British studies of youth culture began to change in two significant ways. First, emphasis moved away from the study of youth gangs and towards style-based youth cultures, such as Teddy boys, mods, rockers and skinheads, which from the 1950s onwards rapidly became an integral feature of everyday British social life. Secondly, in keeping with the central hypothesis of the CCCS, the ‘local’ focus of earlier youth studies was abandoned in favour of a subcultural model of explanation. Using the original Chicago School premise that subcultures provide the key to an understanding of deviance as normal behaviour in the face of particular social circumstances, Resistance Through Rituals (1976), the centrepiece of the CCCS research, re-worked this idea as a way of accounting for the style-centred youth cultures of post-war Britain. According to the CCCS, the deviant behaviour of such youth cultures or ‘subcultures’ had to be understood as the collective reaction of youth themselves, or rather working-class youth, to structural changes taking place in British post-war society.

The notion of subcultures as a response to structural changes was adopted from an earlier CCCS working paper, Cohen’s ‘Subcultural Conflict and Working Class Community’ (1972). According to Cohen, youth subcultures were to be understood in terms of their facilitating a collective response to the break up of traditional working-class communities as a result of urban

redevelopment during the 1950s and the re-location of families to ‘new towns’ and modern housing estates. Thus argues Cohen (1972:23): ‘the latent function of subculture is this – to express and resolve, albeit “magically”, the contradictions which remain hidden and unresolved in the parent culture [by attempting] to retrieve some of the socially cohesive elements destroyed in [the] parent culture’. Cohen’s concept of ‘magical recovery’ is developed in Resistance Through Rituals but is posited as purely one of a number of themes around which subcultural responses are constructed. Subcultures are seen to form part of an on-going working-class struggle against the socio-economic circumstances of their existence and, as such, subcultural resistance is conceptualised in a number of different ways. John Clarke’s study of skinhead culture echoes Cohen’s view in arguing that the skinhead style represents ‘an attempt to re-create through the “mob” the traditional working class community as a substitution for the real decline of the latter’ (Clarke 1976:99). Jefferson’s examination of the Teddy boy style argues that the latter reflected the Ted’s ‘“all-dressed-up-and-nowhere-to-go” experience of Saturday evening’ (Jefferson: 1976:48). The relative affluence of the Teddy boys allowed them to

‘buy into’ a middle-class image – the Edwardian suit revived by Saville Row

tailors in 1950 and originally intended for a middle-class market. Jefferson

argues, that the Teddy boys’ ‘dress represented a symbolic way of expressing

and negotiating with their symbolic reality; of giving cultural meaning to their

social plight’ (Jefferson 1976:86). Similarly, Hebdige claims that the mod style

was a reaction to the mundane predictability of the working week and that the

mod attempted to compensate for this ‘by exercising complete domination

over his private estate – his appearance and choice of leisure pursuits’

(Hebdige 1976:91).

Aesthetics and the Practices of Qualitative Inquiry

2011-02-23T19:10:00.000-08:00

Writing is not an innocent practice, although in the social sciences and the

humanities, there is only interpretation (Rinehart, 1998). Nonetheless, Marx

(1888/1983, p. 158) continues to remind us that we are in the business of not

just interpreting but of changing the world.

In this article, I explore new (and old) forms of writing, forms that are

intended to forward the project of interpreting and changing the world. Specifically,

I work back and forth between variations on a Chicana/Chicano

(Gonzalez, 1998; Pizarro, 1998) Black and African American aesthetic (Davis,

1998; hooks, 1990, 1996), and the relationship between these practices and

critical race theory (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Parker, 1998).

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Although there have been efforts to bring critical race theory into qualitative

research, few have merged this theory with the poststructural turn in ethnography

(see hooks, 1990, pp. 123-134). Nor have critical race theory and

qualitative inquiry been connected to the radical performance texts stemming

from the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s (Baker, 1997;

Baraka, 1997; Harris, 1998). These interconnections are now being established

in the various Black Cultural Studies projects of the new Black Public Intellectuals

and cultural critics (Hall, Gilroy, hooks, Gates, West, Reed, Morrison,

Wallace, Steele). A current generation of blues, rap, hip-hop, and popular

singers, jazz performers, poets (Angelou, Dove, Jordan, Knight, Cortez), novelists

(Walker, Morrison, Bambara), playwrights (Wilson, Shange, Smith),

and filmmakers (Lee, Singleton, Burnett, Dash) are also making these links

(see Christian, 1997, pp. 2019-2020; Harris, 1998, pp. 1343-1385).

This is a utopian project. I assume that words and language have a material

presence in the world, that words have effects on people. Words matter.

I imagine a world in which race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation

intersect; a world in which language empowers, and humans are free to

become who they can be, free of prejudice, repression, and discrimination

(Jackson, 1998, p. 21; also Parker, Deyhle, Villenas, & Nebeker, 1998, p. 5).

Those who write culture must learn to use language in a way that brings people

together. The goal is to create sacred, loving texts that “demonstrate a strong

fondness . . . for freedom and an affectionate concern for the lives of people”

(Joyce, 1987, p. 344). This writing addresses and demonstrates the benevolence

and kindness that people should feel toward one another (Joyce, 1987,

p. 344).

Thus do I examine new ways of writing culture; new ways of making qualitative

research central to the workings of a free democratic society.

AN AESTHETIC OF COLOR AND CRITICAL RACE THEORY

Afeminist, Chicana/Chicano and Black performance-based aesthetic uses

art, photography, music, dance, poetry, painting, theatre, cinema, performance

texts, autobiography, narrative, storytelling, poetic, dramatic language

to create a critical race consciousness, thereby extending the post–civil

rights Chicana/Chicano and Black Arts Cultural movements into the next

century (see Harrington, 1999, p. 208). These practices serve to implement

critical race theory (Anzaldua, 1987; Collins, 1991; Davis, 1998, p. 155; Gonzalez,

1998; hooks, 1990, p. 105; Joyce, 1987; Ladson-Billings, 1998; Parker, 1998;

Parker et al., 1998; Scheurich, 1997, pp. 144-158; Smith, 1993, p. xxvi; 1994, xxii;

Trinh, 1992). Critical race theory “seeks to decloak the seemingly race-neutral,

and color-blind ways . . . of constructing and administering race-based

appraisals . . . of the law, administrative policy, electoral politics . . . political

discourse [and education] in the USA” (Parker et al., 1998, p. 5).

Thus, is Collins’s (1991, 1998) Afrocentric feminist agenda for the 1990s

moved into the next century; that is, theorists and practitioners enact a

standpoint epistemology that sees the world from the point of view of

oppressed persons of color. Representative sociopoetic and interpretive

works in this tradition include those of Amiri Baraka (1998), Jones (1966),

Shange (1977), Joyce Joyce (1987), Larry Neal (1988), June Jordan (1998), as

well as the more recent arguments of hooks (1990, 1996), Smith (1993, 1994),

Angela Davis (1998), Gloria Anzaldua (1987), Noriega (1996), and others.

This aesthetic is also informed by successive waves of the Asian and Native

American, women, gay, lesbian, and bisexual movements, who “use their

art as a weapon for political activism” (Harris, 1998, p. 1384; also Nero, 1998,

p. 1973).

Theorists critically engage and interrogate the anti–civil rights agendas of

the New Right (see Jordan, 1998). But this is not a protest or integrationist initiative

aimed solely at informing a White audience of racial injustice. It dismisses

these narrow agendas. In so doing, it rejects classical, Eurocentric, and

postpositivist standards for evaluating literary, artistic, and research work.

The following understandings shape this complex project:

· Ethics, aesthetics, political praxis, and epistemology are joined; every act of representation,

artistic or research, is a political and ethical statement (see Neal, 1998,

p. 1451). There is not a separate aesthetic or epistemological realm regulated by

transcendent ideals, although an ethics of care should always be paramount.

· Claims to truth and knowledge are assessed in terms of multiple criteria, including

asking if a text (a) interrogates existing cultural, sexist, and racial stereotypes,

especially those connected to family, femininity, masculinity, marriage, and intimacy

(Neal, 1998, p. 1457); (b) gives primacy to concrete lived experience; (c) uses

dialogue and an ethics of personal responsibility, values beauty, spirituality, and a

love of others; (d) implements an emancipatory agenda committed to equality,

freedom, social justice, and participatory democratic practices; and (e) emphasizes

community, collective action, solidarity, and group empowerment (Denzin,

1997, p. 65; hooks, 1990, p. 111; Pizarro, 1988, pp. 63-65).

· No topic is taboo, including sexuality, sexual abuse, death, and violence.

· It presumes an artist and social researcher who is part of, and a spokesperson for,

a local moral community, a community with its own symbolism, mythology, and

heroic figures.

· It asks that the writer-artist draw on vernacular, folk, and popular culture forms

of representation, including proverbs, work songs, spirituals, sermons, prayers,

poems, choreopoems (Shange, 1977), folktales, blues (Davis, 1998), jazz, rap, film,

paintings, theatre, movies, photographs, performance art, murals, and corridos

(see Fregoso, 1993; Gates & McKay, 1997, p. xxvii; Hill, 1998; Noriega, 1996;

Pizarro, 1998, p. 65).

· There is a search for texts that speak to women and children of color, to persons

who suffer from violence, rape, racial, and sexist injustice.

· It seeks artists-researchers-writers who produce works that speak to and represent

the needs of the community (drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, murder,

gang warfare, AIDS, dropping out of school).

· It is understood, of course, that no single representation or work can speak to the

collective needs of the community. Rather, local communities often are divided

along racial, ethnic, gender, residential, age, and class lines.

Thus are sought emancipatory, utopian texts grounded in the distinctive

styles, rhythms, idioms, and personal identities of local folk and vernacular

culture. As historical documents, these texts record the history of injustices

experienced by the members of an oppressed group. They show how members

of a local group have struggled to find places of dignity and respect in a

violent, racist, and sexist civil society (see Gates & McKay, 1997, p. xxvii).

These texts are sites of resistance. They are places where meanings, politics,

and identities are negotiated. They transform and challenge all forms of

cultural representation: White, Black, Chicano, Asian, Native American, gay,

or straight.

Effective history and the end of art

2011-02-23T18:52:00.000-08:00

This article takes its shape from a recent conference at the School

of Visual Arts in NYC on the theme, ‘Tradition and the New: Educating

the Artist for the Millennium’. Central to the way the conference was advertised

and described was an implicit tendency to view tradition as wholly

separate from the new. While the conference did not itself make a theoretical

argument for the opposition of tradition and the new, Arthur Danto’s

recent elaboration of a thesis of the ‘end of art’ does provide such a theoretical

underpinning for the opposition that the conference seemed to

presuppose. Danto’s thesis of the end of art offers a compelling view of

‘what’ and ‘where’ art is today, but it also has troubling implications for

how our relation to the past is configured and, in Danto’s view of art’s

having come to an end, for what it means that we are now living in ‘posthistorical’

times. That is, as a compelling contemporary reading of the

history of art, Danto’s thesis seems to be more implicated in the very

modernist project that he, in other ways, seeks to move effectively beyond.

This article, then, explores the problem of counterposing tradition and the

new, specifically, in Danto’s thesis, but also more generally. In the first part

of the article, I present Danto’s end of art thesis. Next, I will offer a counterweight

to this tendency to separate tradition and the new by examining

the concept of ‘effective history’, focussing here on the writing of Hans-

Georg Gadamer. Gadamer’s insights, which I will link to Nietzsche, provide

a way of moving beyond some of the problematic implications of Danto’s

thesis, and also illuminate some of the ethical dimensions at stake. In

concluding, I will look at some contemporary examples where the notion

of effective history can be productively applied.

Key words: art theory · effective history · end of art · hermeneutics ·

modernism · tradition.

..........

Introduction

This paper takes its shape from a recent conference at the School of

Visual Arts in New York City on the theme ‘Tradition and the New: Educating

the Artist for the Millennium’. Central to the way the conference

was advertised and described was an implicit tendency to view tradition

as wholly separate from the new. While the conference did not itself

make a theoretical argument for the opposition of tradition and the new,

Arthur Danto’s recent elaboration of a thesis of the end of art does

provide such a theoretical underpinning for the opposition that the conference

seemed to presuppose. Danto’s thesis of the end of art offers a

compelling view of what and where art is today, but it also has troubling

implications for how our relation to the past is configured and, in

Danto’s view of art’s having come to an end, for what it means that we

are now living in ‘post-historical’ times. That is, as a compelling contemporary

reading of the history of art, Danto’s thesis seems to be more

implicated in the very modernist project that he, in other ways, seeks to

move effectively beyond. This paper, then, explores the problem of counterposing

tradition and the new, specifically, in Danto’s thesis, but also

more generally. In the first part of the paper, I present Danto’s end-ofart

thesis. Next, I will offer a counterweight to this tendency to separate

tradition and the new by examining the concept of effective history,

focussing here on the writing of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer’s

insights, which I will link to Nietzsche, provide a way of moving beyond

some of the problematical implications of Danto’s thesis, and also

illuminate some of the ethical dimensions at stake. In concluding, I will

look at some contemporary examples where the notion of effective

history can be productively applied.

Materialisme Sertifikasi: Wajah Buram Umar Bakrie

2010-11-28T18:07:00.000-08:00

Noda hitam pekat para pelaku pendidikan, sudah sering berlaku sepanjang sejarah pendidikan di Indonesia. Kekerasan dalam dunia pendidikan, plagiarisme, pencurian dan kecurangan dalam Ujian Nasional, serta pemalsuan dokumen untuk mendapatkan sertifikasi. Para pelaku pendidikan ini, sekaligus sebagai contoh, ternyata tidak menempatkan moral dan etika sebagai landasan berpikirnya, kebutuhan-kebutuhan fisik dan psikologis, sepertinya menjadi landasan utama, demi kepuasan, kesenangan, atau beban hidup yang dipersalahkan, mereka mempermalukan diri sendiri, keluarga, dan lembaga, sekaligus mencoreng wajah pendidikan di Indonesia. Hukum sosial kemudian ditegakkan sebagai alat dan hakim yang ampuh, terhadap perusak-perusak stabilitas pendidikan nasional, tidak ketinggalan dan seharusnya juga dikenakan sanksi administratif. Sepertinya, oknum-oknum pendidikan ini, mengikis habis image “pahlawan tanpa tanda jasa”, yang kemudian digantikan “pahlawan dengan tanda jasa”. Kemana para Umar Bakri yang dilantunkan oleh Iwan Fals? Ada gerangan apa dengan “pahlawan tanpa tanda jasa” tersebut? Kenapa, sepertinya terkikis hanya oleh hal materialisme saja.

..........

Paling tidak, sertifikasi bertujuan adalah untuk meningkatkan kualitas tenaga pendidik, yang pada akhirnya diharapkan berdampak pada peningkatan mutu pendidikan di Indonesia. Apa yang diamanatkan didalam UU Nomor 14 Tahun 2005, tentang Guru dan Dosen, bahwa mereka mempunyai fungsi, peran, dan kedudukan yang strategis dalam pembangunan nasional dibidang pendidikan dan karenanya perlu dikembangkan sebagai profesi yang bermartabat. Selain itu, dituntut untuk menjadi professional yang mampu melaksanakan sistem dan mewujudkan tujuan pendidikan nasional, yaitu berkembangnya potensi peserta didik agar menjadi manusia yang beriman dan bertakwa kepada Tuhan Yang Maha Esa, berakhlak mulia, sehat, berilmu, cakap, kreatif, mandiri, serta menjadi warga negara yang demokratis dan bertanggung jawab. Jika apa yang diamanatkan ini tercapai, sudah dipastikan wajah pendidikan nasional akan cerah, dengan senyumnya yang menawan hati.

Menurut penelusuran data saya, sebanyak 20.000 guru mengikuti sertifikasi di tahun 2006, 170.450 guru di tahun 2007, dan tahun 2008 sebanyak 200.450 orang guru. Dari proses pelaksanaan sertifikasi yang dilakukan secara bertahap, kenyataan di lapangan banyak yang tidak lolos dalam penilaian portofolio. Hampir lebih dari 50 persen harus menjalani penilaian dan mengikuti Pendidikan Latihan Profesi Guru (PLPG). Seharusnya, guru bersertifikasi adalah guru yang berkualitas.

Contoh tersebut menujukkan, bahwa proses mencapai amanat UUD tersebut tidak berjalan mulus. Goncangan demi goncangan yang muncul, sebagai proses dinamisnya sertifikasi, sekaligus atas perdebatan bagaimana memaksimalkan sertifikasi itu sendiri. Program sertifikasi, tidak serta merta dipahami sebagai sebuah metode untuk peningkatan pendidikan, tetapi ajang untuk meningkatkan penghasilan dan memenuhi kebutuhan hidup. Alasan klasik, untuk mengabdi yang baik, dibutuhkan sokongan hidup yang baik juga, bagaimana akan mendidik dengan maksimal, jika mereka masih harus memikirkan urusan rumah tangga, ini kilah para pendidik yang telah tersertifikasi. Kesan materialisme, yang selama ini popular di wilayah budaya, mulai merambah di kegiatan pensertifikasian ini. Materialisme sertifikasi, menjadi tantangan dan dinamisnya kelangsungan program sertifikasi, sekaligus menjadi tanda, bahwa program ini masih harus ditangani dan dikontrol dengan serius untuk setiap bagiannya.

Materialisme dan Sertifikasi di Indonesia

Pemikiran materialisme menganggap, bahwa dunia ini tidak ada selain materi, segala peristiwa diatur oleh hukum alam, serta pemahaman tidak ada kehidupan dan tidak ada pikiran yang kekal. Paling tidak, ada beberapa macam materialisme, yaitu: rasionalisme, mistis atau biologis, parsial, dialektika historis. Ajaran materialisme memiliki beberapa dasar pemikiran, diantaranya: bersifat empirisme, naturalisme, alam semesta bersifat abadi dan sebagai keseluruhan tidak terarah secara lurus kepada satu tujuan tertentu, jiwa merupakan gejala dari materi.[1] Pandangan ini, secara langsung mengisyaratkan materialisme adalah suatu faham dengan landasan materi yang tinggi.

Begitu program sertifikasi dilaksanakan, kecenderungan yang muncul adalah terjadinya kecemburuan sosial dikalangan guru, baik dari satu instansi, diluar instansi, PNS dan non-PNS, daerah dan kota. Ini bukan saja mengganggu stabilitas proses kegiatan belajar mengajar, tetapi keharmonisan hubungan antarpendidik. Kecemburuan tersebut, dimulai dari sistem dan persyaratan kelayakan guru yang disertifikasi, terlebih pada materi (gaji sertifikasi) yang diterimakan. Pembunuhan karakter, semangat pengabdian yang luntur, bahkan orientasi mendidik yang kemudian bergeser pada faham materialisme, jelas-jelas merugikan peserta didik yang seharusnya lebih utama diperhatikan. Materialisme pada ranah pendidikan akan merusak, baik pola pikir para pendidiknya, pada akhirnya tertentu berdampak pada pendidikan nasional.

Faham materialisme ini sering ditakutkan masuk pada wilayah akut. Pandangan materialisme mendapatkan kritik keras dan pedas, sebagai bentuk filsafat yang tidak bermoral, yang membuat kehidupan manusia menjadi tidak manusiawi, dan dianggap bertuhankan materi. Merunut sejarahnya, implementasi filsafat materialisme yang dijadikan sebagai ideologi negara di Uni Soviet dan Cina, melalui masa revolusi, sangat memakan banyak korban. Materialisme akut ini, akan mentiadakan mistisisme dan hukum Tuhan atas pahala dan dosa, ini berdampak orang tidak lagi takut berbuat dosa. Menghalalkan segala cara untuk mencapai tercukupnya kebutuhan materi, mengorbankan kewajiban sebagai tenaga pendidik, dengan memanfaatkan “jam terbang” yang tinggi, lebih memilih kesempatan mengajar di tempat lain, meninggalkan kelas tetapnya, sehingga ini akan merugikan peserta didik yang menjadi tanggungjawabnya. Kelemahan materialisme bukan masalah digugurkan logika berpikir benarnya, tetapi masalah kebenaran etika dan kepatutan moral seseorang, khususnya tenaga pendidik.

Sertifikasi tentu bukan program kemaren sore yang dibuat hanya untuk menghabiskan anggaran negara saja, tetapi bertujuan untuk perbaikan perkembangan ilmu pengetahuan, keterampilan, dan pada akhirnya memperbaiki pendidikan pada tingkat nasional. Lebih jauh lagi menghasilkan ilmuwan-ilmuwan muda yang handal, bertaqwa, berakhlak mulia, dan bertanggungjawab. Materialisme juga bukan pola pikir baru yang menghampiri kancah pendidikan nasional di Indonesia, bukti-bukti yang dipaparkan sebagian penulis; tentang kecurangan, isu plagiarisme, penggelapan dan korupsi anggaran pendidikan, kebocoran jawaban Ujian Akhir (ujian tingkat nasional), dan banyak hal lainnya, merupakan isyarat rezim materialisme ini sudah merongrong sekian lamanya dan melekat, serta menjadi penyakit yang mendarah daging pada elemen penggerak pendidikan di Indonesia.

Materialisme dan Pahlawan tanpa Tanda Jasa

Menurut pemikiran dan landasan ideologi materialisme dialektika historis, bahwa peradaban dunia ini sebenarnya terjadi hanya dipenuhi oleh pertentangan kaum penguasa. Pada awalnya menggunakan mitos tuhan untuk kekuasaannya, kemudian menggunakan kekuasaan, yang berlangsung secara turun temurun (kebangsawanan), dimana kaum penguasa tersebut selalu mengeksploitasi kehidupan masyarakat miskin dan tertindas. Penguasa-penguasa inilah yang kemudian memberikan kecenderungan dan kecemburuan sosial, yang mengkodisikan sakitnya kehidupan sosial. Pada saat para “pahlawan tanpa tanda jasa” dan infrastruktur pendidikan sangat memprihatinkan dan membutuhkan bantuan dana dari “penguasa”, sarana tunjangan dan biaya operasional menteri dan kepala daerah justru sangat mewah. Kebijakan otonomi daerah, justru menjadi bumerang bagi perkembangan sosial dan pendidikan.

Sakitnya kondisi sosial ini, menularkan dan menyebarkan virus-virus yang mematikan. Membunuh setiap senti denyut nadi kehidupan masyarakat sosial, termasuk kelompok para pahlawan. Kebijakan yang seolah tak berpihak, biaya hidup yang kian mencekik, tuntutan bersosial yang tinggi, ketimpangan perlakuan atasan, dan tuntutan kesempurnaan hasil pendidikan, membuat kelompok ini secara perlahan memiliki faham materialisme berlebihan, yang sebetulnya tidak layak ada dalam hati seorang pahlawan tanpa tanda jasa. Guru yang telah tersertifikasi ternyata juga tidak lebih baik daripada yang belum tersertifikasi, ini juga membuat faham materialisme semakin menjadi-jadi. Jika memang ingin meningkatkan kesejahteraan para pahlawan tanpa tanda jasa, kenapa harus dengan persyaratan yang sedemikian rumit, kenapa sertifikasi ini dilakukan pada saat mereka sudah dalam lingkaran alam pendidikan, bukan saat mereka akan memasuki dunia pendidikan tersebut. Para pahlawan ini, pada awalnya tidak perlu diragukan kepahlawanannya, walaupun juga sering mengeluh minimnya dana kehidupan mereka, setelah adanya sertifikasi, satu sisi mereka merasa terbantu, satu sisi kematerialismeannya semakin jadi orientasi saja.

Para penguasa dunia pendidikan, sangat menentukan kebijakan, hitam dan putih berlangsungnya sistem pendidikan di Indonesia. Tidak bisa disamakan para pahlawan tanpa jasa dengan para penguasanya, kekuatan materialisme yang lebih berpikir keuntungan sepihak saja, berpengaruh pada tatanan keberfungsian kondisi sosial yang sehat. Materialisme ini sangat dekat dengan nilai-nilai konsumerisme, dimana para pelakunya adalah orang-orang yang selalu mementingkan kepuasan diri dan mengobral gaya hidup yang berlebihan. Konsumerisme membangun pemikiran-pemikiran egosentris tinggi, yang berkaca pada eksistensi pencitraan diri. Jika saja sudah sampai tahap fanatik pada kecintaan hal memenuhi kepuasan diri sendiri, ini membuktikan bahwa jual beli citra diri yang diusung pada iklan-iklan, berhasil mengenai dan tepat sasaran terhadap konsumennya. Jiwa-jiwa konsumerisme akan membentuk kecintaan pada hal-hal yang berbau materialisme, secara perlahan para pahlawan tanpa tanda jasa ini, akan terlalu banyak menuntut hak-hak kesejahteraan, dan mengabaikan kewajiban untuk mensejahterakan dunia pendidikan.

Mengenai peliknya perilaku ini, dipertegas oleh Chaney, bahwa konsumerisme telah menjadi pusat perkembangan sosial modernitas, kekuatan ini didorong oleh kuasa iklan, tersedianya waktu dan fasilitas belanja yang berlebihan, dan menjadi gaya hidup. Chaney juga menegaskan, bahwa ideologi yang muncul dalam konsumerisme adalah perasaan bangga. Dalam pandangan Featherstone, konsumerisme dilihat sebagai cara atau tahapan tertentu perkembangan kapitalis; ia merupakan persoalan yang lebih bersifat sosiologis mengenai hubungan antara penggunaan benda-benda dan cara-cara melukiskan status; ada yang menaruh perhatian terhadap kreatifitas praktik-praktik konsumerisme. Dari dua pemikiran mengenai konsumerisme tersebut, dapat kita tarik benang merah yang terhubung pada cara-cara hidup yang berfaham materialisme. Kedua-duanya lebih mementingkan gaya hidup dan bergaya, pikiran terbentuk atas logisnya materi, serta ketergantungan hal-hal duniawi saja.

Pendidikan dan Ladang Materialisme

Jika ingin bercita-cita menjadi kaya didunia pendidikan, sebaiknya lepaskan status anda sebagai guru, dosen, ataupun sebagai pendidik, karena niat tersebut sudah bertentangan dengan landasan pikir pahlawan tanpa tanda jasa. Pendidikan jelas-jelas bukan lahan mata pencaharian yang dilandasi hukum ekonomi, azas jual beli, dan perhitungan untung atau rugi. Keterbatasan atas terpenuhi kebutuhan hidup sehari-hari seharusnya tidak dijadikan sebagai alasan untuk meninggalkan kelas yang menjadi tanggung jawabnya.

Secara sederhana, kekhawatiran bersemainya ladang materialisme ini, dapat ditunjukkan dengan munculnya perilaku guru untuk mengeruk keuntungan pribadi. Tidak maksimalnya pengelolaan uang BOS untuk kepentingan sekolah dan maraknya pemungutan liar, sepertinya sarat dengan hukum ekonomi. Hukum yang saling berhubungan dan sebagai sebab akibat. Kenapa tidak? Biaya sekolah yang mahal dan tinggi, tidak diimbangi dengan peningkatan kualitas tenaga pendidik, layaknya sarana dan prasarana untuk belajar, serta miskinnya motivasi mental dan psikomotorik peserta didik. Para peserta berkembang dengan dinamis, tetapi pola pikir yang dimiliki para pendidiknya sangat statis. Munculnya sekolah-sekolah secara bersamaan, yang diikuti dengan persaingan untuk mencari peserta didik sebanyak-banyaknya, jelas orientasi semacam ini bukan lagi berbicara mutu pendidikan, tetapi lebih didasari untuk mempertahankan keberlangsungan lembaga pendidikan tertentu saja.

Kematerialismean tersebut mulai muncul pada saat promosi dan iklan yang dilakukan sebagai usaha merekrut peserta didik, tawaran program, kegiatan, jaminan kualitas lulusan, serta persaingan harga dan biaya pendidikan; memperkuat ciri-ciri materialisme itu sendiri. Iklan yang merasuk pada jiwa peserta didik, sekaligus orang tua mereka sebagai penyokong dana, semakin mencitrakan faham materialisme, yang memberikan batasan-batasan pemisah, antara orang kaya dan miskin. Citra sosial yang terbangun atas lembaga-lembaga pendidikan yang favorit, menjadikan ladang-ladang materialisme tumbuh subur, diatas pertentangan kuatnya kondisi sosial pendidikan nasional untuk semakin maju.

Kekuatan dan kelemahan finansial, yang menjadi tanda si miskin dan kaya, mempertemukan perbedaan cara pandang, termasuk pada sisi para peserta didik dan sistem pendidikan yang diberikan. Secara tidak disadari, kecintaan pada materi, telah menanamkan nilai-nilai yang akan membuat degradasi kemanusiaan, yang mengarah pada dehumanisasinya rasa bersosial. Materialisme ini akan merasuk pada pola pikir peserta didik, yang menghasilkan generasi penerus dengan sikap idealisme, individualisme, hedonisme, dan egoisme.

Citra Diri para Umar Bakri dan Singkirkan Materialisme!

Memiliki impian untuk mewujudkan pendidikan nasional yang bermutu, dengan biaya murah, serta kehidupan para guru yang sejahtera, adalah harapan yang harus tetap dipertahankan. Jika keinginan tersebut ingin terwujud, harus dipersamakan persepsi untuk mencapai tujuan yang sama, antara para guru, orang tua peserta didik, lembaga pendidikan, dan tidak terkecuali para penguasa pendidikan. Maister berkomentar mengenai profesionalisme, bahwa hal ini bukan sekadar pengetahuan teknologi dan manajemen, tetapi lebih merupakan sikap, pengembangan profesionalisme lebih dari seorang teknisi bukan hanya memiliki keterampilan yang tinggi tetapi memiliki suatu tingkah laku yang dipersyaratkan.[2] Berkenaan dengan ini, Akadum mengemukakan, bahwa ada beberapa hal penting yang menjadi faktor rendahnya tingkat profesionalisme guru; yaitu: masih banyak guru yang tidak menekuni profesinya secara total; rentan dan rendahnya kepatuhan guru terhadap norma dan etika profesi keguruan; dan pengakuan terhadap ilmu pendidikan dan keguruan masih setengah hati dari pengambilan kebijakan dan pihak-pihak terlibat.

Antara pemahaman profesionalisme, rendahnya tingkat profesionalisme, dan ideologi materialisme, memiliki keterkaitan dan kesamaan yang merujuk ketergantungan pada materi. Persoalan materi tersebut akan semakin berlarut-larut yang akan mengganggu pencitraan diri Umar Bakri. Menjadi tenaga pendidikan yang profesional, bukan perkara yang mudah. Semakin baik citra kelompok guru, maka semakin baik pula wajah pendidikan di Indonesia, bahkan mengangkat harkat dan martabat bangsa di mata dunia. Sinergi positif atas berbagai elemen yang terkait dengan dunia pendidikan harus dibangun utuh, sehingga maklumat yang ingin disampaikan oleh UUGD dapat tercapai.

Para Umar Bakri hendaknya tidak bersertifikasi atas orientasi materialisme, sekali lagi, pencitraan terhadap kesalahan oknum pendidikan, mampu mencoreng seluruh wajah para pelaku pendidikan. Evaluasi itu menjadi nilai yang sangat penting, profesionalisme juga disadari sebagai kemampuan untuk melihat kekurangan dan kelebihan sebagai proses perbaikan diri, serta mau belajar atas kekurangan-kekurangan tersebut. Inilah proses penyempurnaan untuk profesionalisme, belajar sepanjang hayat.

DAFTAR BACAAN

Barnard, Malcolm. Fashion sebagai Komunikasi. Yogyakarta: Jalasutra, 2007.

Chaney, David. Lifestyles: Sebuah Pengantar Komprehensif. Yogyakarta: Jalasutra, 2003.

Ibrahim, Idi Subandy. Budaya Populer sebagai Komunikasi. Yogyakarta: Jalasutra, 2007.

Kattsoff, Louis O. Pengantar Filsafat. Yogyakarta: Tiara Wacana, 2004.

Lavine, TZ. Marx, Konflik Kelas dan Orang yang Terasing. Yogyakarta: Penerbit Jendela, 2003.

Maister, D.H. True Professionalism. New York: The Free Press. 1997.

Praja, Juhaya S. Aliran-aliran Filsafat dan Etika. Jakarta: Bumi Putera, 2005.

Soedjatmiko, Haryanto. Saya Berbelanja maka Saya Ada. Yogyakarta: Jalasutra, 2008.

Syadali, Ahmad. Filsafat Umum. Bandung: Pustaka Setia, 2006.

Tafsir, Ahmad. Filsafat Umum. Bandung: Rosda Karya, Cet. Ke-5, 1997.

[1] Louis O. Kattsoff. Pengantar Filsafat. Yogyakarta: Tiara Wacana, 2004.

[2] Maister, D.H. True Professionalism. New York: The Free Press, 1997.