Book Review: Demanding Images: Democracy,Mediation,and the Image-Event in Indonesia

On 22 May 1998, after three decades of presidency, Suharto delivered his resignation speech following an eruption of antiauthoritarianism demonstrations and a hard blow of monetary crises in Indonesia. Despite being dubbed as the Smiling General, his smile was not to be seen on that important day. However, one and a half decades after he was overthrown, the famed smile once again resurged in post-authoritarian Indonesia – this time on the posters that emerged anonymously in public surfaces all over Java, nostalgically captioned: Piye kabare? Isih kepenak jamanku, toh? (“How are you? My era was better, wasn’t it?”). Counterimages – mostly created by independent artists – mushroomed to tackle this longing for the authoritarian New Order regime. One of the most well known was the posters bearing the face of Munir Said Thalib – a human rights activist who was murdered on a plane – which reminds the audience of the “unfinished struggle for human rights in Indonesia” (p. 217).

Arguing against the idea that these publicly circulating images are mere epiphenomenal noises, Karen Strassler’s ethnography Demanding Images seeks to understand Indonesia’s democratisation through the lens of contesting images in the country’s media environment. Focusing on arts, memes, pornography, and other visual images, Strassler traces the shifting of these images’ meanings through time and their effects on the political imaginaries during the tempestuous era of Indonesia’s democratisation (p. 8). Images, as Strassler posits, are eventful and able to embody citizens’ anxieties and aspirations towards democratisation (p. 12). This argument leads to her conceptualisation of the “image event,” which she describes as a “political process set in motion when a specific image or set of images erupts onto and intervenes in a social field, becoming a focal point of discursive and affective engagement across diverse publics” (pp. 9–10).

This book begins by discussing Indonesian citizens’ hopes and dreams of a cleaner government through the visuality of the Rupiah (Rp) money bills. In chapter 1, Strassler argues that money should not only be understood as a political or social medium, but also an object firmly embedded in a broader media ecology (p. 38). Often considered as the symbol of the nation-state (p. 48), money provides “symbolically rich surfaces” (p. 36) that become the ground for the autocrats to assert their power through visuality. Such was the case of the old Rp 50,000 bill bearing the face of Suharto. His visual omnipresence – including on paper money – further constructs him into the nation’s mask and icon. The bill’s image was so symbolically significant in the nation’s politics that after Suharto’s downfall, protesters of the New Order regime reworked the bill’s visuality as a critique to the corruption-ridden regime. In this case, refashioning money’s visuality has become an avenue through which citizens articulate their critiques of the corrupt New Order and aspire political authenticity (p. 38).

In the next two chapters, Strassler turns to the issues of transparency and authenticity of visual evidence. Chapter 2 presents the predicament of the visuality of evidence – which offers the promise of transparency (p. 74) – in the case of mass rape of Chinese-Indonesian women in 1998. The lack of photographic evidence of the incident has led the deniers – including the government and some Islamist groups – to refute the validity of the rape claim. This denial was rebutted by activists who argued that it was burdensome for victims of such sexualised violence to “submit to the public eye” (p. 89) – hence the insufficiency of identifiable testimonies. The victims face what Strassler calls the “threat of visibility” (p. 86) that would shame and put them in danger for presenting themselves in the public spectacle. In addition to the lack of visual evidence, the circulation of fake images of the rape also add to the murkiness of the rape debate, leading the deniers to accuse activists of fabricating the rape claims (p. 83).

The exposure of scandalous pictures of public figures becomes the main image event in chapter 3. Strassler explains people’s obsession with exposure scandals by following the figure of Roy Suryo, a “telematics” expert who uses sophisticated technology to measure the authenticity of images (p. 97). As a lucrative form of entertainment (p. 99), exposure scandals – from celebrity sex tapes to explicit photographs of politicians – occupy Indonesia’s media environment in which Suryo often provided his commentary as a pundit. Strassler argues that the emergence of such an expertise is a response to citizen’s demand of a corruption-free and transparent post-New Order government (p. 99). However, as Suryo ascended the political ladder, his stance shifted from guarding citizens from the possible dangers of new media to allying with the state power and establishment. His conservative stance on blogger communities, for instance, had put him under “attack” from Indonesian bloggers who circulated his parodically reworked images in public. At the end of this chapter, Strassler reminds the reader that such forms of parodical and ludic critique should not be interpreted as people’s cynicism of Indonesia’s political past. Instead, these publicly circulated images are a testament of the public’s participation in politics.

The weakening of state control on media in Indonesia also gave rise to privatised forms of civil censorship (p. 135), in this case from the Islamic right claiming moral righteousness. Revisiting an artwork called Pinkswing Park, chapter 4 follows the controversy the surrounding the “nude pictures” featured in the artwork. Reducing Pinkswing Park to mere pornographic images, right-wing Islamic groups demanded that the artwork to be taken down in support of the antipornography bill. Artists, feminists, and “traditional” art activists countered the demand, arguing that the bill would threaten cultural diversity and traditions. The image events presented in this chapter, however, was not meant to juxtapose the “secular” and the “Islamic.” Rather, it is to show that people employ different readings to public images – including Pinkswing Park – which characterises post-authoritarian Indonesia.

Chapter 5 links nicely to the opening part of this book by discussing urban streets as a medium to envision a new democratic public space in post-authoritarian Indonesia (p. 217). Indonesian urban streets have a long history of being a dense site for political contestation since the colonial heyday. In the modern era, this struggle involves street artists who attempt to reclaim urban streets from the grip of capitalism and local chauvinism. Often labelled “dirty” by the state, social critiques created by street artists compete with unregulated advertisements and government propagandic banners. Despite street artists’ claims about the participatory and revolutionary nature of their art, Strassler remains sceptical that street art really speaks for everyone. With the existing class and gender disparity among street artists, Strassler argues that urban inscriptions’ promise to speak for the public comes with no guarantee (p. 218).

Concluding her book is a discussion about how public visuality is employed in the 2014 presidential election, an event Strassler argues as a critical moment in which voters refuse to engage in the nostalgia for Suharto (p. 245). Unlike in the New Order regime, a more liberal use of new media in Indonesia has given the citizens more freedom to participate in democratic politics. During the election, voters posted pictures from their phones to support the then-presidential candidate Joko Widodo. These photos included reworked images to challenge his portrayal, in addition to using phones to become watchdogs during vote counting. This phenomenon suggests that public visuality is not the result of political struggle, but instead the very force that constantly conditions the arena where such political processes take shape (p. 243). With unfolding image events following the 2014 presidential election, Strassler ends this book by saying that democratisation in Indonesia remains “eventful and unfinished” (p. 246).

Treating images as open-ended and dynamic rather than frozen in time (p. 14), Strassler has successfully put together a variety of public visualities to capture the fragmenting voices in the post-authoritarian Indonesia. Paying careful attention to the ways images circulate both vertically and horizontally, she has argued that public images – something taken-for-granted, seemingly fleeting and short-lived – can be an important locus where diverse critiques and aspirations towards the government are expressed. This analytical knife also serves as a significant critique to ethnographic method that often prioritises the textual: by seeing images not merely as a buttress of written sources, but as a subject of scrutiny on its own (p. 27). One of the most important contributions of this approach is that it enables anthropologists to render abstract and elusive concepts tangible, and therefore more easily comprehended (p. 244).

However, there is a lack of justification as to why Strassler chose to feature these specific image events in this book, considering that Indonesia is deluged with a plethora of democracy-related image events. Why these image events and not the other? Is her rationale the intensity of the image events? Is it their historical importance? These questions are left unexplored, making Strassler’s case selections seem arbitrary and loose. There is also a question about to what degree this book represents the democratisation happening in “Indonesia” – as written in the title and claimed in the book – since the cases raised in this book are heavily centred in Javanese cities such as Yogyakarta and Jakarta.

All things considered, Demanding Images has brilliantly offered a fresh quotidian viewpoint in understanding democratisation in Indonesia. Big political shifts need not always be seen from a macro perspective. Often, the mundanity of money bills, independent artworks, and urban streets speak louder of the issue.

Amrina RosyadaDepartment of Anthropology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA