Yudi Noor’s works are something of a mystery — and indeed, to a great extent, you’re simply not meant to comprehend them. For the artist himself, it’s a quasi-spiritual and mystical impulse that leads him to build sculptures and installations from objects he’s collected over the years. “I like putting things together without reason,” he says of this process in which tangible items combine to form an abstraction. “I will have to ask the ghosts in order to make sure that the sculpture is strong in the end,” he continues, in total sincerity. Noor’s sculptures are multifarious: Coral, earthenware, plastic, thread, steel, and titanium come together in “Dynamism,” 2012, a precarious-looking assemblage; “Opium,” 2011, uses metals, wood, pink spray paint, and rubber to create what looks like a record player straight out of a Dr. Seuss book.
Much of this practice stems from Noor’s childhood in Indonesia (he has lived in Berlin on and off for 10 years, beginning just after the wall came down, in 1990), with some elements of the work offering direct interrogation of his upbringing. Of the neon pigments — pink, yellow, green, and orange — that add flash to such pieces as “Privatisarong,” 2011, or “Enter Commune,” 2010, he tells a most peculiar story: “When I was growing up in West Java, we used to swim in the river and fish. But the river was colored green and orange. Around our area was the second-biggest textile company in Indonesia. I didn’t realize until I came to Europe that it was dangerous. The pink color is the color I remember the most, but they were all just a form of happiness to me at the time.”
Admitting that these colors now are somewhat political in his application, he cautions against a prescriptive reading: “I do not point a finger or try to be pedagogic, but I try to remind myself that there is a big responsibility.” According to Noor, to be explicitly political as an artist from Indonesia opens one’s work up far too easily for propagandistic co-optation. “The corrupt people use the artists to wash their hands. It’s very scary,” he says. “I’ve tried to engineer my practice such that there has been a sufficient introduction to stop those uses. Now I try to have a conversation; much later there might be a statement.”
For example, he sometimes combines mystical text with found objects, such as in “The Ritual of Kalijaga,” 2009, where the eight-part Hasta Brata, an ancient Indonesian ritual of self-control, provides textual context to a wooden canoe that is filled with white neon tubes and painted bright pink along the rim, while its mooring chain is piled on the floor. The canoe was an allegory for his then recently deceased spiritual teacher, while the Hasta Brata text alludes to doctrines governed by eight local nature gods. By combining religious elements both sculptural and textual, he disarms those who might otherwise twist it to signify something more sinister. Noor himself, though a practicing Muslim, acknowledges an influence from the fluidity of Indonesian religious practice, which involves elements of Buddhism and Hinduism as well as animistic religious traditions.
Noor’s works continually question this flux of spiritual and existential understanding, or what he calls “quantum change.” Most recently — with “Mixed Opera” at Berlin’s now defunct Birgit Ostermeier, “Between the Bars” at London’s Nettie Horn, and “Clear Mountain” at his new Berlin gallery, Christian Ehrentraut, where he will open his second solo show this month — Noor has worked through major figures in the world’s religious history, from Moses to Jesus to Abraham. With Jesus, his interest is in the ascetic, showing up in more minimal works such as Breaking the water picture, 2010, an earthen jug on a teak pedestal. With Abraham, the focus shifts to the idolatry of sculpture. “What was it promising at that time to humans?” Noor asks, referring to previous animisms. “Abraham believed that the sun and stars would guide them; now we believe in plugs, in electricity.” One resulting piece — a woven tapestry — is inscribed with passages referring to natural phenomena from the Koran, the New Testament, and the Torah.
And while spirituality and religion play an important role for him both personally and in his work, again the relationship is more abstract. “It’s about questioning where I’m coming from,” he says, referring to the complex religious makeup of Java. “All the various religions in my work are to remind me that the secret to existence is always changing. But it’s a collective memory.”
When looking at a sculpture like “Listening Post,” 2011 — a table on which a piece of plywood, its surface painted pale blue, is topped with a cake dish holding a pink-rimmed mirror and is pierced by a metal pole—the hefty conceptual background may be lost. His works hold out the possibility of clear meaning, just out of reach. “It’s like a black ant walking in the night on a black wall. You don’t see it, but you might know it’s there,” he explains. “I realized: I have no control, not even of myself. All of life is so abstract, so I put that into my works as well.” In a way, the pieces — both in the process of their creation and in viewing them — are like mental exercises to get one step closer to a universal understanding. Noor wants to create a microcosm in which an ideal, godly existence can be accessed. But this, too, the artist concedes, must be broken down at times. “I’m mixing things less in my work now,” he says, “focusing more on minimal forms because they represent simple truths.” For example, a rattan mat on which he slept as a child is now a ready-made for his aptly titled show at Christian Ehrentraut, “Accumulation and the Hereafter Perception,” a follow-up to “Clear Mountain.” It’s the discipline of practice — of faith, and of dreaming realistic dreams and acting in such a way that they become reality — that extends far beyond Noor’s Kreuzberg studio.
To see works by Yudi Noor, click the slide show.
This article appears in the September issue of Modern Painters magazine.