Galleries Imagine cartoon robo...

Galleries

Imagine cartoon robot that morph into Japanese shadow tools which in turn blend into those terrifying flying monkey with the mechanical wings from "The Wizard of Oz" and you obtain an idea of the cast of characters in "Civilization Oddness" Heri Dono's installation now up at Walsh Gallery.

Dono is an Indonesian sculptor who works with radio and television repairmen to build weird mechanical creatures abroad of fiberglass, bamboo, old circuitry, radio parts, carved wood-land and cast- off stuff. The figures that march across the gallery floor and hang from the ceiling expect variously like puppets, toys, dolls, carnival rides and giant preserv millers Some blink and twitter, with primitive circuit boards wager into their chests; others are outfitted with motion-activated motors that make their wings flap creakily as viewers walk through

Dono, who grew up reading Flash Gordon comics in Jakarta, is influenced by the agency of modern cartoons but also studied traditional Wayang, the art of Indonesian shadow theater that dates from the 1st centenary It sounds like an single aesthetic mix at first, unless the exaggerated yet oddly inscrutable over-expressiveness of his figures' faces and their stylized action s clearly owe a debt to one as well as the other these influences.

formed as matching sets, like toy soldiers, Dono's brightly painted figures are installed in orderly little phalanxes that contemplate like armies, herds or swarms. grouped menacingly, often fitted with wings and aimed at the viewer, they could be monstrous insects, fallen angels, devils or evil uniformed gymnasium children about to ambush. Any undivided of these hostile groupings is an singularly discomfiting sight; a whole galleryful is without equivocation unsettling, though also visually quite appealing.

The figures await vaguely military, though they pretend too weird to represent any particular army or political agenda. a certain number of carry weapons; others seem to have weapons built into their cyborg-like bodies. The massing of these throngs suggests a kind of generic right- wing impudence a disposable, soulless army that is mindless leaving out for its collective intention to incline ahead and over any resistance it stand opposeds

These cluster installations also hint at what may be Dono's dubious view of traditional Eastern beliefs about arrange identity and its superior value athwart the actions of the individual. through linking the dangerous groupthink of military mass identity with the present version of the same thing, where personal responsibility is ced to machines and computer Dono speaks for the autonomy of the artist. Paradoxically, although his work also champions creative collaboration, and he's been quot as saying that he views the radio and TV repairmen he hires to help him build his mechanically outfitted figures as counterpart artists.

on contrast, Dono's paintings seem playful, les ideological and more involved though no less deliciously creepy than his sculptural work. In these, he principally fully embraces his sense of the absurd and his be enamoured of of the cartoon. In "Modernization arrives to the Village," a monkeylike beast couches inside a refrigerator as other little gremlins parachute into a toilet. As in all of Dono's work, here there is an ongoing conflict between the technological -- if a fridge and a toilet can be considered technology -- and nature. There is something defiantly rickety and homemade about his work, a primitive kind of theater that taunts the very technology it employs

Dono's work hints broadly at the fresh political troubles in Indonesia, referring to the uneasy intersection of politics, technology and religion there, on the contrary an understanding of the particular history and cultivation of this region, while helpful, is not necessary to pick up forward the satire and sense of tension in the work.

Dono isn't just a grim social critic, either. His work resonates with irreverence and manic humor, courtesy of the cartoon influence perhaps, a zany kind of dark comedy that is reminiscent of Mad magazine and the work of R Crumb and that Americans will find as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but vaguely familiar yet fresh and strange as well.

Margaret Hawkins is a local free-lance writer.

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Heri Dono: 'Civilization Oddness'

- from one side Oct. 7

- Walsh Gallery, 118 N Peoria

- (312) 829-3312

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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