(Thursday, May, 21 2026) Historically, design and material culture have often frozen metal in highly masculine definitions: solid, hard, cold, and rigid. Metal is the backbone of the industrial era; it is shaped to serve utilitarian functions or is simply commodified. However, what happens when this ontological rigidity is dismantled? The exhibition “Metal In Flux: Crafting Tradition and Innovation” held at Omah Budoyo, Yogyakarta, provides a provocative answer. Through this exhibition, we are invited to see metal not as an inanimate object, but as a medium that continues to flow, mutate, and archive the resistance of the times.
To read this exhibition precisely, our first step must be placed in Sudjud Dartanto’s curatorial epistemology. Through the concept of “In Flux”, Sudjud critically intervenes in the outdated hierarchy between fine art and craft. Borrowing Glenn Adamson’s thesis in Thinking Through Craft, this exhibition challenges the old habitus that considers craft merely a fetishism of manual skill. Sudjud demonstrated that contemporary metal craft is an epistemology, a way of producing critical knowledge by transforming past traditions into a medium for critiquing today’s reality.
This material dialectic emerges with great ferocity, yet humor, in Budi Hartono’s work. Through “Where is My Son II” and “Sorry I’m not a Clown,” Budi presented the figure of Bawor, the iconic Banyumasan punakawan. Rather than falling into the pit of shallow local exoticism, Bawor here represents the subaltern; a commoner (wong cilik) who consciously seizes his agency. Borrowing Antonio Gramsci’s analysis, Bawor rejects the objectification of the elite class that often reduces the voices of the common people to mere court jokes. The statement “Sorry I’m not a Clown” is a declaration of resistance.
Visually, Bawor’s disproportionate and grotesque anatomy operates within Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque logic, a parodic subversion that ridicules the hypocrisy of those in power. However, the most pointed critique lies in the medium and the process. Budi’s choice to use the kenteng (hand-forged) technique on copper is a complete antithesis to the logic of mass production and industrial automation. The repetition of hammer blows on copper becomes an intimate bodily metaphor for the suffering and resilience of the working class. The metal is forced to deform through violent structural impacts, yet it refuses to break.
The ontological paradigm shifts sharply when we encounter Titiana Irawani’s work. While Budi draws from the tradition of forging, Titiana practices a design that excavates the archives of civilization through a method of gleaning. She assembled post-industrial residue in the form of a 1968 motorcycle exhaust and gear, forcibly fusing them with natural stones from Pacitan.
Through Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter perspective, Titiana refuses to view industrial waste as passive trash. These discarded objects possess agency; they hold the accumulated memories of street masculinity and the brutal traces of the industrial era. Through the welding process, these traumatic objects are conquered and sublimated into metaphors for women’s psychological resilience. Titiana’s work conveys a poetic irony: fragments of wounds, consumer waste, and historical trauma can apparently be reconstructed into autonomous monuments that refuse to be silenced.
The aesthetic confrontation between these two artists ultimately exposes an acute crisis in our art, design, and media institutional ecosystem today: pedagogical alienation. Field observations with Dr. Suwarno Wisetrotomo revealed an anxiety about how educational institutions often separate designers from their work materials. Art and design students are often trapped in conceptual work behind desks, distanced from the workshop and dust.
This reality confirmed Richard Sennett’s critique in The Craftsman, which strongly rejected the class distinction between intellectual and manual labor. “Metal In Flux” offers a stark warning to graduate art education: students must not be merely skilled in discourse. They are required to possess a keen material sensibility—the ability to marry the lofty heights of critical theory with the raw physical practices of the creative laboratory.
Ultimately, “Metal In Flux” is more than just an aesthetic exhibition. It is a manifestation of resistance, proving that metal, in the hands of critical artists, can become a living social archive; preserving post-industrial memory, voicing subaltern resistance, and demanding a radical reorientation of the future of our art and design education.
This art criticism field trip also serves as a concrete step towards realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which focus on:
SDG 4 (Quality Education): Ensuring inclusive and high-quality higher education by synchronizing academic theory on campus with the realities of artists’ creative work. (GM)
