COMMENT | Salleh Ben Joned – my iconoclastic friend
COMMENT | One late Saturday night, in my first year as a tutor and Masters candidate in the University of Malaya (UM) circa 1973/74, I was returning from a celebratory meal with students after completing the production of a play.
I had Salleh Ben Joned literally staggering into my life on his first day on campus – he was walking in the middle of a dark road at the university apartments outside campus with Willie Willetts, the curator of the Asian Arts Museum in UM.
Fourteen adrenalin-fuelled hours later, along the way losing some party-animals and picking up new ones, we took leave of each other outside the Majestic Hotel.
After decades of serving Colonel Blimps and haughty hoity-toity locals, the service staff at the Majestic had perfected, up till that day, an air of restrained obsequiousness and bland placidity. By the time Salleh was done with them that Sunday afternoon, they were flustered, ruffled, and reduced to blustery incoherence.
What an introduction to my friend. There is a wealth of memories, the many party-times are personal and unprintable, but even in those long nights of sensory-scorching merriment, Salleh’s mind was always at play, always sharp, an exciting intellectual foil...
COMMENT | One late Saturday night, in my first year as a tutor and Masters candidate in the University of Malaya (UM) circa 1973/74, I was returning from a celebratory meal with students after completing the production of a play.
I had Salleh Ben Joned literally staggering into my life on his first day on campus – he was walking in the middle of a dark road at the university apartments outside campus with Willie Willetts, the curator of the Asian Arts Museum in UM.
Fourteen adrenalin-fuelled hours later, along the way losing some party-animals and picking up new ones, we took leave of each other outside the Majestic Hotel.
After decades of serving Colonel Blimps and haughty hoity-toity locals, the service staff at the Majestic had perfected, up till that day, an air of restrained obsequiousness and bland placidity. By the time Salleh was done with them that Sunday afternoon, they were flustered, ruffled, and reduced to blustery incoherence.
What an introduction to my friend. There is a wealth of memories, the many party-times are personal and unprintable, but even in those long nights of sensory-scorching merriment, Salleh’s mind was always at play, always sharp, an exciting intellectual foil.
A discussion of Sufism will have him springing up in excitement to quote word-perfect passages and lines of Rumi to bolster his point, dashing into the next room to rummage in thousands of books to find one of the Muslim scholars he had quoted because he was not certain he had gotten one sentence correct, soon emerging triumphant with the book and showing me he had got it right the first time.
Amazing. Even when sober, at best I can roughly guess where the quote might be in a book, don’t talk about after a night of ingesting aged fermentation.
Skoob Books Publishing (London) published a collection of Salleh’s essays and newspaper columns in the form of a book - “As I Please”. My joke with him was that the title should have been “As I Piss” because, in most conversation where his name came up, the probability was high that there would be a reference to the occasion when he peed on Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa’s art exhibition “Towards a Mystical Reality” at the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in Kuala Lumpur.
One of the pieces in the book is an open letter to Piyadasa, published in the ‘Dewan Sastera’. The editor Usman Awang had to fend off objections to parts of the piece, particularly the title “Kencing dan Kesenian” (Peeing and Art).
In an introductory note for the Skoob collection, Salleh says, “The incident went unreported in the press; I was told that somebody or other had managed to have it hushed up, and I, having made a public exhibition of myself in that hallowed corner, was not about to make another one in the media.”
Salleh is erudite in the open letter in explaining the philosophical and artistic basis for his existential Dadaist absurdist act of peeing on an artwork.
I am not taking sides on the issue of valid art criticism because I also was/is a friend of Piya and Sulaiman. But I was one of the 50 or so people at the occasion, so this is my addressing of a minor grievance of Salleh that the occasion had passed without notice in the media.
(Note: My memory may be faulty about the particular art exhibit. There certainly is a divergence in Salleh saying he peed on the manifesto proclaimed by Piya and Sulaiman, while I remember him peeing on an artwork.)
Piya and Sulaiman were questioning the stultifying straitjacket of the picture-frame, proposing a redefinition of what constituted art. The exhibits were “found” objects like a half-empty Coke bottle, an empty birdcage, or even a blank canvas with a label telling us that a shadow had fallen on it on such a day, at such a time - all on pedestals.
What did I know, 24-years-old, barely five years into discovering the many pleasurable depths of the various arts, and displaying a facile arrogance to hide insecure ignorance?
It was different. Instead of the usual art catalogue leading you to paintings, the manifesto was the occasion, the exhibits mere illustrations of the treatise with practically no visual interest - come on, how long can you stare at a blank canvas and think “Deep! Deep!”?
There was a pile of car engine parts in a heap on the floor, round which we gathered for the obligatory ritual of blankly listening to speeches extolling the value of artists in the country’s development.
Piya made the mistake of asking for a response. Salleh walked up to the pile of engine parts, turned around, pulled down his pants, no underwear, squatted and tried to take a dump. After a minute or so, his bare behind mooning the VIP – I can’t remember, minister, deputy minister or secretary-general from the Ministry of Culture, he rose, apologised for his uncooperative bowels, turned around, and sprayed the exhibit.
Multiple jaws, mine included, dropped. We were all frozen in an awkward silence that stretched and stretched, till someone quickly ended proceedings, and all hell broke loose.
Piya was in a heated discussion with a few of us for many minutes. After agreeing to carry on the discussion at a café around the corner, I pointed out to Piya that while ranting and raving with us about Salleh’s transgression, he had been unconsciously grabbing the exhibit of a half-drunk Coke bottle next to him, draining it dry.
I told Piya he had to change the label for the exhibit since it was no longer a half-empty bottle. Piya was not amused. I thought he should have been pleased – a clear illustration that art cannot be static, it must evolve.
In later years, Salleh always referred to me as “the inscrutable Chinaman”, sometimes driving him to physically shake me for a more fulsome animated response. I never told him my poker-face was my defence against his siren call to take another walk on the wild side. Age blunting my edge.
Rest in peace, my dear old manic friend. Or go raise hell, if the spirit so moves you.
THOR KAH HOONG is a veteran journalist.
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.
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