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COMMEMORATING THE 60/20 ANNIVERSARY 204

PART 2 “While I was in the United States, I traveled a lot and camped in New York
State and New Jersey. We also took a long journey by RV motorhome from
Los Angeles to Yosemite, the Redwoods, Lake Tahoe, the Mojave Desert,
and the Grand Canyon, to Las Vegas, San Diego, and San Francisco. For
more than a month, we slept in a large caravan and parked in a well-
equipped parking ground where we could take part in a variety of social and
recreational activities with other campers.”

Wagiono very much enjoyed his educational and recreational experience.
“The urban life and culture in New York City are also very lively. There are
carnivals, Shakespeare in the Park, festivals, cinema clubs, live music and
opera, Broadway and Off-Broadway, and jazz in Greenwich Village,” he said.

What is the relationship between Indonesia and the United States
like? “In cultural fields, I think there is a balanced reciprocity, both in
terms of programs based on cultural tradition and heritage as well as in
contemporary-experimental art. Artistic exchange via academic as well as
professional tracks has been running quite well,” he said.

“However, in the creative industry, we are way behind in industry
infrastructure at the global level, and our national cultural-art institutions
cause a lot of our creative industry artists to rise and fall even though
there is competition only with the spillover from the creative industries
of developed countries. The market for international creative industries
in Indonesia is small and minor compared to the international market
for comics, movies, software, videos, and books from overseas, which
have power over our markets as spillover; we have not yet been able to
compete with them at home, let alone abroad, although one or two small
breakthroughs have occurred,” said Wagiono.

To enhance the cultural dialogue, Wagiono argues that we need to be aware
of the “stammering in English” among Indonesian artists. “If portfolios and
artistic skills took precedence over English language tests, the exchange of
Indonesian artists to the United States would be more beneficial,” said the
man born in Bandung in 1949, who earned his doctorate from the Faculty of
Humanities at the University of Indonesia.

1981 - 1983, Pratt Institute; Design and Visual Communications.