This dissertation contends with the development of seni rupa kontemporer (contemporary art) between 1973 and 1993, with certain case studies extending to the late 1990s. I offer a history and genealogy of concepts of critical artistic practice, examining to what purpose strategies of a contemporary art have been put and from what conditions they emerged. I examine how these have been interpreted to possess criticality in Indonesia. Taking the controversial curatorial essay published for the 9th Jakarta Biennale of Art (1993) as a catalyst rather than as a point of reference, I rethink the possibility and value of a construct of an avant-garde and postmodern in seni rupa kontemporer.I propose a kind of avant-garde without modernism's tradition of transgressive poetics. The mode of marginality I have in mind is a critical position possible only on this side of the political sea change and depoliticization of the cultural field in Indonesia after 1965. This entails tracing shifting notions of art's and artistic autonomy, which were largely dependent upon the relation art had with politics and the spheres in which artistic practice was seen to reside. My argument for a kind of pascamodernisme (postmodernism) in contemporary art in Indonesia posits its position also as one of a critical marginality, whose experiences with modernity are specific and distinct from those of the Euro-North-American context. I argue that a pascamodernisme in contemporary art articulates critical artistic practice as a postcolonial critique of modernity-as-development, and the mutilating forces of modernization. A key aspect in this discussion is those practices that sought to assume alternative traditions, realities, and futures within modernity. In this regard, an important subtext is notions of collaborative work and the artist as members of artists' collectives and collaborative type of work as a primary and critical artistic solution. I am interested in those artistic collaborative and collective projects that helped to establish installation and performance art into art-historical categories in Indonesia, and whose activities and projects have had a discernible impact on the development of seni rupa kontemporer and how it would be defined vis-à-vis the terms and concepts generated by them.