Art ventures into the mainstream in urban Bali<\/p>\n
By Degung Santikarma<\/p>\n
DENPASAR, Bali (JP): The famous saying that in Bali everyone
\nis an artist may no longer be true. Many young Balinese now dream
\nof becoming punk rock stars rather than painters, waitresses
\nrather than weavers or corporate executives instead of carvers.<\/p>\n
What is true in contemporary Bali is that packed into a scant
\n5,000 square kilometers there are more galleries than probably
\nanywhere else on earth. Indeed, just to utter the word \"gallery\"
\nin Bali is to overload the imagination with a stereotypical set
\nof associations.<\/p>\n
There is the sophisticated expatriate connoisseur, the modern-
\nday Walter Spies or Rudolf Bonnet who invites the Art Council
\nbureaucrat and the barefoot critic to discuss postmodernism and
\npublic relations at his elegantly appointed home in the hills.<\/p>\n
There are the tourists whose art experience is packaged for
\nthem like a guided excursion to a mall, where everything is on
\nsale and no transaction escapes being taxed by the 10 percent
\ncommission.<\/p>\n
There are the New Agers seeking to experience an exportable
\npiece of authentic Balinese artistry, and the cultured travelers
\nprowling the meditative, climate-controlled tranquility of the
\nfive-star hotel boutiques for something of investment quality.
\nAnd then, of course, there is suburban Ubud, perhaps the most
\ngallerized village in the world, with an aesthetic experience
\nbeckoning prospective buyers from every corner.<\/p>\n
In recent months, however, a new image of the gallery has
\nemerged to challenge the stereotypes. Wedged between warehouses
\nand traditional warung (food stalls), and surrounded by the
\nconstant groan of traffic from the streets of urban Denpasar,
\nplaces like Jezz Gallery and Bali Mangsi Gallery are
\ndemonstrating a conviction that Balinese art does not need to
\ndepend on a tourist market to flourish.<\/p>\n
Far from the quaint lanes of Ubud, the hushed hotel boutiques
\nof Nusa Dua or the art shops with parking for a dozen tour buses,
\nthese venues are offering not just art for sale, but new images
\nof Balinese identity and creativity.<\/p>\n
Although their numbers are still few, these new urban
\ngalleries are representative of a more widespread ambivalence on
\nthe part of many middle-class Balinese about the role of
\ntraditional culture in modern life.<\/p>\n
To appreciate the importance of the contemporary urban
\ngallery, one needs first to understand something of the history
\nof art in Bali, especially its relationship to the West in the
\nform of tourism.<\/p>\n
Tourism, one could argue, was responsible for inventing
\nBalinese art. In traditional Bali, there were painters and
\nsculptors and creators of objects of beauty and power, but there
\nwere no \"artists\".<\/p>\n
Those who made things -- whether they were delicately shaded
\ndrawings or religious offerings or shoes -- were called tukang,
\nor workers. \"Art\" was not an activity set apart from everyday
\nlife, but one way of serving one's community and one's gods.<\/p>\n
The major impact of Westerners like Spies and Bonnet was not
\nmerely in that they provided the Balinese with pens and paper and
\nencouraged them to draw, or taught them new techniques of seeing
\nand painting, but in the cultural concepts of \"art\" they brought
\nto Bali.<\/p>\n
By buying Balinese works, these early expatriates demonstrated
\nthat painting could be a product, something with a commercial
\nvalue separate from its use in ritual and everyday life. By
\norganizing Balinese into artists' groups, they imported the idea
\nthat artists were a special class of people, distinct from the
\nrest of society, who needed their own space to thrive.<\/p>\n
The emergence of the modern urban gallery is, in many ways, a
\nresponse to these kinds of cross-cultural encounters and the
\nfantasies and frustrations that they evoke. By making art into a
\nprofession, and the exhibition and sale of it into a specialized
\nand high-status vocation, middle-class Balinese are creating
\naesthetic and commercial spaces virtually indistinguishable from
\nthe galleries of New York, Paris or Rome.<\/p>\n
Despite the numbers of Balinese artists and gallery owners
\nsporting the same Rolex watches, driving the same BMWs and
\nspeaking the same language of \"art for the people\" and
\n\"empowering creativity\" as their foreign counterparts, something
\nmuch more complex is at work in the modern Balinese gallery than
\na simple mimicry of Western ways.<\/p>\n
By opening urban galleries catering to wealthy Indonesians
\nrather than tourists, and by exhibiting not the typical tourist
\nimages of bare-breasted maidens, colorful ceremonies and
\nromanticized village life, but the works of a new breed of
\nBalinese artists grapples with modern themes and styles,
\ncontemporary gallery owners are taking an anticolonial,
\nanticonservative stance.<\/p>\n
They are refusing to be satisfied with the role of the
\npowerless native who is photographed and painted and described
\nand analyzed in Western artworks and anthropology books, but who
\nnever gets to represent himself or herself.<\/p>\n
They are claiming that \"culture\" is not merely the product of
\na distant past, the possession of a traditional elite or the
\ndomain of the postcard picturesque, but that it is alive and
\nthriving in the complex urban present of places like Denpasar.<\/p>\n
The collectors who frequent these new spaces are investing not
\nonly in valuable objects or a particular aesthetic style, but in
\nethnic pride.<\/p>\n
By demonstrating that Balinese can author and exchange images
\nrather than merely smile for the camera or pose for the painting,
\nthe gallery asserts that despite its developing world location,
\nBali is not underdeveloped in terms of taste and talent.<\/p>\n
At the same time as these artists and gallery owners are
\nstaking a place for Bali on the world art map and celebrating
\ntheir own ethnic identity, they are also claiming for themselves
\na universality that transcends cultural location. By forgoing
\ntraditional themes and techniques to forge new styles, modern
\nartists are trying to create works that speak across barriers
\nbetween classes or cultures or countries.<\/p>\n
By purchasing and putting these works up for sale -- at
\ninternational standard prices -- Balinese collectors and gallery
\nowners are demonstrating their ability to understand and enter a
\ntransnational market.<\/p>\n
By exhibiting their fluency in an international language of
\nart criticism and asserting their place in a global community of
\nartists, dealers and collectors, these Balinese are claiming that
\nthey, too, can be as cosmopolitan as anyone else. By restlessly
\npursuing the modern, these new galleries are, paradoxically,
\nreasserting traditional values of Balinese community and
\nidentity.<\/p>\n
This kind of ambivalent relationship to both Balinese heritage
\nand Western influence is expressed in the works and words of
\nBalinese artists such as Made Wianta. Last December, this
\ncontroversial artist staged a colossal performance-cum-ritual
\nspectacular, choreographing 2,000 dancers and a helicopter which
\ndropped banners proclaiming \"peace\" in hundreds of different
\nlanguages across Bali's beaches.<\/p>\n
Wianta's work drew a great deal of criticism from local
\nartists, who wondered aloud why he did not print banners reading
\n\"free all political prisoners\" or land the helicopter on the
\nlocal jail. Despite the criticism, Wianta insists that his work
\nstraddles shifting lines between politics and esthetics, or local
\nconcepts and concerns and globally meaningful expressions.<\/p>\n
These tensions are neatly expressed in the title of a recent
\nbook published by Times Editions surveying his career: Made
\nWianta: Universal Balinese Artist. Here he claims that while he
\nis drawn toward the symbols and concepts of his childhood, he
\ndoes not want to be pigeonholed by an ethnic label. He dreams, we
\nare told, of making Apuan, the small village of his birth, into a
\ncenter for artistic conversation and creativity of the same
\ncaliber as the cities of Europe or America.<\/p>\n
The question still remains as to whether these galleries and
\nartistic events are succeeding in challenging the commodification
\nof a conservative image of Balinese culture, or whether they are
\nreproducing the very powers they purport to resist.<\/p>\n
Certainly, from a purely economic standpoint, the modern
\ngallery, despite its move off of the tourist track into the urban
\ncenter, still remains quite distant from the everyday lives of
\nthe majority of Balinese. Indeed, by pricing works of art
\nequivalent to several decades worth of rice for an average
\nfamily, the contemporary gallery can be seen as even more
\nalienating than the art-for-export shops whose mass-market styles
\nare at least compatible with the typical Balinese budget.<\/p>\n
It is not just economic differences that are evoked by the
\ngallery. The creation and consumption of art in contemporary Bali
\nalso takes place within a social hierarchy that defines those who
\nhave \"taste\" from those who simply own things. \"Anyone with money
\ncan own a BMW, but taste can't be bought,\" remarked one Balinese
\nat a recent art show.<\/p>\n
By using this discourse of \"taste\", galleries have solidified
\nnew forms of social status by educating an audience about
\nappropriate ways of viewing and valuing art, and selecting those
\nwho will be exhibited and invited into its domain.<\/p>\n
For even as the gallery opens its doors to the masses, it has
\nto guard against becoming a full mass media in order to secure
\nthe value of what goes on within its walls. If art were truly
\naccessible to everyone, there would be no room for \"taste\" to
\nperform its work of drawing distinctions between high and low,
\ngood and bad, art and craft.<\/p>\n
In this sense, the modern Balinese gallery may prove even more
\npotent than tourism in shifting the place of art in the lives of
\nBalinese.<\/p>\n
It remains to be seen how these new urban galleries will
\naddress the serious challenges these issues pose. What is certain
\nis that the modern Balinese gallery provides a space not merely
\nfor the buying and selling of art, but for pondering some of the
\nmost explosively powerful issues facing Balinese today.<\/p>",
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