Art ventures into the mainstream in urban Bali

Art ventures into the mainstream in urban Bali

By Degung Santikarma

DENPASAR, Bali (JP): The famous saying that in Bali everyone
is an artist may no longer be true. Many young Balinese now dream
of becoming punk rock stars rather than painters, waitresses
rather than weavers or corporate executives instead of carvers.

What is true in contemporary Bali is that packed into a scant
5,000 square kilometers there are more galleries than probably
anywhere else on earth. Indeed, just to utter the word "gallery"
in Bali is to overload the imagination with a stereotypical set
of associations.

There is the sophisticated expatriate connoisseur, the modern-
day Walter Spies or Rudolf Bonnet who invites the Art Council
bureaucrat and the barefoot critic to discuss postmodernism and
public relations at his elegantly appointed home in the hills.

There are the tourists whose art experience is packaged for
them like a guided excursion to a mall, where everything is on
sale and no transaction escapes being taxed by the 10 percent
commission.

There are the New Agers seeking to experience an exportable
piece of authentic Balinese artistry, and the cultured travelers
prowling the meditative, climate-controlled tranquility of the
five-star hotel boutiques for something of investment quality.
And then, of course, there is suburban Ubud, perhaps the most
gallerized village in the world, with an aesthetic experience
beckoning prospective buyers from every corner.

In recent months, however, a new image of the gallery has
emerged to challenge the stereotypes. Wedged between warehouses
and traditional warung (food stalls), and surrounded by the
constant groan of traffic from the streets of urban Denpasar,
places like Jezz Gallery and Bali Mangsi Gallery are
demonstrating a conviction that Balinese art does not need to
depend on a tourist market to flourish.

Far from the quaint lanes of Ubud, the hushed hotel boutiques
of Nusa Dua or the art shops with parking for a dozen tour buses,
these venues are offering not just art for sale, but new images
of Balinese identity and creativity.

Although their numbers are still few, these new urban
galleries are representative of a more widespread ambivalence on
the part of many middle-class Balinese about the role of
traditional culture in modern life.

To appreciate the importance of the contemporary urban
gallery, one needs first to understand something of the history
of art in Bali, especially its relationship to the West in the
form of tourism.

Tourism, one could argue, was responsible for inventing
Balinese art. In traditional Bali, there were painters and
sculptors and creators of objects of beauty and power, but there
were no "artists".

Those who made things -- whether they were delicately shaded
drawings or religious offerings or shoes -- were called tukang,
or workers. "Art" was not an activity set apart from everyday
life, but one way of serving one's community and one's gods.

The major impact of Westerners like Spies and Bonnet was not
merely in that they provided the Balinese with pens and paper and
encouraged them to draw, or taught them new techniques of seeing
and painting, but in the cultural concepts of "art" they brought
to Bali.

By buying Balinese works, these early expatriates demonstrated
that painting could be a product, something with a commercial
value separate from its use in ritual and everyday life. By
organizing Balinese into artists' groups, they imported the idea
that artists were a special class of people, distinct from the
rest of society, who needed their own space to thrive.

The emergence of the modern urban gallery is, in many ways, a
response to these kinds of cross-cultural encounters and the
fantasies and frustrations that they evoke. By making art into a
profession, and the exhibition and sale of it into a specialized
and high-status vocation, middle-class Balinese are creating
aesthetic and commercial spaces virtually indistinguishable from
the galleries of New York, Paris or Rome.

Despite the numbers of Balinese artists and gallery owners
sporting the same Rolex watches, driving the same BMWs and
speaking the same language of "art for the people" and
"empowering creativity" as their foreign counterparts, something
much more complex is at work in the modern Balinese gallery than
a simple mimicry of Western ways.

By opening urban galleries catering to wealthy Indonesians
rather than tourists, and by exhibiting not the typical tourist
images of bare-breasted maidens, colorful ceremonies and
romanticized village life, but the works of a new breed of
Balinese artists grapples with modern themes and styles,
contemporary gallery owners are taking an anticolonial,
anticonservative stance.

They are refusing to be satisfied with the role of the
powerless native who is photographed and painted and described
and analyzed in Western artworks and anthropology books, but who
never gets to represent himself or herself.

They are claiming that "culture" is not merely the product of
a distant past, the possession of a traditional elite or the
domain of the postcard picturesque, but that it is alive and
thriving in the complex urban present of places like Denpasar.

The collectors who frequent these new spaces are investing not
only in valuable objects or a particular aesthetic style, but in
ethnic pride.

By demonstrating that Balinese can author and exchange images
rather than merely smile for the camera or pose for the painting,
the gallery asserts that despite its developing world location,
Bali is not underdeveloped in terms of taste and talent.

At the same time as these artists and gallery owners are
staking a place for Bali on the world art map and celebrating
their own ethnic identity, they are also claiming for themselves
a universality that transcends cultural location. By forgoing
traditional themes and techniques to forge new styles, modern
artists are trying to create works that speak across barriers
between classes or cultures or countries.

By purchasing and putting these works up for sale -- at
international standard prices -- Balinese collectors and gallery
owners are demonstrating their ability to understand and enter a
transnational market.

By exhibiting their fluency in an international language of
art criticism and asserting their place in a global community of
artists, dealers and collectors, these Balinese are claiming that
they, too, can be as cosmopolitan as anyone else. By restlessly
pursuing the modern, these new galleries are, paradoxically,
reasserting traditional values of Balinese community and
identity.

This kind of ambivalent relationship to both Balinese heritage
and Western influence is expressed in the works and words of
Balinese artists such as Made Wianta. Last December, this
controversial artist staged a colossal performance-cum-ritual
spectacular, choreographing 2,000 dancers and a helicopter which
dropped banners proclaiming "peace" in hundreds of different
languages across Bali's beaches.

Wianta's work drew a great deal of criticism from local
artists, who wondered aloud why he did not print banners reading
"free all political prisoners" or land the helicopter on the
local jail. Despite the criticism, Wianta insists that his work
straddles shifting lines between politics and esthetics, or local
concepts and concerns and globally meaningful expressions.

These tensions are neatly expressed in the title of a recent
book published by Times Editions surveying his career: Made
Wianta: Universal Balinese Artist. Here he claims that while he
is drawn toward the symbols and concepts of his childhood, he
does not want to be pigeonholed by an ethnic label. He dreams, we
are told, of making Apuan, the small village of his birth, into a
center for artistic conversation and creativity of the same
caliber as the cities of Europe or America.

The question still remains as to whether these galleries and
artistic events are succeeding in challenging the commodification
of a conservative image of Balinese culture, or whether they are
reproducing the very powers they purport to resist.

Certainly, from a purely economic standpoint, the modern
gallery, despite its move off of the tourist track into the urban
center, still remains quite distant from the everyday lives of
the majority of Balinese. Indeed, by pricing works of art
equivalent to several decades worth of rice for an average
family, the contemporary gallery can be seen as even more
alienating than the art-for-export shops whose mass-market styles
are at least compatible with the typical Balinese budget.

It is not just economic differences that are evoked by the
gallery. The creation and consumption of art in contemporary Bali
also takes place within a social hierarchy that defines those who
have "taste" from those who simply own things. "Anyone with money
can own a BMW, but taste can't be bought," remarked one Balinese
at a recent art show.

By using this discourse of "taste", galleries have solidified
new forms of social status by educating an audience about
appropriate ways of viewing and valuing art, and selecting those
who will be exhibited and invited into its domain.

For even as the gallery opens its doors to the masses, it has
to guard against becoming a full mass media in order to secure
the value of what goes on within its walls. If art were truly
accessible to everyone, there would be no room for "taste" to
perform its work of drawing distinctions between high and low,
good and bad, art and craft.

In this sense, the modern Balinese gallery may prove even more
potent than tourism in shifting the place of art in the lives of
Balinese.

It remains to be seen how these new urban galleries will
address the serious challenges these issues pose. What is certain
is that the modern Balinese gallery provides a space not merely
for the buying and selling of art, but for pondering some of the
most explosively powerful issues facing Balinese today.