'Images of Power' highlights Bali conference
By Kunang Helmi Picard
SYDNEY, Australia (JP): The special guided tour of the show Images of Power conducted by internationally respected authority on Bali, Professor Hildred Geertz, highlighted the Bali Conference in Sydney in July.
Full of infectious and youthful enthusiasm, Geertz, who teaches anthropology at Princeton University, explained her analysis of the Bateson-Mead collection of paintings gathered in Batuan, Bali during the 1930s. Famed anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Magaret Mead collected hundreds of paintings reflecting the power of sakti (inner power) they had perceived to be relevant to the study of the Balinese psyche.
As is generally known, the core of the artists' colony in Ubud, Bali developed in the late 1920s, but Images of Power consists of paintings specifically from the 1930s when "creative expression expanded as a result of rapid social, religious, economic and political changes which had begun in the 1920s." In fact the 1930s saw an increasing number of European artists such as Walter Spies and Rudolf Bonnet living in villages centered around Ubud. These artists influenced and encouraged the Balinese to paint oral history traditions in a style previously unseen in Bali.
These particular images reflect the artists' impressions of interactions with intangible spiritual forces which inhabit their world and influenced their daily lives. The spiritual beings depicted have considerable power, whether for good or for evil, and are revealed interacting with the people of Batuan in dramatic moments from everyday life, folktales, dance-drama performances and religious ceremonies.
The works in this traveling show come from the collection of Bateson and Mead. The famous anthropologist pair began collecting the almost 1,000 works for a study of the Balinese psyche in 1936 during prolonged field research. It wasn't until 50 years later that Professor Geertz began researching the works after opening the box of pictures wrapped in 1930s' newspapers.
Geertz, a grandmother in her sixties, decided to group all the paintings from Batuan together to form the exhibition and comprehensive catalog called Images of Power. The book is published by the University of Hawaii Press.
Geertz was interviewed in Sydney at the beginning of July at the National Australian Museum. The exhibition was shown here before continuing its tour to New Zealand, Tokyo and other international venues after Aug. 6.
Q: I think you should perhaps just start with the pictures you find the most riveting and important because some of these are probably more significant to you than others, and there is likely to be an interesting and valid reason behind your choice.
A: I love them all, you know like children, but out of the narrower choice of seven hundred of the almost 1,000 in the collection, I could only select 104 paintings for reasons of space. These tend to be the ones that I consider of higher quality, the works of black ink on paper that I picked are mostly larger in size and deal with more complex subjects.
Q: Did you ever fear repercussions in your personal life while dealing with themes of the pictures in the collection that some still consider to concern black magic and images of particular power, as for example, paintings by Ide Bagus Made Togog?
A: No, not at all, unlike some of my colleagues who seem to be afraid of feeling the power of sakti. I do not know if that somehow disqualifies me from talking about it. In any case as I stated in my paper for this conference: Sorcery and Social Change in Bali: the Sakti conjecture, a prolonged and sympathetic engagement with a set of paintings made by some young men of Batuan, Gianyar in the 1930s has brought me to a new understanding of Balinese religion and the transformations it has undergone in the 20th century.
Q: What do these paintings collected by Gregory Bateson and Magaret Mead almost sixty years ago convey to an interested viewer like you?
A: Well, like I stated in my recent paper, taken as windows into the inner worlds of the Batuan painters, the paintings, taken as a whole, convey vividly a profound preoccupation with anak sakti -- such as leyak, healers, and desti. The terms leyak and desti when translated into English as "witch" and "black magician", have been taken as ideas that are peripheral to the real Balinese religion, and dismissed as not directly related to the higher matters addressed by priests in temples. I will suggest an alternative view in which the larger notion of anak sakti is the key. This term was used by the painters of the Batuan pictures to specify human beings with extraordinary powers. In the tales that they illustrated, their heroes and heroines were, at times, apparently weak or disfigured human beings who in fact were capable of fantastic feats of strength, influence and transfiguration.
Q: Can you remember your first impression when you opened the collection which had been stored for years before anybody actually resumed the research pioneered by Gregory Bateson and Magaret Mead?
A: Yes, I do. I was totally puzzled and did not understand what they were; I remember saying to myself, oh look there is a demon. Now I know that it is not a demon, I know exactly what it is. I even put on a small exhibition before I really began to study them. When I first opened the collection I did not know how to speak Balinese and I did not even know where the documentation and all the other notes were because the physical pictures were in New York and all the documentation was in Washington in the Library of Congress. So it was many years later that I could begin to read all those Balinese documents. In fact it was only in 1988 that I connected the written documentation with the pictorial information. I had already conducted field research in Batuan on other subjects before I started to study the social context in which those paintings must have been made.
Q: Could we look at some of these story pictures together with your explanations?
A: Yes, let us look at the one that is in the video about The Tale of the Two Sisters Bawang and Kesuna by Ida Bagus Made Tibah. The interesting point of this painting is the way the story goes around the picture with six consecutive episodes spread about in unsystematical order. We see the selfish sister, Bawang, persuading her good younger sister, Kesuna to prepare the day's dinner. When their mother arrives home from the market, she says that Kesuna has done none of the work and the mother beats Kesuna. Then Kesuna goes to a forest temple where she prays, and a bird gives her jewelry and new clothing. Returning home, Kesuna meets her lazy sister, who demands the clothing. The bird gives Bawang clothes of snakes, caterpillars and leeches. A farmer sees Bawang in trouble and beats on the signal drum to call the villagers to help. Finally we can observe the last scene at the top of the painting where the villagers try to free Bawang of the insects and snakes covering her.
Q: Why didn't Magaret Mead and Gregory Bateson use paintings such as this for their study on the personalities of Balinese people?
A: I think that it was because they were in a big rush and could not use them for the book on Balinese characters, but they were also photographing as many pictures as they could, just in case they got lost or damaged. They had a set of photographs of the pictures, and of the Balinese babies as well; these baby portraits did get published in their book. What they did, was that after Batuan they left for New Guinea and then the war broke out in 1939. Bateson went back to England to enlist in the army and they got caught up in the war. It was only in 1942 that they were both together in the New York area and then they wrote that book on Balinese Character very fast, without opening up the box with the paintings and studying them. Bateson only wrote one article in his life on these paintings after having a baby together with Mead, Mary Catherine Bateson who is herself an anthropologist.
It happened like this, soon after the marriage broke up, Bateson never looked at a picture again until the 1950s when his mother died and a painting he had given to his mother came back to him. It was here in Canberra, Australia that Anthony Forge asked him to write that article about primitive art. The painting is here in the show. Incredibly Bateson had centered his whole article on primitive art on that one painting, the rest stayed wrapped up in old Times newspaper waiting for me to open them up years later. I think that if they hadn't divorced they would have probably done a book about them. Magaret Mead in particular was like a vacuum cleaner gathering up documentation about Bali which has never really been evaluated properly and still lies awaiting in Washington.
Q: To come back to the actual paintings which we can see here, some are very static and others such as this one have a definite movement and graphic statement as well as the narrative.
A: Yes, that one is by Djatasoera. He always showed a strong upward movement, often diagonal and he, in fact, was Mead and Bateson's favorite artist and his painting was the one published by Bateson in that article on Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art. Mead and Bateson also filmed him at work and collected nearly all the pictures he made during their research period and so we find nineteen of his pictures in the collection. This artist had never been to school, yet spoke Malay. He danced in the gambuh and played in the tourist orchestra, the genggong. Although he came from a Brahmana family, he never was involved in ritual work and he became a nationalist guerrilla combatant against the Dutch with another painter of the collection called Ngendon. They were both captured, severely beaten and died in prison in 1948.
Q: Was he not influenced by Western artists at all?
A: I do not think so, although he did show his work to Spies and Bonnet. I think he worked it all out for himself, his strength was composition. There is an interesting story about it. Bateson and Mead were filming some of these artists working because they were interested in how they used their hands and not in what style or technique they used. So Djatasoera was one of these painters. They went there on three consecutive afternoons and he did a picture for them, Bateson filming it and Mead taking notes, not only on what lines he drew, but also everything he said. So on that picture I can tell where and when he started, which line was drawn first, and so on because it was all recorded even though is was not finished at the end of the three afternoons. Part of it was penciled, then it was inked in and solid color wash was applied.. Then after all of that he inked it in again. So we have a document showing us how they worked, or rather how Djatasoera did. Bateson then wanted the picture but the painter refused saying that it was too ugly. Three months later Djatasoera presented Bateson with another picture, but with the same topic which was much more perfect and which was spread over a much bigger canvas with a much stronger composition. This is in contrast with Togog who really concentrated on the storyline. Togog continued painting until the 1980s when I came to Batuan and watched him do this one (she points to one in the show).
Q: Here we see some of Togog's work all of which seems to be telling a story.
A: Yes, he did do a lot of story telling and Bali scholars Adrian Vickers and Raechelle Rubinstein were still able to order pictures from him. Vickers ordered a scene where we see men working and Rubinstein ordered one where we see women at work. Togog was a leader in the group of Batuan artists, in painting, in teaching painting to others, and in selling pictures. He was about twenty-five in 1937 and became a member of the Pita Maha artists' collective which had been inspired by Spies and Bonnet. He assisted Bateson in checking the attributions of the paintings and made eighty-tree pictures in the collection.
Q: I see that you have included some simpler pictures with less detail and darker backgrounds.
A: Yes, these are done by very young artists at the time and I liked their style besides choosing them for their subject matter. Some people prefer these simpler and starker pictures with darker backgrounds. I think that they show a lot of movement and starkness. Generally speaking though it is very different working on paper as they did in the 1930s, in contrast to working on cloth where you can change the subject much easier and work with less detail, on paper the artists told me that they had to work with more detail and could not correct their work as easily as on cloth or canvas. In fact when Bonnet came back in the 1970s he persuaded some artists to return to working on paper as they did in the 1930s and specifically pressed them to do so. Now there is a small group of painters who work on paper again and produce wonderful detailed miniatures as a result of Bonnet's encouragement.
Q: Did Bateson and Mead specifically order pictures to be made or did they leave the artists to choose themselves?
A: No, they never ordered specific pictures to be made, but they did not accept any picture that was a duplicate of an existing one. They did not want to have any copies and they also rejected any painting with a dancer posing amongst others which were very much en vogue those days because they were too stylized and formal, therefore there would not be any psychological content. Bateson and Mead did not want to influence painters but they did want to ask for a few things such as asking Togog after living in Ubud for about a year to paint his dreams. There is a note which I read where Mead stated that they had asked him to paint his dreams and two days later another note to say that Togog had already begun painting them, he produced about eighty dreams on paper in six months. Togog started to have dreams about sorcery and could possibly have wanted to become a healer or balian. Usually each dream was illustrated by two pictures and then he dictated the text in Balinese to their assistant called Kaler. The whole collection of pictures were collected over two years with Bateson and Mead coming back later for a few months to complete the collection, but it was basically put together in two years. I personally can see in the two years the changes in the pictures and what the painters were doing because they were dated by Mead. Some of the painters had just started and produced more crude work before developing more fine work.
Q: What about pictures of death and the unseen by the Batuan artists for Mead and Bateson?
A: Most of the pictures of rituals made for these two in Batuan went far beyond the cliches of those made directly for tourist, with many rituals and portions of rituals not usually viewed by foreigners. This showed up particularly in the pictures showing the ceremonies surrounding death and mourning. Oddly enough none of the pictures in the Bateson Mead collection shows the burning itself, and only one shows the tower. I think this was perhaps because the Batuan picture makers were not content with making images of the vivid and exciting moment of carrying the body to the burning field, but went on to show more intimate, and more significant steps in the mortuary sequence.
Q: Did some of the themes also come from an oral story telling tradition in Bali?
A: Yes, possibly, because many Balinese who saw a picture with, say a special big knife, would understand where that came from, which story it referred to. These pictures are thus identifiable to the Balinese. Bateson also took care to note each picture's contents on the back of each work, but any Balinese would have known right away what it was about. Here for instance, one of the painters shows how to become a leyak step by step, that is a human being who transforms himself into a malevolent creature at night that roams around in search of prey after having changed his bodily form. The field of study which these pictures offer are immense and the notes in the documentation equally stunning, just judging by their sheer volume. However, the foundation is now looking for an institution that will be able to house the picture collection in one spot so that it will be available for more researchers to work on. Ideally this would be in Indonesia in a temperate and controlled environment to protect them. I would be very happy if they could actually be brought back to Bali where they originated from, but sponsors are not very easy to find nowadays, besides making sure that they will be stored correctly. The original documentation will stay in the Library of Congress in Washington. Meanwhile I am continuing my research on sakti and images of power and will soon bring out a book on this interesting subject relevant to present-day Bali and eventually Indonesia in the wider context.