'Images of Power' highlights Bali conference

'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.