Ketut Budiana's fantastic art on display

Ketut Budiana's fantastic art on display

By Jean Couteau

UBUD, Bali (JP): The world of Balinese painting has in the last few years been overtaken by modernist concerns. Galleries, journalists and collectors alike - mostly non-indigenous and with their own vested interests - support an art which retains very few references to the indigenous tradition of Bali.

Bali seems embroiled in a discourse where the problem of "form" has become paramount, relegating everything else to the background.

Abstraction or semi-abstraction - either in the constructed, informal or "American expressionist" mode - rules the day while little is being said about Balinese society and values, as if these were permanently on the wane.

When "Bali" appears, it is either to worship the (past) greatness of the island culture or merely in a referential way - eyes of the Balinese witch, checkered black and white cloth, triangular shape of the cosmic mountain - as if being Balinese simply meant making a statement of identity through the use of connotative symbols.

There are a number of causes for this phenomenon. Part of the modern painting dialogue is probably authentic, but much is certainly determined by the alienating conditions of the Balinese market, which is mainly controlled by Jakartans, foreigners and non-indigenous locals who are looking to buy art corresponding to their "national" and cosmopolitan expectations.

This situation is even sadder because there is in Bali, besides a stilted, tourist-oriented art, a post-traditional genre of painting that is assiduously striving for modernity within the Balinese system of forms and themes.

A presentation of this "different art" can be found in the current exhibition of Ketut Budiana at the Agung Rai Museum of Art (ARMA) in Ubud which has been completely and shamefully by- passed by the national press. The exhibition is running from 5 April to 5 May 2000.

Ketut Budiana was born in 1950 in Padangtegal, Ubud. His background, along with being immersed in the magic of Bali itself, included being exposed to the Balinese imagery of Pita Maha, the school founded in the 1930s by the painters Walter Spies (1895-1942) and Rudolf Bonnet (1895-1978).

Modern-educated and currently a teacher at the Senior High School of Fine Arts in Batubulan, he nevertheless belongs to "Bali".

Budiana is skilled at making temple images, masks for sacred performances and cremation artifacts.

It is the renewal and expansion of this tradition, rather than its questioning, that his painting is really all about, as we shall see below.

Thematically, Budiana's painting is deeply rooted in Balinese tradition: he talks about pradana-purusa, Bumi, Rangda and Barong, Tumbal, leyak and other characters and symbols typically Balinese.

Yet it would be a mistake to see his work as a simple transmission -- for a New Age public of spiritually vapid cretins -- of ordinary Balinese symbols.

The Balinese symbolic references Budiana is using are neither narrative, anecdotal, exotic nor magical in the operational sense of the word. They are instead philosophical, albeit dolled up in "fantastic" garb.

What Budiana actually exposes in his work is a visual reconceptualization of Hindu-Balinese concepts, a reconceptualization which, interestingly, has never been attempted in philosophy -- modern thinkers preferring to cast aside Balinese concepts by replacing them with ready made, imported Indian ones.

This reconceptualization is achieved through the simplification and transformation of Balinese iconography.

Even though the canvas is "full", as is typical in Balinese painting, the symbols are limited in number, and therefore easier to identify. They also owe little to tradition, or rather are a free reinterpretation of it.

We are taken beyond "Bali" into a fantastic world which is at once personal, "Balinese", and directly, universally readable.

In Kelahiran, birth, as an example, we see two characters in the upper part of the painting that symbolize the male and female principles emerging from the cosmic haze. They can be construed as cosmic forces, the union of opposites, the deities Siwa and Uma, or male semen and female ovule kama putih and kama bang.

The monstrous shape of the cosmic mother occupies the center of the canvas, while the cross symbolizes the cosmic movement.

This work is no less than a visual presentation of the cosmos in its birth process both at the microcosmic (Bhwana Alit=human) and macrocosmic (Bhwana Agung=world) levels. It is a Balinese version of Hindu philosophy.

This renewal of iconography occurs in tandem with a renewal of the form. Melihat Bumi, Behold the Earth, a depiction of the cosmic force of the planet, represents the head from a quite uncommon angle -- from above.

There is an uncanny touch of Degas in this view of the bald head of the earth, considering that the Balinese normally use a very limited and highly stereotyped range of angles in their representation - mostly in semi-profile or face forward.

Budiana demonstrates in this work that he can use traditional iconographic patterns when it suits his symbolic purposes and, when needed, create altogether new forms to enhance the "power of meaning" in his chosen themes. His is a modern mind within a "traditional" frame of reference.

Budiana's technique rests, like that of any "traditional" Balinese painter, on the quality of his drawing. Some of his works are black and white and his lines flow freely, as if unconstrained by iconography, in a manner that is reminiscent of Lempad's.

See for example Ngereh, Witch Dance, based on a witchcraft story.

In his color works, Budiana still employs like Ubud painters of his generation the wash technique using Chinese ink. But, unlike most of his contemporaries, he does so in a way that enables him to fully exploit the expressive potentiality of color.

In his best paintings the wash layers create a general atmosphere, on top of which bright color surfaces are painted to enhance the painting as a whole.

Going back to the concerns expressed at the beginning of the article, what Ketut Budiana is demonstrating in this masterful exhibition is that there is room for the growth and development of Balinese "post-traditional" painting.

Themes can be expanded and modernized, the iconography renewed, the techniques perfected.

The works can remain Balinese while their esoteric meanings are made accessible to people who don't understand Hindu symbology.

And, as far as Ketut Budiana is concerned, one would like to see him recognized as one of the masters of "Fantastic Art" in the tradition of the late European Middle Ages or Fussli and Odilon Redon.