Made Wianta: Nature as an installation

By Jean Couteau

DENPASAR, Bali (JP): If you have been to Bali, you have probably been surprised by the way the local people sometimes treat their great trees, they dress them in colors, in honor of the spirit thought to dwell in it. Now imagine a forest, a valley, where the trees are all dressed in colors; this is the installation painter Made Wianta has just created in Apuan, his village of origin.

Made Wianta is best known for his abstract pointillist works, and gained international recognition recently by holding a retrospective at the Tokyo Railways Station Gallery, crowned with a catalog of world-class quality. But he suddenly decided, last month, that he was fed up with "aesthetics", i.e. works without any message other than visual. In Gianyar, a hill had just collapsed, he said, crushing 30 people to death in a huge landslide. He had to relate to the fate of these people, and indirectly to that of nature. And he would do that through a gigantic statement, an installation at the base of Batukaru mountain, by calling to life the forces of nature through symbols, as the Balinese have done for thousand of years.

His gesture would help restore, or so he hoped, the old balance between himself and the world of his youth, between city and village, Nature and Man, and ultimately Man and the world.

This is how the idea came of "empowering" Nature, by dressing its trees. The trees in a gorge, where water meets and melts, hidden in earth, rocks and lushness. For 500 meters along the stream running through the bottom of the deep gorge at the back of the village of Apuan, Wianta wrapped all the trees in the basic colors of Balinese lore: white, red, yellow and black; the colors of the rose of the winds, the color of the four Lords of the world. Thus, Nature became again life and cosmos. The old connivance was reestablished.

The Balinese have always communed religiously with their environment. They treat its elements as living beings. No tree is cut without a proper offering addressed to its "invisible" dwellers. Large trees are dressed with a colored skirt and a small shrine stands nearby, where the local people who pass nearby present offerings. Nature is sacred.

Wianta's installation shifts the range of this sacredness. The animistic rite of offering is, by his intervention, turned into an ecological statement. By wrapping the four godly colors around the trees of a whole valley instead of those of a village, and by doing this at near the source of a stream, Wianta displaces the problem of ecological balance from the ritual village level to the ecological, global abstract level.

He is telling us that it is not simply the village and the villagers which must be protected, but the island and all its inhabitants. It is not the water to irrigate the local rice fields which must be saved, but water as a scarce and squandered resource. Nature is not sacred merely because of its magical appeal, but for itself, because of its invaluable function of life-bearer.

Wianta, the abstract artist, also reminds us that what makes an artist is his/her "sensitivity", and the ability to convey it to others, as here, with regard to the environment.