Made Wianta's 'Art and Peace' is an offering-cum-mantra

By Jean Couteau

DENPASAR, Bali (JP): Since Otto Dix depicted the horrors of war in the 1920s, artists have long denounced violence in their works. In Indonesia, artists such as Samsar Siahan and Dadang Christanto have made a career of denouncing the abuses of the New Order regime. More recently, almost all the entries to the last "Philip Morris Price Award" dealt with the themes of oppression and political violence.

Using art to simply protest against violence is easy, however, because the facts are condemnable, and the culprits known. Art takes side and becomes the tool of a "good" political struggle. There are no intellectual risks. Only applause.

This is precisely why Made Wianta's upcoming colossal performance, Art and Peace, is worth more than our disdain or casual attention.

What Made Wianta, one of Bali's best-known modern painters, is preparing is indeed a colossal performance. On Dec. 10, the International Day of Peace, he will carry around Bali, and then drop from a helicopter, no less than 2,000 pieces of material written with the words of peace in all the world's main languages. These flying banners will then be welcomed on the beach of Padang Galak by no less than 2000 dancers. This event will be preceded by a seminar on art and peace, a poetry festival, meetings of figures from the main international religions and various related activities.

To affirm peace, instead of protesting violence: such is the challenge that Made Wianta has taken up. This is no easy task. The struggle "for" peace alone has a bad name in the small activists' world: it smells of the status quo and political repression. The Pax Neerlandica (Dutch Peace) left a sour taste for most Indonesians, and everyone recalls the relentless "struggle for peace" of the former Soviet Union, not to forget the "peaceful" stability prevailing under Soeharto's New Order.

So has Made Wianta entered into a trap? Is his Art and Peace event a distraction from the urgent need to "make peace", and therefore to side for justice against the dark forces at work in East Timor, Maluku, Aceh and Jakarta. Has he been manipulated? Or is he engaged in the manipulation of the event for his own mediatic purposes?

These are the questions raised, sometimes naughtily, about the event. But what does the artist himself say, and what about the role of his Balinese context?

"My performance is a gift to peace, and it should as such influence reality; it will create peace, the state of quietness -- kerta raharja -- which all Balinese are longing for," he said.

In other words Wianta's "esthetics of peace" should be understood as an offering-cum mantra, the utterance of which compels a change to reality, a restoration of the "cosmic order" dear to the Hindu Balinese.

As for the accusation of manipulation, he said: "I don't care; the fact that I have accumulated money during my career is accidental. It was never a goal in itself, and for this reason the money I earn has now to be returned to where it belongs, creativity, i.e. the 'creation' of peace, which is where the essence of religion belongs too."

In Bali, people who "make it" are expected to contribute donations for the restoration of temples and the holding of ceremonies. To Wianta, the "temple" should therefore be understood as being Bali itself or the "world", and his performance as being a donation. The potlatch-like "wasting of money" of Art and Peace should therefore primarily be seen as a "traditional" redistribution of wealth in a modern, aesthetic and humanistic way. As for the political aspect, it does not smell of opportunism either: The idea of "Art and Peace" was conceived before the democratic government came to power, when tensions were peaking in East Timor and Indonesians questioning the scope and meaning of nationalistic and humanistic values. They were risky days.

In short, what Wianta's Art and Peace tells us is that there is room for a "humanistic" struggle for peace and justice that does not follow Western paradigms. It avoids the theory of conflict and the struggle for justice dear to Western leftists and other liberals, and may be for this reason labeled as "naove". But isn't the very affirmation of the "word" of peace -- be it through the means of art -- a necessary precondition to the taking of concrete steps toward peace in troubled places. By emphasizing the role of "consciousness", Made Wianta is actually reminding us of the need to be, before anything else, idealistic: it is in his own, very Balinese idealistic was that he embraces peace and the world with it.

The impact of the event will, of course, depend on its implementation. The technical problems of the helicopter -- wind, the unfurling of the 2000 pieces of material -- have been dealt with. Gunawan Muhammad and some other reputed national and international speakers have confirmed their attendance. Everyone in Bali is now waiting for the uttering of the magic mantra: "Peace", and the colossal show -- the aesthetics of peace -- that accompanies it.