Ni Tanjung or Art Brut in a Bali corner

Jean Couteau, Contributor, Bali

A mentally ill person has created one of the most interesting -- and contemporary -- pieces of art in Bali, writes contributor Jean Couteau with the help of Swiss anthropologist-cum-museologist, Georges Breguet, who also provides the photographs.

"You must absolutely go to Buda Keling and see the works made by this weird lady on the side of the road between Budha Keling and Tirta Gangga."

I had heard about this lady several times and the word was, in Denpasar art circles, that she was a "student" of "Bali's wandering painter" Made Budiana. I was somewhat skeptical. But the injunction was coming this time from a Swiss anthropologist- cum-museologist, Georges Breguet, with whom I had recently collaborated for an exhibition about Time in Bali held in Switzerland. He has the ear of European museums and this warranted my attention.

"You must absolutely see it," he insisted, "What she does is pure Art Brut", and we must collect information and try to preserve her work."

A few days later, we were in Buda Keling.

Passing the village proper, a few hundred meters on the road to Tirta Gangga were the art works I had come to see. Something unlike anything one makes in Bali, yet deeply rooted, in its own weird way, in Balinese culture: a mound of stones, on top of which lurked strange primitively sculpted or painted faces, with incense sticks stuck here and there. It would have warranted, in another environment, the name of "art installation".

But it was in fact "Balinese art and religion" at its most essential, when the two concepts are not separated. It represented an altar on top of which were seated gods and deified ancestors; and the incense sticks were the signs of a cult addressed to them.

Yet, there are no such primitive altars in Bali, where sophistication prevails. Ordinary Balinese, when praying or addressing offerings to gods and ancestors, always follow strict rituals. The iconography of their art works is tightly patterned, and the patterns thus created are transmitted from generation to generation with very little modification. Here, it was different. Outside the Balinese mainstream. There was no obvious cultural memory visible on the way this "monument" had been conceived - apart from the very "Balinese" need to worship the gods and ancestors dwelling on the holy mountain.

The answer to my wonderment came as a I heard a strange woman's singing, or wailing, approaching on the road. It sounded like kidung poetry, but it was nothing of the sort: it was just a jumble of words sung after the manner of the kidung. Then I saw her; old, yet astoundingly nimble. She was dancing, but it was not a dance in the classical Balinese way. It was when she talked, her sticks of incense in hand, that I understood: she is a mentally ill person.

And when I was told that she was the one who had created this fantastic "installation", I quickly understood the meaning of the whole thing: a mentally ill person had created one of the most interesting -- and contemporary -- pieces of art in Bali.

As we went around the village collecting information, Georges Breguet told me her story, or rather the pieces he managed to collect in previous visits.

Ni Tanjung -- such was the name of the creator of this installation, was born sometime in the late twenties or early thirties. During the Japanese occupation (1942-1945) she had a highly traumatic experience when she was taken away to work as forced labor by the occupation troops. Later, she married and had two children, but the younger one died in 1965, still a pupil at the local elementary school. She then did what some people do after experiencing severe psychological trauma; she flipped. She refused to recognize reality and withdrew into her own world. From that time on, her wild imagination took over.

Five or six years ago she began collecting stones from the nearby river bed, first making a small mound, then painting or carving faces on the stones she would put on top, thus creating her own mountain world of ancestral gods that she could worship, apart from the traditional village gods and separate from the local temple structure. Considered buduh (insane), or a victim of bebai, by the local people, Ni Tanjung is left alone. Passers-by, trucks, bicycles sometimes stop by her "installations", moved by the view of this woman singing alone, always carrying her incense sticks with a few flowers. Some give her some money, from which she makes a meager living.

A very simple living, indeed. As we walked around, we came to what was Ni Tanjung's place, a simple bamboo hut on the outskirts of Budakling, an isolated remnant of Bali's poorer days, where she lives alone with her caring husband, I Nyoman Kembang. A daughter, Ni Wayan Penpen, the only surviving child of the couple's four children, looks after them.

No one else seems to pay much attention to them. Among the artist's community, the only one to have given recognition to Ni Made Tanjung is the modern painter I Made Budiana, who gave her white paint with which she made some of her ancestors' haunting faces. It is obvious that Ni Tanjung's mound will continue growing as long as the old lady has in her enough force and spirit to sustain her worshipping "madness". It will then wane with time, as people pick up the stones, children play with them and animals rummage around. Unless of course something is done to salvage the site.

Ni Tanjung's "installation" is an example of a type of art that has not yet been granted recognition in the Indonesian art world. It is a perfect piece of "Art Brut'.

The term was coined by Jean Dubuffet, one of the most famous artists of the 20th century. This artist said that the art of "insane" people was to him the equivalent of what "art nhgre" (African Art) had been to Picasso.

He believed that the notion of art should not be the exclusive realm of those who called themselves artists. And he saw in the expression of "instinct, passions, marginality and even brutal force and delirium," a potentially rich field of artistic creativity. His own works were attempts at going "beyond" the subconscious; but his most important contribution to 20th century art was arguably his discovery and support of Art Brut, the art works of the world's "outsiders".

Art Brut, he says, consist of "works executed by those immune to artistic culture in which imitation has no role, in which their creators take all (subjects, materials, transposition, rhythm, style etc.) from their own individuality and not from the base of classical art or stylish trends." There ensues from this definition that the practitioners of Art Brut are all the mental and social "outsiders": patients of psychiatric hospitals, the original, the condemned etc.; all those in other words removed from social conditioning and who create works outside the constraints of the existing art world (education, marketing etc.).

Jean Dubuffet "discovered" Art Brut well before graffiti artists and social outcasts such as Basquiat were discovered by Warhol.

Beginning immediately after the Second World War, he collected art brut from psychiatric hospitals, crazies, criminals and other outsiders. By 1971, he had gathered a huge collection, which he offered to the city of Lausanne, in Switzerland, where it continues after Dubuffet's death to fascinate an ever larger public. The collection is continuously enlarged and now comprises more than 15,000 works from "outsider" artists from all over the world, and with all kinds of creative oddities. Now, other similar collections have also appeared in other European and American cities, a testimony to the variety of art in the world.

Ni Tanjung's peculiar testimony cannot be taken away and brought to any museum. The extraordinary worshipping altar of a suffering woman, it belongs where she made it: Buda Kling; and where stones can be made into god repositories: Bali. But it must be preserved.

Looking at my friend Georges Breguet taking pictures, I know that the fantastic Art Brut monument of Buda Kling will soon be part of some museum's memory. But what can be done to preserve it where it is? Or to help Ni Tanjung? And to "discover" all the other "outsider" artists hidden in the many towns and villages of this great archipelago?

As we walk away, I catch one last sight of Ni Tanjung. She is wafting with her hands the fumes from a stick of incense she has lit on top of her mound of stones. To her, only the gods have retained meaning.