Ni Tanjung or Art Brut in a Bali corner

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.