Offbeat Murni tramples taboos in unorthodox view of Bali

Offbeat Murni tramples taboos in unorthodox view of Bali

By Astri Wright

DENPASAR (JP): Something is afoot in Bali. Shoes with just the barest hint of legs disappear up into the sky. Tall boots with a life of their own cross streets in the rain. High heels smile from one end of a naked body.

The front tips of a gum boot opens up into the leering smile of a tantric elephant traversing wet streets. A pointed shoe charts its course, aiming between the legs of a naked female torso.

What is this? A cartoonist with a shoe fetish? An Italian shoe factory's creative new campaign in Asia? A code language only the initiates of an unknown secret understand? No, no, no. What's up is Murni.

Her name means "pure", but Murni is a young woman who in the last few years has begun to paint subjects that are not only original, provocative and funny, but also taboo to most Balinese.

A self-taught painter who returned to her childhood love of painting in her late 20s, Murni, now 31, is on the threshold of becoming known, nationally and internationally, as one of the most original younger artists in Indonesia.

The originality is rooted in a combination of her personality and her history as a self-taught artist.

Since she has lived in village Bali and not partaken much in urban culture, she is more inured than most to the fashionable trends in art schools and the art world.

The drawback to being self-taught is that Murni, as she herself admits, needs technical instruction to improve her skills with her materials.

The strengths lie in the freshness and individuality of her visions as they are translated into the group of themes she likes to paint from different angles.

Murni paints images which her subconscious and her imagination offer up during sleeping and waking dreams.

Servant

Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih was born near Tabanan in 1966. Soon after moving with her parents to a transmigration program, she grew up in Sulawesi with poor access to schooling.

At 10, she first worked as a servant and later as a seamstress. In her mid-teens she moved back to Bali to be independent and seek opportunities there.

She worked as a silvermaker in Celuk, joining the scores of women who serve the tourist and export industries.

In her late 20s, Murni met a couple of artists, who reassured her that it was not at all far-fetched that she might paint, too.

She learned the rudiments of painting with tempera on canvas from noted and highly original painter, Dewa Putu Mokoh.

Fortunately, Murni's return to the realm of drawing and painting coincided with the surge in support for women artists in Bali. This was evident through the founding and efforts of two organizations, one, an art association for women and, first and foremost for Murni, the Seniwati Gallery for Women Artists in Ubud.

In Murni's visual imagination, we also encounter amoeba-like beings, flying figures, animals, flowers and body parts in strange combinations and transformations.

There are fetuses, monsters, Egyptian imagery and erotic imagery, both of couples together and of women or animals pleasuring themselves.

These are the images which shock Balinese viewers, especially the women artists who are also struggling for recognition without an inner need or ability to envision their worlds afresh.

Perhaps local male viewers of Murni's works dismiss the sensual paintings as pornography.

This is merely another way of entirely missing the point, and continuing to keep a lid on women's inherent freedom to paint their own experiences.

By the end of the 20th century, women's right to include their own views of their bodies in an art world where men's objectifying views of women's bodies are fully accepted, should have been firmly established.

Murni joins internationally known artists like Kartika Affandi as someone who claims this right naturally and artistically, and not as part of a political program.

Like all serious, non-trendy artists, Murni paints what she has to paint because it demands to be painted, as only she sees and feels it.

The female nude, stylized into shapes with a life of their own, dominates Murni's work.

These do not represent external objects the artist has studied in order to reproduce them on her canvas.

Rather they are subjective confessions about the experience of being a woman, with a fully orchestrated range of emotions and experiences, as envisioned from inside the experience.

Looking through dozens of paintings -- tempera on canvas -- we encounter frustration sadness, longing, happiness and ecstasy.

A woman's torso evolves away from the Greek statue ideal of Western art by the cascading long black tresses that frame it; her hand, covering her private parts, becomes a flesh-colored flower.

Above a domed tower, which hints at sacred architecture, a green forehead with large eyes hovers in the sky -- awesome, omniscient, omnipresent -- and a rose blooms from the tower to lodge between the eyebrows.

There is an English proverb to the effect that a prophet is never welcome in his hometown.

Perhaps the practice of merantau, or young adults migrating to seek their fortune abroad before returning home -- so important in many Indonesian societies -- has at times served a similar psychological function.

This is a process one can observe in the modern Indonesian art world as well: training and success abroad goes a long way to making an artist's career.

While self-taught artists are increasingly marginalized in Indonesia, foreign interest can bypass the emphasis on art school degrees.

This begs the question about the specter of colonial dependency on foreign models and values -- a dependency on modern Western art.

There is now a beginning interest in Murni's art shown from Australian curators and upcoming exhibitions scheduled in Hong Kong, Bangkok and Italy.

This process can be disheartening to artists who are as deeply rooted in local as in more universal contexts.

But it is just a matter of time before Murni is a "Name", with a "Price", who no longer needs to struggle to finance the materials for her next work, or the one or two dreams that she carries in her heart.

For now, and for the next few precious months, there is a window of opportunity here for serious and forward-looking collectors, who can contact the artist through the Seniwati Gallery in Ubud. Indonesia's art world, watch out!