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!