Swiss painter taps essences of Bali

By Astri Wright

UBUD, Bali (JP): The marbled, cooling halls of the main exhibition building at the Agung Rai Museum have yielded the pluralism, variation and color of the Indonesian Art Awards exhibition to the vision of a single artist: Swiss painter and printmaker Marc Jurt.

From a myriad different approaches to a painted surface, and nearly a hundred different ways of depicting the concerns of artists and communities in Indonesia, the art viewer in Ubud this "cold season" now faces a unified oeuvre of texture and line, and color contrasting with monochromatic, in rectangular canvases spaced in serial rhythms along walls and across spaces.

The natural, earthen tones of ochre that at times gleam like old gold dominate, punctuated by black and unbleached white. Spontaneous splashes of large brushes alternate with the hair- fine controlled lines of dry-point etching or illustrations from old Balinese lontars. Two dimensional surfaces find texture as paint overlays plaited bamboo in one work, and in others thin acrylic paint reveals fine Balinese weaving or the particular crinkled surfaces of handmade paper. Echoes of textiles and Bali Hindu cosmology reverberate from pieces accented by black and white plaid areas.

Surrounded by nearly 140 works, the viewer's eye and the spirit are blown open by a sense of pure elegance. This does not stop at the surface but expresses an aesthetic depth that invites exploration. The beauty of the works is astounding yet, unlike so much that one sees in Bali and in Asia's nouveau riche art worlds, this is not a swaggering display of overwrought and gaudy form and media. The works reveal ideas that are not simplistic. Yet the whole is carried by a sense of unity in the way that an excellent orchestra plays together.

The music here is like a shower of unfamiliar notes rooted in familiarities that have not encountered each other in exactly this way before. Who is this artist? How did he arrive at these ways to express essences of Bali that are so often hidden beneath its overmarketed exotica, and combine this with the deepest aspects of himself that fuse into new synthesis?

Artist's voyage

Marc Jurt was born in 1955 in Neuchatel, Switzerland. He began to paint at 15. A year later he went on his first travel abroad, beginning a pattern that has come to dominate his life ever since.

On his first voyage, he traveled to England; next to Turkey, Greece and Portugal. While traveling, he took photographs and sketched, and already at this age the urge to share his visions was strong. His first solo show was held when he was 18, a year before he enrolled in the School of Fine Arts in Geneva. His next step in international travel was his voyage to India, which became an extensive stay with immersion in both artistic work and spiritual discipline: studying in Dharamsala, the home community of the Dalai Lama in exile from occupied Tibet.

Jurt also studied Hinduism and Tantra. Since then he has traveled, sought insight into matters of body, spirit and healing, often also exhibiting his work, in Africa, the Philippines and Japan. Many of his prints have been used by well- known printers in Europe. In Nepal and Japan, Jurt also studied how to make paper by hand, and handmade paper remains one of his favorite materials.

Jurt now divides his life between Nice, Geneva and international travel, returning to Bali more often than anywhere else. He has been coming to Bali regularly since 1980. The present exhibition is an important one for him, he says, because he is here able to return something of all that he has received and learned in Bali over the years. He needs at lest four or five months a year traveling abroad to work, Jurt says.

He also travels to Africa, the Americas, or Australia. Last year he spent a month in Australia and another in Tokyo in connection with exhibitions there. His exhibition in New York in 1995, and in Connecticut last year, will travel to Toronto next year. About one third of the works to be shown in Toronto are inspired by Bali.

"But unless I point this out, people will not see the link," Jurt says. This is not of primary importance to him. What is important is that people can respond in the ways they know how. He is not interested in being dogmatic, bringing a particular message from one part of the world to another. His message is open-ended.

"I learn so much from exhibiting in other cultures," Jurt says, standing in the Agung Rai Museum of Art gallery. "When I work, it is very private, I am very much alone. But when I work abroad, I am also always in dialogue with the culture and with local people, especially local artists and gallery people."

In Bali, preparing for the present exhibition, Marc Jurt has worked with the talented mask carver, Ida Bagus Alit, to make the three-dimensional carvings that will accompany some of the paintings. Jurt gives him the idea and he creates something completely unusual, unlike any of the other carvings one sees in Bali.

"People can touch these while looking at the paintings, which are not really meant for touching," Jurt says, holding a smooth undulating piece of wood that mimics, in transformed matter, a banana leaf held together by a sharpened bamboo pin. "These carvings are meant not as a copy of a form in the painting, but as a formal echo." The carving becomes another type of metaphor to complete the visual poem begun on the canvas, like a second or third line in a poem.

The human figure is rarely present in Jurt's work. It is the traces of the human hand and their presence in the materials and the landscapes that fascinate him. By refusing to give representation to human beings the works resonate on a universal level: no choices have to be made about what types of human beings to represent; there is no exoticizing, idealizing or uncomfortably direct revelation of self or others. Jurt is more interested in pure forms, inspired by but elevated above the realm of nature or objects of daily life.

Some of his works are accompanied by short haiku like poetic insights: "An almond leaf falls on my etching plate, its shadow tells me something." Like the assembling of strings of words to express a feeling-state of mind, Jurt likes to work in series. One is called Collection: collection of shells, of cactus, of insects. Other series are Wind Chime, Tabula Rasa, Talisman, Daphne, Poleng, and Lontar. Some of these motifs and ideas are specific to Bali, others not.

The series Painting and Lontar is inspired by the Lontar drawings of 10 protectors of the different areas of life. In each case, the form of the figure, whether demonic or refined, is cut out from the lontar and glued on some part of the canvas, inspiration for the abstract gestural marks in paint that covers the rest of the surface. In this way, another variation of Jurt's dialogue between fine-line black drawings and the wild swirl of a brush dipped in color is born.

In Bali, it is not primarily painted or sculpted arts that have inspired Marc Jurt. He names the landscape, the volcanoes, all of nature, along with the offerings and the dances, as primary inspirations.

"I like to work with the four elements -- humidity, smells, everything is very alive here, very strong and present. I get the feeling of water and fire, of earth and fire, and so on. Before coming to Bali I had a very strong feeling for the vertical energy between earth and sky, and how it combines with the horizontal energy that represents community and communication between people. But for me the vertical is not a mystical expression, it is rather an expression of a feeling of the wholeness of everything. I include this feeling in my art but I do not overwork it. There is no place for dogma in my work." Marc Jurt unpacks some more wood pieces from a large basket, asks when the pedestals will be there, where each piece will be placed by its painted partner.

"I am not intent on people getting the idea that I had while making the work. Some people call my work spiritual, others call it sensual, everyone says different things. What people receive is based on what echoes with them. Art is not a fixed statement, it is open: it is a proposition, a mirror, in which everyone can see something of themselves. If indeed a work of art is a kind of mirror, it means that it works."

Quality vs White skin

Marc Jurt represents a new kind of artist -- the kind that will be incorporated into the newly evolving discipline of world art history. He represents an emerging type of person, too, the world citizen, to whom borders and political and cultural differences are not hindrances, but part of the varied landscape that feeds his imagination and inspires him to build relationships through artistic exchanges.

His work inspired by Bali shows that it is possible for an outsider -- in this case a white European man -- to immerse himself in a new place with refinement, with a sensitive step and open senses, avoiding the worst cliches that are present in the work of so many foreign artists living in and around Ubud. Here are none of the soft-porn images that exploit the bodies of young and mature women of the local culture for the male gaze, foreign and local; here are none of the homoerotic images of brown youths with flowers behind their ears made for the consumption of men, white and otherwise.

Here are none of the scenes of dancers, temple compounds, rooster fights and market scenes that are produced ad nauseum, in greater numbers year by year. Sadly, those excellent examples one finds of such subject matters in Balinese art, are all but submerged by poor quality cliches, local and foreign.

Only a very few foreign artists have contributed in any significant way to the promotion of quality art in Bali, and unfortunately those few get lumped together in high-profile public art collections with more recent arrivals of mediocre talent.

It seems that now the time has come in Indonesian modern art, spearheaded in Bali by strong voices like that of Agung Rai, director of Agung Rai Museum of Art, to promote innovation, creativity and quality in art, whatever the nationality of the artist. Hopefully, this will stimulate greater freedom from earlier models, foreign and national, among Indonesian artists.

This may also put an end to the privileging of white male artists who play "little Gauguins" in making lives of wealth and stature here that they would have been unable to create at home. For the sake of all the talented, sincere and hard-working artists living in Ubud and elsewhere -- foreign, Indonesian and Balinese alike -- one can only hope that the art public is able to absorb and respond to the "quality with a difference" that characterizes the work of Marc Jurt. This art is both rooted and transcendental, rational and imaginative, powerful and sensitive. It is art that does not exploit another culture's exotica by transforming it into a sexy or merely pretty commodity.

Jurt's work aims to give back as much as it takes, by his merging with his subject matter in creative partnership. What we receive from it is up to us. The result is enriching on every level.

The exhibition, presently showing at the Agung Rai Museum of Art in Peliatan, Ubud, runs through Aug. 20. The exhibition is scheduled to open again in Jakarta, at the Duta Fine Arts Foundation, from Oct. 30 - Nov. 30. Prices range from US$120- $4,500.

Astri Wright is an associate professor of art history, B.C. Canada, and author of Soul, Spirit and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters (Oxford University Press, 1994).