Textiles show binding thread of culutres

Mehru Jaffer, Contributor, Jakarta

There is much that is bewitching about Indonesia, but the magical spell cast on people by textiles here is legendary.

Irwan Holmes first traveled to Jakarta in 1967. He grew so obsessed he with the batik that he saw that he dropped his art studies at a U.S. university to begin lessons in batik painting on cloth from artisans.

In 1970, he decided to make Indonesia his permanent home.

Over the years, he has collected a rare collection of textiles from across the country.

Spreading out a Balinese ritual cloth that he believes is at least 100 years old, Irwan points to the motifs of people engaged in the sport of boxing with great glee.

One piece even uses the pattern of the American flag.

One favorite features yet another ceremonial cloth from Bali called Tirtanadi, or holy waters, probably woven in the early years of the last century.

Silken yarn is used to create a pattern that strongly resembles a canvas of modern, abstract art.

The oldest piece of cloth is another altar cloth folded inside a copper box that is intricately carved with floral motifs from the times of the pre-Islamic Majapahit rulers of east Java.

Another textile freak is Inger McCabe Elliot, a photojournalist and author of Batik: Fabled Cloth of Java.

She has emotional recollections of a colorful day in 1963 when the first became acquainted with the splendor of Java's batik, which turned her black-and-white world into a rainbow of glorious colors.

Inger recalled being pleased and, at the same time, disturbed as she saw the amazing textiles on which lions roared ferociously, ducks paddled serenely, and mythical animals leaped, while grains of rice dappled the cloth.

She observed that batik artists splashed their colors about with controlled abandon.

And they break all the rules.

Somehow, they are able to use green with red and end up with something that does not look like a Christmas card: somehow, they can combine pink, yellow, brown and aqua blue without bringing to mind Mae West's boudoir.

Inger was so ecstatic that she came to Indonesia in the 1970s to unravel the mystery of batik herself.

It is quite possible that, at first, people here had no use for cloth. They were likely content to clothe themselves in the shade of the lush, green rain forest that surely covered the entire length and breadth of this tropical paradise.

It must have been merchants from miles away who came with the first meters of material here. Chinese records from 1,400 years ago mention a king in northern Sumatra who wore silk. And it is suspected that the silk he wore at that time was imported.

Cloth was clearly a prized possession only the rich and mighty could afford to covet in those early days.

For a long time, the most important use for the textiles were as a gift to loved ones, or as an offering to God.

This importance came both from the real value of textiles, and from their symbolic value as the product of the magical hands of human beings.

For many Indonesians, textiles have sacred origins in myth and this aura is not completely lost to this day.

In Splendid Symbols: Textiles and Tradition in Indonesia, Mattielelle Gittinger illustrated how Arabs and other traders had made cloth the primary medium of exchange.

Early in the 16th century it was said that, on the spice-rich island of Maluku, Indian cloths were held in great value.

Every man toiled to own a great pile of the cloths so that, when they were folded and laid out on top of each other, they could have been stacked into a pile several feet tall.

To possess that much of the cloth signified what it meant to be free and alive.

If taken captive, the owner was ransomed for nothing less than the very pile of cloth he owned. In 1603, the price of imported cloth was worth 40 pounds of nutmeg on the island of Banda.

During most of its 2000-year history, Indonesia has been an important trade route for merchants from around the globe.

Like a vast net, it has caught migrating people from everywhere, along with their way of life and beliefs and the land has captured the imaginations of scholars, artists, fortune hunters, and travelers for centuries, all of whom have contributed to the romantic musings about the region's fortunes in aromatic spices and sandalwood.

The Java coast was also visited by Marco Polo, Ferdinand Magellan, Sir Francis Drake, and Saint Francis Xavier, trade bringing with it both material and spiritual rewards.

Along with the goods also came a succession of religions -- Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity -- which left their permanent influence here.

All of these experiences, both foreign and local, eventually married and transformed into robust patterns that are being woven to this day on luxurious looking textiles, as if with the thread of life itself.

It is now possible to share some of these human experiences immortalized on rare and unusual textiles, along with an array of tools used in the variegated activity of picking cotton, the making of yarn, and finally the weaving and wafting of cloth itself.

An exhibition of textiles chosen by the Dharmawangsa Hotel from Irwan's vast collection that will be inaugurated by Ghea S. Panggabean, one of Indonesia's leading fashion designers here.

The exhibition begins on Feb. 16, and runs through Feb. 24 in the Bimasena Club in the lobby of the Dharmawangsa Hotel. For more information, call 725-8668.