Balinese Art - Adrian Vickers

Скачать книгу

have been able to be added to the rich cultural mix of the island. Balinese first saw Western art in 1597, when the captain of the first Dutch expedition to the island presented the king of Gelgel, then ruler over the whole island, a painting of a ship pressed into the doors of a mirror. Through exchanges of gifts with the Dutch East India Company over the following centuries, Balinese rulers must have acquired other products of Western art and craft, although in their correspondence with the Dutch these kings showed that they were more interested in the rich and colourful fabrics of India than in Western items.

      The largest impact of the West on Balinese art was technological. The introduction of Western paper, manufactured cloth, painting implements and paints had a far greater role in changing Balinese art than any observation of Western art. The latter, with its attention to the painterly and its dependence on oil paints, was inimical to Balinese drawing up until the late twentieth century. Paper and the smoother manufactured cloth allowed Balinese artists to work with greater speed and dexterity than the difficult surfaces of bark cloth and local cottons. Paper formats meant that Balinese could focus on working on single-scene drawings and paintings in ink rather than the larger canvases or long rolls of Kamasan paintings. Such a major compositional change meant a new understanding of the possibilities of what should be highlighted in these single scenes.

      In the late nineteenth century, artists such as I Ketut Gede from north Bali experimented by taking scenes from mythology and mixing them with historical and contemporary images in unique compositions. These possibilities came because a Eurasian dictionary maker, Herman van der Tuuk, wanted Gede and others from south Bali to illustrate scenes from mythology and daily life.32 Precedents such as this allowed Balinese artists to further explore new possibilities presented to them by Western painters, who began to settle in Bali from the 1920s onwards. Western modes of shading, perspective and painterly depiction were added to the array of choices available to Balinese, although these seem to have been choices rarely taken up until the second half of the twentieth century.33

      Fig. 12 India/Bali, Indian printed textile incorporated into a Balinese painted cloth with flaming heads signifying lightning (gelap-gelapan), 19th C, natural dyes and paint on cotton, 39 x 54 cm, Forge Collection, Australian Museum, E76400 (photo Emma Furno).

      The Stories

      The narrative element of Balinese painting is at the heart of its continuity as an art form. Most Balinese painting communicates on a primary level through story-telling, and the painters assume a knowledge in their audience of the major stories, even if some parts of these are no longer well known. The Indian roots of Balinese narrative, as Djelantik’s discussion quoted above shows, are closely related to the way Balinese aesthetics combines Indian and indigenous ways of looking at the world. These ways of seeing link understandings of beauty, feeling and communication with the world beyond the senses. In the presentation of narratives, artists act like puppeteers, communicating between the everyday and the divine worlds.

      The chief narrative sources for Balinese art are the great Indian epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata.34 Scenes appear in Balinese art that are also found throughout India and other parts of Southeast Asia, such as the story of the gods and demons Churning the Ocean of Milk. There are also many indigenous stories depicted in Kamasan works, such as the courtly romance of Prince Panji and the story of the Brayut family who had too many children.

      Iconography

      The stories in Balinese paintings are understood through the system of iconography that is employed in the shadow theatre. This divides characters into different types: male and female (indicated by obvious body types); refined (thin, with narrow eyes, aquiline nose and usually golden or light-coloured skin); and rough or coarse (rough, hairy, bulging eyes, bulbous nose). While the refined versus rough categories are usually seen in terms of good versus bad (for example, the refined king Rama versus the demon-king Rawana), this is not always the case, as the example of the hero Bima shows. He is one of the semi-divine Pandawa brothers, the protagonists of the Mahabharata, but has a large body, round eyes, large nose and speaks gruffly. People of low social rank, commoners, are usually shown with rough, even caricatured features.

      Iconography also identifies rank. There are two types of iconography. The first is based on the narratives and characters of the Hindu epics, a category dubbed ‘mythological’ by anthropologist Anthony Forge in his attempt to describe the systems of Kamasan painting.35 ‘Mythological’ stories are concerned with the gods and the most important heroes, who are incarnations or children of gods. The major heroes in this iconographic subsystem, figures such as the Pandawa brother Arjuna, are princes who have a ‘crab claw’ hairdo and other kinds of ornamentation in their hair and around their necks, such as a pointy ear ornament (sekar taji), a bird face decoration at the back of the hair (garuda mungkur), a necklace and shoulder guards. The princes and princesses all sport diadems. Kings have a variety of crowns or coiffures, the highest ranking having an actual tower-like crown with a rainbow ornament at the back, and large bird face ornament, with diadem, ear ornaments and other decorations shared with those of lower rank. Lower-ranking kings and their courtiers have various other coiffures. Men are shown with sarongs, but are barechested except for their ornaments, while women of high rank have cloths wrapped around their breasts and two layers of sarongs. Priests and other characters of spiritual power usually have turban-like headdresses and wear long coat-like garments over their sarongs. Commoners and servants usually have minimal or no ornamentation and wear only a loincloth.

      Amongst the commoner figures, two sets of servants are particularly important. These are the clown figures who serve the main characters of the ‘right’ and ‘left’, respectively Twalen and Merdah and Delem and Sangut. In the wayang they play the role of interpreting lofty speech into everyday language and comedy, and in traditional painting their roles are a visual equivalent, since they mediate the views of ordinary people with their comic actions. These servants are ubiquitous in Kamasan paintings (Fig. 13).

      Indigenous stories belong to the second category of iconography, what Forge labels as ‘post-mythological’, legends that belong to a more recent past, with protagonists closer to humanity than the deities and semi-divine figures of the epics.36 The main identifying features are a variety of coiffures denoting different ranks, for example, kings with upswept hairbuns and princes, such as the hero Panji, with downswept hairbuns called ‘crescent moons’ (tetanggalan). In post-mythological iconography, characters have less ornamentation than in the mythological, though female characters are similar in their presentation.

      Fig. 13 Kamasan, Bima, with ‘crab claw’ hairdo, thick, hairy body and bulging eyes, possibly c. 1900, paint on cloth, 108 x 81 cm, flag (kober), Forge Collection, Australian Museum, E93475 (photo Finton Mahony).

      Fig. 14 Kamasan, The Snake Sacrifice of King Janamejaya. Janamejaya is seated on a lion throne, to the right of centre. The priests, led by Bagawan Srutasrawa, are shown to the left of the central sacrificial fire in the main scene. At top right, Indra talks to Taksaka. At top left, Astika talks to the naga, 19th C, natural paint on bark cloth, 152 x 144 cm, ex-Nieuwenkamp Collection, Gunarsa Museum, USA (photo Gustra).

      Mahabharata

      The Mahabharata is a long story that centres on the battle between the Pandawa brothers and their cousins, the Korawa. Balinese painters learn the epic through translations of sections into prose texts and poetry, both in the Old Javanese language, and focus on certain scenes. In Kamasan and other villages, even those painters not literate in Old Javanese would have learned stories from shadow puppeteers and passed those stories down to their students and families. Thus, the painters usually focus on certain main stories and do not seek to depict all the details of the epic.

      The first part of the Mahabharata, the First Book (Adiparwa), provides Balinese painters with a range of stories about the origins of the world and the great kings of the mythological past. The First Book is concerned not only with the ancestors of the heroes of the

Скачать книгу