Susi Johnston Bali Blog

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Asia Society, New York, offer an unprecedented exhibition of art from ancient Viet Nam—the first U.S. exhibition to address in depth the historical, geographic and cultural contexts of precolonial Vietnamese art. Arts of Ancient Viet Nam: From River Plain to Open Sea will expose approximately 110 objects dating from the first millennium B.C. through the 17th century, on loan from Viet Nam´s leading museums.

Highlights of the exhibition include ritual bronzes, terracotta burial wares, fine gold jewelry, Hindu and Buddhist sculptures, and ornaments of jade, lapis lazuli, crystal and carnelian. The works have never before been exhibited. 

The exhibition runs 13 September 2009 to 2 January 2010, and afterwards travels to the Asia Society in New York. While we wait for September, let’s all read the book behind the exhibition, by its chief curator Nancy Tingley, with Andreas Reinecke, Pierre-Yves Manguin, Kerry Nguyen-Long and Nguyen Dinh Chien (in stock at amazon.com now).

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Last week was spent with two designers from Douglas Durkin Design, Greg Elich and Andrew Horn. They were in Bali with me to work on a collection of extraordinary custom furniture for a residence in Hawaii. 

For those of you who might imagine that creating high-end custom furniture is pure glamour, just have a look “backstage” at the process of design refinement. We spent hours and hours each day in the workshop, a fascinating place, but very dusty, and very, very hot and humid. And lo! Wonder of wonders! A furniture workshop normally has almost no furniture suited to comfortable sitting, so we perched and paced and mopped the sweat from our  brows, all the while utterly absorbed with the work at hand.

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The textile traditions of Indonesia are no longer ethnographic curiosities. They are the material of couture creations that can take you from the beach to the ballroom and out on the streets of the world’s culture capitals in capital style. 

Not convinced? Just take a look at the chic ikat resort wear, above, created by Ratna Panggabean, one of the country’s most prestigious fashion designers and an outspoken evangelist for Indonesian textile arts. 

Then visit the annual exhibition of Adiwastra Nusantara, an organisation devoted to exposing and promoting the traditional textile techniques of the Indonesian archipelago. This year’s show is entitled “Beyond Fashion! Art to Wear” and will take place 15 – 19 April at the National Convention Centre in Jakarta.

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 In difficult times we need reasons to be cheerful, so here are some rags to be glad about. SF Tribal, a consortium of art dealers from the Bay Area, has posted a slew of new images on their group site. The ratio of textiles to objects is high. Why? SF is a textilian town, and its astute collectors were early adopters of the concept of tribal textiles as Art with a capital “A”. 

Why do they think that way about textiles? See for yourself.

A truly outstanding exhibition at a truly outstanding institution. The Beyeler Foundation in Basel offers “Visual Encounters — Africa, Oceania and Modern Art,” through 24 May 2009.

The show juxtaposes masterpieces of tribal sculpture with important canvasses of modern masters; van Gogh, Cézanne, Braque, Matisse, Léger, Picasso, Rothko. The result is utterly sublime. The way these works talk to each other is like long lost friends who have just met by chance after decades. The conversation is animated, joyous, rich and deep.

Generously spread over thirteen exhibition spaces in the Beyeler’s Renzo Piano designed gallery, this exhibition suggests new avenues for serious art collectors to explore. The juxtapositions make both bodies of work resonate more strongly than either would on its own. This is an an aesthetic nuclear fusion, releasing tremendous energy. Go. See. Be awed and inspired.

© Photo Hughes Dubois, Brüssel – Paris

The San Francisco Tribal Art & Textiles Fair is normally the most lively fixture on the tribal/textiles circuit. Held every year in February, the show draws over 100 dealers from around the world and buyers from across America. This year’s show was predictably lackluster in terms of sales, but still brilliant in terms of the art on exhibit.

I guess February was a very busy month for me, because I notice there were no posts in February. The blog archives column looks rather sad as a result, with the month of February 2009 not listed at all. 

Therefore, I feel obliged to post this post-dated post, just so February appears on the archive list by month!

Forgive me for this minor transgression of blogiquette, but I’m a perfectionist at heart, and can’t bear a list of months that’s missing one. Even if it is the shortest month of the year, February deserves its due.

Now, please click some other month, or category, and read something more interesting than this . . .

OK here we go, a bit late. The best gallery opening of the winter holiday high season in Bali was just before Christmas at Biasa Artspace. Indieguerillas were the artists, a husband and wife team out of Central Java, who hail from the worlds of interior and graphic design and from the burgeoning galaxy of Indonesian global geekdom. And what a show it was. These two (Bung Otom, pictured above right, and Santi Ariestyowanti), go boldly where no Indie couple has gone before, orbiting the separate suns of Javanese sacred iconography and global-techno-sound-data-culture. Swinging from the gravitational field of both of these in a twisted Moebius loop, and fueled by the spirit of post-punk alt culture, this binary star system of partnered artists explodes across our visual and perceptual fields with a pow that punches at least as good as Lichtenstein’s did for his own milieu.

What we have here is an irreverant bundling of the software of pop and global culture now, with ancient iconography, into a critical cartoonish package, and the artist-couple takes great pains to present it to us as it should be presented. The impeccable quality of painting is here, matched by meticulous competence in other media and means, as well. Laser-etched plexi meets epic-scale canvasses meets sound+vision on the outdoor terrace of Biasa Artspace into all hours of the night. (That’s Bung and Santi standing up to the scrutiny of renowned Bali-anthropologist-at-large Jean Couteau, above.)

I doubt many of the free-drink scavenging masses of Seminyak society knew why the vibe was so real and so alive that night. It was the art that did it, augmented by the spirit of generosity and inclusiveness that characterises Biasa Artspace.

This multimedia evening was an ecstatic celebration of generous talent and generous patronage on the part of Susanna Perini (above), proprietress of the whole Biasa biosphere. Who wasn’t there? Indo and mondo and molto and pseudo and slinky all gathered in the charged energy of an indoor-outdoor Indiguerillas moment. 

Indie = Independent/Indonesian. Guerillas = operatives on a mission using the means available in a creative and subversive manner. That’s what we got with this exhibition, and it surprised everyone who was paying even the slightest bit of attention.

The title of the show, Fool’s Lore, was apt. There we had the Punch and Judy poignant criticism of iconic Javanese wayang kulit, mixed with ironically deployed imagery from animé, China-pop, gaming and the whole gamut of pop culture icons.  Masterfully mixed it was – iconoclastic icon revival in the disco-ball light of now. (Even international tribal art dealers Michael Palmieri and Antonio Casanovas, pictured above, made the scene.)

To the title, Fool’s Lore, all I can say is “Lord what fools these mortals be,” and count myself willing or no among the foolish band of mortals. Thanks, Indieguerillas (Bung above left, Santi above right), for this moment of self-awareness which startled me like seeing myself in the security cameras of an office-block elevator, looking like the earnest little fool fixed in the Indo-mix that I am. That’s me silhouetted like a shadow puppet in front of the digi-video screen, below right.

I bought one piece from this show, and it wasn’t the free beer that made me do it. I had them slap a red sticker on the first work you could see on entering the gallery, almost the minute I arrived. It’s a laser-etched perspex panel on stainless steel mounts, representing a “gunungan,” the Javanese phalliform shadow puppet which begins and ends every story. The “gunungan” traditionally depicts within it all the contents of the known world, and my Indieguerillas “gunungan” has etched into it PSX-worthy icons of sounds and speakers and DJs and a hi-tech Hanoman (the monkey-god from the Ramayana) all woven into a unified visual groove as if they were parts of a single circuitboard. I could not resist this encapsulated statement of the schizo-Indo zeitgeist, in which the complexity and contradiction and raw humour of the moment is rendered eternally in plastic.

I had a fine evening, to boot, in addition to scoring a fantastic work of art. There’s Susanna of Biasa Artspace again, above. She clearly enjoyed the celebration, and I know it was a pandemonium of effort to get it all together, so bravissima Susanna.

We’ve found once again an extraordinary line of furniture that just works. Comfortable, stylish, elegant, confidently irreverant. It’s Gervasoni’s Ghost collection, a semi-spooky, seams-out fog of soft seating. When you have a space containing art and artefacts worthy of attention, you can either go museum-bench rigid with the upholstered pieces, or sit back and opt consciously for seating that whispers eloquently instead of shouting. Let’s all sit comfortably to take in our surroundings and the people occuppying them, shall we, rather than poising rigidly while eyeing the nearest exit?

We love the slipcovered nonchalance of the Ghost collection, with its wrinkled ease. Relaxed, after all should be authentically relaxed, yet with good bones and proportions. This is it. These pieces are draped in a way that’s more like a summer home taken by surprise than a stuffy Miss Havisham horror. And Gervasoni’s Ghost collection is emininently practical, one might add. It’s all slipcovered, ready to wash and wear and wear and wear. No ironing necessary.

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Is it just me? Or do we have a total system crash here?

I wrote the following rather long piece start to finish without stopping, in response to two heartfelt comments on the Jakarta Post reader’s forum. In those comments, the writers were giving voice to their concerns as visitors, about Bali and the issues that this island faces.

While their comments were valid, I doubt these two writers understand the unprecedented and bizarre situation which Bali finds itself in now, being all at once many things, among them: a beloved tourism mecca; a crossroads of global and regional cultures; a development boomtown; a small province in a country beset with serious structural, economic and ideological crises, many of which are not especially salient in Bali but affect it nevertheless; and a hotbed of internally generated and internally felt conflicts that are unique to the island. All of this is Bali now.

Internal conflict can result in internal injuries, or economic and social ones.

The issues mentioned in these two readers’ comments touched on various themes often noted by visitors, like long queues on entry at the airport, bad sidewalks and garbage strewn hither and thither. I agree entirely with their comments, but felt compelled to go a bit further.

Why Bali Might Need a Total System Reboot

Bravo to both Jakarta Post readers for speaking up. I have the same concerns that they do. As well as several others. Where to begin?

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