Adrian Vickers

This beautifully photographed book of Balinese Painting and Sculpture is one of the most stunning collections of its type in the world.

Collections usually grow out of interests, ones that come to border on obsession. Collecting art from Bali often begins with a love of the island itself, but can take different directions depending on the experiences we have there. The Krzysztof Musial Collection is one clearly based on encounters with the island and its culture, and from that basis the collector has accumulated works that are both new and old, representative of the known history of Balinese art, but also of the most recent developments in the style of Bali.

The older styles of art were focused around areas of power, palaces and temples. Art was consumed by the competing Balinese kings, who strove to make their palaces the most beautiful and ornate on the island. Likewise these many kings, queens, lords and ladies dressed in the most lavish textiles, from imported Indian cloths to local home-spun products, many of which were woven in the palaces. Kings and priests were meant to be practiced in the arts themselves, and did their own carving and painting, but they also cultivated and supported great artists and craftsmen so that they would become their dependents. Most of the sculptors and painters were men, while women produced beautiful textiles and elaborate offerings. Since all Balinese communities are so closely tied to religious practice, temples are the focus of Balinese spiritual life, and the most important art should be there, for the gods to appreciate.… (mehr)

As a pure history, this isn't great – the first couple of chapters, about early Balinese kingdoms and Dutch colonisation, seemed to get bogged down too often in lists of names, dates and assassinations, with little ear for anecdotal value. Maps would have helped. However, things start looking up when Vickers gets to the modern era and is able to concentrate more directly on his overall thesis, which has to do with how Bali's image – variously as savage hinterland, untouched paradise, erotic idyll or tourist trap – has been created and propagated by the island's visitors and locals.

As with many colonies, the Dutch East Indies (as Indonesia then was) drew the attention of all kinds of travelling explorer-scholars in the grand nineteenth-century tradition. Despite the many evils of colonialism, I have always had a soft spot for these figures and Bali's examples are no exception. From the pioneering philologist Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk, who grew up in Surabaya and wandered around Bali wearing pyjamas and carrying a gigantic cudgel, to the archaeologist Pieter van Stein Callenfels, who went everywhere with a skull called Ahmad, the island had an extensive roster of eccentric orientalists.

One of the most interesting, and influential, was a medical doctor called Julius Jacobs, whom Vickers refers to as ‘the man who discovered the Balinese female breast’. Jacobs wrote detailed, prurient and scholarly examinations of Balinese sexual culture, painting the island as a place of erotic license, and lacing his papers with Latin, French and German terms for a veneer of respectability. His description of what he called Lesbische liefde, for instance, included a helpful account of Balinese scissoring, or ‘(metjèngtjèng djoeoek), literally “to hit cymbals against each other without making a sound”.’ Also, with a wink: ‘Yams and bananas are much used by the Balinese girls as delicacies, but not only for eating.’

This image was to have lasting endurance, and KLM marketed Bali explicitly as ‘the island of bare breasts’, with postcards and posters to match (a more decorous version of which is used on the book's cover). This iconography in turn would be picked up by the artists who gathered in Bali, especially after the 1930s set that coalesced around the German painter Walter Spies. (Though ironically, Spies and his friends were more interested in Balinese boys than girls, and most of them, Spies included, ended up in jail following a crackdown from Dutch Calvinists.)

Towards the end of the twentieth century, Bali went, as Vickers puts it, ‘from being one of the most densely populated islands on earth to one of the most densely toured islands’. First the hippies, then the surfers, and now the package tourists have changed the island quite dramatically. The original tourist plan drawn up by Bali's governors in the early 70s was quite sensible – forbidding any hotel from being higher than two-thirds the height of a palm tree, or within a hundred meters of a beach – but most of these restrictions were ignored or overturned during the 1990s, when the Suharto regime had a lot of financial stakes in Balinese developments.

In the original 1989 version of this book, Vickers is quite sanguine about the effect of tourism on Bali, making the obvious point that ‘Balinese culture is strong because of tourism, not despite it’. The 2012 edition, though, following the escalation of package tours as well as the Bali bombings of 2002 and 2005, takes a more cynical tone.

For tourists coming to Bali the impressions of Balinese culture became quite limited, and the emphasis shifted to staying in self-contained accommodation. The old problems of tourism in a poor country have remained: when tourists step outside their hotel areas they are assailed by heavy traffic and harassed by touts: “You want massage, you want special young girl massage, you want boy massage, just looking my shop, come just look, transport” etc. This kind of harassment has made resorts a welcome refuge from the street life of the island. When tourists are taken to see Balinese “art” it is the low grade products of the artshops, and their guides are only interested in taking them to places where major commissions are on offer. If tourists see beautiful landscapes the experience only comes after sitting through traffic jams, and if they see Balinese performances it is usually the tired old lègong and “welcome dance” of hotels and restaurants. There is little of the direct experience had by the hippies and surfies of an earlier era.

This was my experience too. It is a hard country in which to travel ‘responsibly’, that is, without contributing to a rather destructive kind of large-scale tourism. Nevertheless, Balinese culture and history does reward the effort required to unearth it, and this book seems a pretty good grounding in trying to understand where it came from and where it's going.… (mehr)

Although Indonesia has the fourth largest population in the world, its history is still relatively unfamiliar and understudied. Guided by the life and writings of the country’s most famous author, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Adrian Vickers takes the reader on a journey across the social and political landscape of twentieth-century Indonesia in this innovative and timely account. He begins by explaining the country’s origins under the Dutch in the early part of that century, the subsequent anti-colonial struggle and revolution which led to independence in 1949. Thereafter the spotlight is on the 1950s, a crucial period in the formation of Indonesia as a new nation, which was followed by the Sukarno years, and the anti-communist massacres of the 1960s when General Suharto took over as president. The concluding chapters chart the fall of Suharto’s New Order after thirty two years in power, and the subsequent political and religious turmoil which culminated in the Bali bombings in 2002. Drawing on insights from literature, art and anthropology, Adrian Vickers portrays a complex and resilient people borne out of a troubled past.

Vickers's Modern Indonesia is no one-thing-after-the-other textbook. Innovatively framed around the writings of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and invoking the arresting insights of Indonesian novelists and playwrights, it provides a stimulating, fresh understanding of Indonesia's modern, often tragic, trajectory. This is not a book written over the shoulders of nationalist politicians and military officers, but one that evokes the senses, flavours, turmoils and smells of everyday life in that irresistably complicated country.… (mehr)