Aboriginal Art – Bali Style

As I ride my bike around my home town Ubud, in Bali, I am struck by many similarities with Alice Springs, not least of which is the people.  These things I have witnessed for many years.  But lately I am struck by a very different realisation.  Two weeks ago I was riding north to Kintamani – a town on the edge of a vast volcanic crater – when I witnessed young men hollowing branches with cloth-covered crow-bars.

Last week as I went with my children to a friend’s house to play, I saw rows of didgeridoos, dot and x-ray painted, lined up along the road; at another store a few hundred metres up, the more traditional, ‘authentic’ looking, unpainted didj polished to a high gleam.

As I walk down my street I see beautifully articulated, optically alive paintings of flowers, mandala-like rounds.  All dots.  Impeccably placed, row after careful row making its way to the work’s edge.  I could be in Alice Springs, I realise, well, the airport anyway, with its extraordinarily graceful works from St Teresa, not a dot misplaced.

What do I feel about this, I wonder as I ride along.  At first I feel it in my spine, observe it straighten up, the way I tilt my pelvis back and take a more solid seat.  I am, I realise, readying myself for battle.  I have taken my warrior stance, self firmly planted, spine long, strength coming from my centre.

I look at the paintings, think about the way of the world, how where I live, in Penestanan, just above the Campuhan Ridge in Ubud, people have painted for generations, how shop after shop displays paintings made by brothers, fathers, uncles and sons.

It reminds me of the Todd Mall in Alice Springs, ‘gallery’ after gallery, all promising the next big thing.  Many of the Penestanan painters are influenced by the ‘30s Dutch painter and musician Walter Spies whose house has now become the famous Tjampuan Hotel.   Now, however, the influences on the paintings are coming from another place as well, the place I spent the last decade, Aboriginal Australia.

They share so much, the Balinese and Central mob.  An inimitable sense of community and its central place in our lives; the ability to laugh and love when there is little money left to eat; a deep reverence for the laws of spirit and culture; the ability to sit and to be.

And these people also share a deep understanding of commerce and the laws of trade; have spent centuries trading across cultures.  They know how to take advantage of the vagaries of the market, in this case the art market. These ever-ready entrepreneurs, fixers of things, have no problem moving with the times, so why do I want things to remain fixed?

So as I watch my spine straighten I sit a little longer with what I see.   I begin to understand that this ‘appropriation’ is in fact another of life’s cycles; that the precious and untouchable labels that I had, unbeknownst to me, stuck across all Aboriginal art forms was in fact a colonisation like that I had accused many faceless buyers from interstate and overseas of as they rushed out to buy the next big thing.

I had, I suppose, read owning aboriginal art  – except the collections of myself and my friends of course! – as another act of colonisation: the ‘other’ strung up and hung up on walls, owned: and who needs to worry about understanding then?

Regardless of my interpretations though, was it this ‘need to own’ that so many Aboriginal people read years ago, that saw so many take to painting: not only because they were fulfilling some cultural, even a sacred spiritual obligation; but because they understood they had something that others wanted and trade too was in their cells?

Many of my Alice friends have heard me talk about the bubble bursting.  My hypothesis went something along the lines that Indigenous art was about the only industry allowed to remote Aboriginal people- in that it could be learnt on site without heavy resourcing and done by all – ‘literate’ and ‘illiterate’, young and old, initiated and un, infirm and healthy.  Materials were always accessible and hey look, the governments, both state and federal, seemed wiling to put money in to enhance productivity.

It always worried me though, because when art becomes industry yet it is pretended it is not so, it becomes extraordinarily susceptible to the market.  Whether the rich white folk from thousands upon thousands of kilometres away will continue to be entranced with work they find difficult to explain, work whose very foreigness once claimed for itself a certain shimmer factor: overnight the shimmer can turn to dust.   Markets crumble. It happens.

And here, in the streets of Penestanan and beyond, where large ‘abstrakt’ canvasses are sold for less than $50, churned out as though copied on some large printing press, and “aboriginal-esque’ instruments burst like bamboo through the soil into life, where dots become the new line in a long list of lines to try, nothing changes.  Trade goes on.  That 300,000 rupiah ($50) will feed his family of 6 for a week and the ‘bule’, the foreigner whose skin colour runs depending on the time of day and season, happily wanders off with his own ‘next big thing’.

I ride my bike, leave it to the gods to decide.