Bali Experience

Perhaps more than any other commentary on Bali, the famous words of the Mexican artist and anthropologist Miguel Covarrubias, that “everyone in Bali seems to be an artist,” have succeeded in drawing legions of eager visitors to the island’s mythical shores. Even today, fifty years after the publication of Island of Bali, Covarrubias’s monumental work on Balinese culture, the idea that Bali offers the ultimate setting for aesthetic expression has become a highlight of the established image of the island and an intrinsic part of its enchanting allure. Searching for a land where the arts are an indispensable part of human experience and where artists are respected members of society, a long line of wandering Westerners have come to Bali to paint and to patronize, the draw and to deal, to sculpt and to study the incredible richness of the Balinese arts.

Yet Covarrubias was not entirely right about Bali. Not everyone on the island is an artist. In modern Bali, as in the modern West, there are priests and computer programmers, travel agents and tour guides, high school teachers and government bureaucrats who have never wielded a paint brush or a sculpting tool in their lives. In fact, in the Balinese language there is no word for “art” or “artist.” There are picture painters and mask makers and stone sculptors and wood carvers, but they do not form a special category of people separate from the rest of society. What does remain true of Covarrubias’s characterization is that on Bali, like no place else on earth, a concern with the beauty, passion and creativity that marks Bali’s aesthetic activities is an essential aspect of everyday life. The same man who spends afternoons painting a complex array of colorful figures on a canvas or sculpting elaborate designs out of soft volcanic stone may spend mornings tending his rice fields or searching the ocean for fish. Artistic activities are mundane ones in that they are tightly woven into the fabric of daily work rhythms, making the humblest activity one of grace and beauty. When a Balinese builds a house, plants a garden of tropical flowers, dresses for a wedding or a temple ceremony, makes a kite for a child or even lays out a colorful assortment of wares for sale in a market stall, it is no exaggeration to say that they do it with unparalleled grace and style. Even the rice fields of Bali are gorgeous green sculptures cut out of the living earth in patterns to delight the eye as well as feed the body.

But part of what makes the arts so vibrantly alive and so stunningly spectacular to behold in Bali is that art is also an inseparable part of religion. The Balinese gods love beauty, and their worshippers spare no expense or effort in providing a sensuous feast for the divine. Balinese temples are famous for their intricate stone carvings and statuary, complex works that take highly skilled craftsmen months to create by hand, offering testimony to both human talents and divine inspiration. The ritual offerings made to thank the gods for their blessings - from the simplest combinations of flowers, fruits and rice placed daily in the shrines of houses to the elaborate towers constructed of colored rice dough figurines, fragrant tropical blossoms and exotic fruits presented to the deities at temple festivals - display similar attention to aesthetics, with shades, shapes and decorative touches chosen as much for their beauty and harmonious appearance as for their religious significance. And even the arts which might seem to have no relation to the world of the spirit were, in fact, developed out of the desire to please the gods. The spectacular dances and dramas that have made Bali world famous and which required the artistic contributions not only of dancers and musicians but of designers and cloth weavers to create the spectacular costumes, gold and silver workers to shape the brilliant decorations, and carvers to shape the fantastic faces of the masks used in wayang topeng dramas, began as sacred performances to welcome the gods down to earth at temple festivals. And the skills of scores of talented craftsmen, including builders, sculptors and painters, are needed to construct necessary ritual objects, including the spectacular cremation towers used as part of the ceremonies to send the soul on its journey to the afterlife and eventual reincarnation.

It is also this embeddedness of the arts in religious ceremonies and community celebrations that gives Balinese aesthetic creations their characteristic similarity to each other. In Bali, where an ethic of individualism has yet to take hold, the highest praise one can give to an artist is to copy him. Thus in Bali one sees whole villages producing the same kinds of paintings, carvings or jewelry designs, although there are acknowledged masters of their crafts who are renowned for their special talents who will then teach others their methods. For Westerners brought up with copyright laws and an insistence that creativity must express something unique about the personality of the artist, the Balinese penchant for using similar motifs and styles over and over again may seem confusing. But for the Balinese, it makes perfect sense. Where art is not separable from life and where artists work together as a way of serving the gods and the community, the arts are fundamentally social activities, drawing on shared bodies of knowledge and techniques and expressing shared hopes and visions of the world.

Balinese art is also special in that it is constantly transforming itself to incorporate new ideas and accommodate social changes. Much of this artistic openness can be attributed to the fact that there are few permanent materials used in the Balinese arts. Gorgeous creations made as gifts to honor the gods are burnt up in cremation fires or placed in front of shrines where they quickly rot or serve as a meal for wandering dogs and chickens. Carved wood is attacked by termites, painted canvas or cloth falls prey to the high tropical humidity, and even stone carvings are made out of soft volcanic rock that is worn down by weather in a matter of a few dozen years. Having to continually create art anew to fulfill their cultural demand for beauty, the Balinese have become quite willing to experiment with reworking and remodelling previous styles to adapt to contemporary conditions.

In fact, when tourists talk about searching out the “traditional” or “authentic” arts of Bali, they often overlook the fact that in Bali there never has been one fixed and stable way of creating art. Over the past thousand years, Bali has seen a steady stream of visitors from all the corners of the world, and has combined these foreign influences with its own local talent to create art forms that are always changing and always hybrid. Traders from India, Polynesia and the Arab Peninsula left their mark on the Balinese arts. The Chinese, especially, had a great influence on the island’s aesthetics and ritual, introducing the Balinese to the lion figure, which remains visible in the famous Barong dance, and the design-stamped coins Balinese still use to make religious offerings. Balinese arts underwent a renaissance in the 14th and 15th centuries when migrants from the Javanese kingdom of Majapahit, fleeing the rise of Islam on Java, brought their own artistic traditions with them to Bali. Under this Javanese influence, the kingdoms of Bali blossomed like never before, and artists, dancers and craftsmen were brought to the courts and offered royal patronage to produce works of beauty that glorified the gods and the kings. New styles were devised and new techniques perfected in a continuous imaginative process of creation. Twentieth century tourism thus encountered not fixed art forms but aesthetic genres that were in constant creative flux. And the Balinese, with their characteristic love of innovation, have made the most of the opportunities of tourism as well. Working with Western artists, they have learned new techniques and explored new styles, producing a wider range of creations than ever before. And tourism has opened vast new markets for the Balinese arts, enabling many painters, carvers and craftsmen to devote themselves full time to their vocations. Of course, tourism has also brought a commercialization of the arts, with quick profit seekers turning out careless work for ignorant tourists. But as visitors to Bali become more informed about the Balinese arts and the Balinese themselves become educated about their own rich cultural heritage, tourism has the potential to spark another creative renaissance on the island of the arts, assuring a prominent place for Balinese art on the new global map for the millennium.