Is the world’s most
gorgeous culture becoming its most grotesque?
Has the stampede towards
modernism driven classicism into reverse drive?
Is natural, beautiful
Bali being buried under a tsunami of bad taste and environmental vandalism? Is
Balinese Art and Culture becoming an Art shop culture?
“Look, Honey, someone
blew up the art shop” one critic commented about Bali’s Garuda Wishnu Kencana Hindu
Theme Park.
Many art historians and
anthropologists are blaming tourism for the loss of the lovely, but a more
detailed look reveals that the slide towards the gaudy — what the
Balinese call mocé (or ‘kitsch’
taste) — has been going on since the Soeharto Era when the nation’s taste
slumped, and thousands of handsome Dutch colonial bungalows were given
international school, neo-fascist facelifts. During the 1970s the celebration of theme park culture
— such as Mrs. Soeharto’s Taman Mini Indonesia in Jakarta — seemed
to take over from the concerns for real culture. Cultured modernists such as
theatrical impresario Guruh Soekarno and batik maestro Iwan Tirta struggled for
want of government support as did museums, and other cultural institutions.
It is hard for the
Balinese government to now start lamenting the lack of interest in the classical
by the tourism sector when successive national governments have done little to
promote cultural conservation. It is the village communities who have taken
conservation of ceremonies and classical Hindu Balinese life-style seriously
— there has been a
marked village-based renaissance in the past 20 years, with more and more
youngsters involved in temple affairs.
This surge in interest in
ceremonial activity has also, paradoxically, ushered in an era of architectural
revisionism, all too evident as one drives around the island today.
The island’s classical
architecture is fast disappearing : red brick temples of exquisite beauty are
regularly replaced by formulaic ‘masterpieces’ fashioned out of black andesite
stone often with gold paint trim, that seem to emulate cheesy Chinese temples.
This follows a nation-wide trend in restless restoration that has seen the
demise of ten thousand elegant Moorish mosques in Java and Lombok as well.
The Balinese have always
been trendoid — fashion waves can be traced in classical Balinese
architecture over the past 1000 years — but only in the past ten years has the taste spiralled down,
following the example of successive national trends for souped-up celebrity
culture and commercial mall taste.
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| Mocé Temple Fashion |
’Polos’ (plain), once worshipped in Balinese culture with an almost
Amish zeal, has now been replaced by a love for the loud.
Today’s must have
architectural accessory is an overly ornate door in the Javanese “Kudus” style
which is applied, like a postage stamp, to the facade of suburban bungalows.
Are the Balinese just
following national trends?
In Java, the cradle of
classical Hindu culture and traditional arts, the national dress, the sarung-kebaya, has all but disappeared from the street —
replaced by more Islam-appropriate attire. With the demise of the sarung-kebaya, appreciation of
traditional batik is now confined to the palace courts. Even the sexy sinden singers on Indonesian
television’s most popular program — the outrageously ribald Opera Van
Java — have, over the past year, deserted the slender sarung-kebaya for upholstered costumes
that are a travesty of traditional dress, all in the name of fashion (in this
case, courtier Raden Sirait’s ‘warrior woman’ fashion).
Balinese beauty warriors,
famous throughout history for their restraint and elegance, have adopted these
trends and turned them into capital crimes against fashion with particular
Hindu-Balinese zeal. Denpasar weddings are now horror shows of excessive
make-up and appliqué; brides can barely move for the beads and baubles, the
grooms look like circus performers.
Of course in the middle
of this plague of bad taste there’s a lot of Bali high style : the beautiful classic
kites of Sanur beach flying majestically over the McVillas of Mertasari modernism,
for example; and the grand old temple guardians at the temple festivals still
being celebrated with great verve across the land.
“Jazz up the Barong
Dance” screamed a government tourism agency recently —, “to make it more
attractive”.
Please don’t!
Miss World and world
leaders may now be taken to see the cabaret-Bali style shows in Nusa Dua
instead of the real thing (deemed too shocking and too Hindu) but please leave
something of the classical to inspire future generations.
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| Mocé “BALI STYLE” Architecture |
Australian-born
writer and designer Made Wijaya is a cultural observer and author of many books
on Balinese architecture and culture.
