Donald
Friend and Balinese Art
Adrian
Vickers
What
is involved in a meeting between someone imbued with the sensibilities
and history of European art and an Asian artistic tradition? The cultural
meeting between Donald Friend and Balinese art goes beyond the aesthetics
of Donald Friend’s work in Bali, and beyond the accompanying decadence
of his lifestyle. It was a meeting that attempted to transcend the restrictions
of colonial background, but one which was only partially successful in
so doing.
Donald
Friend belongs in a story of the romance of foreign artists in Bali, and
this story obscures our view of his interactions with Balinese art. This
is a story written by those who see themselves as belonging to the same
expatriate genealogy, but in more recent times it has also been embellished
by glorification of expatriate artists in collections made by Indonesian
patrons. The role which this myth of Bali has assigned Donald Friend is
that of the empathetic artist, but that role ignores the daily practices
of self-absorption necessary to produce works like the Friend diaries.
His accumulation of objects and paintings was mainly curiosity-driven
and unsystematic, motivated by the desire to create a lifestyle absorbed
in art. There is a marked disjunction between these motivations and the
subsequent commodification of ‘lifestyle’ in the interests of tourist
corporations and art investors. This commodification relies on appropriating
Balinese art and culture for other ends. Was Donald Friend also appropriating
Balinese art?
Before discussing
the role of Balinese art in Donald Friend’s eyes then, it is important
to unwrap parts of the myth and to look at what has become of the Friend
legacy. The elements of the story of Donald Friend in Bali have been well
told, both by Donald himself in his diaries and publications, and in the
catalogues accompanying the retrospective of 1990.
[1] A key moment in the story was the designing by Geoffrey Bawa
of the Donald Friend house, and Wija Wawo Runtu’s Tanjung Sari hotel and
Batu Jimbar estate. Friend, Wawo Runtu and Bawa combined three unique
aesthetics: Friend’s ‘tropical’ interests and his experiences in Northern
Australia, Africa, the Mediterranean and Sri Lanka; Wawo Runtu’s appreciation
of artistic heritages from all over the Indonesian archipelago and his
links with antique dealers and collectors; and Bawa’s Sri Lankan influences
in architecture and landscape gardening. The three, guided in particular
by what Wawo Runtu’s friend and neighbour Jimmy Pandy had already done
in Sanur [2] , produced a whole experience
of luxurious good taste, harmonising gardens, building and objects. Friend
and Wawo Runtu encouraged innovative Balinese traditional architects and
sculptors, such as Wayan Cemul, to produce works which added Balinese
depth to this aesthetic, and likewise supported local artists such as
Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai. The living aspect of this art fitted in with the
picture of active involvement with the local community and merging of
interests to create a complete experience. A hollow version of this experience
has been turned into a commercial prospect by the tourist industry.
From the
late 1980s, the Indonesian government encouraged the concept of ‘elite
tourism’ and the building of large and expensive resorts. The majority
of these resorts have become links in international hotel chains. In order
to put a ‘Balinese’ stamp on these resorts the Friend-Wawo Runtu-Bawa
style was copied, directly and indirectly. Along the way a number of creative
designers learnt from the style and made something unique of their own.
Made Wijaya is the most prominent of these and, in the best of the resorts
such as the Four Seasons, we see a blending of his creativity and the
need to provide a taste of luxury during a brief stay on the island. I
feel uneasy, however, that this style is now identified as ‘the Balinese
style’, or that an author writing about ‘contemporary Balinese gardens’
should choose his examples from the grounds of hotels and the mansions
of expatriates, rather than the houses of Balinese.
[3] What started as an earnest appreciation of elements of Balinese
art and culture has ended in corporate appropriation of Bali into a generic
‘tropical style’.
The corporate
‘tropical style’ is a long way from the eccentric processes by which Donald
Friend brought together the art that went into his Balinese lifestyle.
As well as bringing practising artists into his house, Friend, drawing
on Wawo Runtu’s extensive networks of collectors and dealers in Indonesian
antiquities, produced an unsystematic assemblage of objects, in the best
tradition of the European avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s. Objects
and paintings were not chosen necessarily as exemplars of a style for
a museum-like collection, but in much quirkier terms of their ‘charm’—qualities
of beauty, but also of emotive force, raw energy, eroticism, humour, or
for being bizarre.
The
Friend collection was never unified, just as it is now dispersed. The
main interests were Javanese terracottas, ancient Javanese and Balinese
bronzes, wooden sculptures, textiles and other antiquities such as krises,
and a large number of Balinese paintings. At the time of collecting, superb
paintings could be bought for a few dollars and dealers from all over
Bali and Java came to the Sanur area to bring new pieces to Donald. Some
of these objects are of such quality that they have ended up, or perhaps
one day will end up, in major collections. One example is the splendid
ancient Javanese bronzes acquired by the National Gallery of Australia
when it was setting up the Asian collection. Other objects remain, appropriately,
with family and friends, while others are ‘whereabouts unknown’. Many
of the bronzes and apparent antiquities are copies, fakes, since ‘authenticity’
seems never to have been a criterion for the Friend collection. These
dispersed fragments of a lifestyle speak of certain obsessions: the phallic,
deers and deer horns, vibrant and earthy reds and browns.
Balinese
art was primitive art for Donald Friend. The problem is that the connotations
of the term have been transformed by the critiques of recent decades.
Picasso’s passion for African sculpture and the Surrealists’ interest
in ‘Oceanic’ art were inspired by that art’s ‘supreme ability to unlock
our hearts’. [4] These
same ‘exuberant’ qualities of ‘the marvellous’, in André Breton’s words,
‘with all that it presupposes in the way of surprise, of pageantry, of
glittering visions of something other than that which we can know’ [5] , resonate with Friend’s sense of joie de vivre.
When Breton speaks of the interest in the primitive as one of ‘osmosis’
[6] in art, he could well have been writing of the saturation of
having Balinese art fill every space of the Donald Friend house.
Up
until the 1970s, anthropologists still wrote of ‘the primitive’ and ‘the
savage mind’, and for at least a decade longer philosophers had no problem
with these categories. In popular culture, the term ‘stone age’ still
crops up from time to time, but those who were supposed to be ‘primitive’
have found the designation insulting. The rejection of such terms in anthropology
largely came from the recognition of their colonial origins, that is the
mode of thought which has upheld one line of ‘development’ as the natural
form of progress for all humanity.
What
is intriguing about Donald Friend is that he experienced a range of circumstances
we might call colonial, from the race relations of northern New South
Wales and Queensland to African colonialism. He rejected the racist underpinnings
of that colonialism: for example, he crossed the colour lines in Queensland
and was horrified particularly by the way the French treated their colonial
subjects in Eastern Africa. But in order to ask whether he could come
to terms with Balinese art we have to ask whether his preconceptions about
that art really transcended the limitations of his background and the
assumptions in western art about ‘the primitive’.
In
his amazing repertoire of stories, Donald the great raconteur had one
that sheds some light on this question—although I should add the caveat
that this is as I remember the story through a thick haze of red wine,
so some of the details may not be as originally told (in 1981). He had
once been commissioned by the Indonesian government to do a work to be
hung in some official place or other in Jakarta. So he depicted his house—or
as he told it, he depicted himself looking out over his garden. The painting
was rejected, the problem being that he showed his gardeners and other
staff below him, and the Indonesian officials did not like the idea of
a white man shown above Indonesians. Although Donald did not put it in
those terms, they probably found this a little too colonial for comfort,
what with being only 20 years from independence, and only about ten years
from Sukarno’s nationalisation of Dutch assets. Donald genuinely could
not see what the fuss was about, and I think many would sympathise and
say, in 1990s terms, that this was all a bit too ‘politically correct.’
But for many Indonesians the idea of constantly being ‘looked down upon’
by the West has been a little hard to stomach.
So here we
have two irreconcilable views of the world which return us to the question
of whether the meeting between Donald Friend and Balinese art could have
been a meeting of equals. There are many stories of Donald’s amazing generosity,
many Balinese can recount how he helped them out, gave them the gift which
changed their life, or simply showed great kindness. For others he was
still another rich white man, a category apart, whose status also allowed
for a rumoured, less-public sexual exploitation. These two elements of
his character cannot be reconciled, but this is not the point in terms
of his art. The question is more: would he have regarded Balinese art
as being on an equal footing with western art? I think not, and certainly
I am supported here by Donald’s view of modern Balinese art as he saw
it circa 1970. [7]
So far this
sounds like another one of those narratives of expatriate glamour that
diminishes places like Bali. The story of a declining artistic scene given
a new lease of life by a great western artist has been retold in a number
of contexts, and Andrew Sayers has documented versions of this also for
nineteenth-century Aboriginal art. [8] In the case of Bali, the German expressionist
artist Walter Spies and his friend and colleague the Dutch artist Rudolf
Bonnet have usually been ascribed the roles of western creators of modern
Balinese art in the 1930s. Their story is based on an underlying assumption
that the West is creative, the rest imitates. Although some of us have
been working hard to overturn that myth, at present it survives in a watered-down
form, with a number of postwar artists, notably Arie Smit, also being
assigned starring roles. The story has been absorbed into the valuing
of expatriate art, and so in the 1990s fuelled a price boom that began
from the collections of a number of upwardly mobile Balinese. These people,
notably Suteja Neka, Rudana and Agung Rai, had their imitators amongst
the nouveau riche of Jakarta, leading to the usual over-inflation
of prices and the production of a lot of second-rate works and forgeries.
In a colder light most of the expatriate artists who have lived on Bali
are very second-rate, were not famous before they came to Bali and, if
they did not have a romantic myth attached to their work, would never
have been heard of.
Donald Friend
was an exception in this tradition. He was already famous, and in many
ways he helped make Bali better known to Australians—the opposite of the
path of the other expatriate artists who used Bali to try to make themselves
known. [9] Despite this
difference, the name ‘Donald Friend’ has now been absorbed into the more
general myth and his paintings have entered the list of desirable items
for aspiring Indonesian collectors. While there have been some attempts
to credit him with influence over Balinese artists, most commentators
have sensibly noted only that he was a patron who stood to one side of
the Balinese tradition. The only artist who had sustained contact with
him, Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai, does not show any stylistic influences. Ida
Bagus Rai’s prewar works are continuous in style with the works he did
after the 1960s, when Donald become his close friend and freed him from
commercial needs to paint by providing a steady income and assistance
with fixing his house. [10]
The Friend studio style of working allegedly produced a number of
Balinese artists who directly copied Donald’s style to produce what we
might call ‘fakes’. I have heard it rumoured that, with a mocking wink
at posterity, Donald himself signed some of these works, much in the way
he enjoyed collecting the recent Javanese and Balinese copies of ancient
bronzes. The imitation Friends left no real stylistic legacy in the mainstreams
of Balinese painting.
What then
was the role of Balinese art in relation to Donald Friend’s work? It was
a source of inspiration and thus also an indulgence, an absorption of
the other into the self as means of distilling creative energy. The paintings
collected were mainly older works, in various forms of what is called
the ‘traditional’ style, or rather styles. The majority of the paintings
that filled—even made up—the walls of the Batu Jimbar house are from the
village of Kamasan, the home of classic Balinese painting. [11] Nevertheless Donald Friend also collected
a large number of ‘traditional’ paintings from other areas. Sadly, and
I think this also reflects the fact that these were collected out of a
search for artistic connections rather than any sense of the kind of appreciation
that builds art histories, none are documented as to provenance (although
a lot of valuable incidental information died with the collector). The
major attempt to document these non-Kamasan traditional works, by Tom
Cooper, has had to start late, after the death of many of those who might
have been able to fill the many gaps in such studies.
[12]
The works
themselves are windows to an extraordinary vitality. The senses of composition,
colour and energy that come from the best of them have the ‘rawness’ which
one seeks in ‘the primitive’ but with the sophistication of over 1000
years of history behind it. Putting them next to Friend’s work you can
see the ‘kindred spirit’ qualities of Balinese painting, the humour—frequently
pornographic—and the experiments with composition that may have also intrigued
Friend. Most obviously, Donald was a linear artist, and this was a linear
style. Despite Barry Pearce’s attempts to reclaim the painterly aspects
of Friend’s work in his retrospective catalogue of 1990 [13] , the sense of line, the basis
of his art in drawing, makes Friend unusual in modernist Australian traditions
of painting, but ‘at home’ in Balinese art.
‘Influence’,
‘meeting’, ‘immersion’, ‘osmosis’, how does one cross from one style to
another? If Friend had no profound influence on Balinese painting, Pearce
argues that Balinese painting had no profound influence on Friend in the
sense that the features of his style were all present in pre-Balinese
works from Sri Lanka. [14]
Pearce notes that ‘the majority of Balinese cultural motifs in his
work are objects observed; fabrics, bronzes, stone and wood carvings,
puppets and so on. In other words they are depicted from the outside rather
than the inside.’ [15]
Bali provided Donald Friend with experience, that is, it and its arts
enriched his subject matter. There is one point that disturbs Pearce’s
notion of the ‘Euro-centred detachment’ in Donald Friend’s approach to
Bali. Bruce Carpenter, documenting Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai’s association
with Friend, observes how Friend’s studio approach involved ‘allowing
Rai to paint large areas of his canvases with waves and other Balinese
motifs’. [16] Carpenter sees direct influence
on Friend’s paintings of Sanur Beach from Ida Bagus Rai’s earlier depictions
of the same subject. [17]
Whatever the veracity of Carpenter’s claims, they tend more to depict
Donald Friend as another western appropriator rather than someone who
is interested in Balinese art in and for itself.
I do not
think ultimately that this question can be settled. We can subject various
Friend works to intense stylistic scrutiny, but that is not hard evidence;
it is a matter of judgement. We can look at various Friend works against
Balinese paintings, producing some inconclusive links. Probably the clearest
example is the possibly Balinese hand in depictions of waves, fish or
figures in The Lagoon c.1975, and a possible Ubud original source
being used as the basis for The Drama, Bali of c.1968. In neither
case is there a dilution of Friend’s individual talents. The Balinese
work in the first does not diminish the beauty of the central figure which
could not possibly be by any one but Donald Friend. In the second case
the composition, and particularly the sense of perspective, could not
come from a Balinese artist.
[18]
There
is no denying that Donald Friend was a great egotist, or that his encounters
with Balinese art took place in circumstances of extreme contradiction.
It is those contradictions that push the value of that art beyond any
ethnical or moral values, into a kind of creative decadence which has
a life of its own. That life force fed off Balinese art, bent it to its
own purposes, but without breaking it, in a way that has allowed values
of Balinese art to emerge as autonomous powers. It would ultimately be
an act of bad faith to Donald Friend’s art to ignore Balinese art, to
treat it as merely a backdrop to his exotic life.
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