'Seeing… As if through a Sparse Shawl Unraveling': Ritual Cloth, Commercial Canvas, or a Good Opportunity to show a Nude in Bali Between the Wars (1930-1950)"

Kaja McGowan, Department of Art History and Archeology, Cornell University

Through the painted depiction of a multi-colored ritual cloth called cepuk, this paper explores how Balinese painter and ritual specialist, Ida Bagus Made Poleng, brings past and present quite literally "face to face" through the conscious interplay between two spatial models, one based on Balinese talismanic drawings exposing a reverberating aural component, and the other grounded in the triangulated vision afforded by linear perspective. While spatial and structural analyses of paintings utilizing linear perspective may be discussed quite readily without reference to color by art historians trained in the west; this is not, however, the case for many Balinese paintings employing spatial models where color and cosmology are intimately linked. By probing the interplay of these painted threads of sound, this author will attempt to "lay down a path" in love and death between two worlds, revealing how the magical powers of colorful raw ingredients not only continue to inhere on a commercially painted canvas, but may even provide a playfully sophisticated critique of a colonial encounter seductively veiled in a musical riddle.

Kaja M. McGowan is Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art, Archaeology, and Visual Studies. She is the author of Ida Bagus Made: Art of Devotion, a volume honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the Puri Lukisan Museum in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia. Her articles include "Chasing Sita on a Global/ Local Interface" in Ramayana Revisited ed. M. Bose (Oxford University Press, 2004), "Raw Ingredients and Deposit Boxes in Balinese Sanctuaries: A Congruence of Obsessions" in What's the Use of Art? ed. M. Pitelka & J. Mrazek (University of Hawaii Press, 2007), and "Love, Death, and Shifting Patronage in Bali during the 1930s: Two Spatial Models Meet 'Face to Face' on Sacred Threads of Sound" in Asian Art in the Twenty-First Century (Clark Studies in the Visual Arts) ed. V. Desai (Yale University Press, 2007).

Her geographical areas of interest involve South and Southeast Asia with emphasis on Indonesia, particularly Java and Bali (both historically Indic in orientation) studied in relation to the subcontinent. Rather than see India and Indonesia, for example, as modes of influence between two points, her scholarly interests encourage studying the reciprocal relationships between neighboring countries in Southeast Asia. Her research explores the flow of ideas and artifacts along this highway -- architecture, bronzes, textiles, ceramics, performance traditions, and visualizations of texts like Panji Malat, the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata -- artifacts that move and those that are locally produced. This accounts for the shaping of ideas and the development of styles across vast geographical and historical distances. Her work is governed by the complex ways in which the History of Art and Visual Studies intersect with Anthropology, Material Culture, Colonial and Post-colonial Theory, Performance, Gender and Religious Studies. Having first begun her study of Balinese performing arts as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, one ongoing project has involved documenting the work of painters in Bali who experiment with depicting musical sound and the rhythmic motion of the dance in their work.

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