Anthony Forge in Bali: The Making of a Museum Collection

Abstract

This article analyzes the formation of the Forge Collection of Balinese Art at the Australian Museum, Sydney, in the context of Anthony Forge's career as a visual anthropologist. His collection was made at the time of a paradigm change in attitudes toward “traditional” art, in which some scholars were discarding the old paradigms of authenticity and where much-used categories such as “primitive” and “tribal” art were being challenged by the acknowledgment that works placed in that category had long histories of articulation and that their present practitioners were as contemporary as any working in Western contexts. The article is presented in a loosely chronological manner, tracing the role that collecting played in Forge's academic life. Arguing that this collection is his main contribution to the study of Balinese art, it focuses on his fieldwork in Bali to explain how and why the museum collection came into being.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article is based on material from my doctoral thesis, titled Collecting Balinese Art: The Forge Collection of Balinese Paintings at the Australian Museum in Sydney. I wish to acknowledge the contribution of Adrian Vickers, Peter Worsley, Stan Florek, as well as the family members, friends and colleagues of the late Anthony Forge.

Notes

The Museum bought over 200 prints from Forge in 1960–61, now housed in the Photograph Study Collection of the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

These works are now held in Mandeville Special Collections, Geisel Library, University of California at San Diego (Mss. 0411). Sheila Korn, Forge's doctoral student at the LSE, later used the paintings and documentation in an experiment to identify the formal properties of Abelam painting, without recourse to field experience or to the ethnographic data that Forge had gathered from artists about the designs [Korn 1978]. This semiotic exercise revealed that Forge still entertained the possibility that formal analysis might produce a scheme to understand how art communicated. He later compared the results of Korn's independent analysis with his own ethnographic data [Forge 1990], stating that “meanings are usually highly ambiguous as in the sense of the best poetry—they allude to a range of meanings that support and reinforce each other, thus intensifying their impact on the fully socialised beholder” [1990: 30]. Although the analysis was incomplete, Forge concluded the experiment by explaining that although Korn uncovered the workings of the Abelam system, she could not go any further and discover what meanings were conveyed without investigating the culture of the artists.

Reviews of the resulting conference publication suggest that it had a major impact on the disciplines of art history and anthropology [Edwards 1976].

Other anthropologists working in New Guinea have also taken up the problem of verbal communication in field research and indigenous resistance to aesthetic explication; O'Hanlon [1992] and Losche [2001].

I refer to Forge's application to the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (November 10, 1972). It was made some months after his arrival in Bali with the encouragement of two anthropologists, Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger (both then employed by the Foundation). Forge's proposal, “Symbolic Systems in the Maintenance of Hierarchy,” outlined his plan to identify a symbolic and conceptual system in visual representations, arguing that such systems could only be meaningfully investigated in terms of the society in which they occur. Although he had already settled on Kamasan as his field site, he wrote that after consulting with colleagues “Bali seems the most likely area to provide the continuing use of art in vital social and ritual contexts... a prerequisite of the sort of field investigation I wish to carry out.” Forge's Kamasan project was one of the first projects funded by the Foundation since it began making grants in 1971. He got initial fieldwork funding from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in the United Kingdom. I thank Karen Colvard of the Harry F. Guggenheim Foundation for providing a copy of the research proposal.

On September 30, 1965 an attempted purge in Jakarta overturned the government of President Sukarno and brought Suharto to power. This followed a decade of political mobilization around the issue of land reform amid high expectations, at least amongst non-elite and impoverished sectors of the population, that economic inequality would be redressed through the redistribution of land holdings. From December 1965 mass killings swept Bali, ostensibly to obliterate supporters of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI). Members of the military, partisan groups and killing squads murdered between half and one million Indonesians; roughly one-tenth of these killings took place in Bali, a figure disproportionate to the population of the island [Vickers 1998: 775].

Forge was referring to the collection of Donald Friend.

In Klungkung the cost of rice was 75 rupiah a kilo and meat 300 rupiah a kilo [Field Diary, 8 March 1973]. The price of rice per kilo quoted here is consistent with the average price of 79 rupiah per kilo for 1973 given by Warren [1993: 328]. During 1971–78 the official exchange rate was maintained at 415 rupiah to the US dollar [Poffenberger and Zurbuchen 1980].

Cremations are the most important rites in the religious life of the Balinese and entail weeks or months of preparations, especially if the family is wealthy or of high caste [Connor 1979: 105]. (For a brief ethnographic account of the Balinese, see McCauley [1993].) The 17-min. film was unfinished at the time of Forge's death but completed by Patsy Asch in 1993. It featured a voiceover by Forge explaining the sequence of events he recorded. He had also observed the construction of the cremation tower (bade) used in the film; it was made by Mangku Putu Cedet from Satria, Klungkung, a greatly sought-after expert in this craft.

Pers. comm., Adrian Vickers.

The entire collection was a Kamasan painting donated in 1964 [E070532]. However, the museum did have about 50 Balinese objects. The first-ever Balinese object acquired by the Australian Museum was probably a betel-nut box some time before 1882, lost when fire destroyed almost the entire ethnographic collection at the Sydney International Exposition Building in 1882. During the 1930s the museum got several objects from the Bali-based foreigners Theo Meier and Mrs. T. Pattinson.

Zoe Wakelin-King [interview, Sydney, July 2009].

A 2nd edition of the catalog was being planned for an overseas tour of the Forge Collection to Europe and America. During 1978 Forge wrote to a number of museums offering the exhibition; in 1980 the Australian Gallery Directors Council (AGDC) took over formal arrangements for a tour. Despite overseas interest the tour did not eventuate, consequently the catalog was not revised.

The painting on wood that Forge referred to was collected by W.O.J. Nieuwenkamp for the National Ethnographic Museum in Leiden; it is described by Brinkgreve [2010: 229–231].

Forge paid 300,000 rupiah for three paintings [E076401-403], 65,000 each for two [E076404-405] and 90,000 for one [E076406]. Of the other new paintings he bought in Kamasan two by Pan Putera cost 35,000 rupiah [E076407] and 30,000 rupiah [E076408]. Those by Ni Wayan Rumiasih were 30,000 rupiah each [E076409 and E076410]. That by Ni Nyoman Normi, the wife of Nyoman Mandra, was only 10,000 rupiah [E076411], while a painting by a student of Nyoman Mandra was 14,000 rupiah [E076412]. The exchange rate in 1979 was 625 rupiah to the US dollar [Warren 1993: 329].

Western Desert acrylic painting. He reveals considerable ambivalence about his “foray into the purchase of paintings” [2002: 75], and his role as a broker in helping artists to sell their work. Yet he describes his involvement in local art exchanges as an unplanned yet inevitable consequence of working in a field where research subjects were producing art.

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Notes on contributors

Siobhan Campbell

Siobhan Campbell recently completed her Ph.D. thesis at the University of Sydney, and is an affiliated Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies in Leiden, The Netherlands.