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soon she had a romance,
found a "man" and love too, and they married. After
two years, Murni had to quit her job, with her husband in tow:
the work was too demanding for her health. The couple moved to
Ubud, where Murni had found a new job. But her husband, seeing
that Murni hadn't borne him a child, wanted to take a second wife.
She refused and applied for a divorce: "The first time a
Balinese woman had asked for a divorce in court", she says
with pride. meanwhile, the place where Murni had found a job,
Pengosekan, was promising. There was a school of painting
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an offshoot of the Ubud style,
with the old master I Mokoh, famous for his naive village sceneries.
And there was a "man", her boss, a realist and sometimes
"daring" talian painter by the name of Mondo. From
Mokoh, Murni picked up the Pengosekan style and from Mondo,
beside support and opening up towards the world beyond Bali,
more importantly, acceptance of her person personality as it
was .
He became, until today "my
future husband". Murni, who stopped being a "servarit"
and learned how to take birds and other patterned subjects after
the mPengosekan manner, was losing patience. There were hundreds
of painters making similar paintings. She found a way The birds
she painted changed function, and then shape. And there she
was, in 1992, opening herself to the discovery of her imaginary
world and her woman's self.
By 1995, there was already word in Bali that a girl from Payangan
was making strange paintings. Meanwhile a gallery had been opened
in Ubud to promote woman artists. Finally Murni and the owner
of this "Seniwati Gallery", Mary North more, met and
the rest was history. She is now one of the most promising woman
painters in Indonesia. How to locate Murni in a cultural perspective?
To take the "body", in particular the "female
body" as a topic of discourse is not a common occurrence
within the Indonesian tradition. lbu Kartini, the mother of
Indonesian feminism, died in 1904 as the second wife of a Javanese
nobleman.She was then dreaming of education for women, not of
strange body parts on the loose or masturbatory habits. If she
comes to know that Murni is the new symbol of feminine liberation,
she will probably wake
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up from her grave
and write a "letter' she is famous for her letters to a Dutch
woman- about the necessity to preserve morals. Because in Indonesian
society as a whole, long influenced by Semitic religious values,
only men are culturally entitled to desire. Not women Their body
is either "taken" by men in lawful marriage and turned
into a reproduction factory, or it is the source of temptation
and sin. That women may claim control over themselves and their
body, down to their sexual life, is just gross and
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outthought of anyway.
If everyone finds it normal that a former president may collect
3000 paintings of nude women (Gatra Magazine), it is considered
improper that a poor, uneducated woman like Murni talks about
her body in imaginative ways.
Thus her arrival on Indonesia's cultural scene has come as a shock,
welcome only by a small enlightened section of the populace. Are
there Western influences? Beyond Mondo's encouragement, very little.
Western woman figures who discourse about their body such as Anais
Nin, Simone de Beauvoir and their contemporary epigones are heir
in a reversed way to the old sexual repression of yore. They affirm
their liberty, but in such a way that the "directeur de conscience"
(confessor) which Michel Foucault talks about in "History
of Sexuality" is never far away: they "suffer",
go to the psychoanalyst or render sex "obligatory" and
political. So if they make art of it, it is politized too. Otherwise
they end up unhappy! So is there something specifically Balinese
in Murni's discourse about her body? Indirectly, as we shall see
below. In a "real" Balinese environment like in pre
Islamic favanese tradition, it is common to talk and make art
about sex. Instead of being repressed, sex is given a room of
its own in religious symbolism. In philosophy there is the dialectics
of "purusa-pradana" (lingam and yoni), while in the
arts one may tell the stories of sexual torture incurred by the
dead souls in "the field of sorrow" while waiting for
another incarnation. In other words, the discourse about sex is
used as a pillar of the value system. It is accepted as long as
it fulfills a religious function. This is where Murni's position
is peculiar.
She grew up "wildly" outside the normal framework of
the Balinese. An exile and poor of the poorest, she wasn't shaped
by the banjar nor by the normal social and aesthetic values of
Balinese society. Different frorn most other Balinese artists,
her cultural memory is not that of the wayang world of myth and
wonder. She never memorized the repetitive patterns that make
up the basic framework of most Balinese painting. On the other
hand, she is not modern in the usual sense of the word. She has
never studied the analytical techniques of the academy of art
nor has she been trained to "question" in the modern
sense of the word. In the end her creativity occurs spontaneously
inspite of her "lack of education" and formal norms
-social, "moral" and visual. Her marginality has made
her free and non-repressed. And when she had the opporturvity
to exercise this freedorn in a creative way -in Pengosekan- she
became the Murni we now know: wild, imaginative and naive in an
odd surreal way. This is why, well-thinking readers, boring moralizers
and other low-thinking defendants of the soul of nations, calm
down and rest your anger. Murni is no moral danger. Her work won't
take husbands to the back alleys of shame. They are simply moments
of joy and candid liberty.
jean Couteau
Photos by Saut Situmorang
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