Art Review : Art, Life Are Equals in Indonesia Works

Browsing the vast residue of world art can give the brain claustrophobia, like a library out of shelf space. To deal with this overload, the mind simplifies treasures into categories and categories into cliches.

Um, let’s see--African art is sort of blocky, pre-Columbian tubular and squat while Oceanic leans to the spiky. Such pigeonholes have their uses but are inherently confining. That’s why exhibitions such as two new ones at UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History are so bracing. They let fresh air into the attic of perception and rearrange the old furniture.

Titled “Arc of the Ancestors” and “Gift of the Cotton Maiden,” they present venerated objects from Indonesia, a geography rarely the subject of aesthetic scrutiny, despite being the fourth most populated place on the planet and the largest of Muslim nations. Sailing off the southern coast of continental Asia, it’s an archipelago consisting of more than 13,000 islands.

They spread across the map in an upward-smiling curve. Aptly enough that curve is a leitmotif of Indonesian art. According to art history professor Jerome Feldman, the show’s curator and author of the informative catalogue, the curve turns up in everything from saddle-shaped roofs to dagger hilts. Sure enough, it does.

Aside from that, the exhibition tends to throw viewers a bit of a curve of its own. The art’s purposes are familiar enough. These 70-odd objects donated from the collection of Jerome L. Joss involve the veneration of ancestors, encouragement of fertility, celebration of harvest and the rest of the earthy and sidereal themes typical of such magical art.

It’s their form that challenges preconception. Lovingly patterned surfaces seem to combine Oriental refinement with the ferocity of objects from the Sepik River region of New Guinea. It’s as if Indonesia remembered the high cultures that flourished in Java and Sumatra in the 12th and 14th centuries, and before that the presence of Buddhist and Hindu influences, not to mention the residue left behind by such colonialist powers as Portugal, the Netherlands and Japan. When you add this historical palimpsest to the polyglot of local-dialect styles that make up this art, it’s a marvelous melange.

A decently cultivated viewer might get a mental toehold on all this by remembering the elegance of Javanese rod puppets. In fact the most spectacular work in view is a puppet, but of a very different sort. Called a Sigalegale, it was fashioned by an artist of the Toba Batak people of North Sumatra and depicts a near life-size male figure carved from wood dressed in a robe and turban-like hat. (In woollier days the head was covered in human skin or fashioned from a real skull.)

He stands atop a decorated wooden box containing the complex mechanism that runs him. He can dance, blink or even weep, all apparently unaided because the operator sits at a discreet distance.

His job is to soothe the spirits of those who died childless. He symbolizes all the substitutes people use for unborn offspring--art, pets, dolls, cars. . . . He is Pinocchio eternally promising Geppetto that some day he’ll be a real boy.

Indonesian art has a knack for this kind of archetypal imagery. A pair of carved wood male and female ancestor figures from the Nage of Flores Island look at once like infants and adults. Depicted nude, they have large round heads, simplified features and minimal emphasis on gender differences. Their artist imbued them with a combination of innocence and savagery that is both Shakespeare’s Calaban and Freud’s Id.

Textiles are generically less directly expressive than figurative objects, but anyone who appreciates the form, likes abstract art or wants to flesh out their impressions of Indonesian society shouldn’t pass up the Fowler’s companion exhibition.

Organized by the museum and assembled by curator Roy Hamilton, “Gift of the Cotton Maiden; Textiles of Flores and the Solar Islands” is the first comprehensive show ever devoted to the subject. Its 288-page catalogue is richly illustrated and redolent with revealing stories. One tells of an Indonesian group who regards the normally esteemed weaver as bearing a curse.

Generally the “Cotton Maiden” is valued as a practitioner of women’s most important work. Making sarongs and shawls is venerated as an important source of income and prestige since the items play an important role as brides’ wealth. Designs passed down the generations are so distinctive it’s possible to tell where a person comes from by the pattern of their garb. When girls are old enough to undertake weaving they dance the streets with anklets of cotton balls.

It’s surprising that such lush objects can be fashioned from humble cotton. Patterns are so finely calibrated and hues of burgundy, indigo and saffron so sonorous the textiles look heavily textured.

Taken together the exhibitions evoke a culture in some ways richer than our own. Like other peoples we have had the arrogance to call “primitive,” Indonesians manifest a mentality innocent of our myriad mental pigeonholes.

The concept of dualism is strong in the archipelago, but otherwise practical life and myth are equally alive and real. The categories we use to separate the arts from one another and denigrate them to the status of fictive entertainment seem nonexistent. They live vividly blended and equal.

* UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, to April 9, closed Monday and Tuesday (310) 825-4361.