now blogging from the Asian Art Museum's website

Woohoo! We've got the blog figured out for the Asian Art Museum. So if you were following the Bali Art Blog you may also be interested in following that one. It has a wider focus, not just on Balinese art, but on art from all over Asia. Right now lots of posts are around the coming exhibition "Lords of the Samurai" which is an exhibition of Japanese art from the Eisei-Bunko Museum in Tokyo.

As we get closer to the opening of the Bali exhibition, in February 2011, you will see more posts about that project, including posts from other folks, such as the curator, the registrars, and marketing folks.

Please link to the Asian Art Museum's blog so we can get more people engaged. The posts have been pretty interesting.

NEH grant preparations & Interesting article on barong and rangda

I have been swept into other projects at the museum--Afghanistan programs, budget planning, Bhutan and Samurai exhibition planning--so my Bali posts have suffered. But over the past few weeks the curator, Natasha, our grant-writer, Dino, and I have been working on a grant proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities to provide lead funding for the Bali exhibition. It has been fun to think again about our plans for this exhibition, which will be the first of its kind in the US, and the first of its kind at the Asian, in the sense that the performing and ephemeral arts will play major roles unlike ever before.

I enjoyed the attached article on how the Balinese distinguish between art for sacred purposes and art for commerce using the Barong and Rangda as examples. Just as the Barong and Rangda represent the polars of good and evil that are in constant flux and realignment (rituals are enacted to maintain a healthy balance), the two uses for sacred arts--ritual and commerce--may also be seen as a contiuum that the Balinese expertly keep in balance.
http://www.baliaround.com/barong-and-rangda-balinese-two-opposites/

I was fortunate to see two Barongs enlivened, one in a temple procession and one danced on stage by professionally trained dancers (the latter in the picture above). Both experiences are etched in my memory and make me want to see the Barong again.

Dinner and Gamelan FAQs

A Lovely Dinner
Tonight I was very fortunate to be included in a dinner hosted by the Consul General of Indonesia in San Francisco, Mr. Yudhistiranto Sungadi and his wife Mrs. Nenny Yudhistiranto. The dinner was to give a send-off to the members of the museum's Jade Circle who are going to Bali on a 10-day study tour led by the museum's Chief Curator, Forrest McGill. The Jade Circle raises hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to support the museum in its educational mission. They are an amazing group of individuals from all different fields and backgrounds. Many have lived or do business in Asia, some collect art, some are docents, some are board members, all are avid supporters of the museum and give their time and money to support our many outreach programs. The Consul General and his wife treated us to a lively and warm evening, and a delicious Indonesian meal in their gorgeous 1905 Pacific Heights home that was featured in a few San Francisco movies, including Sudden Fear (1952) starring Joan Crawford and Jack Palance. The Yudhistiranto's couldn't have been nicer to our group.

Gamelan FAQs
On a totally different note, I have been reading other blogs about Bali and came across one (http://blog.baliwww.com/arts-culture/1459/) that mentioned an interesting website created by a group in Washington, DC, Gamelan Mitra Kusuma, providing frequently asked questions about gamelan music. I found it helpful, myself knowing very little about gamelan other than the most basic information. The page provides some answers to the following questions that gamelan musicians often hear from their friends and families:

1. Gamelan? What the heck's that deal?
2. What instrument do you play? 3. Where is Bali?
4. How do you learn how to play?
5. Is there musical notation?
6. Are you all Indonesian?

From what I understand, gamelan is the musical accompaniment to virtually every Balinese dance, with very few exceptions, such as the Kecak dance, which is accompanied by chanting (see historical photo at left from Cornell University.

This particular dance has an interesting history, which is partly told in the Wikipedia article about Kecak. More on this topic later.....