Beyond My Back Yard

In an earlier entry I suggested that this blog would take you on a cultural tour of the enclave and  explain how things were subtly rearranged to allow for the establishment of an art forum in Borneo. This may have sounded a little strange to some of you and may have come across as an arrogant statement on my part, but if there is one thing I have learnt in the five years since I left the comfortable and care-free existence I was able to afford back home it is that the creative liberty most of us take for granted in the so called western world is far from being global. 




At a time when we are discovering that there are more and more opportunities and tools for us to take control of our careers there are still many places on this small planet of ours where artists must struggle against insurmountable odds to make themselves heard and seen let alone dream of making a living (and is this not, in the end, what we would all aspire to?). 

As an artist living in such a place I could not see myself focusing solely on my own creation - breathing-in inspiration without making some sort of effort to breathe something out that could be of value to those around me. Arrogance, again? Most probably, I won’t even attempt to deny it, but there seemed to be so much that could be done and nobody stepping up to the plate to do it... and oh how I sometimes wished [in quieter moments when I was sitting in my outdoor studio and the immensity of the jungle started to whisper things to me] that I could have returned to being the hermit I used to be and get on with my own work.

But you see I wanted this place to become a part of my life, part of my work. I wished to claim it!  How else could I account for those four years if I had remained in my studio without ever having tried to meet the artists who live here and hope to learn and be inspired by their experience and insights? We artists are builders of bridges [see previous entry]. How could I not grasp this opportunity to build one such bridge? That, I believe, would have indeed been arrogance, to have lived here for so many years, plundered at will the inspiration it could yield and return home with hundreds of paintings and mysterious tales of having lived in the enclave on the island of Borneo without ever having interacted with those who could have afforded me a deeper vision.

And so I decided very early on that I would have to seek out and engage local fellow artists despite the difficulties I knew I would have to face. I will never forget an insight a senior [western] diplomat to the enclave shared with me only days after I had landed, and a couple of others [also mostly western] nodded to in acquiescence [they can be charmingly condescending]: 



'Mr. Cruz, I’m afraid you will find this to be a very dull place. There are no other professional artists, there is not a single art gallery and cultural events are rare and confined to royal ceremonies. You might consider going to Bali, Cambodia or… '



  but I didn’t hear the rest, I was determined to discover things for myself beyond my own new back yard.



I was rewarded for my stubbornness shortly before the New Year. First by the discovery (absolutely buy chance as it was never promoted) of a magnificent exhibition hall at the Arts & Handicraft Centre of the Brunei National Museum and secondly by the announcement of an exhibition of contemporary Bruneian Art to select the representatives to the ASEAN Art Awards to be held in Bali in 2002.
 But then an extra unforeseen difficulty arose out of nowhere, I was white (the orang putih, not to be trusted and a once most cherished trophy amongst the shrunken heads displayed in the vicinity of villages) and I was an infidel (even less to be trusted, a source of contamination and not to be seen with). I visited the show repeatedly but not once did any of the artists I encountered dare speak to me beyond a polite initial greeting. I knew then that I would have to be cautious, utterly sincere and, especially, uncommonly patient and crafty if I wished to break the ice.

Before going on I must add that the intention of the art forum is by no means to disseminate western models of thought, aesthetics or process in a part of the world that is rich enough in tradition and culture to circumvent the morass into which much of western artistic production has fallen (and this is an even greater challenge because, as you will gather from my next entries, the fascination with the west – especially it’s garbage – is tremendous and voracious in appetite). The idea of the forum which was officially launched in January 2004 will, I hope, turn out to be the beginning of something new… at least in the enclave.







A Bridge to Utopia

The purpose of this blog is to describe to you the events that led to the creation of an art forum in the far reaches of Borneo and the resulting increase in artistic activity that has since ensued. Before we go on, however, I would like to share with you a few of the ideas that have occupied my mind for some years now and inevitably found their way into the fundamental structure of the forum and the spirit it wishes to promote.





Consider if you will the following:



Art is nourishment


Art is to be FELT


Art is a religious experience

 



Art is nourishment. It is more than mere food for the soul, however. It is an essential ingredient in the healthy diet of the machine that carries us through life. Art transmits impressions. Our human machine can go on for weeks without solid nutrients, it might last days without liquids, it will hold out for minutes without air but if, for any reason, it were to be deprived of impressions it would not survive beyond seconds.

Impressions abound, they are present all around us - good or bad, impressions nonetheless. Artists absorb these raw impressions and after solving for themselves the questions they give rise to in our Being assimilate them and transform them into more refined impressions we generally refer to as ART. In such a way - transmitting information and a certain type of emotional knowledge - artists contribute to society by enriching it’s culture and the quality of the lives of those who participate in it.

Fortunately we find ourselves in times when public, corporate and private institutions have become increasingly aware of the impact these impressions can have on the productivity and wellbeing of the individual and have started to invest in this ‘software’ of the human machine. However, it is still curious to note that we should find it natural to equip our laptops with the latest gadgetry yet still hesitate when the time comes to upgrade our very own machine.



The question then arises: How do we upgrade the machine. How might we best capture and understand these finer impressions? 



We often worry too much about understanding a work of art [critics confuse us, galleries can sometimes be daunting even for the most weathered artist, the list of things that condition us is endless and very subjective]. Perhaps the reason for this is because we approach it with the wrong apparatus. We seek to find meaning with our minds when the message can only be captured by the heart. And by heart I mean the combined operation of the sensory and emotional apparatus of our human machine. First and foremost a work of art has to be FELT.

Emotion is the necessary filter through which impressions are processed in order to be capable of having any significant impact on the mind. Once absorbed they lead us to new levels of understanding thanks to new connections they help establish between pockets of scattered intellectual knowledge we accumulate and sometimes forget over the years. True understanding is knowledge rooted in deep personal experience.



This, then, leads us to my third point. Namely that Art is indeed – inescapably – a religious exercise and experience.

However, I prefer to use the word freed from the customary discriminating labels we tend to attach to it. Religio is a Latin word that suggests the re-linking of something that has been severed. Art provides a link between the microcosm and the macrocosm; between what we have chosen to see and what we do not yet see; between what we know and what we may still come to know; between what we are and what we can become. Should we venture to travel across these bridges that Art provides, guided by heightened emotion and awareness, our thoughts will become charged with a new kind of energy that will eventually lead to a better understanding of ourselves and others and towards a platform of deeper communication through which men and women might be able to look beyond their specific differences and grasp the essence of one another's being.





Utopia?

Perhaps, but what is Art if not a bridge to utopia...



With these and a few other unorthodox thoughts in mind I set myself the task [utopian at the outset] of, how shall I put it, rearranging things in a country where in spite of immense riches and a general state of well-being artistic activity was at a standstill and where there were no commercial outlets for local artists to promote their work and assume themselves wholeheartedly as such - due in great measure to social and religious conditioning. 

From Gardens Where We Feel Secure

…Is a hauntingly beautiful set of musical interludes by Virginia Astley I was introduced to by a friend whom I would have never known to enjoy such athmospherics. I was never one to judge a book by it’s cover but Luís Augusto Cid, or alferes Augusto as he was known to his friends - a young man who had been in the famous Portuguese Commando regiment and whom we all suspected of having joined the ranks of a foreign-legion type outfit and later found murdered in the streets of Algiers – caught me off-guard with that one. You can never be too sure where and how inspiration will find you.

Faced with the lethargy and the void that I felt around me in those early days in Brunei I stuck to the garden, tending to the trees and flowers if something took longer to dry or whenever I felt the need to distance myself from what I was working on to take a fresh look before moving on. It was not procrastination. After Berlin, where we had lived for one year before coming here and where it had not been possible for me to paint, I had no inclination towards procrastination. There were too many things I wanted to get off my chest and the way I usually solve such things is through painting.

Berlin – East Berlin – was still a dark place when we passed through, and Lichtenberg, where our meagre budget found us a flat while waiting to find out where we would be sent next, was still years away from getting the face-lift Mitte was undergoing or even becoming trendy. Weitlingstrasse, we discovered, was only a few blocks away - the infamous street where the Neo-Nazi movement had an HQ at number 122 and which was barricaded in the late 90’s to prevent the ‘Aussländer’ from getting back in.

Shaved heads in bomber-jackets and paratrooper boots patrolled the streets with their pitt-bull terriers and rotweilers, and I swear that I could feel the baseball bats tucked underneath their jackets. In the first few weeks after we arrived a little girl was abducted on her way home from school and another was mauled to death while playing in the park. That set the tone for me. Angst breathed down my neck. I could handle being bumped off my course in the street or being told ‘Verpiss Dich du Arschloch’, all I had to do was keep my head low and walk-on hoping for the better – this was no place for exalted egos – but I wasn’t about to let that spill onto my daughters.

There are worse predicaments in life, I'm not complaining. We had a home, the children were at school and my wife had a job. But I found it difficult to find the inner space and Time to even think of painting*. For a year I forgot that I was a painter. I didn’t feel like one. Not even when I visited the galleries on my walks around Friedrichstrasse and Oranienburgerstrasse or when I went in to see what was happening in Tacheles was I able to voice out loud that I was an artist – because I was unable to make myself paint I just couldn’t say it. This was what scared me most, not the surrounding conditions, but this unexpected feeling of impotence and of loss... 

In hindsight [I couldn’t quite see it while I was painting them] this may explain why the first set of paintings to emerge from my studio in Borneo were darker than usual, and anyone watching me go at them would be excused for not understanding where they were coming from or how they related to the seemingly peaceful surroundings of my garden studio. It was only when I had exorcized the demons and completed the series that they started to make sense and that, understanding where they belonged, I found titles for them.

The first of those paintings is titled ‘Berlin X [the sound of a neighbour shot dead – somewhere I heard but could not see]’. For many months before we left for Borneo this one particular image left a deep imprint in my mind: a bottle with a flower and a note (a new letter and a new flower each week) placed on the pavement in front of the house next-door where it all happened.

Beauty jumps at you from the most unexpected corners.

Berlin was a very creative place... all I needed was the time and the space to connect all the pieces. 

___________________________________________________

*At this time, too, other worries in other forms reached me from Portugal.

Heaven is a Place...

...a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.

I had heard it repeatedly said that nothing happened here and that it would be difficult to get anything afoot or sell my work. I could feel the void - I had no doubts about that - but I had difficulty accepting the notion that nothing could be done, that there was no Art, no artists or living cultural dimension to the place. I insisted in believing that maybe they just weren’t visible, or that the people telling me such tales simply didn’t have an appetite for these kind of things and therefore hadn’t looked in the right places, or for the right things.

I had never really given much thought to the effect absurd amounts of money can have on a society as a whole – I had never been this close to absurd amounts of money. Here, in the land of unexpected treasures, there are reminders of the absurdity of the amounts of money at hand at every street corner. Here, too, one more of my naïve preconceptions was brushed aside: absurd amounts of money do not necessarily promote a happy and more productive society with a greater focus on culture and the arts.

Money alone doesn’t do the trick, it merely lulls you to sleep. If there is no deep-rooted motivation for the appreciation of aesthetics or the joy of creation and what it can bring about, money only goes two ways – it either slips between your fingers or finds ways to multiply itself even further, but it will not, in and of itself, motivate higher culture. This was the biggest and most difficult paradox to accept – that I really had reached a cultural black-hole: a beautiful place which I had believed to be culturally rich but where, in spite of all its riches, nothing ever happened. It felt very much like Heaven in the Talking Heads song.

My first steps away from the studio in an attempt to assess the situation and devise a strategy, or at least a workable course of action, took me to the local framers. My framers have often been key allies and Michael Lim at Alley Framemakers in Kiulap was one of the most enthusiastic and supporting I ever came across. Most of the work one could see being taken to Alley’s were prints and posters brought back from weekend trips to London or NY, the odd photograph, mostly landscape, and an abundance of portraits of Royal-Family members waiting to be hung in households and shops throughout the land. There was very little in the way of what one might call Art - a few, very few, watercolours and the odd sketch or etching surrounded by members of the Royal family in various combinations, nothing more.

It was at the framers that I came face to face with the facts. I learnt that there was indeed no commercial art gallery in town and that the Brunei Arts Society was long since inactive, if not altogether extinct. There was a museum down by the river with a gallery but very little happened there aside from a biennial selection exhibition for the ASEAN Art Awards for which a handful of Bruneian artists showed up for the prize-money and the opportunity to travel beyond the enclave. But most of the time these circumstantial artists were happy to hang on to their government jobs at the museum or as teachers in local schools - the perks were too good to pass on and no one in their right mind could afford or would even contemplate living off their art, there simply wasn’t a market or any other sort of incentive. The combined Malay-Moslem mindset and the security of a government job do away with the desire to create art for the sake of art – of wishing to fly the trapeze without a safety net. Money stifles the creative spark and if you ever do get too close to absurd amounts, as I did here, you must discipline yourself not to march to the beat of its drum.

The information gathered was a starting point, not the brightest of perspectives, but information I could chew on nonetheless. In the meantime, and after a luckless first visit to the museum where I found very little happening and where the artists were nowhere to be found there was little else I could do except concentrate on my work.

Day in and day out I sat outside trying to capture the rain, waiting for inspiration to trickle down.

A Piece of the Puzzle

It is all very well that I should tell you about all this, but in your minds you probably still haven’t found the answers to the whys and the hows you’ve been asking yourself. Why is he here in the first place? How did he get here? A piece of the puzzle is missing.

In the 90’s, between ourselves, my wife and I juggled six jobs as life sped onwards in fast-forward, our babies growing quickly into not-so-little girls and the dreams we had for them decidedly not agreeing with the bills that had to be paid. My wife got the harder end of the deal, she worked half-days at a local school, half-days as a tourist rep and somehow managed to fit in an extra half-day working for Expo 98 during the six months that it went on. I was more fortunate - I translated books for a few Lisbon publishers and ran a gallery to help with the bills and still managed to keep things going on the painting front, but these were all things I enjoyed doing.

At some point, most fortuitously, in the midst of our comings and goings my wife came upon a small advertisement in the corner of a magazine publicizing openings for government jobs in Germany. We discussed the possibility, analysed things from all the angles we could think of and she even sent in her details, but we failed to act on it, we let time go by and allowed the mechanics of our sunny existence in Portugal to go on. It was only a few years later when the ministry followed-up on my wife’s initial application, asking if she was still interested in taking the admission’s test, that we felt that it would be unwise not to give it a try even if we still weren’t sure precisely what the job and the move entailed. Having established that the thrills of adventure outweighed the possible disadvantages we took the gamble and set out for Berlin where my wife joined the diplomatic corps being posted one year later in the Sultanate of Brunei.

There is some irony in this, a sense, too, of the inevitability of certain things – the impossibility of escaping particular patterns in one’s life. I grew up in diplomatic circles and studied to become one myself only to drop-out in my last year in Law-School to become an artist – a move that I felt liberated me from a course that, having been of my own choosing, felt increasingly not to be truly mine [especially in post-revolutionary Portugal and a rapidly shrinking world when diplomacy lost much of its mystique in favour of what I call ‘diplocracy’ in which true diplomats were subtly made redundant, replaced by technocrats and the wonders of IT communication].

Art gave me wings and a feeling, arrogant perhaps, of having taken the reigns of my life back into my own hands. I believed that I had managed to escape from the conveyor-belt on which I had been trapped and moved along for so many years as if in sleep, and to finally awaken and DO – to reshape and redirect my life through new conscious action towards a different ME. But for how long can you keep up conscious action? How long before that too finds its way back into the mechanic drone of everydayness that inevitably wraps us up in the end?

In the first years after leaving that other life behind I was at times assailed by doubt, not the hindering kind, but there were thoughts in my mind, conjectures of what it might have been like to live it out, and what kind of person I would have become. How can you ever be sure that moving away from what you are isn’t actually running straight into the pitfall fate has laid down for you all along – and that staying on course, for once, would have been victory. Had I really taken the reigns of my life into my hands or had I given up on a promising career and succumbed – brought down once more by the downward pull of human nature – to a condition of dilettante mediocrity?

To this day I take some comfort in the belief that the Life-energy and joy I get out of creating Art and being exposed to the public’s response are indicators that the move was not completely misguided. Not an easy move, mind you, never an easy move, but one that makes me feel much more alive than when I contemplate myself in the parallel world I still find myself revisiting in my mind every now and then. Life on this side of the tracks still feels very much like an adventure I don’t wish to know the end to. And then there are all the ideas, knowledge and understanding of things I came across and gained and that I know full-well I would never have had the time or disposition to investigate or live as profoundly as I did had I decided to stay on course.

And so, finding myself so close again to aspects of that other life through my wife’s new job, I can’t help but feel fate’s mockery over my childish attempts to free myself from its claws.

Before the Rain

A short ten-minutes-drive away from the city-centre and its icons of recent glory lies hidden a different Brunei, one still unscathed by the concrete and the glitter. Tucked away between the Markucing hills and the Kota Batu range the Subok valley could easily be 500 hundred years away. But for a narrow strip of tar that wiggles from one end of the valley to the other for approximately 10 km, along which a few colourful kampongs are strewn, the vegetation remains dense on both slopes and many of the houses are in the long-house style so typical of these parts. Surprisingly, Subok has escaped the construction boom of the 80’s and 90’s which has littered most of the land stretching north from the city to the coast with an abundance of sophisticated condominiums and luxury row-houses, and has therefore managed to preserve much of its raw tropical charm.

Belimbing is the malay word for star, and Kampong Belimbing is our village. It is here that my wife and I have chosen to live with our two daughters, intentionally away from expatriate prime locations and closer to nature and the rhythm of the locals – time measured by the call of the muezzin to prayer and by meals that bring the family together. Away from the main road and accessed by a dirt track and a rickety bridge over the Subok, a deceitfully peaceful brook at this point, our landlord explains how the house was built according to the principles of Feng Shui and blessed by the local Christian priest and as he hands over the keys we are pleased to hear that this is the wind-catchment area, one of those few places in The Land Below The Wind where a breeze sometimes blows.

You can’t see them anymore, all physical trace of their existence has been removed or engulfed by the jungle that creeps-up on everything it is allowed to, but I’ll let you know that it was here in Subok that the Japanese set-up their prisoner camps in Brunei. There is no rearranging of energy, no blessing or sufficient calls to prayer capable of dispelling the heaviness that breathes down upon you when the wind subsides and the spirits of what went on around these parts are set free. [But it’s too soon to tell of these things, I still didn’t know about them at this stage. In the early days I just kept away from the heat and made the best of the moments that preceded and followed the tropical downpours.]

I set up my studio under the car-port, a shaded space, open on two sides. From a wicker chair placed in one corner I could feel the Brunei river flowing to the south beyond the jagged ridge of Kota Batu, and to the west and north I was surrounded by the jungle that rolled down the Markucing hills into the garden. It was a magical place, so overwhelming that it took time adjusting to. For months on end all I could do was sit there listening to the rustling of the leaves, the sounds of insects and birds, waiting quietly and motionless in the hope that some monkey or wilder creature wandered closer to my field of vision – in the very early hours of the morning the bolder monkeys usually bathed in the pool. In our post-box there lived a baby monitor lizard, and I would have to remain particularly still if I wanted to catch the blue and gold-feathered bird that occasionally flew out of the thicket, across the valley and back, stopping at various trees along it's way to steal the eggs of smaller birds from their nests.

When inspiration gets overwhelming it leaves me close to stunned, unable to pass things on to the canvas. At these times I prefer to enjoy the ride and brood about what stirs up inside me, digesting it and writing notes about possible directions in a notebook I always carry around with me. In those first few months I applied myself to getting the studio ready for work, conditioning the ground with rattan carpets bought at the local market, setting up easels and extra shading for the paints and brushes I would be leaving outside throughout the next four years. The heat and the humidity were constant and the paintings too were left outside, far from the warping effects of air-conditioning. I focused on finding my bearings in these new surroundings and deciding what I was meant to do from among the many ideas that assailed me. One thing I did establish clearly from the start: I did not wish my Borneo work to revolve around the obvious theme of Magellan - the rain and the heat had much more interesting tales to tell.

Distant Memories

Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital of the Abode of Peace, does not lie on the coast but a few miles upriver along the Sungai Brunei. It is only recently that it has come ashore. Well into the nineteen-sixties the capital rested on stilts in the Kampong Ayer, the water-village, an expanse of houses made of wood and corrugated iron that stretches out of sight on both sides of the river. One of the few dwellings on terra-firma, apart from those belonging to the Chinese, was the late Sultan’s palace, a humble blue house only the most curious of tourists makes plans to visit and invariably misses.

You would be a fool to dismiss as a shantytown what you see upon arriving at the jetty that leads into the labyrinth of catwalks and bridges that give access to the kampong. They may look similar to the ones one comes across in the Philippines or in Vietnam, but upon closer inspection it becomes clear that their owners are much more affluent. Their exterior aspect belies what is concealed within and it is only when you walk across the catwalks or venture deeper on the speedboats that ferry people to and from town that you realise that this is a complete city with schools and hospitals and police stations and everything you can imagine in each sector.

We are too quick to judge the comforts of others by the standards of our discomfort. People live here because they wish nothing more than to continue to live the way their ancestors have lived since before they joined in recorded western history. For even before the first recorded encounter with people from the west in 1521 there was news of great splendour in the kingdom of Poni as the Chinese called it and the display Pigafetta describes in his chronicle is not something one readily puts up over night.

Before the Oil and natural-gas boom, Brunei’s camphor and sandalwood were highly prized and helped to establish it as a major trading post in South East Asia. Records of the Sung Dynasty which ruled in China from the 10th to the 13th century tell of the significant trade and cultural links between the two empires. Trading agreements were signed, ambassadors exchanged, and there is little doubt that the art and craft of Brunei was influenced by its close ties with China. In the late 14th early 15th centuries Brunei reached its apogee, occupying the whole of Borneo and parts of the Philippines as far away as Manila. In those times culture flourished and the 5th Sultan of Brunei, passionate for music and poetry, would have the royal orchestra accompany him on his boat whenever he visited his territories.

In the Royal Regalia Museum it is possible to wander amongst replicas of what I imagined to be the same Perahus that sailed downriver to meet Magellan’s fleet under it’s new commander, Sebastian del Cano - Ferdinand Magellan himself having been killed in Cebu. The boats are there, decorated with gold leaf and flying peacock feathers and one has only to imagine them laden with gifts, musicians and court dignitaries come to greet the visitors and take them ashore where they were then escorted on silk-covered elephants to the palace in Kota Batu, the ancient capital enclosed behind fortifications and guarded by 62 canons of cast-iron and bronze, it’s interior draped in silks and brocade, as told by the fleet’s chronicler Antonio Pigafetta.

To find myself here almost 500 years later stirs up emotions, a certain patriotic pride - the fleet may have been Spanish but Magellan, even if he didn’t make it here, was Portuguese and the spirit of his achievement is not blemished by the actions that took place four days later and started to spell the decline of this once great Empire. The distinction between the achievements of the Portuguese and the actions of the Spanish comes across quite clearly in my contacts with the local people - I feel it is like a door that is being left open to me.