I’m not ashamed. Of anything, really, but certainly not of being an art slut. So much of our motivation to travel is to see what clever people in different places can do with their thumbs. We love us some beautiful nature, and I’ll never turn down a waterfall if offered (hit me up if you have one available), but other than food, art is what gets us up in the morning and keeps us on the road.

I’m using a pretty broad definition of art in this context, covering everything from fine art to handicrafts to ancient structures. All of that stuff UNESCO crams under the rubric of Tangible Cultural Heritage. And even the performing arts UNESCO considers Intangible Cultural Heritage. Close to our entire purpose in visiting other places is to see how those cultures express ideas about beauty, truth, and history.

I’ve already written about crafts and performance in Java, so for the purposes of this post I’m narrowing my definition of art to museums and galleries. But as you’ll see, that leaves a pretty wide range of expression on the table.

ArtJog

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than smart. Our stay in Bali coincided with their annual arts festival, Pesta Kesenian Bali. That same luck of the calendar delivered us to Yogyakarta during their annual arts festival, ArtJog. Staged at the Jogja National Museum and lasting five weeks, each year’s festival is curated around a theme. This year’s theme is Motif: Amalan, and is incomprehensible even by the standards of ArtSpeak™.

To be fair, this morsel was translated from Indonesian (by ArtJog, by the way – I didn’t just run the original through Google Translate), but I really don’t think that’s the problem.

Thankfully, comprehending this year’s motif wasn’t necessary to appreciating the work that their rubric prompted. I’m pretty sure there was work on display that pre-existed, but the vast majority of the work was created for the show. This is a prestigious exhibition, and artists step up to be included.

The entrance to the museum drops you right into it, with a massive piece called Secret of Eden. Tree roots grow out of the ceiling and spotlights cast eerie shadows on the walls. You walk through the door and enter another, alien world. It’s a brilliant way to bring you into the exhibition.

This gives you a real feeling for the overall space.

Once past Secret of Eden, the rest of ArtJog is more traditional arts festival fare: paintings, sculpture, ceramics, kinetic art, multimedia pieces… But the range of expression and the quality of the work was impressive. We actually came back for a second visit, rather than racing through. There was a lot to see.

One of our favorite pieces was called Rupa tan Matra, which roughly translates to Unmeasurable Work, referring to the labor women put into the home. To us, it was the Cotton Kitchen, every item made completely of cotton. We were allowed to enter the room and get up close. The vision and the craftsmanship were perfectly aligned.

Here are some highlights from the rest of the show. We’ll warm you up with some traditional media.

This one needs its own explanation. There were about 8-10 of these in a white room. They all just looked like blurs, but after staring, and some strategic squinting, the underlying images came into soft focus. But they didn’t have any definition until I saw them through the camera lens, which picked up contrasts the human eye couldn’t make out. I always think of cameras as capturing what we see, but it’s clear cameras see differently than we do. This photo is what the camera saw, not what I saw.

And we’ll close out with the installations and oddities.

Sonobudoyo Cultural Museum

We’re always interested in what the kids are up to, but it’s hard to understand the modern context without going back to the source. The new work riffs on traditions, so it’s important to see both sides. The Sonobudoyo’s focus on Indonesia’s rich cultural heritage is the perfect counterpoint to ArtJog’s commitment to the moment.

While we’d seen many of the more modern exhibits, like the masks and puppets, in other contexts, seeing the ancient work, going all the way back to the Neolithic era, was wonderful.

The closest the curators could get to dating the Neolithic pieces was “1st Millennium,” which is pretty loose. You’d hope they could narrow it down a little tighter than a thousand-year window, but this stuff is pretty fucking old, no matter where it falls on that spectrum.

There was also a nice collection of the expected puppets and masks.

We’ll close out our visit to the Sonobudoyo with a random collection of Other Shit.

Wahanarata Royal Carriage Museum

This was a very strange place, and Dorothy and Nef had very different responses to it than I did. They thought it was a museum devoted to a particular slice of vehicular history, and I thought it was a monument to oppression, and couldn’t figure out why Indonesians tolerated its presence. Not that far apart, really.

Admittedly, there were some sharp wheels on display, all from roughly 1900, plus or minus. They were all royal carriages, and they were almost all Dutch, which is the part I struggled with. The Dutch permitted Indonesian royalty to exist only to the extent that they were agreeable puppets. It was easier for the Dutch to stand behind the throne than in front of it, with the Indonesian royal families serving as a wafer-thin fig leaf both concealing and legitimizing Holland’s brutal rule.

As part of this arrangement, the Dutch provided the royal families with carriages, toys intended to make them feel important. Modern. European. In the same way that Western dress infiltrated Indonesian society under Dutch rule. The condescension of the Dutch comes through loud and clear, although I’m less inclined to indict the Indonesians for complicity. Life during wartime…

All of which would have been fine if the carriages had been displayed with any shred of this history attached. They’re not simply artifacts of transportation history, they have meaning and intention. The signage was neutrally informative when it could have provided depth and context to the displays. It seemed like a curiously deliberate omission.

Contrast that with Bali’s Bajra Sandhi Monument in Denpasar, which featured historical vignettes, by way of charming dioramas, of key events in Bali’s history, with plenty of space given over to Dutch fuckery. If you walked into the Wahanarata with no knowledge of Indonesia’s history the displays would leave you with the distinct impression that the Dutch were kindly, generous carriage makers. If I were Indonesian I would want to burn the whole thing down. Or at least guest curate.

But Dorothy and Nef weren’t wrong (even though they deemed me a humorless git who couldn’t just appreciate a nice collection of antiques). There were some outstanding examples of the carriage arts on display. Why not simply enjoy them for what they are, rather than what they mean?

The Sultan’s Palace

A funny thing about the Sultan’s Palace museum is that it’s actually the Sultan’s palace. The current Sultan. It’s hard to wrap your head around, but Yogyakarta is a monarchy, whose Governor is the Sultan. Or whose Sultan is the Governor. The current Sultan, Hamengkubuwono X, wields official state power as payback for the then sultan’s support for independence during the post WWII revolution.

Chunks of the Sultan’s ancestral home have been turned into exhibits and opened to the public. But he still lives there. I said it was a funny thing, but it’s also an interesting thing, with exhibits focused around court life.

Like the illustration of troops, there were also hats and parasols on display that codified fine-grained definitions of role and status in the court. A lot of attention was given to these distinctions, in large part, I think, because it was all the Dutch let them do. They were cosplaying as rulers, making the cosplay itself the only thing they could control.

Every single design element of each of these hats communicated detailed information about the wearer’s position at court and relationship to the Sultan.

The same with the parasols. Color and pattern were an elaborate code, decipherable by every one at court.

Wet Ground

There’s a nimbus of ArtJog-adjacent galleries that pop up with shows coincidental with the main event, and ArtJog publishes a helpful listing of who’s doing what. We went to a popup craft market and found a maker of shagreen leather accessories, we found a gallery with breathtaking modern takes on traditional batik, and we visited Wet Ground, a little gallery with a small but choice smattering of wall art. You know. Art.

Monggo Chocolate Kingdom

If you think this stretches the definition of art to the breaking point, fine. You can just stop reading. I put it at the end on purpose. I think that the crafting of chocolate directly speaks to beauty, truth, and history. Rather than agreeing to disagree, perhaps we can just agree that you’re very narrow-minded.

But lest you think I’m shoehorning a factory and tasting tour into this post, Monggo did start out with a museum. Of chocolate art. Packaging, marketing posters, anything and everything chocolate-related.

The art was swell and the company history was interesting, but the truth is we just love factory tours. There’s something hypnotic about seeing things manufactured, the elegance of the orchestration required to make sure all the moving parts are moving in sequence. I’m hard pressed to imagine what I’d be disinterested in seeing manufactured. Turkey franks? Sure. Hula hoops, toilets, cardboard boxes, tires… Yes, yes, yes, and yes. It’s a human/machine ballet whose choreography never fails to entrance.

But they had a museum of chocolate posters, so it counts for this exercise. Don’t like it? Think I’m willfully blurring taxonomic boundaries? Get your own blog.

Chocolate in Indonesia is a Dutch hangover. Along with the twitching. Cacao itself was brought over by the Spanish in the 1500s, but the Dutch amped that up into large-scale production for export when they took the reins. Meaning that there’s really no historical legacy of chocolate consumption in Indonesia. That said, a handful of entrepreneurs have set their sights on creating modern artisanal chocolate, leveraging Indonesia’s still potent cacao production.

The Kingdom includes the production facility, all behind glass so you can follow the process, the museum of chocolate art, and a shop/tasting lounge. As part of our modest entrance fee we were assigned a docent who stayed with us the whole way through, helpfully explaining the process and answering questions.

Truthfully, I could watch this all day. I think there’s something wrong with me.

How did it end? In a potlatch of chocolate, of course. After touring the production facility, we decamped to the shop and tasting lounge where we picked up enough truly excellent chocolate to last the rest of our trip. Our favorites were the mango, unsurprisingly, and the rendang, which caught us by surprise. Rendang is a spice mix used for cooking beef in Indonesia, and we didn’t expect to find it in chocolate. But we’re glad we did.

We enjoyed bowls of their house-made gelato while we waited for our car. You’ll be shocked to hear that the chocolate gelato was very, very, good.