sacred art for show?

Bull vessel for cremation

Before the museum blog started I created the Bali Art Blog to post about my trip to Bali and progress on our Bali exhibition. I was reviewing some of the comments there and thought this one would be of interest to the readers of the museum’s blog about the question of whether the museum should commission funerary arts as props for our exhibition. Gus Dark wrote:

please stop playing the sacred art with contemporary art which will causing Young generation in Bali or other place will misunderstanding or misinterpreter it, until the art itself losing it meaning, losing it sacred and “magical feeling” or we Balinese call it “TAKSU”. Feel free to search and create something new based on Balinese art but please don’t put the sacred art into modern or street art things, these arts have their own place… and we all have to respect it. thank you for your concerning about bali, I love Bali and Bali will always loves you..

We talked to lots of folks about the idea of commissioning a bull-shaped coffin used in Balinese cremations for display in the exhibition. We are borrowing an impressive, carved wooden cremation platform, which was never used, and thought we needed to complete it by having the bull inside. In the photo above the platform is very tall with white columns. It usually is burned with everything else in the cremation. While it certainly would have been possible to have an artist create a bull coffin, we decided not to go ahead with this on the advice of our Balinese advisory committee who shared similar sentiments to Gus. One person said that it was not a good idea to create a coffin unless you had a body to go into it. Makes a lot of sense, don’t you think?