Curating Ornament and Textile Exhibitions as Highwire Acts: On Guest Curator Negotiations with Lenders and Museum Director
Abstract
In studying museum exhibitions, there is value in looking at hidden negotiations (even combat) among academic guest curators, museum directors, and collector/lenders. These often-veiled interactions occur as different ideological stances and positionalities come into contact and friction with each other regarding what is important in displaying material culture. In this essay, I provide a close-up view of such negotiations in the planning and implementation of three shows that I guest curated as an anthropologist (one at the Asia Society Gallery, two at Cantor Art Gallery at Holy Cross). All concerned indigenous arts from island Southeast Asia. Judicious compromises and consensus resulted in stronger exhibitions.
Citation: Rodgers, Susan. “Curating Ornament and Textile Exhibitions as Highwire Acts: On Guest Curator Negotiations with Lenders and Museum Directors” The Jugaad Project, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023, www.thejugaadproject.pub/highwire-acts [date of access]
Introduction
Much recent scholarship, and in fact studies tracing back to the touchstone anthology Exhibiting Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Karp and Lavine, 1991), document how fraught the conceptualization and display conventions of museum exhibitions can be when these curatorial projects attempt to cross deep cultural differences.[1] Pitfalls such as misconstruing the original creators’ worldviews can result in culturally myopic exhibitions, no matter how well-intentioned a museum’s aims might have been (Mohan, 2021; Chambers et al, 2017). Another common misstep: underestimating or even missing the importance of the social systems that generated the objects in their original settings (Heckel, 2021). Reiterations of colonial-era power relations between nation states and smaller-scale tribal or chiefdom societies can also knock a museum exhibition off kilter (Edwards et al, 2006; Flynn and Barringer, 1998). These are all serious issues deserving more scholarly attention and fact-finding projects to discover how, in the search to create “the effective exhibition,” some museum shows have veered away from historical or ethnographic accuracy or indeed equitable forms of curating, community engagement and justice (Lonetree and Cobb, eds., 2008). Also important, if less-discussed, is how differences of perspectives and aims among object lenders, museum directors, and guest curators can lead to disputes when an exhibition is in its embryonic stages. In this essay I detail several such differences of opinion among lenders (all of whom were major collectors), museum leaders, and myself as an anthropologist serving as guest curator for three exhibitions. These exhibitions were hosted by the Asia Society Gallery in New York City for Geneva’s Musee Barbier-Mueller (“Power and Gold: Jewelry from Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines,” 1985) and by the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery, College of the Holy Cross, a liberal arts college in Worcester, MA (“Gold Cloths of Sumatra: Indonesia’s Songkets from Ceremony to Commodity,” 2007, and “Woven Power: Ritual Textiles of Sarawak and West Kalimantan,” 2016). Negotiating our way toward a workable consensus resulted in two cases in a stronger exhibition with more nuance and both aesthetic and social scientific depth. In the third case, the 2016 exhibition about the ritual textiles of Indonesia’s West Kalimantan and Malaysia’s Sarawak in Borneo, the display practices were largely shorn of any anthropological component. However, as guest curator I was able to make sure that that social science approach came through strongly in some of the publications and in numerous gallery walk-through tours led by my undergraduate student docents and myself. So, the micro-level power politics among collector/lenders, museum directors, and anthropologist curators need not result in a failed or incoherent exhibition. Judicious compromise was possible.
Approaching Exhibitions from Different Worlds
It will be useful to describe the different ways that the collectors, museum directors, and also I as a sociocultural anthropologist approached these several exhibitions that we jointly created. Unacknowledged or not, we all operated from contrastive ideological stances and different degrees of engagement with quite different scholarly literatures. I begin by describing my own positionality and then, in discussions of the three exhibitions later in this essay, I detail the perspectives of the lenders and museum directors and remark upon how we managed to negotiate our way toward rewarding exhibitions.
As an anthropologist, in these curatorial opportunities I was committed to the value of fieldwork interviews with present-day makers in Indonesia and Malaysia and also with local families that own similar ritual ornaments or textiles as part of house treasures. My interviews were conducted in the Indonesian national language (Bahasa Indonesia, which is almost identical to Malay, the national tongue of Malaysia). I am also fluent in an ethnic language, Angkola Batak, but none of these three exhibitions touched on the arts of that North Sumatran society. As I was trying to document and thematize the arts of ritual jewelry and the ceremonial textiles of a wide variety of ethnic societies, not knowing any of the relevant ethnic languages and thus having to use a national tongue was a hindrance to my project. The lenders to the three shows are not fluent in Indonesian/Malay.
In my work on Angkola Batak-language oratory and the transition to print literacy (e.g., Rodgers, 2005), I have the advantage of setting my analysis within multiple ethnographic and historical contexts. Yet, my museum work was limited to sources in Indonesian/Malay, Dutch and English. However, much of the folk aesthetics of ceremonial cloths and ornaments lie in the indigenous languages of outer island Indonesia and Sarawak in East Malaysia. So, I used a work-around strategy to aid my museum-going audiences in understanding some local knowledge: where Indonesian or European-language translations of old chants and orations tied to the artworks were available, I would give these heavy play in publications and wall texts for each exhibition. For instance, for “Woven Power” in the book connected to the show (Rodgers, 2019) I relied on James Jemut Masing’s and Vinson Sutlive’s wonderful English translations of timang death chants by Iban shamans (Masing, 1997; Sutlive, 2012).
Since I was able to do from four to 12 months of fieldwork for each show, I wanted to remain true to that research experience by writing detailed wall texts about the local social, religious, and aesthetic contexts for the artworks in “Power and Gold“ and so on. I wanted to incorporate precis of life history interviews with makers in fairly lengthy, well-illustrated wall texts. Indeed, I wanted to make lavish use of fieldwork photographs from art-making villages and households; including archival photographs of crafters in colonial times was also a high priority. All of these aims were easily accommodated in the book that accompanied the “Power and Gold” exhibition (Rodgers, 1985).
Not surprisingly, then-Asia Society director Andrew Pekarik and now-retired Cantor Art Gallery director Roger Hankins had their own distinctive criteria for what would constitute an excellent exhibition in their specific museum spaces. The lenders also had much to say. They were Jean-Paul Barbier for the “Power and Gold’ exhibition, Anne Summerfield and John Summerfield for “Gold Cloths of Sumatra,” and John Kreifeldt for “Woven Power.” All of these players’ perspectives will become evident in my discussions of the three shows.
Finding a Way to Cooperate in “Power and Gold” at the Asia Society Gallery, 1985
The gold, silver, bronze, gilded metal, and shell ceremonial ornaments in the “Power and Gold” collection had been amassed with care by Musee Barbier-Mueller president Jean-Paul Barbier since the 1980s and 1990s. The jewelry came from purchases in international auction houses and from aristocratic families in rural areas of Kalimantan, North Sumatra, Sulawesi, Sumba, Flores, and Tanimbar. This was a time when many old noble families across the archipelago were heritage-rich but cash-poor. This was a problem since many wished to send their grandchildren to Indonesian universities so that the young people could prosper in the national, secular, modern-sector economy. Heritage objects such as finely woven and dyed textiles and precious metal ornaments poured out of the noble households during this era so that the older people could help with the grandchildren’s university tuition payments. Runners from Bali would sometimes work on behalf of the international collectors to visit the outer islands and purchase ornaments from nobles. [2]
The “Power and Gold” collection that resulted was breathtaking in its comprehensive character and high quality. In 1983 Barbier approached me via a long, effusive, and totally unexpected letter saying that he admired a chapter on Angkola Batak ulos textiles that I had written for the anthology Indonesian Textiles: Irene Emery Roundtable on Museum Textiles (Gittinger, ed., 1980). My article (1980) included my translation of an Angkola Batak-language blessing oration about the messages inlaid, invisibly, in Angkola baby carrier cloths (parompa sadun). Barbier took this facility with Angkola Batak-language verse-form praise speech in connection to ritual textiles to mean that I was an expert in ‘indigenous’ systems of meaning attached to ceremonial objects. This was not the case (at the time I had not published anything beyond this one chapter on textiles in regard to artwork; I was concentrating my research and publications then on ritual oratory and print literacy). Nevertheless, I continued to read on through the letter. Barbier wanted me to guest curate an exhibition on his entire “Power and Gold” collection, scheduled for an opening at the Asia Society Gallery in 1985. He proposed to send me to outer island Indonesia, East Malaysia, and Manila in the Philippines for four months of interviews with jewelry makers, local museum staff, and noble families who still owned some of the old house treasures. After making it clear that I would not myself collect any objects for the project, as that would have ethical entanglements for an anthropologist, I said yes to Barbier’s overtures.
In Karoland, Sumba, and so on I discovered upon talking with local nobles that the ornaments in the collection (I had taken color photographs of each piece with me to Southeast Asia) were anything but ‘indigenous’ or ‘traditional.’ Many of the ornaments were replete with cross-regional motifs and design elements ( e.g., Rodgers 1985, 286-287). Other jewelry items instantiated the power dynamics of relations between the Dutch East Indies colonial state and small-scale chiefdoms.For instance, gold crowns and frontals had sometimes been crafted in the precious metal after members of a local aristocracy had acquired gold coins through political cooperation with colonial officials. With their newly-acquired gold in hand they had made precious metal copies of their old regalia, which had been crafted of palm leaves or feathers.
I also soon discovered that the ornaments were profoundly shaped by history. While some decorative details in a Karo ear ornament, for instance, did evoke the shape of a design element that could indeed be traced to the Dong Son era (see Rodgers, 1985: 105) none of the ornaments were unmediated holdovers from earlier historical eras such as the Southeast Asian Bronze Age -- despite the fascination that idea held for some Western connoisseurs. Dong Son Bronze Age culture, located in what is now northern Vietnam, probably extended from about 1000 BCE to 100 CE. It was a source for advanced agricultural techniques, the back-strap loom, and the famous Dong Son ceremonial drums, region-to-region trade in which spread important design elements throughout island Southeast Asia.
I found the ideological and historical complexities surrounding each object in the collection to be fascinating on their own account, and I wrote Power and Gold (1985) in that deeply historicized interpretive key. Jean-Paul Barbier remained fascinated with Dong Son correspondences to jewelry designs found in the “Power and Gold” collection.
From knowing Barbier since 1983 I can say confidently that he takes a sophisticated, knowledgeable, even passionate connoisseurship interest in Southeast Asian tribal arts (terminology he is comfortable with). He has a particular collecting and research interest in outer island Indonesian village arts such as ritual regalia made of precious metals. He also has a special interest in the arts of the Toba Batak (which he sees as having ancient roots). Indeed, when Indonesian artworks tie back in terms of motifs to the Southeast Asian Bronze Age, Barbier is even more entranced. He sees many of the arts of Java and Bali as ‘too influenced by’ the 8th to 14th c. Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms, Islam, or modern Indonesian life in the national period since the 1945-1949 national revolution. A Flores gold crown, an east Sumba mamuli pendant, a heavy silver Karo Batak ear ornament: these are “purer” expressions of Dong Son art worlds, in his view. However, Barbier is also quite open-minded when it comes to ways that sociocultural anthropologists see cultures in holistic ways (where religions interpenetrate with politics and both with artistic production, for instance). He admires long fieldwork and ethnographic depth. He is also knowledgeable about the impact of the Dutch colonial empire on local art worlds in places like Flores, for example. He wanted the “Power and Gold” exhibition to shine, literally, along all these dimensions.
Enter Andrew Pekarik, at the time the director of the Asia Society. Its gallery’s aim was to display the beauty of the region’s art and Asia’s ideological and artistic complexity overall, for broad New York and in fact international visitors. Pekarik appreciated the collection’s gold crowns, gold neck chains, and so on specifically as art. Thus, at one level at least, Pekarik wanted to forefront the sheer loveliness and expert craft skills that produced the ritual jewelry in “Power and Gold.” His priority was on the objects themselves, as finely wrought necklaces, crowns, chains, pendants and so on.
The 1985 opening of “Power and Gold” was the first iteration of this exhibition but it had already been picked up by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES). So, Pekarik wanted the Asia Society version to be particularly polished in terms of wall texts, fieldwork and archival photographs, and especially in regard to the layout of the displays of the ornaments. Most centrally, Pekarik wanted to show the objects to the best possible visual effect. Thus, his decision to place a Nage gold crown from central Flores (Figure 1) all by itself, at the very beginning of the show, set off against a dramatic deep blue wall.
Figure 1. The spectacular gold crown, from the Nage area, Central Flores, Indonesia.
In the weeks up to the exhibition’s opening in New York City I talked with Pekarik several times to discuss how the ornaments were to be displayed and what I might be able to write in wall texts. I was anxious to pack in as much political and economic information from my fieldwork interviews and my reading of the critical historical scholarship on the Indies and Indonesia as I could. However, to my surprise, Pekarik announced to me that the entryway to the show would be totally devoted to one jewelry piece, that tall gold crown from central Flores. It would be spotlighted to make it glow; it would have the briefest explanatory text (just a label really, with the descriptor “crown,” and the information that it was made of beaten gold and hailed from Nage society in Flores, from about the early 20th century). I gasped: would all my fieldwork go for naught? Would the exhibition design reduce the collection to an ahistorical level of crafted objects per se, shorn of context?
I should not have worried, and this is a key to working productively with firm-willed museum directors, who (in my experience at least) are very much the bosses in having ‘the final say’ in planning exhibitions with anthropologist guest curators. Fortunately, what Pekarik proposed is what we ended up using as our overall aesthetic and teaching ethos for the entire show. We did different things interpretively in different spaces in the large gallery. Fortunately, the gallery was big and could be divided into separate alcoves, corners, and even entire small rooms. Some of these spaces would follow the ‘look at me’ approach to displaying particularly stunning pieces. I had to admit, this was effective as many of the eastern Indonesian ornaments related well to each other on a visual theme-and-variation pattern (other examples, Rodgers, 1985: 306-307). But, in other places in the show, sometimes in entire small rooms, as curator I could offer lengthy wall texts to provide nuanced historical and anthropological context, with the relevant ornaments displayed nearby, mounted on the walls.
Figure 2. 1920s photograph, Nage aristocrat attired for a ceremony with gold crown similar to the one in the “Power and Gold” collection.
An example will show what I got away with, so to speak. Both Pekarik and Barbier were pleased with this sort of display practice resolution idea, to my relief. Not too far away at all from that entryway placement of the Nage gold crown shown with its tiny wall label, around a corner was an interpretive wall text of gratifying length. It had two photographs, shown in Figure 2 and Figure 3. The archive photograph from the 1920s in Boawai village, central Flores, shows a young Nage nobleman wearing a similar gold crown for a ceremony. The next image is one of my 1984 field photos: this very same gentleman, then in advanced years, looking at my copy of the archive picture as I talked with him about the forthcoming exhibition in New York. In public lectures I later gave at several American museums as SITES took the exhibition on its national tour (always with the same wall texts), I highlighted the way this pair of photographs urges the museum visitor to grapple with several layers of anthropological insight.[3] That is, these images ask museumgoers to mull over the complex and sometimes uncomfortable issues related to the sale of family treasures to collectors from wealthier societies. I would also mention the layers of reflexivity packed into these two photographs: the way I was asking an elderly Nage aristocrat to talk to me about his younger self, attired then in a crown that has emerged in the international museum world as ‘indigenous art,’ even ‘primitive art’ in some tellings. The ethics and politics of this situation would almost always spark critical debate with my audiences, who were generally avid American museumgoers as opposed to Southeast Asians of any background, or Southeast Asia scholars from that region or beyond. The exhibition worked in terms of beauty but also in terms of public education. I experienced no censorship whatsoever.
Figure 3: The same man (from Figure 2), now elderly, looking at the archive photograph in 1984 during the field research for the 1985 exhibition. Nage, Central Flores, Indonesia.
Perhaps the lesson here is that an anthropologist curator can negotiate delicately with a museum director, at least one who is open-minded. The SITES tour of the exhibition was sometimes problematic, though. Different museums mounted the borrowed show in different ways, some placing it in larger gallery spaces as with the Asia Society practice but at least one museum consigning the entire show to a narrow hallway. I was back in Indonesia and in the Netherlands at the time of most of the SITES’s tour travels around the country, so I had no control of any of that. Nor did I have a say in museum trinkets or keepsakes on “Power and Gold” themes.
“Gold Cloths of Sumatra” at Holy Cross: Collaborations with Lenders and a Museum Director
Cantor Art Gallery director Roger Hankins and I had worked with collectors and textile researchers Anne and John Summerfield of Pacific Palisades, CA, in several previous Cantor shows before we embarked upon our most sweeping and ambitious project: a display of numerous antique songket cloths from their collection and also ones from UCLA’s Fowler Museum’s strong holdings on this same type of metal-wrapped thread cloth. The Summerfields had donated many textiles from their collection to the Fowler and so could help to arrange these loans to Holy Cross. Songket textiles are made either on a frame loom (West Sumatra) or a backstrap loom (Palembang, Jambi, Bali) by adding metal-wrapped threads across the weft as the textile grows on the loom toward completion. This is a supplementary weft technique and the Minangkabau women weavers since at least the early to mid-1800s have produced magnificent examples of this shiny, resplendent cloth. Songket is used in ritual costumes and more recently by wealthy merchant families as status display. Today, songket goods can be purchased by an even wider public, including international tourists. In West Sumatra it works as an identity marker for Minangkabau people. I was able to do a year’s fieldwork in Bukittingi before “Gold Cloths” opened and acquired many modern-day versions of this textile type. I conducted interviews with weavers, songket brokers and songket entrepreneurs and wanted to infuse the exhibition with these findings. Anne and John Summerfield readily agreed.
Anne, then in her late seventies, had a Ph.D. in nuclear physics and had been the CEO of her family business in medical technologies. She and her husband John had spent their retirement years studying Southeast Asian songkets and amassing a comprehensive collection of the textile type, with the intention of eventually giving the cloths to the Fowler Museum. Like Barbier, Anne had a similar interest in ‘old Bronze Age’ motifs, in her case in the Minangkabau ritual textiles. But, she was also fascinated with the ways these songket fabrics had changed in production techniques and patterns due to Islamic influence, to the economic changes brought by Dutch colonial control until 1949, and to modern-day cross-regional trade. In other words, Anne did not fetishize the so-called ancientness nor the supposed genuineness and authenticities of songkets that included centuries-old motifs such as the rhomb and hook pattern found in many island and mainland Southeast Asian hand-woven cloths.
Her husband John was also open minded in this regard. With a long history in American business and research think tanks, John Summerfield concentrated on the technical details of metal-wrapped threads from Malaysia through Sumatra. As well, his Ph.D. in economics probably shaped his intense interest in textile trade networks in Southeast Asia as these affected songket cloths. They both revered the great old Minangkabau women weavers of the late 19th century, who could work with the delicate ramin fibers, making their songkets especially filmy and hard to reproduce today. They had read my Power and Gold and appreciated its attempt to integrate economic, political, and local kinship system studies into my discussions of ritual ornaments. We started to work together in part because they came to a lecture I gave at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art when SITES was touring the “Power and Gold” exhibition there. Anne’s and John’s close-grained appreciation for Minangkabau weaving animates their edited book, Walk in Splendor: Ceremonial Dress and the Minangkabau (1999). That book included many chapters by scholars who were themselves Minangkabau. Anne and John also tried to further the museum careers of young Minangkabau. For instance, they helped secure a full-time six-month internship for a Minangkabau woman at the Fowler in 1999, when the “Walk in Splendor” show was being prepared and after it opened; she lived with Anne and John at their home before returning to Sumatra.
The Summerfields very much valued the chance to work with Roger Hankins of the Cantor Art Gallery at Holy Cross. Like Andrew Pekarik, he was also acutely attuned to the physical “look” of exhibitions. A ceramicist with an MFA as opposed an art history background, Hankins approached the Cantor gallery space as an artwork in itself. Hankins and his museum installation specialist, Timothy Johnson, paid close attention to choice of paint color for the permanent and moveable walls in the gallery (for instance, royal blue, forest green, rust red, and an amazingly effective pea-soup green). Lighting arrangements for the different areas of the gallery and the different types of metal-thread and ikat textiles were also central to Roger’s aesthetic for his several textiles exhibitions with me. Cantor Art Gallery’s mission statement valorizes “fine art” but Hankins took an expansive view of that, one that surely included minority society arts of island Southeast Asia (I have found in my five exhibitions at Cantor). Hankins’ particular interests are American contemporary arts (prints, ceramics, mixed media) but he has developed an eye for excellence of weaving technique and natural dye work in his encounters with island Southeast Asian songket and ikat weavings, in working with me and the Summerfields. Ikat technique entails wrapping tiny portions of the warp threads (more rarely, the wefts) with ties to make pictorial or geometric designs on them before the fabric is woven. When the ikatted yarns are taken off the frame and plunged into a dye bath, the ties work as resists so the threads do not soak up that color. This process can be repeated several times, to yield numerous layers of motifs and hues. Some of the textiles in “Gold Cloths” combined songket with ikat.
Anne and John Summerfield’s respect for Minangkabau colleagues and their voracious interest in all scholarly literature on Sumatra made them ideal people for me to work with in designing our Cantor exhibitions. They both wanted the same mix of ethnographic context, historical depth, and passion for the great artistic accomplishments of the 19th and early 20th century Minangkabau women weavers as I did. For our Cantor exhibitions together, though, the relatively new Cantor Art Gallery director Roger Hankins was something of an unknown for the three of us: Would he recognize and be able to present West Sumatran fabrics to a college audience who knew nothing about Southeast Asian ceremonial cloth, much less songket?
Figure 4: Installation photograph, Cantor Art Gallery, Holy Cross, showing the entryway to “Gold Cloths of Sumatra,.” 2007. My field photo of songkets being sold, Pusako Weaving House, Pandai Siket, West Sumatra, farmed the exhibition.
What Roger brought to our mix of gallery design ideas made each of these shows come alive (Figure 4). “Gold Cloths of Sumatra” exemplified all of the ways that collaborating with a museum director who is also an accomplished artist can work well. At base Roger’s success in crafting these exhibitions so deftly flowed from the fact that he engaged with the textiles and the gallery space qua artist. Anne and John and I had all worked on a number of exhibitions before in various venues, individually, but collaborating with a studio artist/museum director was a first for us. The gains for the Cantor shows were many.
These included the following. Roger encouraged us to have multiple things on display in the gallery related to Minangkabau textiles, so that the viewer was not confronted with just one cloth after another hanging on the walls, monotonously. Roger knew well that the vertical wall hanging approach to Indonesian heritage textiles was artificial anyway. These fabrics can lose some of their imagined spiritual power by being cut off the loom (a problem for eastern Indonesian village cloths), in Minangkabau the songket are meant to be folded into high status costumes for ritual processions, or for scenes in which a bride and groom ‘sit in state’ in their wedding. So, in the exhibitions we showed some of the textiles on mannequins.
Taking Roger at his word about avoiding monotony, we did have many of those cloths-on-the-wall, in abundance, but we also included large blow-ups of field photographs of Minangkabau women selling the cloths at Pusako Weaving House in Pandai Siket, a famous weaving village. We had large wall texts, which I wrote, about the economic, political, and historical settings of the exact songkets in the show. Roger and his installer, Timothy Johnson, took great care with lighting, cautious not to over-stress the cloths with too much bright light while also making the details of each songket “pop” for the viewer. Working together, Roger, Anne, and John figured out a way to hang the textiles so that they were positioned about seven inches away from the wall, so that they could wave a bit in the circulating air in the gallery (the textiles were not boxed in with plexiglass).
In larger senses, we wanted our gallery visitors to understand that Minangkabau ceremonial cloths existed in a multiplicity of mobilities; these were textiles that did not stand still (see Rodgers 2012 for a fuller discussion). Anne suggested an additional way to thematize that insight: since luxury goods in West Sumatra were often influenced by the wealthier Muslim families’ pilgrimages to Mecca, we evoked that circumstance by including a large mannequin wearing not a songket but a heavy gray silk cloak that a West Sumatran man had purchased while on the haj. He had brought this cloak back to West Sumatran with him, perhaps as a repository of travel and pilgrimage memories (and as a public sign for other Muslims that he had made the prestigious as well as the faith-filled trip to Mecca). We also included masses of red coral, silver, and bead jewelry that rich Minangkabau women would wear with their luxe songket sarongs, shoulder cloths, and headdresses. In an even more important way to evoke the idea that Minangkabau textile art is rich and resplendent, Roger picked jewel tones for the paint for the different portions of the exhibition, walls and pedestals. We continued these colors on over for the free handout that visitors received when they entered the gallery. We also made sure that the book that Anne, John, and I wrote together (2007) included color photographs of different parts of this busy exhibition.
“Woven Power,” 2016: Ways Not to Fight
The 2016 exhibition that Roger Hankins and I did with collector and researcher John Kreifeldt (“Woven Power”) had a bumpier microhistory of collaboration. Differences of perspective did get sorted out, if not resolved. Once mounted, the exhibition was remarkably lovely: Iban women’s pua (large banner/blankets) and Dayak kain kebit ceremonial skirts from West Kalimantan do tend to overwhelm the viewer with their intricacy and beauty of warp ikat design work and their red-toned dye work (Figures 5, 6). The large number of textiles Hankins and the lender wanted to show meant that wall texts were notably small and brief, which I felt was unfortunate for visitors’ understandings of the cloth’s complex cultural contexts. “Woven Power” ran for the entire fall semester and visitors included many Holy Cross classes from across the curriculum as well as local school children and members of Massachusetts weaving co-ops. One additional saving grace of the exhibition was the close participation of my four undergraduate student docents (from majors and minors in Classics, History, Asian Studies, Sociology). Drawing on their summer 2016 Holy Cross research fellowships they all spent eight weeks studying Ibanic textiles with me. We travelled to Bali (to learn about textile-making techniques with the social business, Threads of Life) and then on to Kuching, Sarawak to learn about Ibanic dyeing and warp ikat weaving from the staff of the Tun Jugah Foundation (an Iban-run museum, library and research institute). While in Kuching we saw how old and contemporary pua are being marketed and sold in Malaysian Chinese shops; we also studied how old pua motifs are re-purposed in touristic t-shirts and factory-made batik goods (sarongs but also tote bags). The students integrated their discoveries about the present-day lives of pua and kain kebit into their gallery walk-through tours with me. We did 16 of these, for Holy Cross classes and community groups.
Figure 5: The first section of “Woven Power,” Cantor Art Gallery, 2016, showing our only large wall text. To right: our only ritual skirt shown on a mannequin.
Figure 6: Ritual skirts were all mounted on slant boards, with small labels. Other wall texts were also diminutive and the exhibition had very few photos, so as to accommodate a large number of textiles on the walls. Context had to be provided through gallery walk-throughs.
What we said there deviated from Kreifeldt’s approach to the old textiles, in his publications and conversations with Roger Hankins and me, as we shall discover in a moment. John Kreifeldt, Ph.D., was a most generous lender of older Iban and Dayak ikat textiles to Cantor Art Gallery for “Woven Power.” He is a retired engineering professor from Tufts University. Several decades previously he had done consulting work on product design in Taiwan; that allowed him to travel often to Sarawak, east Malaysia. He developed a passion for the iconography and technical brilliance of iban pua cloths and Dayak ritual skirts (kain kebat). Working with high-end dealers in the city of Kuching he launched into his project of assembling a comprehensive, notably high-quality collection of these elaborately patterned ikat fabrics. He also made purchases through international auction houses and via island Southeast Asia-focused dealers based in California. Kreifeldt finds the scholarship of older generations of Iban art specialists to be compelling (e.g., Haddon and Start, 2010[1936]). He consulted books such as ethnographer Traude Gavin’s Iban Ritual Textiles (2003) and works by Michael Heppell as well (2005, 2014). Kreifeldt is widely read in the specialist journal article literature and has published there (e.g., Kreifeldt 2006, 2010). The technical details of hand-loom production are a key focus, as are the chemical processes involved in natural dye and mordant use in making the exquisite old pua banners. Most centrally, though, what has caught Kreifeldt’s imagination is what he sees as links between ‘ancient’ iban myths, village ideas about fertility and head taking, and Iban ritual cloths. He looks to myth (seen as ‘ancient myth’) when trying to tease out the ‘meanings’ of the imageries in old pua textiles. The social science literature about globalization processes and ritual fabrics in Southeast Asia (e.g., Forshee, 2001) is apparently not one of his foci. Since he did not know my work before our “Woven Power” collaborations and since I was not by any means a specialist in iban or Dayak cloth, perhaps he was taken aback that I was the guest curator.
John focused what he saw as the tight connections between pua weaving and dyeing and Iban myths about head taking and its connection to human and rice field fertility. Before head-taking raids were outlawed in Sarawak by British colonial officials for the most part by the late 1800s, special pua were used by women to ‘welcome’ and cradle human heads that male warriors had gotten in battle and had brought back to the longhouses where families lived. The parallelism between women’s textile creation and their pregnancies and men’s warfare and violence fascinated Kreifeldt. As an anthropologist my view of myth was much more historicized. In fact, I saw the pua and kain kebit as themselves embodiments of Sarawak’s and West Kalimantan’s historical experiences with European colonialism and then, with Malaysian and Indonesian nationalism (not to mention recent heavy interaction of heritage textiles with globalized textile production).
On one of our many car trips to John’s home near Boston to see which pua and kain kebit might work well in the ”Woven Power” exhibition, Roger Hankins and I talked about the catalogue that I was supposed to be writing for the show, a publication that Cantor Art Gallery’s budget would subsidize. I lamented to Roger: I simply cannot write a text that validated John Kreifeldt’s entirely non-anthropological views of these textiles. Roger had a brilliant solution: John himself should write a classic catalogue (Kreifeldt, 2016) complete with his own commentary about each textile in the exhibition (with color photographs of each piece), and I should write another, separate book, speaking as an anthropologist, about the political, economic and critical museum studies dimensions of the same cloths (Rodgers, 2019). We did this, and peace reigned.
Conclusion: Negotiation as a Highwire Act in Museum Work
Only well-financed museums such as the Cantor, of course, can offer lenders and anthropologist guest curators this sort of pleasant resolution to their irreconcilable differences of interpretive perspective, by producing two contrastive books. The situation was particularly complex since Borneo textile studies and in fact scholarship on Malaysian and Indonesian Borneo in broader senses are both notably circumscribed to something of an in-group of specialists (King, 2017 offers a sharp discussion of this). However, I hope that this account of the Cantor’s variegated experiences with exhibitions about island Southeast Asian ritual cloth and my “Power and Gold” experiences some years before with displaying ceremonial ornaments in multifaceted ways have gone to demonstrate that lender/museum director/guest curator interactions form a promising site for future research. More light is needed on the often-veiled terrain of combat and/or compromise before a show opens among high status, wealthy lenders, wily but patient museum directors, and anthropologist curators pursuing, I admit, their own agendas.
The two museum directors, the lenders Jean-Paul Barbier, Anne and John Summerfield, John Kreifeldt, and I all shared a similar educational background (advanced post graduate degrees from prestigious universities) and a similar assumption that education is a good thing, as are public-facing museums that seek to educate broad publics about Asian societies and their arts. We all benefited in our personal lives from prosperous upper middle-class privileges; we had secure jobs in fields of study we loved, we were prolific publishers of scholarly articles and books. We stood in contrast to the young Minangkabau woman that the Summerfields hosted in their home before and during the run of the Fowler’s “Walk in Splendor” exhibition in 1999. She had hoped to use her studies at the Fowler in her museum internship as a way to move into a museum curatorial position once she returned home to West Sumatra. However, this proved impossible: she did not have the right Indonesian museum-world social connections to secure such a job. She could not break into that in-group and the Minangkabau are, after all, not the dominant ethnic group in Indonesia (the much more numerous Javanese are). In addition, museum staffers in West Sumatra seemed to be jealous of her California all-expenses-paid internship and the prominent role she played during the “Walk in Splendor’ exhibition as an interpretive docent of Minangkabau arts. Upon her return home, she never got a job offer in a Sumatran museum and eventually went to work in her family’s art dealership and textile shop in Bukittinggi.
The sort of well-mannered negotiations we Americans enjoyed as detailed here were blocked for this young, quite brilliant Minangkabau woman. Asking why that was so could be the subject of more research by many in the field of museum studies.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Paula Rosenblum, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, for the installation photographs from “Gold Cloths of Sumatra” and “Woven Power.” Thanks also to photographer John Buckingham, Holy Cross Audio-Visual Department, for scanning copies of photographs about the Nage gold crown and the fieldwork and archive photographs, from my Power and Gold: Jewelry from Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines (1985, pp. 155, 71).
References
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Elizabeth Edwards, 2001. Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums. Oxford, UK and New York, NY: Berg.
Edwards, Elizabeth, Chris Gosden, and Ruth Phillips, eds 2006. Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums, and Material Cultures. Oxford, UK: Berg.
Flynn, Tom, and Tim Barringer. 1998. Colonialism and the Object; Empire, Material Culture and the Museum. Abington-on-Thames, UK: Routledge.
Forshee, Jill. 2001. Between the Folds: Stories of Cloth, Lives, and Travels from Sumba. Honolulu, HA: University of Hawai’i Press.
Gavin, Traude. 2003. Iban Ritual Textiles. Leiden, the Netherlands: KITLV Press.
Haddon, Alfred C. and Laura E. Start. 2010 (1936). Iban or Sea Dayak Fabrics and their Patterns. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.
Heckel, Claire. 2021. “Classification, Culture Areas, and Gifting on the Great Plains: Remobilizing Objects of Exchange at the American Museum of Natural History” in Special Issue, Classification Schemes Gone Awry, Museum Anthropology, 14 (1 & 2), 2021.
Heppell, Michael. 2005. Iban Art: Sexual Selection and Severed Heads. Leiden and Amsterdam: KIT Publishers.
Heppell, Michael. 2014.: The Seductive Warp Thread: An Evolutionary History of Ibanic Weaving. Phillips, ME: Borneo Research Council Material Culture Series 1.
Karp, Ivan and Steven D. Lavine, eds. 1991. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
King, Victor T. 2017. “Claiming Authority: Derek Freeman, His Legacy and interpretations of the Iban of Borneo. Bijdragen tot de taal, land- en volkenkunde. 173 (1): 83-113.
Kreifeldt, John G. 2006. “Ceremonial Skirts of Kalimantan’s Mualang, Kantu’ and Ketungau.” Arts of Asia, July-August, 2006: 107-118.
Kreifeldt, John G. 2010. “Jewels of the Kantu’”. Arts of Asia. November-December 2010: 146-159.
Kreifeldt, John G. 2016. Woven Power: Ritual Textiles of Sarawak and West Kalimantan. An Exhibition Catalogue. Worcester, MA: Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery, College of the Holy Cross.
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Masing, James Jemut. 1997. The Coming of the Gods: An Iban Invocatory Chante (‘Timang Gawai Amat’) of the Baleh River Region, Sarawak. Two volumes. Canberra; Department of Anthropology, Australian National University.
Mohan, Urmila. 2021. “The Indonesian Alcove at the American Museum of Natural History: Art, Culture Areas, and the Mead-Bateson Bali Project.” Museum Anthropology, Special Issue, Classification Schemes Gone Awry, 44 (1 & 2): 11-23.
Mohan, Urmila and Susan Rodgers. 2021. “Classification Schemes Gone Awry: Implications for Museum Research and Exhibition Display Practices.” Special Issue, Museum Anthropology, 44 (1 & 2): 4-10,
Rodgers, Susan. 1980. “Blessing Shawls: The Social Meaning of Sipirok Batak Ulos,” in M. Gittinger. Ed. 1980. Indonesian Textiles: Irene Emery Roundtable on Museum Textiles, pp. 96-114. Washington, D.C.:Textile Museum.
Rodgers, Susan. 1985. Power and Gold: Jewelry from Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Second edition, Prestel-Verlag 1988.
Rodgers, Susan. 2005. Print, Poetics, and Politics: A Sumatran Epic in the Colonial Indies and New Order Indonesia. Leiden, The Netherlands: KITLV Press.
Rodgers, Susan. 2012. “On Exhibiting Transnational Mobilities: Museum Display Decisions in ‘Gold Cloths of Sumatra.” Museum Anthropology, 35 (2): 115-135.
Rodgers, Susan. 2019. Stunned by Beauty: Appreciating Ritual Textiles of Sarawak and West Kalimantan – Anthropological Essays. Worcester, MA: Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery.
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Summerfield, Anne and John Summerfield, eds. 1999. Walk in Splendor: Ceremonial Dress and the Minangkabau. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History.
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Endnotes
[1] This is now a huge literature. A good place to start: see the list of references in Mohan and Rodgers, 2021.
[2] For historical background on collecting ritual arts in Indonesia see R. Schefold and H. Vermeulen, eds., 2002, Treasure Hunting? Collectors and Collections of Indonesian Artefacts.
[3] For valuable discussion of anthropological fieldwork photographs and archival photographs in museum exhibitions, see Elizabeth Edwards, 2001, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums, ch. 1 and ch, 3 (2001, 1-26, 51-82).
