A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [65]
The Solyoms had lived in Indonesia in the late 1960s and had returned to the United States, as Bronwen Solyom put it in a talk at the University of Hawai‘i in 2008, “fired up for one reason or another about Indonesia.” Like Ann, they had arrived at the university as graduate students in the early 1970s, a time when, in the waning days of the Vietnam War, programs in Southeast Asian studies were blossoming. They were captivated by traditional Javanese art, ancient patterns on textiles, the origins of rituals they had witnessed. They were especially interested in “the making of things,” Bronwen Solyom said—batik, shadow puppets, and the asymmetrical, often wavy-bladed, ceremonial dagger known as the kris, or keris, seen as both magical and sacred. Over the course of a twenty-year friendship, their interests and Ann’s intersected and overlapped. The Solyoms focused on the object, its aesthetics and iconography, and its meaning in a ceremonial context; they studied the kris as a high art form, a court art, in its most refined form. Ann came to focus on the lives of craftspeople in the present day. When she studied blacksmiths, she immersed herself in everything from the making to the marketing of everyday agricultural tools. Her interest was function.
I once asked Maya if she could identify the source of her mother’s interest in handicrafts. Using a phrase that stuck with me, she said her mother had always been “fascinated with life’s gorgeous minutiae.” When Ann was young, she had owned a loom and had woven wall hangings as a hobby. After moving to Indonesia, she began collecting batik and other textiles, handcrafted silver jewelry, rice-paddy hats, and woven baskets. In a foreword to the version of Ann’s dissertation that was published in 2009 by Duke University Press, Maya wrote that her mother “was interested in the place where vision meets execution, and where the poetic and the prosaic share space. She loved the way something beautiful could speak about the spirit of both the maker and the owner; the skill and soul of the blacksmith are revealed in the keris, but so too is the desire and perspective of the buyer.”
Ann had landed in Indonesia when the country was on the cusp of a renaissance in the traditional arts—a rebirth that resulted from scarcity. “Artistically, the 1960s were the best time for traditional arts, because people were so poor,” Garrett Solyom told me. Renske Heringa, who lived in Indonesia in the same period, said, “We didn’t have books, we couldn’t buy clothes, we all went around in batik because that was all there was. There was nothing—but suddenly people became aware that they had something that nobody else had.” Indonesians who traveled abroad noticed that Indonesian handicrafts were treasured elsewhere. With the growth of tourism in Indonesia in the 1970s, the market for handicrafts grew. At the same time, opportunities for women to earn a living in agriculture were shrinking. With the introduction of mechanical rice hullers, for example, fewer women could expect to make a living by hand-pounding rice. Many turned to small industries, including handicrafts, and petty trade. The government even adopted policies intended to encourage rural craft industries as a source of income for the poor. Ann had lived through that period.
In 1968, on her first visit to Taman Sari, the ruins of an eighteenth-century pleasure park built for the sultan in Yogyakarta, she learned that there were four or five factories in the area making traditional batik jarik, an ankle-length wraparound skirt. “I did not visit these but I did see a number of older women sitting in groups in front of their houses doing tulis work on jariks,” she recalled in a field notebook some years later, referring to the traditional method of hand-painting patterns in