Kathleen Ditzig

This two-part essay introduces the exhibition Bali, Background for War: The Human Problem of Reoccupation, an exhibition curated by anthropologist and cybernetics pioneer Gregory Bateson at The Museum of Modern Art in 1943. Bali, Background for War was an important exhibition of Southeast Asian modern art history and occupies an exceptional place in the Museum’s institutional history. This second essay traces the wide-ranging infrastructural implications of Bateson’s exhibition from the unrealized Wartime Regional Materials Unit at MoMA to the landscape of foreign capital flows and cultural infrastructure that contributed to the canonization and conceptualization of a Southeast Asian modern art during the Cold War.

A wartime exhibition curated by anthropologist and cybernetics pioneer Gregory Bateson, Bali, Background for War opened at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in late summer 1943 and then traveled to universities and museums across North America. Bali, Background for War was an anthropological exhibition of Balinese modern art and culture conceived as a technology for producing a necessary subjectivity in the American infantry and civilian administrators who would oversee the “reoccupation” of Japanese-captured territories, such as Bali. The exhibition sought to cultivate the ability to recognize cultural patterns so as to foster understanding of “those habits of thought and behavior” characteristic of a particular people.

In her detailed analysis of Heman Chong’s nearly two-decade-long artistic practice, art historian and curator Kathleen Ditzig contextualizes the ways in which Chong has consistently and intently negotiated with cultural policy and national politics.