Read the first part of the series here.

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson believed that a systematic understanding of other cultures was important for a peaceful postwar world order. He also believed that the museum, particularly The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), was the ideal institution to undertake this work. In MoMA’s press release for the exhibition Bali, Background for War: The Human Problem of Reoccupation (1943), Bateson notes that “there is one common ground between the scientific world of the anthropologist and the world of art: the idea that in some sense the artist expresses himself. The exhibition is based on that idea which, in time of war, may become as grim as a mathematical equation in ballistics.”¹

Bali, Background for War captured the social science and art networks that were brought together during World War II by the war effort and an institution of modern art. In turn, the exhibition became an important constellation of global history. At MoMA, Bateson’s notion of the museum as a common ground for science, art, and social engineering dovetailed with Bauhaus thought on the shaping of visual culture and perception, leading to a historical confluence of proto-cybernetics, regional thinking, and the New Bauhaus within the modern art museum in the service of military goals and postwar rebuilding. The influence of Bali, Background for War resounded in the postwar years, possibly contributing to the formation and intellectual history of Southeast Asian modern art networks in terms of how the exhibition foreshadows but is also informative in reading the postwar rehabilitation of the US cultural Cold War in Southeast Asia.

During World War II, the Museum executed 38 contracts for various government agencies. Among these contracts and programs, Bateson found work in the Film Library developing cultural intelligence studies of Axis countries through film.² While Bateson was not a film specialist per se, it was his work in Bali and his use of still and motion photography in analyzing cultures that attracted the attention of Iris Barry, first curator of MoMA’s Film Library (now the Department of Film), and led to his employment.³ Prior to joining the Museum, Bateson believed that MoMA had a specific and important role in the war effort, particularly in producing wartime subjectivities through exhibitions. This resonates with how scholar Fred Turner has described the exhibition-form’s compilation of material and the vistas from which viewers could freely discern cultural patterns and navigate the exhibition as a “democratic surround.”⁴ This experience of moving from image to text, of observation, inference, and deduction, could lead the audience to become more psychologically flexible and democratic in nature.⁵ In this regard, Bali, Background for War was an occasion for viewers “to exercise democratic choice.”⁶ This was an exhibitionary logic that provided a counterpoint to Nazi Germany’s instrumentalized modes of communication and power associated with fascist propaganda. Turner notes that Mead and other members of the Committee for National Morale, of which Bateson was secretary (while still at MoMA), envisioned the museum as the proper setting for a new kind of propaganda that could nurture both the individual democratic personality and a collective sense of national purpose.⁷

As an institution, MoMA was committed to these same ideas. In addition, some of the emigrant Bauhaus artists who had made their way to the United States after the closing of the Bauhaus by the Nazis in 1933 were committed to ideas of producing psychological agency through vision. Bauhaus artist Alexander Schawinsky was invited by the Museum (as opposed to Bateson personally) to design Bali, Background for War. Turner has noted that the museum was an important wartime node, one that mobilized Bauhaus methods. Victor D’Amico (founding director of MoMA’s Department of Education), for example, mobilized László Moholy-Nagy’s ideas for treating and resocializing veterans through the Museum’s War Veterans’ Art Center, which opened in 1944.⁸ MoMA likewise employed Bauhaus artist and designer Herbert Bayer’s techniques for extending field of vision by hanging photographs below and above eye level to give viewers of wartime exhibitions a field of visual choices.⁹ Bayer designed MoMA exhibitions Road to Victory, which was curated by photographer Edward Steichen in 1942, and Airways to Peace: An Exhibition of Geography for the Future, which was planned and directed by Monroe Wheeler in 1943.¹⁰

Schawinsky attended the Bauhaus and studied with Moholy-Nagy, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, and Oskar Schlemmer. At the invitation of Josef Albers, he taught from 1936 to 1938 at Black Mountain College, where he developed the “Spectodrama,” a multimedia stage design. In response to MoMA’s interest in Bauhaus ideas of how vision might inform subjectivity, on October 28, 1943, Monroe Wheeler, then director of Exhibitions at MoMA as well as the Museum’s first director of Publications, wrote to Schawinsky to solicit a proposal for an exhibition based on the artist’s notion of “perspective,” which Schawinsky explained in terms of the “changes in visual conceptions with the climax of today’s formation of new visual experience in the making.”¹¹

Bateson’s correspondence with Schawinsky in May 1943 indicates a highly collaborative exhibition-making process, wherein Bateson sent detailed notes, expanded the list of artwork to be included, and solicited feedback.¹² However, in July 1943, Bateson wrote to Wheeler and James Thrall Soby, then director of the Museum’s Armed Services Program, to request that Schawinsky be removed from the project. Bateson complained that Schawinsky lacked “respect for the material” and that he was “trimming . . . photographs to fit in with his scheme of rectangles regardless of the internal composition of the pictures.”¹³ Ultimately, Schawinsky was kept on, and in the press release for the exhibition, he is credited as designing the exhibition.¹⁴ Despite their differences, Schawinsky’s Bauhaus training was evident in the exhibition. His design employed Bayer’s extended field of vision techniques—with images placed at different proximities to eye level—and performatively staged modern Balinese art against linear fields in a way that recalled the Spectodrama.¹⁵

These affinities between Schawinsky’s Bauhaus ideas and Bateson’s interest in social engineering subjectivities through vision and aesthetic experience would take on an expanded and international vision through Bali, Background for War and Bateson’s work at MoMA. As part of his job at the Museum, Bateson attended a conference that, held in Chicago in March 1943 by the army’s Military Government Division, brought together faculty from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and universities in Wisconsin and Michigan to develop training for the Army Specialized Training Program. Upon returning to New York, he and MoMA Film Library founding director, John Abbott, drafted a proposal to set up a Wartime Regional Materials Unit within MoMA that would be responsible for circulating artworks, cultural objects, graphic materials, photographs, and films to college campuses hosting the army program and eventually to nongovernmental agencies involved in postwar reconstruction. Bali, Background for War was an exhibition that attempted to put these ideas into operation. In his letter to Mortimer Graves, then executive director of the American Council of Learned Societies in Washington, DC, Bateson identifies the exhibition as a basis for setting up a Wartime Regional Materials Unit at MoMA.

Bateson’s papers include notes regarding who would be part of the unit and how it would be constituted through MoMA’s infrastructure. Bateson focused on the diversity of artistic and cultural material at the Museum, including graphic design and film, as well as on its public programs.¹⁶ He considered the Museum an ideal institution to host the unit because it dealt “both with the Arts and with the Sciences.”¹⁷ The notes draw defined lines from Abbot, founding director of the Film Library, to Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum, and Elodie Courter, who would organize circulating exhibitions, which were seen as fundamental to this unit. The unit was imagined to mobilize the different departments of the Museum, with dotted lines drawing different divisions across the institution into the unit. The inclusion of Barr in Bateson’s notes and Bateson’s supposed attempt at writing a Balinese modern art history point in turn to the transmutation of the currency of modern art history to military value. Bateson’s exhibition expanded the visions of modern art history that Barr had mapped out in his diagrams on the development of abstract art.¹⁸ The anthropologist’s vision for MoMA was that the Museum would be an apparatus that produced intelligence derived from exhibitionary experience and the visual analysis of art. This intelligence during the war represented a convergence of the anthropological and the art historical as these were mobilized toward militaristic ends. Ultimately, however, Bateson’s proposal to develop a Wartime Regional Materials Unit within MoMA was not realized.¹⁹

At first glance, Bali, Background for War was not a particularly successful venture. Yet, it can still be considered an important exhibition of its time and one that is significant in a Southeast Asian modern art history. At the close of the exhibition in 1943, Bateson joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), an American wartime intelligence agency. This was an unusual achievement given Bateson was a British national. Created in 1942, the OSS was the first centralized intelligence agency in the United States. It was the institutional predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).²⁰ David Price, an American anthropologist who has spent his career studying the historical and contemporary military uses of anthropology, has noted in his archival research on Bateson’s wartime work that the OSS was interested in the techniques of visual anthropology.²¹

An OSS memo Bateson authored in November 1944 suggests strategies for maintaining the long-term interests of the United States in South Asia.²² Bateson’s position paper envisions the postwar period as an extension of the prewar colonial system. His memo posits a moderation of the dynamic of “exhibitionism” and “spectatorship” to manage possible rebellion from independence movements—concepts that Bateson had first deployed in explaining child-rearing norms in different cultures. In the memo, Bateson elaborates:

The most significant experiment which has yet been conducted in the adjustment of relations between “superior” and “inferior” peoples is the Russian handling of their Asiatic tribes in Siberia. The findings of this experiment support very strongly the conclusion that it is very important to foster spectatorship among the superiors and exhibitionism among the inferiors. In outline, what the Russians have done is to stimulate the native peoples to undertake a native revival while they themselves admire the resulting dance festivals and other exhibitions of native culture, literature, poetry, music and so on. And the same attitude of spectatorship is then naturally extended to native achievements in production or organization. In contrast to this, where the white man thinks of himself as a model and encourages the native people to watch him in order to find out how things should be done, we find that in the end nativistic cults spring up among the native people. The system gets overweighed until some compensatory machinery is developed and then the revival of native arts, literature, etc., becomes a weapon for use against the white man. . . . If, on the other hand, the dominant people themselves stimulate native revivalism, then the system as a whole is much more stable, and the nativism cannot be used against the dominant people.²³

Bateson suggests that if Indigenous peoples are encouraged to exhibit and celebrate their culture, as opposed to being encouraged to model themselves on Western culture, then “nativism cannot be used against the dominant people.”²⁴ Taken at face value, Bateson’s comments read as patronizing prescriptions for how to manage the postwar decolonizing process. Yet at the same time, an inverse relationship of cultural relations of “occupation” was being brought to the fore. In Bali, Background for War, Bali defined the region that the American soldier was to reoccupy. In this framework, the exhibition established an exhibitionism-spectatorship dynamic in which American soldiers were the spectators celebrating the culture of a region that they were liberating. In theory, American soldiers were placed in an exhibitionism-spectatorship dynamic that prepared them for the more benign reoccupation and postwar worldbuilding that they would have to enact in the Pacific.

Price detailed that when he declassified Bateson’s documents under the Freedom of Information Act in the 1990s, Bateson’s memo from November 1944 was found in the CIA archive and not the OSS archive. This suggests that Bateson’s advice for intelligence gathering was influential beyond World War II and perhaps formative to the CIA. Indeed, in 1951, only four short years after its founding, the CIA outlined a policy on Cold War weapons. The classified report considers culture a “Cold War Front” and advocates for private foundations to patronize and issue commissions to artists “who could create works of art symbolical of the struggle against tyranny in their native lands.”²⁵ The CIA would also infamously fund cultural organizations around the world, including the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Asia Foundation.²⁶ Both organizations contributed to the advancement of modern art internationally in the postwar years. From 1951, the CIA put into effect a program code-named DTPillar to influence the development of nationbuilding in Asia as a means to limit the growth of communism. Stirred by a public exposé in Ramparts magazine (in circulation from 1962 to 1975), the CIA ceased funding of cultural organizations in 1967.²⁷

Bateson was also strategic in targeting individuals who should see Bali, Background for War. He wrote personal invitations to the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and to individuals at the OSS.²⁸ Particularly telling is a loose list that includes Cora Du Bois (OSS, 1942–45). Du Bois was chief of research and analysis for the Southeast Asia Command by 1944 and, after World War II, influenced the framing of Southeast Asia through her positions as chief of the Southeast Asia Branch of the US State Department’s Office of Intelligence Research (from 1945 to 1949) and as an academic at Harvard University. The list also includes Charles Fahs (OSS, 1941–45), who became chief of the Research and Analysis Division (Far East) of the OSS in 1942 and director of the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1950, where he was directly involved in allocating Rockefeller grants and providing critical support to individual artists and intellectuals as well as to museums and art spaces in Southeast Asia.²⁹ In 1947, as if telegraphing Bateson’s comment about regions as a sane orchestration of the world, Du Bois, having returned from her service in the OSS and been asked to speak about cultural anthropology and Southeast Asia, stated at Smith College: “Regions and areas, like fields of academic learning, are artificial boundaries which we erect around our curiosity. They do not represent limits of integrated reality, but defenses built to encompass the frailties of human comprehension.”³⁰ This correlation and the constellated network of Bali, Background for War raises complex questions about US postwar and postimperial worldbuilding and intelligence, as well as about Southeast Asian modern art.

After the war, Bateson would advance his ideas on visual anthropology in other fields. In 1947, he addressed the United Nations, giving a speech titled “Atoms, Nations and Cultures” to argue for the urgency of social engineering based on the cultural analysis derived from visual anthropology.³¹

Twenty-four years after Bali, Background for War opened, in 1967, Bateson published the essay “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art.”³² In this text, he performs an analysis of Balinese art as information coded in style, material, composition, and skill. He emphasizes the profundity of art in terms of its relational quality. Thus, he argues, Balinese paintings, under the influence of traditional and Western art forms, encapsulate the communication process between these societies. Furthermore, the text resonates with Bateson’s interest in addressing differences in international relations, which could also be read as laying out the framework for data to remake the world.³³ In this sense, Bali, Background for War in many ways foreshadowed Bateson’s work on cybernetics in the 1960s and throughout the Cold War.³⁴

The cross-cultural relations based on aesthetic experiences with modern art that defined Bali, Background for War were echoed in MoMA’s contributions to the postwar construction of modern art in Bali. In 1953, the foundation Puri Lukisan was set up to establish a museum of modern Balinese art in Ubud. Tjokorda Gee Agung was its founding chairman while Rudolf Bonnet was its curator. The museum sought support from patrons of Balinese art in Holland, the United States, and England. Monroe Wheeler answered the call. Beyond sending a book on the care of artworks, he supported the development of the museum by soliciting donations from American foundations. The first organization he approached was the Asia Foundation, which would contribute to the building in 1956 of Museum Puri Lukisan, the oldest museum in Bali. Wheeler might not have known at the time that the Asia Foundation received funds from the CIA. Nevertheless, the networked triangulation of capital flows from the CIA as well as the belief in aesthetic experience being able to mold subjectivities is important in the intelligence-making project of modern art in the Cold War.³⁵ In his letter to the Asia Foundation, dated July 10, 1955, Wheeler notes that a financial contribution to the Indonesian government to complete the building of the museum would be an admirable “token of American concern with the fine arts, which is too little understood in Asia,” extending MoMA’s wartime concern for Balinese modern art and Southeast Asia into the postwar period.³⁶

Bali, Background for War, when read against its possible influences on the cultural Cold War in the region and Bateson’s postwar accomplishments, anticipates exhibitions of Southeast Asian modern art as forms of intelligence-making, marrying the regional as a method in structuring the world with “modern art” and as a product of international exchange. Thus, Bali, Background for War offers a vista onto early cybernetic entanglements between Southeast Asia and modern art. It is important to keep in mind that MoMA did not set out to make a regional art exhibition with Bali, Background for War. Neither did the Museum set out to influence the policies of the cultural Cold War in Southeast Asia that Southeast Asian modern artists (like the Balinese modernists) would later navigate in seeking support for their own development through the Asia Foundation and other CIA-funded organizations. As an exhibition that predates Southeast Asia as a field of area studies, Bali, Background for War is an exhibitionary method: it is at once a field of relations, a feedback loop, and an open-ended imaginary produced from comparatively looking at modern art. Bali, Background for War foreshadowed future articulations of the relations that have come to define cybernetics as a field. As this essay argues, the exhibition also expands our understanding of MoMA’s influence as a museum and center for a global history of modern art, a critical part of the construction of a postwar world order.

*This essay has been adapted from and expands on an unpublished chapter from the author’s dissertation titled “Exhibiting Southeast Asia in the Cultural Cold War: Geopolitics of Regional Art Exhibitions (1940s–1980s),” Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 2023.

**With special thanks to Ana Marie of the Archives, Library, and Research Collections Department and Ottilie Lighte from the Imaging and Visual Resources Department of The Museum of Modern Art.

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The whites of eyes and the glint of teeth, the only discernible features in the otherwise dark shape of the Balinese shadow puppet of the witch Rangda in her supernatural form, were probably the first things visitors encountered when they entered the 1943 exhibition Bali, Background for War: The Human Problem of Reoccupation. With its fiery head and tendril fingers, the shadow puppet is a totem for a ferocious “other.” Encapsulating the anxieties that contextualized this exhibition, which coincided with World War II, the shadow puppet embodied the sensibility of the exhibition-form—an elusive sensemaking of a culture oceans away.

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.¹ Unlike MoMA’s other wartime exhibitions of the early 1940s, such as Road to Victory (1942) and Airways to Peace (1943), Bali, Background for War did not visually represent the efforts of the Allied Forces. Instead, it presented Balinese sculpture, paintings, puppets, and idols—Balinese modern art—collected by Bateson and Margaret Mead, his wife and collaborator at the time, as well as a selection of photographs from the more than 25,000 images taken during their joint anthropological expedition to Bali in 1936–39.²

Designed by Bauhaus artist and designer Xanti Schawinsky to be portable, the exhibition’s display system relied on wooden structures composed of thin vertical poles on which artworks and cultural objects were hung or otherwise installed in a variety of ways and at different heights. Balinese cultural objects were installed to facilitate distinct sight lines, which Bateson referred to as “vistas,”³ with the individual pieces appearing to float relative to one another. The exhibition presented works and objects on the same ground, alluding to how the artist and their making of the artwork were the material products of a society in which they lived and worked.

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.⁴ In turn, it represented a weaponization of the then emerging methods of visual anthropology. Bali, Background for War was, in this respect, an exceptional exhibition. Bateson’s only curatorial effort while he was employed at MoMA (from 1942 to 1943), it encapsulated aspects of Bateson and Mead’s most influential work in visual anthropology—at the time, a new subfield of anthropology that would, in part, lead to a break from the racial codification informing exhibitions of Balinese culture in Western museums in the 1930s, wherein biological markers identified race as a defining paradigm of a people’s identity.⁵ Mead and Bateson’s use of film and photography in their fieldwork in Bali has been interpreted by scholars such as Urmila Mohan as a move away from such racialized logic.⁶

After their fieldwork in Bali, Mead and Bateson developed this inquiry into a method that became a “leading social-scientific strategy in World War II” through what Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan has described as “a new alliance of federal and foundation sponsorship with university and industrial partners.”⁷ This included the Committee for National Morale, which the couple joined in 1939, and the Council on Intercultural Relations, which they co-established in 1942 to coordinate research projects among an interdisciplinary group of anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists interested in analyzing contemporary cultures to benefit the war effort.⁸

Mead and Bateson cowrote Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942) based on their findings from their fieldwork in Bali. In this book, they lay out their new methodology of visual anthropology.⁹ Photographs capture “behaviors” that are seen as logics or patterns that were registered across a society and found in individual actions or objects. The book explores the social relations that form the basis of larger social patterns. However, this study of Bali by visually surveying the cultural other has been critiqued by scholars such as Geoghegan as indebted to a Dutch colonial policy of turning Bali into a “living museum,” that is, of looking upon it as an idyllic “primitive” society—the assumption being that Balinese culture remained unchanged and thus could be essentialized and understood through visual codes. To be sure, Mead and Bateson’s lack of analysis of the Dutch administration renders their documentation and analysis problematic.¹⁰

Bali, Background for War (1943) was, in essence, the physical manifestation of the method of visual anthropology fleshed out in Balinese Character. Indeed, the exhibition itself became a space in which anthropological methods produced a sense of knowing and relating through the visual encounter with art and cultural artifacts; yet, at the same time, it did not end up being solely an ethnographic representation. In one of Bateson’s many drafts of a press release, he explained that the exhibition would promote “[a] greater realistic understanding of the differences between peoples, of the ways in which each people has developed its own customs and its view of life” and that “if different people are to work together . . . and appreciate each other, some of these special peculiarities must be recognized” and “labelled and pointed out partly so that we may avoid stepping on each other’s toes but also so that each people may have opportunity to make its own special contribution to an organized world.”¹¹ These ideas formed the groundwork for an exhibitionary logic in which the artwork is understood as indexical of a culture and people. Furthermore, it anticipates the belief in postwar art exhibitions as visual arguments for cultural affinities and thus the basis of a shared identity and political consciousness.

Bali, Background for War was the first “regional” exhibition of art from Southeast Asia. In 1943, the imagination of Southeast Asia as a region was a product of World War II. An offshoot of the India Command and formed in response to the Japanese conquest of the region, the South East Asia Command was created by the Allied Forces in August 1943, the same month that Bali, Background for War opened at MoMA.¹² Southeast Asia is referenced in MoMA’s exhibition press release as the “conquered countries” of the Japanese.¹³ The Japanese occupation during World War II had been articulated as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, an economic, military, and cultural bloc of occupied countries in East and Southeast Asia that supported the Japanese war effort. In wartime propaganda, the Co-Prosperity Sphere was framed as part of a larger historic aim of resisting Western colonization and manipulation. Seeding a regional identity through a cultural program that included the establishment of “modern” arts education, it championed the revitalization of local, traditional, and Asian aesthetics across the region.¹⁴

As a regional exhibition, Bali, Background for War was less a geographic understanding of the region as a proof of concept of Bateson’s theorization of a world order based on regions of cultures. While he does not explicitly point to it, Bateson’s presentation of modern artworks alongside anthropological materials advanced an aesthetic argument about the role of art in navigating cultural differences. It reflected an understanding of the region that was sensitive to the effects of war, one that offered an alternative visual logic to “Asian” aesthetics advanced by Japanese wartime propaganda.

Bateson’s notes about the exhibition indicate “Southeast Asia” alongside other themes such as “Problems of Overseas Administration,” “Problems of National Character,” “Intercultural Relations and Propaganda,” and “Problems of Visual Presentation.”¹⁵ His conceptualization of the region was a framework for organizing and ordering the world—one based on visual identification of “cultural patterns.” In memos regarding the exhibition, he commented that “in the organization and orchestration of the postwar world [,] many different types of technical insight will be required—political, geographic, economic and cultural.”¹⁶ Furthermore, he highlighted that a key failure of the Treaty of Versailles was the lack of regional knowledge and warned that in the postwar epoch, there was a real risk that the cultural aspects of the various regions would “be ignored or imperfectly understood.”¹⁷ Bateson believed that this would lead to conflict. In a letter to Mortimer Graves of the American Council of Learned Societies in Washington, DC, sent in April 1943, four months before the opening of Bali, Background for War, Bateson explained that he and Mead were “trying to arrange in the museum an exhibition of Balinese material (native paintings, carvings, observational films, and observational photographs of native behavior) as an example of what a single culture would look like when worked out in this way.”¹⁸ He concluded by claiming the exhibition was part of a larger framework that was “the next logical step towards a sane orchestration of the world’s regional culture.”¹⁹ If regions were a framework for organizing the world and integral to international relations and building a peaceful world, then the ability to read the cultural patterns found in art and its relationship to a society was crucial.

Bali, Background for War sought to represent “the patterns of thought and behavior” of the Balinese people through “works of art and [Bateson’s] photographs of daily life on the island.”²⁰ Developed with MoMA in mind, the exhibition set out a methodology of viewing that made the exhibition-form a generative site for producing “intelligence.” Intelligence in this regard took multiple forms, including the conversion of anthropological information on Balinese culture into “military intelligence,” wherein the viewer learning to read Balinese culture through the exhibition develops a skill necessary for the successful American “reoccupation” of Bali. The exhibition was firstly a collection of material and anthropological information that in the context of World War II had military value. Secondly, it was mobilized to cultivate skills and subjectivities for military application. In turn, the exhibition as a historical object points to an emergent “cultural” military industrial complex centered on modern art and anthropology.

In this context, the “regional” exhibition was a technology that converted anthropological intelligence into military intelligence, both in terms of apprehending a cultural other but also as a way of organizing the world through cultural regions. How was modern art integral to this convergence? How was the production of a modern subjectivity and exhibitionary logic of Southeast Asia entangled with the writing of modern art at MoMA, and how was it distinct from the colonial aesthetics of the census that scholars have pointed out in discussing Balinese Character?²¹

The artworks that Bateson and Mead presented in Bali, Background for War were procured from three main painting centers in Bali: Ubud, where most foreign artists in Bali had settled from the 1920s onward; Sanur, where some foreign artists lived and most vacationed; and Batuan, which tourists rarely visited. Bateson and Mead seemed to have been most interested in Batuan, where most of the paintings in Bali, Background for War were sourced from.²² By the time Mead and Bateson were in Bali, there was a thriving business of Balinese artists making tourist paintings for a Western audience. As products of transnational exchange, these works of art were quintessentially modern.

Hildred Geertz, in her study of Bateson and Mead’s collection of Balinese paintings and, more generally, of Batuan paintings, describes the paintings produced in Batuan as “bicultural” and “bound up in the meaning systems and aesthetic ideas of several cultures at once.”²³ She notes that only a few of the Batuan painters were directly taught by German artist Walter Spies and Dutch artist Rudolf Bonnet, both of whom lived in Ubud. For the most part, Batuan or Balinese painters at the time encountered Western images in textbooks, in foreign magazines, and in the form of small commercial images distributed within the Dutch colony.

Prior to Bateson and Mead’s arrival in Bali, there were already precedents of exchange and modernism on the island. The year 1928 is marked as the first time Western observers recorded art in Bali as consisting of new forms of representation. These observers went on to cultivate a tourist economy for such images.²⁴ The Pita Maha, an artist society committed to modern art in Bali, was established in 1936 and active until 1940. It became associated with modern art of Bali, with Bonnet, a member of the society, organizing exhibitions of Balinese modernists in Indonesia and in Europe, including exhibitions in 1937 and 1938 in Amsterdam and London²⁵

The modern style that emerged from this period in the 1930s and which defined the artworks that Bateson presented in Bali, Background for War was thus informed by engagement with Western art. As Adrian Vickers has noted, Balinese modern art in the 1930s was seen as exotically primitive and distinctly different from Western modernism. And yet, art dealers such as Dutch gallerist Carel van Lier sold Balinese modern art in Europe alongside European modern art.²⁶

Walter Spies housed Bateson and Mead upon their arrival in Bali in 1936 and provided their first introduction to Balinese paintings, influencing Bateson’s perspective on Balinese modern art.²⁷ For MoMA’s installation of the exhibition, Bateson considered an additional section devoted to Balinese modern art.²⁸ In the anthropologist’s personal papers, there is a memo to Xanti Schawinsky about the wall text alongside instructions regarding which photographs and artworks were to be installed. In addition, Bateson scribbled down several possible configurations for the works. A section called “History of Modern Balinese Art,” for example, was to be arranged in a straight row, suggesting a linear historical narrative. The selection of works would include one or two paintings by Spies and about ten artworks from Bateson and Mead’s collection. The wall text focused on the genealogy of the making of the artwork and described how artists made their works as part of a loose art history of modern Balinese art development, information that was then interspersed with short stories and mythical accounts such as how Spies gave paper and black ink to Balinese artist Sorbet and a whole school was born. The genealogy privileged Spies and his position in Balinese modern art at the expense of other influences, implicitly reflecting Bateson’s own perspective of Balinese art.

Bateson claims in the written guide that accompanied the traveling exhibition that all the artworks were of the artists’ “spontaneous invention,” with the exception of a painting by Ida Bagus Made Togog, who was asked to make pictures of his dreams.²⁹ In this regard, Bateson’s mobilization of artworks might seem to speak to how Balinese artists authentically represented their inner lives and society. This was not necessarily the case, however. In her study of Bateson and Mead’s collection, Geertz found that the two anthropologists deeply influenced the Balinese artists. Throughout their fieldwork, the couple was in contact with Balinese painters who would not only travel to see them but also made art specifically to sell to them.³⁰

While Bateson intended the artworks to be seen as sources of information about the inner lives of the peoples they represented, their makers were aware of the Western anthropological gaze of Bateson and Mead, which informed their process and, in particular, their subject matter. Thus, the Balinese society that Bali, Background for War pictured was one already in dialogue with an international world order and a modern art history.In this sense, Balinese modern art in the exhibition was relational, not just representative of a faraway culture. The photographed Balinese man and more generally the people whose gaze met those visiting the exhibition was thus returning a gaze that was part of a cultural exchange that spanned back to the 1930s and was a critical part of the definition of Balinese modern art. The regional imagination captured in Bali, Background for War was, in turn, an emergent international order framed by an encounter with modern art. This nexus of the anthropological and militaristic sensemaking that took shape as an exhibitionary technology of worldmaking during the Cold War will be unpacked in the second part of this essay.

With special thanks to Ana Marie of the Archives, Library, and Research Collections Department and Ottilie Lighte from the Imaging and Visual Resources Department of The Museum of Modern Art.

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In 2011, Heman Chong (Singaporean, born 1977) predicted the future.²

He debuted a work titled Calendars (2020–2096), a collection of 1,001 images of emptied–out void decks, IKEA showrooms, airport terminals, shopping centers—public spaces in Singapore devoid of people. From 2004 to 2010, Chong photographed spaces he described as “susceptible to change, to every sway of policy, to every new wave of capital”³—and by laying them out as a calendar that starts in January 2020 and runs through 2096, he used these images, each of which represents a month, to map the future onto the present and the past onto the future. Chong’s decision to start the calendars in 2020 was informed by his fascination with 2020 being “the year when all the problems in the world could possibly be solved,”⁴ and the inherent mix of disappointment and optimism of such an impossible promise.

Nine years after they were first exhibited, these images proved both prophetic and ironic as the COVID-19 pandemic emptied out public spaces and plunged the world into a year of government-mandated sheltering in place. Heman Chong had made pictures of a future no one could have predicted. Using the calendar format, Chong visualizes a circuiting of the past-present-future through a mechanism of accumulation. In projecting forward images of emptied public spaces, Chong prospects a potential future. I contend that in their ambiguity and open-endedness as banal everyday public spaces, these images hedge the future. They are hedges in terms of being deliberate strategies to systematically limit the risk of becoming irrelevant. Moreover, I contend that these hedges are an artistic strategy that arises out of Chong operating within Singapore’s system of authoritarian capitalism and his global awareness of conceptualism. Given that the histories of authoritarian capitalism and conceptualism arise out of the Cold War expansion of the American empire, these hedges offer a lens through which to consider post-conceptualism from Southeast Asia.

Hedging as Artistic Strategy in Heman Chong’s Work

The term “hedging” generally refers to a risk–management investment strategy undertaken to protect against loss. It can also mean the limiting or qualifying of something by conditions.⁵ In the context of this essay, I have both meanings in mind as I describe Chong’s practice. The open-endedness of the photographs in Calendars (2020–2096) and the appropriation of the calendar format to decontextualize the images into myriad possible futures, create a visual system and a hedge that ensures the work will always produce “new” meanings regardless of how the future plays out. In this sense, how Calendars (2020–2096) literally works is encapsulated in the complexity of its surface—in images of emptied–out public spaces as calendar pages.

Chong’s artworks can be read as both systems and strategies that mirror (and critique) the technocratic systems that define Singapore’s brand of capitalism. Chong has referred to this “surface complexity” as a key facet of his work.⁶ The term is an oxymoron in that it refers to the work’s surface encapsulating the complexity of the work as a generative visual system. In the case of Calendars (2020–2096),the visual register of the calendar is the system, and the images of the emptied–out public spaces are the open-ended components of this system onto which various possible meanings can be ascribed. The images, and the system they embody, beg seductively to be overread. In this way, the surface of Chong’s work is a prime place in which indeterminacy can be managed toward the most “generative” ends.⁷ The point is not that Chong predicts future events like COVID-19—Calendars (2020–2096) is a visualization of a long game: its imagistic system will always predict something—but rather that he manages the indeterminacy of the future.

This form of hedging, or the systematic management of indeterminacy, is an allegory of the larger meta strategies endemic to the Singapore state.⁸ Chong’s choice of subject matter directly points to Singapore’s land management and lauded public housing program, a technocratic system of “hedging” on the future that structures much of life on the island. The nation’s housing program is a form of land management in which land is transformed into public and private spaces and, in turn, into assets. The sale of homes directly contributes to the state’s income. At the same time, the value of those homes is protected from unbridled speculation. The funding of mortgages for public housing through social security savings in particular has been described as “a closed circuit of financial transaction between the Housing Development Board (HDB) and the social security savings boards, the Central Provident Fund (CPF), established in 1955.”⁹ Integral to Singapore’s governance, capital from the CPF is used to purchase government bonds for national development programs and is the foundation of the Government Investment Corporation (GIC), Singapore’s first sovereign wealth fund for global investments.¹⁰ This capital has prevented the Singaporean government from becoming dependent on international financial agencies like the World Bank, unlike many other states in Southeast Asia, and has enabled Singapore to become one of the richest countries in the world.¹¹ It is a networked system of capital accumulation based on forecasting and the realities of operating as an island-nation in an international marketplace. Hedging, understood broadly (and according to the expanded definition used in this essay) within this system, is a strategy of national interest that manages risk by structuring the national system to always be generative and by using any surplus in an international market. In turn, the national system/market is protected from the volatility of the international market.

In a report for ArtAsiaPacific, Chong links his conceptual practice to the material conditions of working within Singapore’s authoritarian capitalism:

“I have always argued that every piece of art produced is embodied in a larger political reality, and that much of what we do as artists in Singapore is linked to our country’s own political realities. As such, all art is political, no matter how much we want to distance ourselves from that fact. How then can I, as an artist, influence these sets of political realities? I am not interested in being a politician, but in many ways there are more possibilities in Singapore for an artist to work politically than for an actual politician. . . . I feel strongly that the answers might lie in the resources that we have in Singapore: namely, an incredibly strong economy that allows for a large budget surplus every year, which, in turn, is channeled in part to art and cultural activities and institutions. As an artist, I have access to these funds, and it is relatively easy for me to come up with art projects that do not involve any form of object-making. I can use this money to organize workshops or informal residencies, all under the guise of an art project. This, of course, is nothing new and I’m not the first to think of this.”¹²

Chong’s “hedges” are artistic strategies that arise from his experience of operating out of Singapore’s authoritarian capitalism, as it fits within larger global systems and histories of capitalism. In a transparent yet totalizing technocratic system of governance, one has to be able to read between the lines that exist in the public sphere to perceive the underlying operations at play. An individual’s agency comes from navigating these systems and manipulating the material byproducts of the system—literally working through and with the surfaces of meta governing systems. In Calendars (2020–2096), one is compelled to read into emptied-out spaces in order to “see” the system at work as it extrapolates into the future, but it is this very compulsion to “read into” that is generative and enables a speculative system that allows Calendars (2020–2096) to “predict” the future.

The Politics of Art and Authoritarian Capitalism

In 2015, the popular Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek published an essay titled “Capitalism Has Broken Free of the Shackles of Democracy,” an ode as it were to Singapore’s brand of capitalism.¹³ Zizek opens the essay with a prediction that one day the world will build monuments to Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding prime minister, as the creator of authoritarian capitalism.

This ideology, Zizek claims, is “set to shape the next century as much as democracy shaped the last.”Ibid. Seeming to fulfill this projection, Singapore has been the national development goal of the likes of Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president, who once stated that he hoped his country would become “the Singapore of Africa.”¹⁴ This sentiment has been echoed by vocal Brexiteers who dream of turning Britain into “Singapore-on-Thames,” as well as by American Republicans who want an American healthcare system modeled on Singapore’s.¹⁵ Moreover, authoritarian capitalism, since the publication of Zizek’s essay and with the increasing anxiety over China’s rise, has gained currency.¹⁶ Yet, even as it found its way into President Joe Biden’s first congressional address, authoritarian capitalism is difficult to define. There are many different and unique forms of authoritarian capitalism. In this regard, it should not be a read as a derogatory term. What the term essentially refers to is a system in which the presence of a capitalist economy exists alongside the absence or erosion of civil liberties.¹⁷

Zizek and other intellectuals have noted that authoritarian capitalism has increasingly become the norm rather than the exception.¹⁸ Yet for the most part, this material historical reality has not been considered within art world discourses or in the art historical examination of post-conceptual practices like Chong’s, which are products of, as much as responses to, these operating systems. In this regard, much has been made of the Singapore state’s censorship, and yet much less attention has been given to thinking about the kind of cultural landscape and society that is produced by this brand of authoritarianism.¹⁹

According to data from 2016, up to 85 percent of Singapore’s art scene is funded by the state.²⁰ Richard Carney’s in-depth study of Singapore’s authoritarian capitalism illustrates how the prevalence of state-owned enterprises is part of the ruling party’s capacity to stay in power.²¹ This extends to the island’s cultural landscape and is most evident in Singapore’s Visual Arts Cluster, a strategic leadership body that consists of the National Gallery Singapore and Singapore Art Museum, museums of modern and contemporary art respectively, and the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI). This centralization of resources transparently ties together the public and private spheres, whose alignment can benefit the ecology of Singapore contemporary art. Arguably the country’s most successful and well-networked commercial art gallery, STPI is itself a government limited company.²² Artists like Chong thus develop their practices in a system in which the public and private spheres are, to a degree, centrally “regulated,” if not centrally “aligned.”

Considering how this has informed his artistic practice, Chong wrote in a feature on the Singapore art scene in 2018:

“Looking back, my entire journey as an artist has been heavily assisted by cultural policies, which have produced the institutions that have served as cornerstones in the evolution of my practice. . . . Since 1999, Singapore’s National Arts Council (NAC) has supplied me with grants to participate in art fairs, biennials, conferences, exhibitions and residencies abroad, enabling me to build a network that allows me access to even more of these art events and festivals. The Substation, an independent art space founded in 1990 by the late theatre doyen Kuo Pao Kun, was the first building funded by the NAC’s Arts Housing Scheme and was also the first place where I showed my work. There, I tested out many of the ideas behind my subsequent exhibitions. The NAC is also commissioner of the Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where I was invited to represent my country at the 50th edition in 2003. The list goes on.”²³

Chong’s development as an artist is entangled in the acceleration of the state’s investment in contemporary art.²⁴ Between 2000 and 2002, with one of the first bursaries from the NAC, Chong studied at the Royal College of Art in London, earning a master’s degree in Communication Art and Design. Shortly after, then Singapore Art Museum (SAM) curator Ahmad Mashadi selected Chong’s video installation Molotov Cocktails (Grey Aquarium Remix) (1999) to represent the country at the 10th India Triennale 2001, where it was one of nine works awarded a jury prize. After receiving his master’s, Chong was the first Singaporean artist selected for a one-year residency (2002–3) at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (KB), again with the support of the NAC. Also in 2003, at the age of twenty-five, he was one of three artists to present work in the 2nd Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.       

Beyond the litany of achievements enabled by the state, the KB residency facilitated a turning point in Chong’s practice. In Berlin, Chong was introduced to an international network of contemporary art and artists, whose discourses and agents would become elements in his practice as he began to operationalize systems beyond those within Singapore. As a testament to his success in doing this, in 2005, as part of its promotion of the 3rd Singapore Pavilion, the NAC commissioned him to organize the pavilion’s opening party at the Palazzo Pisani Moretta. Chong’s savvy, flexibility, and ambition are not just characteristic of a global neoliberal creative class, but also the defining attributes of his capable navigation of Singapore’s authoritarian capitalism.

However, despite this, Chong should not be mistaken for a lackey of the state or a dilettante of the international art world. After moving to Berlin, he shifted his focus from the cinematic to the conceptual, and more specifically, to an interrogation of Western conceptualism. This interrogation paralleled Chong’s development of a reflexive language that spoke to power. In 2004, he organized his own solo exhibition Snore Louder If You Can at the Substation. In an accompanying statement, he describes the works in the exhibition as a series of ideas about negotiating access and authority:

“I have always been fascinated by how a person is allowed or rejected into a space or a situation based on specific criteria of authoritarians, e.g., club bouncers, art jurors, electronic ticketing gates at train stations—and along the lines of this concept . . . I have generally appropriated concepts and styles from conceptualism and minimalism, and it is this strain that I wish to expand on in my work; an endless reworking of ideas inherited from the transmission of other works from exhibitions (real experience) and information (represented experience), in order to see how the works could stand the strain of being copied and realigned, creating different meanings in their forms.”²⁵

This extrapolation of conceptual art strategies to speak intelligently to overarching governing contemporary systems that order human life is perhaps no more apparent than in Chong’s Monument to the people we’ve conveniently forgotten (I hate you) (2008), an expansive installation of one million blacked–out business cards that, when installed, expand into a sea of shimmering black, taking over floors of an exhibition space or bursting forth from a closet, in effect intervening and remaking the architecture of the exhibition space and how people engage with it. The work recalls some of the prominent strategies employed by Felix Gonzalez-Torres (American, born Cuba, 1957–1996) in his emotive installations of luminous candy spills or stacks of imprinted paper, which themselves recall the work of Carl Andre (American, born 1935) and Donald Judd (American, 1928–1994).²⁶

Incidentally conceived during, but not inspired by, the global financial crisis of 2008, the blacked–out business cards can be read as analogous to the ensuing economic devastation and subsequent fundamental restructuring of the world. The one million cards point to a disposable connection or business identity, to the lost and forgotten opportunities that effectively colonize the spaces that they occupy, and could be subconsciously inspired by, the crisis of confidence in the neoliberal capitalist system that was triggered by the 2008 financial crisis.²⁷

In many ways, Chong’s works are successful because they respond and adapt to material conditions of the systems that govern the making of a work and its travel. His blacked–out business cards, for example, accumulate into a dark, tidal mass that viewers have to push through with their feet. Each step upon the cards is deliberate if you do not want to fall. The gallery sitter holds his breath as he watches you, and agonizes over when he should intervene to mitigate the museum’s risk of an accident. Chong re-disciplines viewers’ bodies and social relations through his disproportionate extrapolation of the scale of the blacked-out business cards. He is astutely aware of the material parameters and affects that govern how we navigate the world.

In this sense, the politics of Chong’s work are real and make themselves known in material ways. This was especially evident when he leveraged the opportunities presented by Singapore’s authoritarian capitalist system and operationalized his art world networks as deft critiques. In 2012, the National Arts Council of Singapore—in perhaps the most post-colonial and yet ill-conceived move it has made in its lifespan—decided to withdraw Singapore from the Venice Biennale.²⁸ Gillman Barracks, a designated arts cluster, was scheduled to open that year alongside other initiatives. It could, therefore, be argued that 2013 was the year that Singapore needed to flex on an international stage. Chong, with Ho Rui An, a younger Singaporean artist, authored a public petition to call for the return of the Singapore Pavilion. Leveraging his international network, Chong created CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE (SINGAPORE PAVILION / 55TH VENICE BIENNALE / 2013), an image of a broken file link, which he published in an issue of AsiaArtPacific magazine as an advertisement, bringing a largely provincial protest into regional discourse. The image of a broken link spoke not only to how there had been a breakdown in the marketing of Singapore but also to how art is a system of information, an idea that he had articulated in 2004.²⁹ In 2013, then Minister of Community, Culture, and Youth Lawrence Wong announced that Singapore would return to the Venice Biennale and went so far as to commit to the long-term lease of a pavilion within the Arsenale.³⁰

Post-Conceptualism: Histories of an Authoritarian Future

There is more to the cloth of conceptualism that Chong wears. The artistic strategies that he employs not only speak to the political-economic systems he navigates, but also reflect upon the duplicitous history of Western conceptualism itself. Chong’s painting practice, for example, grew out of Cover Versions (2009– ),an ongoing work comprised of paintings of book covers based on recommendations from friends. For the last eleven years, Chong has engaged in a daily ritual of painting on the same-size canvas with the same brand of commercially produced paint. This practice recalls a similar one by On Kawara (Japanese, 1933–2014), an artist whose legacy, along with that of others, like Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Chong has inherited, making his own artistic practice fundamentally post-conceptual.³¹

Each of Kawara’s date paintings, otherwise known as his “Today” series, straightforwardly notes the date of its making on a monochromatic ground of gray, red, or blue. Each painting was developed through a series of steps that never varied and that were inspired by the conventions of recording the date of the place in which it was made. However, often forgotten in discussions of Kawara’s date paintings is that, as part of the artwork, the artist fabricated a cardboard box in which to store each work. Some of the boxes are lined with cuttings from the front page of the local newspaper.³² Interestingly, the series grew out of a triptych self-referentially titled Title, which consists of paintings that spell out, in sequential order, “One Thing,” “1965,” and “Viet-Nam.³³ The monumentalizing of the small and specific events in Kawara’s date paintings is inseparable from the procedural accumulation of artistic labor reflected in the objects. Yet the roots of this practice are tied to a conflict in Southeast Asia that would rattle the Cold War convictions held in the West.

In channeling the legacies of Kawara’s conceptualism, Chong’s post-conceptual practice implicitly speaks to the twofold relationship between international histories of conceptualism and authoritarian capitalism. Lucy Lippard’s canonical definition of conceptual art, in relation to the American context, the dematerialization of the art object, and the democratization of the art world, as “the era of the Civil Rights Movement, of Vietnam, the Women’s Liberation Movement and the counter-culture,” has often been used as a historical reference in aligning post-conceptualism.³⁴ Marked by the “art of everyday life,” the trajectory of conceptualism in the West took the artwork out of the gallery and into the street, enfolding it in the larger social fabric.³⁵ However, alongside these developments in the West, certain strains of conceptualism in Southeast Asia became embedded in authoritarian regimes placed in power by the United States during the Cold War.³⁶

During the Cold War, authoritarianism was seen as a necessary evil to limit the expansion of Soviet influence and further projects of decolonialization.³⁷ It was believed, at the time, that in order to have agency on the international stage and a place alongside Western states, domestic political struggles and contestations had to be contained.³⁸ Marian Pastor Roces, in her essay “Conceptual Art, Authoritarianism, 1970s, Asia,” notes that in this historical milieu, conceptual art offers the possibility of hidden or coded messages, but could also be mere “window dressing for fascism,”³⁹ as in the case of the first two directors of the Cultural Center of the Philippines.⁴⁰ While Roces does not directly refer to Singapore in her text, the historical and geopolitical milieu that she paints of the Cold War is one that informs Singapore’s history as a nation-state.⁴¹

While different threads of conceptualism evolved alongside and in different ways from authoritarian regimes around the world, the West’s discourse on conceptualism in the 1980s and 1990s expanded the understanding that art need not be aesthetic, freeing up what might constitute artistic material, or what Rosalind Krauss has called the “post medium.”⁴² “Post-conceptual art,” an extension of this trajectory, is a term that, coined by Peter Osborne, refers to an expanded art practice blending art practices from performance to installation to painting.⁴³ Although it has since been defined in a number of different ways, the key tenets of post-conceptual art are its ahistoricity, a condition of high capitalism, and its double-coded nature as both conceptual and aesthetic in form.⁴⁴ As such, post-conceptualism cannot be understood through a linear chronology of post-1960s art movements. As Osborne describes, “It denotes an art premised on the complex historical experience and critical legacy of conceptual art, broadly construed in such a way as to register the fundamental mutation of the ontology of the artwork carried by that legacy.”⁴⁵ The term has been used by Singaporean intellectuals such as C. J. Wee Wan-Ling in relation to contemporary aspects of Singapore’s condition of rapid modernization.⁴⁶

Chong’s post-conceptual practice can be described through either Osborne’s or Wee’s definition. Yet, these readings of post-conceptualism do not address the significance of Chong’s claimed inheritance of conceptualism and the situated histories of authoritarian capitalism from which his practice has developed.⁴⁷ From the cultural value of a painting to a business card and an advertisement in a magazine, Chong occupies the systems and material codifications of our world, and then mobilizes, contorts, distorts, and ultimately explodes these systems from within. The hedges in Chong’s work—the systematic operationalizing of the surface of the artwork—are subversive and duplicitous. They are generous in artistic affinities and yet deftly mercantile in insuring their relevance.

With the pressures of COVID-19 and our reliance on global platform technologies promising to exponentially feed the growth of authoritarian capitalism as a world-system, it is this unpoetic language of the hedge, a facet of Chong’s practice located at the intersection of the Janus-faced histories of global conceptualism and authoritarian capitalism, that speaks directly to a politic of the future that has long since arrived.

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