The Last Wild Men of Borneo Read online

  He made a few changes. The boat was one long open space from wheelhouse to stern; he installed plywood bulkheads to make a cabin. Hung curtains on the open sides for privacy. Built a new outhouse off the stern. Spiffed up the galley. Then he purchased a twenty-seven-foot-long dugout canoe with a long-shaft, air-cooled engine to tow along behind, with which he could navigate shallow tributaries. He loaded the whole thing up. Propellers and spare parts. Pounds of coffee and tea. Hundreds of pounds of rice. And goods to barter: transistor radios and steel parangs, gold earrings and batik sarongs from Bali, Buck knives and Swiss Army tools and binoculars. And a crew: an engineer for the diesel engine, a river pilot, and a general vessel boy. Best of all, much of the boat had a raised deck over plentiful, covered storage space. He was now totally self-sufficient.

  “It was to be Mission Impossible,” he said. “Once we got under way everything was supposed to be kept secret.”

  Things had changed since his first foray into Borneo five years before. Indonesian antique dealers with galleries in Java had long been seeking good objects, but almost universally they were after antique Chinese ceramics, especially the big, very old martavan jars so prized by every Dayak family. After 1976, as Michael first began buying statues, he made the village of Melak, thirty-six hours upriver from Samarinda, his base. It was the last reasonably sized, easily accessible village before the river narrowed and the rapids began, and the final one with a hotel—a two-story plank structure on an unpaved street with a verandah overlooking the river—where you could buy a cold beer. Michael rented two rooms, one for him, one for his stuff. There he frequently encountered the other dealers.

  “They wouldn’t go into the far reaches above Melak,” he said. “They were Muslims and the Dayaks didn’t like them and they’d sit in this little café smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee while their runners went into the villages to buy things. All they wanted was ceramics. Then I came along and they would see me coming off chartered longboats from upriver with porters carrying these statues up to my room. ‘What’s with you?’ they said. ‘Why are you buying this firewood?’ They thought I was silly and stupid. But a few years later they were all buying it too.”

  So were a lot of other people, as it happened.

  Ever since merchants and explorers ventured out of Europe to Africa, India, the Far East, and the New World, they returned with souvenirs of wild lands. Fetishes. Trinkets. The tooths of narwhals and the tusks of elephants. Spears. Drums. Daggers and effigies. Native American feathered headdresses and tomahawks. Crude oddities, it was thought, of exotic places and people, trophies of savage lands and heroic journeys to reach them, wonders meant to shock and fascinate, “to testify to ‘the strangeness and inhumanity of their customs.’” Sailors tucked them in pockets and sea bags; captains hauled them into their cabins; natural historians took specimens by the thousands. These “cult objects and other savage utensils” were booty, often gifted to wealthy benefactors back in Europe, where they were displayed in private cabinets of curiosity. To have such a collection of wonders was fashionable, cool; it meant you had touched, if even remotely, distant, alien worlds that were unreachable for all but a tiny few in an age before photographs or films, much less cheap air travel. Back then public museums and art galleries didn’t exist; scholarship and art were restricted to the rich, with the exception of reliquaries and religious art in cathedrals. Nor was there a distinction between artifacts of natural history—leaves of the tropical breadfruit tree, or the brilliant red feathers of a macaw, for instance—and objects like statues made by human hands. Or even, in many cases, between things and people themselves, a tradition that resulted, as recently as 1897, in polar explorer Robert Peary’s return to New York after his fourth Greenland voyage with six living Inuit curiosities. Thirty thousand people showed up at the dock to see them. “The crowd . . . boarded the vessel to see the Eskimos, who had attired themselves in their native costumes for inspection,” wrote a New York newspaper. “Avian and Minik, the children, attracted considerable attention, and were plentifully supplied with candy and peanuts which they seemed to enjoy immensely.” The Inuit soon took up residence in, of course, the place where specimens were housed: the American Museum of Natural History. Though promised a return home to Greenland, all but one would die in New York.

  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the first public museums opened, largely built on objects from the grandest private and royal curiosity collections. In 1753 the physician Sir Hans Sloane donated his collection of botanical, geological, and zoological specimens to Britain, which soon became the foundation of the British Museum, opened to the public in 1759. Many of the original ethnographic objects in the Louvre and the Musée du quai Branly originated from French royal collections. The cabinet of curiosities of the Danish kings led to the National Museum of Copenhagen. To fill these new museums, art and antiquities were cut down, sawn off, trundled back to Europe. Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin and ambassador to the Ottoman Empire—occupiers of Greece in the early nineteenth century—began cutting the ancient marble sculptures off the Parthenon in 1801, which he sold to the British Museum in 1816. Napoleon raided Egypt and the Valley of the Kings; his booty comprises the exquisite collection of Egyptian antiquities in the Louvre today.

  Colonial conquest brought new ethnological museums, halls of wonder stuffed with lots of curiosity cabinets, like the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, originally opened as the Colonial Museum in 1864, and the Trocadéro Ethnography Museum in Paris, opened in 1882, that presented objects from conquered “primitive societies.” Exotic flora and fauna and human-made ceremonial objects were one and the same in these museums of ethnology. They were objects of science, not art. After all, as writes Robert Goldwater, author of the landmark text Primitivism in Modern Art, who became the first director of the Museum of Primitive Art in New York, for Europeans in the nineteenth century “the touchstone of artistic value” was “the conception of faithful naturalistic representation.” Statues or masks made by Africans or Dayaks were wild, exaggerated, out of proportion, cartoonish, scary, haunting, anything but naturalistic.

  At the Chicago Columbian Exposition in 1893, Franz Boas, the founder of modern anthropology, presented ethnographic objects in a new way: for the first time they were removed from glass cabinets and presented in faux scenes, dioramas of Native Americans around tipis or Inuit hunters standing around a stuffed seal, that simulated their original settings. (It was Boas, while working at the American Museum of Natural History, who suggested to Peary that he bring back some real live Eskimos.)

  Just as Boas was creating his contextualized displays, avant-garde artists like Pablo Picasso became enamored of African masks. “All alone in that awful museum” (i.e., the Trocadéro), said Picasso years later, “with masks, dolls, made by the redskins, dusty manikins, Les Damoiselles d’Avignon must have come to me that very day, but not at all because of the forms; because it was my first exorcism-painting—yes, absolutely. . . . The masks weren’t just like any other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things. . . . The Negro pieces were intercesseurs, mediators. . . . They were against everything—against unknown, threatening spirits. I always looked at fetishes. I understood.” In the objects Picasso spotted was something altogether different—a feral, expressive power, a totally new vision of aesthetic human form that would soon directly influence modern art. It was a vision that transcended pure aesthetics, a turning away from Western civilization and its constraints, a freeing of the ego, the artistic expression of the very themes inspiring everyone from James Brooke to Bruno and Michael Palmieri.

  Primitivism notwithstanding, few really considered the statues and masks that inspired it as art. And how could they? Africans or Dayaks or Asmat tribesmen in deserts or swamps or jungles were still lesser beings. The ethnological collection of the British Museum, after all, had long been known as the “Rag and Bone Department.”

  Slowly that began to change, pushed by the cubists and surrealists.
In March 1935 the Museum of Modern Art in New York, founded just six years earlier by Nelson Rockefeller’s mother, opened an “Exhibition of African Negro Art.” “In commenting on the relation between African art and modern art,” stated the museum’s press release, “[the curator] has said: ‘The art of the primitive negro in its mastery of aesthetic forms, sensitiveness to materials, freedom from naturalistic imitation and boldness of imagination parallels many of the ideals of modern art.’” All of the works in the exhibit were owned by European collectors.

  Twenty years later, Nelson Rockefeller opened the aforementioned Museum of Primitive Art in New York. It was the first museum in the United States wholly dedicated to exhibiting objects made by unnamed indigenous people not as ethnological artifacts but as art in and of itself. Gone were the old glass cabinets. Gone were the tipis and taxidermied seals. African carvings stood atop white rectangles beneath track lights in white-walled rooms. “My interest in primitive art is . . . strictly esthetic,” Rockefeller said, echoing the MoMA press release of two decades earlier. “Don’t ask me whether this bowl I am holding is a household implement or a ritual vessel. . . . I could not care less! I enjoy the form, the color, the texture, the shape. I am not in the least interested in the anthropological or the ethnological end of it.” To Rockefeller and Goldwater, his mentor and the museum’s director, traditional sculptures and carvings from Africa or Oceania could be every bit as great as any painting by the great Western masters.

  Rockefeller’s own collecting—he bought his first piece of tribal art, a Batak fetish staff from Sumatra, now part of Indonesia, in 1934—legitimized tribal art in the United States. In Europe, with its long history of colonialism, the tradition was older, pushed by the Swiss art collector Josef Mueller, who exhibited part of his African collection in a local Swiss museum in 1957, the same year Rockefeller opened the Museum of Primitive Art. Twenty years later—just as Michael Palmieri was putting down roots in Borneo—Mueller’s son-in-law, Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller, Europe’s most important collector of tribal art, opened the Barbier-Mueller Museum in Geneva.

  Mueller’s and Rockefeller’s interest in indigenous art had been an outgrowth of their interest in modern Western art; they were drawn to the pieces that had inspired it and they appreciated it on purely aesthetic, formalist terms. The pieces they acquired had come mostly from former colonists: soldiers, government bureaucrats, commercial traders, people who had traveled to the Congo or Benin or the Dutch East Indies in service of the colony. But Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller represented a new, postcolonial generation, people like Michael Palmieri and Bruno Manser, disaffected baby boomers who were turning away from their Western roots and seeking a new spiritual salvation in the East, in tribal people and their animist power and wisdom. Nelson Rockefeller had boasted of his utter lack of interest in the culture and spiritual beliefs that birthed the art he coveted, but in doing so he missed its entire purpose, its soul. All tribal art is sacred art. Even utilitarian objects like paddles or spears embodied souls and spirits; they had been created in sacred communion with gods and spirits and powers responsible for life and death that could summon good health or bad, that could move heaven and earth, that vibrated with unseen powers that Nelson Rockefeller didn’t have eyes for. A shield carved by the Asmat in Papua didn’t just stop arrows; it was imbued with designs whose power could make an opponent drop to his knees with fear at their very sight. This new counterculture generation suddenly took interest in the original, full meaning of the objects and the cultures that produced them. A pure aesthetic interest in plane and plasticity and form wasn’t enough. “There became an underlying embrace of the Other,” said Jean Fritts, senior director and international chairman of African and Oceanic Art at Sotheby’s. “You have to understand the ceremony, the ritual. Why is this different from that? There is a curiosity! You can feel something from the object.”

  Bruno and Michael weren’t outliers in their turn to the East; they were fully in and of their time, from the Beatles’ embrace of Indian gurus to Ring of Fire’s Blair brothers, whose mother first brought them to Jakarta as a follower of the Indonesian mystic founder of the Subud movement. “Bruno wasn’t unique in what he wanted,” said Bruce Carpenter, a scholar and collector and sometimes dealer in Indonesian art, who visited Bali for the first time in 1975, a year after Michael Palmieri. “We were all running away from our own cultures and wanted the magic and rituals and spiritual meaning behind things.”

  “My generation came of age amidst this great spiritual quest to find meaning in life,” said Thomas Murray, among the foremost dealers in Indonesian sculpture and textiles, a former member of the U.S. Cultural Property Advisory Committee and past president of the Antique Tribal Art Dealers Association. Murray, born in 1951, grew up idolizing his uncle Fenton, a sea captain who visited the family every few years and “turned us on to octopus and sushi and stories of head-hunters and cannibals.” His mother’s death when he was twenty-two—the same year Bruno was drafted—sent Murray reeling. He lived in a yoga ashram, dabbled in vision quest and shamanism, and “with a mystical yearning” went to the “Holy Land,” where he ended up buying a number of “Palestinian dresses that were beautiful and had talismanic properties,” some of which he sold at the Marin Flea Market. “It wasn’t about money,” he told me. “The idea was about how to support your travels, to sell something at the flea market to get a ticket.” He traveled through Bolivia, Guatemala, bought and sold textiles here and there. He was pondering medical school when he met a doctor at the flea market who had traveled in Borneo. The doctor invited Murray to his home, where Murray saw his first Borneo textiles, ikat, in which tiny knots are tied on each strand in a process similar to tie-dye, and then woven—a time-consuming and difficult process that could take a woman years to finish. “Man!” he thought; the textiles “blew me away, the patterns outrageous,” even more so when he discovered they had been woven “to attract the gods in head-hunting ceremonies.” This was the kind of doctor Murray wanted to be. The doctor then said to Murray, “You should go there.” It might have been a crazy idea just a few decades before, a journey by ship and who knows what else that could take months. But now anybody could jump on an airplane and for a few hundred bucks soar across the world in hours.

  “I’ll go when I’m finished with school,” Murray said.

  “No, go now, first,” the doctor said. “You’ll be the only medical school applicant who’s been to Borneo and you’ll distinguish yourself.”

  It was late 1978. Murray was in love with a Swiss woman; he’d recently made two “spiritual” wedding rings for each of them, and he convinced her to meet him in Asia. He flew to Hong Kong, spent ten days in China, flew on to Bali, “this tropical paradise full of living culture,” where, soon enough, of course, he encountered none other than Perry Kesner and Michael Palmieri. The year before, Michael and Fatima had coauthored a chapter on Borneo textiles for Threads of Tradition: Textiles of Indonesia and Sarawak, published by the Lowie Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. They were inspirations, romantic, larger-than-life personalities, hippies with money living a life that the more straitlaced Murray admired even as it frightened him. He found Perry Kesner, who was in those days selling objects to Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller from his hammock on the beach; Michael and Fatima in their beautiful house overlooking the ocean. “They both had this aura of physicality,” Murray said. “Fatima was so beautiful. These guys had sort of carved out areas, but for some reason no one went to Batak,” in Sumatra. Murray went, bought five hundred dollars’ worth of textiles and a carved stick the Bataks were famous for, most of which soon turned out to be fakes. “It was a huge loss for me.” But he was inspired, saw the potential of a new way of making a living.

  He and his girlfriend arrived in Kuching, Sarawak, in 1980 with a hundred dollars left. They traveled around the rivers a bit, watched dances and ceremonies, but in an antique shop he spotted some ikat textiles that took his breath away. He’d seen enough by this time, had read
Michael and Fatima’s essay, and the ikats in front of him, he was pretty sure, were special. He went all in: he convinced his girlfriend to sell their wedding rings and bought the textiles. Out of money and time, they returned home through Switzerland, where they stopped off at the Museum of Cultures in Basel, Bruno’s hometown, and went to see the curator. “I got all stressed out,” Murray said. “I’m saying to the guy, ‘I’m sorry, there are some holes in them,’ and he looks at them and says, ‘These are the best Borneo textiles I’ve ever seen. We must have them for the museum!’” Murray sold them, then sold some more to Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller in Zurich. “He pulls up in a limo and says to me, ‘These are great textiles, but you need to study sculpture. No one has space for textiles; you can’t put them on a table.’”

  Suddenly people like Tom Murray and Bruce Carpenter (and others who would soon spring up), who had been drawn east, were finding a market in the objects that represented the spiritual power and mysticism of these last wild places. It was there, in them, inside the statues and textiles of Borneo, and even if you couldn’t run away to their source like Bruno or Michael, you could buy them, own them, gaze at their power in your living room. Selling them to eager private collectors like Barbier-Mueller or institutions like the Dallas Museum of Art or the Met in New York meant they could maintain their lifestyles in Bali or pursue further travel, without nine-to-five jobs; they could be surrounded by fetishes of indigenous people and exotic places, could indulge in their tropical fantasies and associations in total freedom and make a good living doing so.