ape shall not kill ape

as gamelan music rings out above our rooftops, and the soft glow of lights dots

the rice fields, it’s easy to get lost in bali’s magic and forget about the plight of

the environment in neighbouring islands
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nfortunately for some travellers, Bali is not so magical. When infant orangutans are captured from the forests of Sumatra and Borneo, Bali often marks the first stop on their journey to a private home or zoo. Once there, they will never have the chance to swing from a tree. They will be spending their life in a small cage or room rather than the vast jungle of their homeland. “While East Java is the epicentre of illegal trade in Indonesian animals, Bali remains a prominent site for such trade as well, with captured animals often passing through Ngurah Rai airport,” claims ProFauna Indonesia.

Orangutan – critically endangered in Sumatra and endangered in Borneo – are one of the most in-demand illegally traded species. Thus, their prices are among the highest. This is in spite of the fact that since 1931 – according to the wildlife trade-monitoring network, TRAFFIC – they have been protected in Indonesia. They add: “Despite a maximum sentence of five years in jail and a fine of Rp. 100 million, the chance of being caught or prosecuted is extremely low.”Such trade leads to the overwhelming problem of what to do with the recovered animals. Many are given to rehabilitation centres in Sumatra and Borneo when they reach adulthood and no longer want to obey humans. In Kalimantan, over 1,000 orangutans have been placed in rehabilitation centres and few stand a chance of returning to the wild.

Furthermore, according to World Wildlife Fund UK, for each infant captured, five to six adults are killed as they attempt to defend the baby. Infants must survive the fall from the trees as they cling to their dying mother, and then endure the lack of proper care, extremely cramped conditions, foreign diseases, and the emotional toll of the entire ordeal. The Sumatran Orangutan Society (SOS) also claims “with only about 6,600 Sumatran orangutans left in the wild, each captured or killed animal lowers the chances of the species’ survival.”

thou art my joy

the term “art” has become a grey area that is ripe for the picking, and also poking. since creative expression cannot be measured by a mathematical absolute, how does one define art and its worth? here are eight propositions in search of an argument

text peter stephenson image photolibrary

1 At first it would appear that the only trouble with culture in Bali is that there’s way too much of it. It’s hard to find a single view that hasn’t been embellished, framed by carving or careful cultivation, so that even if after a while you start to take it for granted, and stop consciously looking, the whole experience of Bali remains filtered through a filigree of creative endeavour.

2 Yet a further problem arises when someone asks whether we should classify any of it as “art”. Then there’s that other old chestnut – riddled with borers – about the distinction between craft and art; that is, between an activity adjudged to be primarily concerned with the manipulation of materials and an activity primarily concerned with the task of communication and self-expression for its own sake. Until relatively recently, most cultures had no such distinction.

3 So already, the more astute eavesdroppers in this circular argument will mention the tendency to rely on Western parameters that don’t apply to creativity in cultures in other parts of the world, such as ours. Ideas of creativity in Bali, for example, have not always been so bound up in notions of individualism, or the idea of the artist as the elegant stranger come to teach us how to see, ideas that have at least since the European Renaissance underpinned romantic Western notions of artistic endeavour.