by Carl Hoffman
On a stand sat a Dayak ossuary, old, its sides carved, its once complex end pieces sawn off. “I saw pictures of it before it was cut. The people who got it sawed off the ends and sold them separately and then she got the box. I said she should cut it in half and make wall panels out of it.”
We drove farther, went into another shop. “Andy Borneo, I call the guy who owns this place,” Michael said. “Four brothers and this is one of them. From Kapuas River, Kalimantan. Sintang. West Borneo.” We entered—two long rooms crowded with stuff, stuff of every kind, from furniture to baskets to statues, a smaller back room, stifling, hot, musty, filled with statues lined up like sentries. “Now we’ve got some old things.” He bent down. Peered closely. Touched. “You have to look at details. See, this has the black line around it here,” he said, showing me a patch of whitish lichen the size of a quarter, outlined with a thin black line, a natural growth that was hard to fake. Most of the statues he could identify quickly, easily. “This is old. Very old. Central Borneo. The way the erosion is, it’s totally irregular. If processed with chemicals it’s too uniform.” A big stone piece, four feet tall. A figure. Large penis and eyes. “Could be a couple thousand years old.” We moved on. “These,” he said, picking up a statue that was heavily eroded, “are heavily processed. I don’t know what they’re using. Some chemical. This, it has lichen, but it’s too light and patchy. The erosion is too uniform, the lines too straight.”
He picked up a carved wooden hampatong so eroded you could make out the face and human figure only by squinting, the barest ghost of a human form. “This is original and old, but it’s so fucked up and eroded there’s nothing left of it. That’s how desperate people are getting.”
At yet another shop full of odds and ends, he spotted a fossilized mastodon molar, jet black, the size of a half-gallon jug of milk. “Shit, man, that’s ancient. If this was mounted, it would look beautiful,” he said, holding it up. “He—the owner—is from Sumba and he owes me money. Sold me a statue for $2,000, but when I got it home I realized it was fake. Took it back, got credit. Took another huge molar like this for $1,000 and put it on a stand on my desk and an Italian guy came over and traded me a great, heavy gold ring, so right away I made a profit.”
While we waited for the owner to finish a phone conversation, a hip-looking Indonesian man in black Chuck Taylors and jeans and a ponytail walked up with a backpack. “Mau kain?”—want textiles?—he asked. Emptying the pack, he laid thin red-and-blue ikat cloths out on the ground, each five feet long, bordered by colorful stripes. “This is all natural,” Michael said, running his finger along the pale gold and red print, “but this,” he said, pointing to bright red threads in the border, “this is a commercial aniline dye. All the rest, though, is hand spun, and naturally dyed. I’d say it’s over a hundred years old—those aniline dyes have been around a while. But it’s nothing special.”
“No,” he said to the man, shaking his head, “I don’t want any of this.”
We ambled to the back of the store, where Michael spotted a two-foot-long carved wooden lion, full of rounded, lovely curves and a flowing mane, painted yellow and blue and green. “This is Chinese, from Singaraja [in the north of Bali]. Made of jackfruit wood. You can make good money off of it.”
The owner hung up the phone. We sat on a burnished wooden bench in front of a huge Javanese desk. “You owe me seven hundred dollars!” Michael said. “Give me that,” he said, pointing to the lion. “Let’s finish this thing. Finish it! I’ll give you three hundred.”
“Please, man, this is my capital,” the man said. “I’ll take no profit from that. Empat blas juta”—fourteen million rupiah, about a thousand dollars.
“C’mon,” cajoled Michael, “let’s finish the story. We’re friends.”
“Okay, four hundred.”
“Three.”
“Okay, three hundred and fifty.”
“Three hundred and fifty . . . Okay.”
“Okay!” They high-fived, lit cigarettes.
Michael jumped up, walked over to the molar.
“That’s from East Java,” the guy said.
“How much you want for it?”
All this was in Indonesian and the negotiation accelerated too quickly for me to follow. Michael picked it up again. Examined it. Flicked his ash on the floor. Picked it up. “Okay, I’ll just take my singa. I just came back from America. My father died and my mother is ninety-four years old. She’s sad. She wants to die now. Have you seen this guy?” he said, showing a picture of the Swiss collector.
We walked out to the car, the carved lion tucked under his arm.
Shop after shop, Michael surveying the goods, showing me the fakes and the genuine, always seeking information on the Swiss collector. The last shop was sleeker, shinier, a mix of old and new furniture, giant designer candlesticks and, on the second floor, a handful of big Bornean statues. “This one,” he said, as we mounted the steps, “was owned by a couple of Chinese brothers, and the one brother was great but he was doing some electrical work and stepped in a puddle and zap he was gone. Everything here is too expensive, but you never know. Wow, look at this,” he said as he walked up to a tall, round pillar of a statue, with aged black wood and striated lines of erosion running its length. His eye was quick and refined; while I slowly scanned the goods, looking for something graceful, powerful, he zoomed in on details and the best pieces immediately. “This is probably five hundred years old. How much?”
“Saratus dua pulu juta.” About $10,000.
“Fuck, look at this. Jesus. Look. A face and there’s the tongue. Eyes.” He outlined the faint lines of a face below a body on a piece that was eight feet high, gently and gracefully eroded. “How much?”
“Three hundred and twenty million.” About $28,000.
“Ha, okay, let’s get out of here and go meet Axel for lunch.”
Axel was Alexander Goetz, one of Michael’s closest friends, a legendary dealer in classical Southeast Asian Buddhist and Hindu art. German by birth, Axel had spent years on Bali back in the 1970s, and now lived with his young Vietnamese wife and three-year-old daughter in Vietnam. But, like so many in the antiques and art trade, he was constantly in and out of Bali and Java, buying, selling, meeting clients. We met, as usual, down by the beach on the second-floor verandah of Michael’s favorite spot, literally feet from where he and Fatima had alighted from the horse-drawn cart forty-two years before. Goetz was in his seventies, six feet tall with slicked-back white hair, a row of perfect, white-capped teeth, and large-framed glasses, wearing an orange polo shirt and khaki shorts, a giant antique gold ring glinting with blue stones. Two packs of Marlboros lay on the table, one stacked on top of the other. “My father is 102 and still smoking and my mother died in her nineties, so I feel a bit safe,” he said, lighting up.
Goetz exuded a sharpness, a confident, alert intelligence. “I came to Bali in 1971 with my wife,” he said. “We stayed here at Blue Ocean and then moved up to Ubud, where we built an incredible house out of wood and bamboo right on the ridgetop over town. Had no electricity for ten years, just forty-five oil lamps. The gardener would shine them and snip the wicks every day and light them in the evening and they were all over the property and it was beautiful.”
At first, like so many westerners in Bali, he’d just come for the culture and lifestyle. But one day some Balinese found two bronze axes, dating to 400 BC, up in the mountains, and they contacted Samuel Eilenberg, who was in Bali at the time. Over decades beginning in the 1950s, Eilenberg, the chairman of the mathematics department at Columbia University, had amassed a collection of works made between the third century BC and the seventeenth century from Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and Central Asia. In 1987 he gave four hundred pieces to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which put on a show from his collection, “The Lotus Transcendent: Indian and Southeast Asian Art from the Samuel Eilenberg Collection,” in 1991 and 1992.
On the way to meet Eilenberg, the
men passed through Ubud, heard Goetz was there, and figured maybe another white guy might want them. “I bought them right away,” Goetz said, “and a few days later Sam came up and burst into my house and said, ‘Let me see who bought my axes!’ and he became my great friend and mentor.”
At first he’d considered buying tribal pieces like Michael, but it didn’t feel right to him. “I would be buying the family china, the family heirlooms, and, morally and ethically, I just couldn’t do it. So I went to Java and bought Hindu and Buddhist bronzes, and those were coming out of the ground and it was now Muslim. You weren’t raiding anyone or anything.”
The legality of the art and antiques business is hardly straightforward. Laws on cultural patrimony are complex and vague, depending on where objects are found, their country of origin, and their country of destination. In 1972, 186 nations signed the UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, which, in essence, established a baseline: anything found or traded before 1972 was fair game; anything after could be subject to the individual laws established by each nation. For most countries, Indonesia included, that also extended to anything over a hundred years old. Which meant that, theoretically, much of what any dealer or even a tourist acquired could be claimed as the cultural patrimony of Indonesia. But so too could a nice piece of furniture or just about anything sold at any antique shop in Indonesia; that “aged-one-century” designation cast such a wide net that enforcing it was difficult and arbitrary.
The international conventions, however, were designed for outright theft, stealing, and pillaging—the raiding of tombs in Egypt or Peru, or the sawing off of stone Buddha heads from the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, or the purchase of objects that had been stolen by others from those kinds of tombs and temples. People selling their own family heirlooms or private property? That wasn’t really covered, not explicitly, anyway. And in any event, there is no worldwide, international police entity with the power to enforce the convention. It’s up to an individual country to define and police its cultural property. If Indonesia, for instance, identifies an object being auctioned off that it believes to have been illegally exported to the United States, it must notify American authorities to try to get it back. To further complicate matters, many former colonies like Indonesia only became independent nations recently, Indonesia in 1949. Attorneys have successfully argued that old colonial laws governing cultural patrimony can still be relevant—theoretically anything exported from Indonesia after 1934, when a Dutch cultural patrimony law went into effect, could be claimed by the Indonesian government—but that’s hardly easy to do.
All of which means that if you bought a pair of carvings stolen in the dead of night right out of a temple in Bali, as an Italian dealer did recently, or sold objects stolen from temples in India, as a Manhattan dealer named Subhash Kapoor did—he was arrested in 2011 for allegedly trafficking in more than twenty-six hundred items worth more than $100 million—you’re in a heap of trouble. But Kapoor was only arrested because India pursued him—he had been brazenly stealing antiquities straight from Hindu temples. Likewise the government of Cambodia has been aggressive in reclaiming stolen artifacts. If Indonesia wanted to make a claim on pretty much anything any dealer exported over the years, it might be able to do so. But while the country assiduously guards its classic Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim heritage—the history of its Javanese majority—it’s long regarded its indigenous minorities like Dayaks or Papuans with cultural disdain, and for the most part ignores the private trade in its indigenous objects. In Jakarta one day I met with the curator of the ethnology collection at the National Museum of Indonesia. She simply denied that there was any trade in culturally important objects at all.
“In Indonesia, you’re not supposed to export anything older than one hundred years,” Goetz said. “But from the 1960s to the 1980s, even into the ’90s, curators would buy anything, no questions asked. And museums used to have a long list on the exhibit card, where a piece was from, and now that’s gone. Or it’s in code. They don’t want questions.” After World War II, he said, huge fortunes had been made and a whole new generation of collectors went buying. “[Arthur M.] Sackler, for instance. He bought anything and everything—huge seven-meter stone pieces. Originally there was only the Met, the Smithsonian, a few places. But then the museums exploded with these guys’ collections, when they all needed tax write-offs, and only when the museums were full did the U.S. finally sign the UN declaration.”
These days, though, he said, “You have to make up a story if you sell anything to a museum. I say, ‘This is from an old Dutch family collection and the family had Indonesian servants and when the owners died the Indonesians took it back to Java and sold it.’ The curator knows it’s a story and I know it’s a story, but he says, ‘Give me a story that I can use to get by the board.’ That’s the only way you can do it.
“Now I realize what Michael did with tribal art was good. Christian missionaries, loggers, palm oil plantation guys—they all destroyed so much. The Christians said burn your false idols, these things are bringing you bad luck, get rid of them. So much was destroyed. And then the fires—they put drums of oil in the forest and light them up and burn huge swaths and then say, ‘Well, it’s burned, let me plant palm oil and it’ll be five hundred years before the forest returns, so let’s do something.’ Promise them a hospital, a mosque, tokens for the people, and who knows what gets burned. Whole hidden villages, statues. I realize that so much of what Michael brought out was saved before it could be destroyed.”
It was now late afternoon and big gray clouds were rolling in; soon a tropical downpour would erupt. Michael had to get home to pay his gardener and maid, and I still had my bike at his house. As we parked, the rain holding off still, the air now pregnant with heat and moisture, Michael said, “C’mon inside for a second. I want to show you something.” We padded past the shields and gongs and carvings, through the carved double bedroom doors guarded by the fearsome mask with its tongue and braids of hair, to his bed. He bent down, lifted the mattress, slid his hands under, fished around, and brought out two-foot-by-three-foot sheets of paper. Maps. Hand-drawn. The rivers and villages, the rapids and little tributaries, of Borneo, beautifully rendered in Michael’s neat hand. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Maybe it’s time to go to Borneo.”
Growing increasingly desperate, Bruno Manser tried to deliver a toy lamb to timber baron and Chief Minister of Sarawak Abdul Taib Mahmud by paraglider in May 1999. (Bruno Manser Fund)
Thirteen
It’s hard to imagine being Bruno Manser after his return to Switzerland. He had always felt drawn to the elementary life force of snakes. He had always been attracted to the darkness of caves and the danger of mountain precipices and the highest branches of trees. He had fantasized since he was a child about remote places like Borneo filled with wild animals and wild people, but in 1984 it was still just a dream and he had never even been outside of Western Europe. Lots of people explored caves and climbed trees and rock faces, and the life of an Alpine shepherd was inherently Swiss to begin with. His ego had always needed to prove something, to test itself. But to be Bruno walking through the streets of Basel or Zurich in the spring of 1990 after six years of living as he had was to be a man so removed, so apart from everyone else it was almost inconceivable. He had suffered extremes of cold and hunger and wetness and penetrating loneliness that would drive most people to despair. He had lived off of the brains of deer and week-old, blackened carcasses of wild boar or rats, food that violated every Western law of hygiene, not to mention taste. He had walked up to wild elephants and rolled on the ground with wild orangutans. He had lived for years as a hunted man, had been arrested twice, had escaped both times, had stood up to and outwitted an entire government and its security services, even across international borders. He had climbed limestone peaks without ropes, thrown himself into rivers and rapids with no idea of where the river flowed or what was beyond the next bend. He
could track wild game and build a shelter anywhere at any time. He had helped birth babies in falling rain, children whose first moments in the world weren’t some antiseptic hospital but cold, rotting leaves crawling with ants. He had caught twenty-foot-long pythons and poisonous snakes with his bare hands and had been bitten by them and lived, had nursed himself back to life through searing pain without antibiotics or modern medicine, had even performed surgery on himself.
Can you imagine what that does to a man returned to a culture of seat belts, helmets, antiseptic wipes, and televised nature shows, where a single cockroach or dropped fork was cause for alarm? Where people got worried when the toilet paper ran out at inopportune times? He felt invincible. Powerful. Transcendent. The power of the explorer, the shaman, deep within himself, a charisma that radiated for all to see, even more so because he embodied those centuries of Western tropes, from Rousseau’s noble savage to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan. Lord Greystoke wrestled lions; Bruno Manser wrestled snakes and orangutans. One was fiction, the other real.
“The hype was unbelievable!” said Roger Graf, who presented Bruno to the press seventeen days after his return home. He was seeking nothing less than a moratorium on logging in traditional Penan lands beginning September 1, 1990, leading to the creation of a permanent forest reserve. Bruno urged pressure on the Malaysian government, and the world responded. “If Greenpeace wanted to stage an action it took money and lots of organizing, but all I had to do was to put Bruno in a press conference and that was the action itself,” Roger said. “Bruno was the action. He was remarkable and you could feel it the moment you met him. He was like Mahatma Gandhi or the Dalai Lama.”
