The Specter of Borobudur

The Specter of Borobudur Sheau Yun Lim BA Architecture, Yale College 2019

Sheau Yun Lim

The Specter of Borobudur

Table of Contents Introduction

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Interlude I

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Chapter 1: The Architect and the Preservationist

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Chapter 2: Seeing the Monument

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Interlude II

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Chapter 3: Dioramas, Screens and Technologies of Experience

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Interlude III

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Conclusion

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Coda

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Bibliography

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Acknowledgements There are far too many people who have shaped this thesis. In small increments, I have accrued an uneven map of knowledge from the conversations and relationships developed over two summers of travel in Europe and Southeast Asia. Laurence Loh and Loh-Lim Lin Lee of LLA deserve special thanks for introducing me to the messy world of heritage studies at the young age of 14. I am especially grateful to all the scholars and cultural workers with whom I have spoken in Indonesia: it is their insights and patience that have shaped this thesis. There are far too many people to name, but (deep breath) this list should do for now: Pak Nyoman Sutoyo, Pak Gede Kresna, Pak Made Agus Adi Prabawa, Pak Agus, Pak Agusta, Ibu Dita, Ibu Diah Kardinal, Pak Budi Lim, Ibu Ria Febrian, Ibu Suriawati Qiu and Pak Chua Jin Dee, Pak Ucup Yusuf, Gek Sri Wahyuni, the Pemangku at Puri Maospahit, Melanie Parashar and the Parashar family, and the numerous other nameless individuals with whom I shared peanuts, tea and a conversation.

My travel and research to Indonesia would not have been possible without the generous support of fellowships at Yale, especially the Harvey Geiger Fellowship (2018), the Thomas C. Barry Fellowship (2017), the Lewis C. Curtis Fellowship (2018), the Charles H. Siegel Fellowship (2018) and the John and Alanne Headland Linck Fellowship (2017).

I am grateful to the teachers and mentors with whom I have had the pleasure of working in the short but transformative time I have spent at the Yale School of Architecture, especially Professor Craig Buckley, Professor Marta Caldeira, Professor Ariane Lourie Harrison and Professor Surry Schlabs. Their kindness, patience and generosity in instruction have been critical in shaping my intellectual life, showing me the multivalent ways in which history can be told, thought and taught.

This project is a labor of love many years in the making. I am deeply grateful to the love that I have been shown from my friends and family, especially Yixuan Yang, Alexis Lee, Staphany Hou, Lim Ching Yun and Wei Yun Lim. Particular mention is reserved for my most important reader, Ong Kar Jin, and our ongoing conspiracy. My young scholarly efforts have no doubt been at the cost of these relationships; without them, perhaps I may have gotten a little smarter, 5

but it is also likely that there would be no thesis in which I could write these thanks. I am especially thankful to my parents, Aaron Lim and Hwang Yee Chern, whose years of support have freed me to think. It is to them who I dedicate this work.

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Introduction “We must not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.” – TS Eliot

Figure 1. Borobudur. Photo by author, May 2017.

I first visited Borobudur in May 2017. I watched the sunrise, as many first-time visitors do, armed with a small flashlight in the darkness of night to climb the steep stairs to the top. It was beautiful. But it was only around 10am when I finally saw the base of the temple in daylight.

A corner had been removed, offset from the rest of the structure like a limb severed from a body.

Borobudur’s conservation team is known for its deeply exacting and prescriptive approach. They aim to place every single stone at its original place: a hard ask for a monument built like a threedimensional puzzle. In 2017, my tour guide told me that Borobudur’s conservation was only 30% complete. Indeed, every unoriginal stone placed on Borobudur is marked with a white dot, 9

a scarlet letter on its very presence, as if a failure of those in charge to retrieve a building block of history.

This corner, however, was different. An entire chunk of the temple had been removed and placed about thirty feet away from its original position. The piece measured perhaps 7’ x 7’ x 8’, each layer of andesite stone brick tessellating in and out. I could not help but imagine myself a god in a virtual world, where I could click the corner to lift it, fitting it exactly where it would meet its granite brethren. Order, restored.

But they had moved this corner away to expose what was underneath: a hidden layer of bas relief granite carvings. The foot of the temple, initially meant to be adorned with the same pictorial narratives found at the rest of the temple, had to be covered up supposedly due to the architect’s structural miscalculation. The “hidden foot” of the temple, as it later came to be known, was fully carved – merely hidden away in layers of stone.

But what fascinated me was not the promise of unadulterated mysteries ready to be solved.

When the sun shone on the exposed stone of the void left on corner, the rhythm of stones created a most mesmerizing rectangular pattern of in-out-in-out. A secondary layer of space – made in shadow – had been formed. A stair led down from this wall, bisecting it down in half.

The unexpected, atypical decision to move a corner had not only exposed the paradoxical, contradictory logic of Borobudur’s restoration, but had also carved new meaning in its negative image. ** This thesis is an exploration of the paradoxical logic, presences (and absences), and forms that circulate around Borobudur. Having accrued a veritable archive of contradictory imagistic representations, the latent frictions in narrating Borobudur came to an explosive flashpoint during the moment of its preservation of Borobudur between 1955 and 1983, a period bookended by initial visits by UNESCO to Borobudur and the opening of the Borobudur National Archaeological Park. Borobudur thus exists at the nexus of imaginaries that continue to unfold – it is these imaginaries that guide this project. As such, this thesis is intended as a 10

contribution towards Southeast Asian cultural history, international heritage discourse, the architectural historiography.

Studying the Other: Myth and Material

Sparked by the 1960s school of Critical Regionalism, a veritable tradition of studying the cultural and geographical other in architecture has been rooted in the dialectic between a homogenizing global and an indigenous local.1 Kenneth Frampton’s essay, “Towards a Critical Regionalism,” relies on the dialectic to affirm the essential conflict of historical movement in a Hegelian tradition, but here he places spatial (and, by extension, historical and temporal) agency in the hands of the architect. This conception of history not only fails to account for the imaginative potentials of histories that do not fit into a frame of duality, Frampton further implies that historical agency is embedded only in formal architectural intervention, where users, clients and other actors are peripheral.

Schools of postmodern thought in the 1990s have attempted to correct this by reading agency into non-Western peoples and traditions by recognizing that global knowledge is culturally “indigenized” when it travels.2 Arjun Appadurai’s essay, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Economy,” has become especially prominent in architectural theory, calling on scholars to study the “deeply disjunctive and profoundly unpredictable.”3 However, Appadurai’s focus on ephemeral and shifting “flows” not only fails to recognize the relative power (and flow) of capital in the ability to exercise agency across a larger scale, but also wholesale rejects systems as static in favor of the chaos of dynamics. Further, contemporary approaches in the vein of Appadurai see the post-modern as itself a new historical juncture, failing to recognize the historical processes which create these “flows.”4 This has further crystallized the immutability of

Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: The New Press, 1998), 16–33.

2 Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Economy,” Theory, Culture & Society 7 (1990): 295– 310.

3 See especially Rahul Mehrotra, “Negotiating the Static and Kinetic Cities: The Emergent Urbanism of Mumbai,” in Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age, ed. Andreas Huyssen (Charlottesville: Duke University Press, 2008), 205-218.

4 For more on this critique and Appadurai’s rhetorical voice, see Josiah McC. Heyman and Howard Campbell. “The Anthropology of Global Flows: A Critical Reading of Appadurai’s ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’.” Anthropological Theory 9, no. 2 (June 2009): 131–48.

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“global” and “local,” “static” and “shifting”, “past” and “future,” producing neologisms such as “glocalization,” which assume that a local may only exist in light of, and against, global flows.

Displacing the boundedness of closed-circuits, I instead foreground a geography of historical process. Recent work in the field of anthropology, such as Anna Tsing’s Friction, has attempted to overcome the linear narrative of modernity to postmodernity by focusing an affective desire for the universal. The universal is at the heart of humanist projects, “implicated in both imperial schemes… and liberatory mobilizations for justice and empowerment.” It is the language espoused by colonial governments, international organizations and post-independence leaders alike (Chapter 1, 2), and taken up by those who attempt to oppose them (Chapter 2). As such, to study universals, Tsing writes, is to “identify knowledge that moves – mobile and mobilizing across localities and cultures.”5 In this vein, friction is produced when universal desire encounters the “sticky materiality of practical encounters,”6 that is, when dreams and reality collide.

Crucially, the global is not an abstract force, but forged in the connections between the shreds and fragments of multiple narratives. The history of globalization is non-linear.

In this reading, the process by which Borobudur is made into monument in does not take place in a post-1970s “globalized” landscape. Rather, Borobudur is a generative fulcrum upon which histories and narratives are made – from its first “rediscovery,” to the proliferation of representations of it today. Thus, to study Borobudur, we must study all the places in which it appears and is made history, whether it be a diorama at the National Monument, on the television screen during a solar eclipse, or a 1916 painting reappearing in a 1979 report. Let us next turn to these Borobudurs.

Borobudur and the Nation

Built in approximately 850 A.D. by the Hindu-Buddhist Shailendra dynasty, Borobudur stands atop a small hill in the fertile Kedu Plain in Central Java. It consists of a series of concentric terraces – six square and three circular - that rise to a central peak. Built of stone masonry without any mortar, each volcanic andesite stone brick joins to the next in a three-dimensional

Tsing, Friction, 7.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 1.

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jigsaw. Measuring approximately 118m across each side, it remains to date the largest Buddhist monument in the world.

Borobudur fell into ruination after the Shailendra Dynasty fled the earthquake prone Central Java in 10th-century A.D. Covered in a layer of volcanic ash, undergrowth and distorted by constant earthquakes, Borobudur – with few important exceptions (see Chapter 2) – was largely absent from written records. Borobudur was first “rediscovered” by the British colonialist Thomas Stamford Raffles during the short period of the British Interregnum (1811-1815). In 1817, Raffles’s influential History of Java was published, skyrocketing the modern monument of Borobudur to international attention. It is from the early-1800s that my story begins.

Scholarship on Borobudur from the early 19th-century to the late 20th-century has largely been iconographical. These studies can largely be divided into two camps: studies written by archaeologists, who were often heritage practitioners,7 and studies written by art historians.8 Although iconographical art history no doubt shapes my interpretation of Borobudur, I consider the writing of archaeologists who worked on Borobudur as both primary and secondary sources.

The writings of Soekmono, the lead restorer of Borobudur (1971-1983), are particularly important to how Borobudur becomes interpreted in the field of international heritage discourse, and to popular audiences in Indonesia (see Chapter 1). In this vein, my project is also one of historiography.

Following Benedict Anderson’s masterful study of symbols in making the “imagined community” of the nation state, existing scholarship that reads Borobudur – and other monuments in Indonesia – in its political context often analyses its 20th-century appropriation as a national symbol. Anderson himself argues that Borobudur becomes an icon for the new nation state’s ability to project its power to an international community.9 Monuments in Jakarta have also frequently been read in this strain of the symbolic anthropology of the nation. Sopandi and

See especially Soekmono, Chandi Borobudur: A Monument of Mankind. (1976) and Chihara, Daigoro, Hindu-Buddhist Architecture in Southeast Asia. Translated by Rolf W. Giebel. Leiden: E. J. Brill (1996).

8 See especially Jacques Dumarcay, Borobudur, trans. Michael Smithies (Kuala Lumpur, New York: Oxford University Press, n.d.) and John N. Miksic, Borobudur: Golden Tales of the Buddhas (Hong Kong: Periplus Editions, 1900).

9 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983) and Benedict Anderson, Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).

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Nas have both studied the monuments in Jakarta – including the National Monument (see Chapter 1) – as part of Sukarno’s nation building project.

While there is certainly no doubt that Soekmono and Suharto were quick to claim Borobudur as part of the nation, I show that within these positions – and certainly with Sukarno – there was far more nuance in negotiations with Borobudur. In doing so, I expand the scope of the conversation to show how history is implicated in these spatial appropriations, that always had an eye toward narrations of the past and the future. Thus, the claim of ownership over Borobudur is not merely concerned with the short-term view of projecting power – whether domestically or internationally – but is concerned with steering the nation towards modernity itself.

The Modern Monument

The nation-state, however, is an insufficient category of analysis, overlooking the international institutions and forces that have worked to produce the contemporary monument. Recent scholarship, written by the Dutch cultural historians Bloembergen and Eickhoff, has worked toward understanding the transnational forces that have shaped Borobudur in the 20th-century.

Their argument places Borobudur in a wider Asian network – in particular to a conception of a “Greater India,” the spread of Buddhism, and UNESCO’s simultaneous heritage projects – arguing that the idea of “world heritage” intentionally masks these transnational interventions.10 However, rather than detailing a process of knowledge exchange, their argument is far more focused on a one-way process of how certain figures and events have contributed to a reading of the production of Borobudur as an Asian monument. This approach, while correcting the myopic lens of seeing Borobudur only through the lens of the nation-state, does not overcome the fundamental myopia of seeing history as a process of closed-circuits: the category of the nation has been replaced by the continental category of Asia.

Bloembergen and Eickhoff’s work comes on the heels of a resurgent interest in the question of what to do with monuments after two World Wars. Lucia Allais’s dissertation, “Will to War, Will

Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff, “Save Borobudur! The Moral Dynamics of Heritage Formation in Indonesia across Orders and Borders, 1930s–1980s,” in Cultural Heritage as Civilizing Mission: From Decay to Recovery, ed. Michael Falser (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2015), 83–119, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-31913638-7_5.

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to Art: Cultural Internationalism and the Modernist Aesthetics of Monuments 1932-1964,” poetically argues that monuments, too, underwent their own modern movement with legible aesthetic and narrative tropes, made possible due to an articulation of an idealist, exceptionalist narrative around them. Noting the divide between studies of modern architecture and monuments, Allais positions the monument as a “disciplinary catalyst,”11 creating a spatial imaginary that anchors any discussion of 20th-century art and architecture. My study of Borobudur, while geographically and temporally distant from Allais’s study, follows this reading of the monument as a generative fulcrum for the making and narrating of history.

Architects too have recently been crossing this disciplinary divide between the new and the old.

Rem Koolhaas’s 2004 proclamation, “Preservation is overtaking us” frames much of this debate, making the monument work for the broader claim of “architecture.” Koolhaas positions preservation as architecture’s “formless substitution,” create cultural relevance and mediating a building for a viewer without creating any new forms.12 In this manner, preservation is a savior for the contemporary starchitect. It is all meaning. The act of preservation is a form of representation.

Representation

I position preservation as a form of representation, studying it alongside other technologies and objects of representation that spread Borobudur’s imagination beyond its physical location in Central Java. Positioned between architecture and representation, preservation is revealed as a politically inflected set of choices: the image of Borobudur is multiple, contested and in the making.

Following Beatriz Colomina, who argues that architecture becomes modern in its engagement with representation in media, I closely read images, dioramas and other representational strategies into my analysis. Architectural modernity is thus twofold: it concerns the architectural site itself, but also its representational agenda as each document circulates to a public. I aim “to

Lucia Allais, “Will to War, Will to Art: Cultural Internationalism and the Modernist Aesthetics of Monuments 1932-1964” (Massachusetts Insitute of Technology, 2008), 17.

12 Rem Koolhaas, Preservation Is Overtaking Us, ed. Mark Wigley et al. (New York: GSAPP Books, 2014).

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occupy a public space, the space of publications, his own and others’, but also the space of word of mouth, hearsay, gossip, tips; the enigmatic space of circumstantial evidence.”13 It is for the above reasons that this thesis takes as its protagonist a diorama located in the National History Museum of Indonesia, housed in the base of the National Monument in Jakarta. The diorama, completed in 1971, pictures the construction of a 9th-century Buddhist temple, Borobudur, located 300 miles away in Central Java. Rather than presenting a linear architectural history of modern Indonesia14, I use the diorama to consider a multi-site, episodic approach to writing and representation. I locate this project in the “vast space of metaphorical significance”15 between the diorama and the monument, between sites and representations: this project, that travels between these loci is thus itself a project of metaphorical possibility. Like a ritornello, the diorama performs a discursive and recursive function in this essay: it is the object to which I return, and the metaphor that orders my thinking.

Methodology

My research strategy is thus one of journeys from Borobudur: rather than circumscribing a strict boundary, this research arises from a specific location to engage with a polycentric, diverse, outward-looking knowledge building process. I take the material produced about Borobudur – precolonial, colonial and postcolonial – as one continuous, genealogical archive. It is focused on the analysis of artistic representations, but also draws from institutional reports, textual accounts, speeches, and film (TVRI). This thesis engages with the multiple mediums by which architecture is expressed with a creative and an analytical treatment of three mediums – words, images, installations. It is my hope that this thesis will articulate a historical practice engaged not only with the content of architecture, but that one that also participates in a process of making.

Chapter 1 contrasts the monumental thinking of Sukarno, the first president of Indonesia, and Soekmono, the lead restorer of Borobudur. Through a comparison of Sukarno’s imagination of the National Monument in Jakarta and Soekmono’s writings on Borobudur, I explore how

Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).

A rather unsatisfying, but nonetheless vitally important, compendium to Indonesian architectural history has been written. See Sudrajat, Iwan. 1991. A Study of Indonesian Architectural History. PhD Dissertation, Sydney: University of Sydney.

15 Robert Smithson, “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites,” 1968.

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Borobudur is bound up with the universal imagination of the nation state. Chapter 2 studies the Borobudur National Archeological Park produced by the Japan International Cooperation Agency to explore the continuities and discontinuities between a colonial inheritance of Borobudur. The park presents an opportunity to study the transnational forces that have shaped contemporary heritage movements, and its historical lineages. Finally, Chapter 3 contrasts two mediums critical to the study of Borobudur: the diorama and the television screen. With a discussion of the 1931 World Exposition in Paris, the dioramas at the National Monument and the televised 1983 solar eclipse, I trace the historical and temporal implications of monumental experience in representation.

I have treated these three chapters as discrete historical frames, threaded together by the discursive use of a diorama, and by the specter of Borobudur. Yet each chapter has led me time and again to the question of architectural history and architectural experience. Let us begin in the middle of things.

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Interlude I: The Diorama, from New Haven On a cold winter’s night in New Haven, I clickthrough an “asset” on Google Arts & Culture. A small wheel turns against a field of bright white; my Spotify playlist shuffles to a Mandopop tune. The anticipatory beats of a ceremonial drum liven the still air: the wheel turns blue, red…

An image fills my screen.

I stumbled upon this photograph of a 1971 diorama entitled “Candi Borobudur Temple 824 A.D.” while reading the internet. Monas (formally, the Indonesian National Monument) had made available a selection of 129 items from its attached National History Museum on Google Arts & Culture, including photographs of Monas’s construction, images of its dioramas and a scan of Indonesia’s declaration of independence. This image, tucked away in the far reaches of a pleasant horizontal scroll, conjured an eerie serenity amid scenes of righteous violence. Hovering over the thumbnail to discover that I could barely discern its purported content - the grand Buddhist temple of Borobudur in Central Java - I clickthrough.

Two monks greet me with blank eyes, standing awkwardly in the foreground. In this photograph, they are out of focus: there are more important matters to attend to.

Clickclickzoom. The headshot of me suspended on the top-right-hand side of my screen disappears, a presence so small, ubiquitous and unobtrusive that I only notice it as the expanding image pushes my face beyond the black edge of my screen.

Figures at work populate the vast, barren middle ground. Shirtless and dressed only in a diaperlike covering, male figures perform the labor of carving, cutting and moving blocks of stone. A figure, dressed in similar garb, stands apart from the crowd with his head thrown back and left arm flung out, guiding the workers toward Borobudur in the background while glancing at his counterpart further into the distance. As we move deeper into the picture, deeper toward the monument, these sculptural figures decrease in scale until they eventually walk into the painting, becoming black specks against the peeling, grey-blue patch of Borobudur.

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I pinchout my trackpad. This sky has clearly seen better days. Wave-like clouds stretch languorously across my screen and crest at its edges, tinged with the dulled mustard yellowing of time. Filtered through the high contrast glow-up of Socialist Realist painting, the deep bluegreens of the mountain range meet the sky with a buoyant baby blue trim, defining each peak and trough of the terrain. A spectral, diffuse light source emanates from the centre-right of the painting: as soon as it tucks the blue-grey tones of Borobudur into its fold, it disappears.

It is then I notice a greasy, fluorescent sheen on the left sides of all the sculptural figures. The basking glow of modernity’s brushstrokes has inevitably met its Goliath: a cheap, glaring lighting kit.

Pan right. Purposefully built to provide shade, a hut stands prominently on a monolithic foundation, elevated but umbilically attached to the ground. A plastic tree emerges behind the hut to frame it; if one failed to pay close attention, it would seem as if the two entities were attached. Four columns plant themselves into the ground, moulded and weathered to resemble wood but looking far more like a Bakelite bracelet hammered straight. With its pitched roof and mortise joints, the hut screams: Architectu-re! The hut’s contradictory cousin steals its punchline. Hanging above in my mess of tabs is Google Art & Culture’s logo, a proudly flattened icon with a pediment, base and three columns.

The Greek temple has the last laugh.

But, who is the curious figure sitting cross-legged on the platform? Dressed in monk’s robes, he has scrolls spread out across the table, a writing utensil in the air, with two aides behind him. His one visible scroll is blank, the other hidden from view, giving no details to the contents of his thoughts, even for one urgently pinchingin in spite of the lo-fi fuzziness of the image. Perhaps he is an architect? Perhaps the orchestrator of the project? Perhaps the dreaded middle man, an ancient version of construction project managers?

If only we had a little perspective.

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Figure 1. " Candi Borobudur Temple 824 A.D.� Source: Google Arts and Culture

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Chapter 1: The Architect and the Preservationist Kalau sampai waktuku 'Ku mau tak seorang 'kan merayu Tidak juga kau Tak perlu sedu sedan itu

If my time has come I don't want anyone to beg Not you either Don't need that weeping

Aku ini binatang jalang Dari kumpulannya terbuang Biar peluru menembus kulitku Aku tetap meradang menerjang

I'm a wild animal Exiled from his herd Let bullets pierce my skin I will still charge, aflame

Luka dan bisa kubawa berlari Berlari

Wounds and poison I'll take running Running

Hingga hilang pedih perih

Until the pain disappears

Dan aku akan lebih tidak peduli Aku mau hidup seribu tahun lagi!

And I will care even less I want to live a thousand more years!

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Chairil Anwar, Aku (“I�), 1943

In January 2019, I walked into a very large, musty, windowless room. I had descended down the staircase of one of four identical entrances to enter a large square space lined on each side with dioramas. Its openness was interrupted only by another square structure in the center of the room, housing more dioramas, and a staircase to a peak I could barely fathom from the fuggy atmosphere around me. The resulting void was an ouroboric passage, far too wide to be a hallway, but with none of the democratic overtones of an open square. The doors remained open as the midday sun streamed into an otherwise dark room awash in a grey fluorescence. I had arrived at the National History Museum, located at the base of the National Monument in Jakarta.

The masses of people I had encountered while squeezing my way to the ticketing counter were now dispersed over the room. While some people were examining the dioramas, I amusedly noticed many families simply sat on the cool marble floor, almost always with three generations present. The museum had transformed into a kind of air-conditioned, climate-controlled park, complete with blankets lain on the ground and snacks to go around. Another set of crowds streamed to the center of the room as they prepared to make their way to the top of the National Monument: they had evidently paid the extra 7,500 rupiah (0.50 USD) required to ascend to the pinnacle of monument.

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At dinner the night before, my friend whose family was from Central Java told me that the National Monument remains one of the most popular sites of pilgrimage for domestic tourists. He recounted that to pay for the grand project, a call for donations had been cast across the nation: the draw of the National Monument derives in part from seeing what their ancestors had contributed to the nation. It is said that one businessman from Sumatra even donated 28 kilograms of solid gold to coat the crowning flame of the monument.

But first on my agenda: the diorama. I quickly walked past two dioramas (the first depicting megalithic man, the second the maritime Srivijaya polity) to reach the object of my interest: The Construction of Candi Borobudur. No matter how much I peer, my mortal eyes fail me: I cannot see what is on the scroll of paper at the table. However, the zoom function on my phone camera sees what the eye cannot. The only clearly discernable figure is a roughly drawn octagon with eight inward spokes that meet in a circle at the center, enclosed by a square with four perforations on the middle of each side. The figure’s hand is midair, caught in a caesura of time. Could this be an early plan? ** What can we make of the person sat at the table in the diorama? How do we make sense of this meeting of monuments and the characters that pervade their stories? In this chapter, I trace the arc of two figures whose legacies have become synonymous to their work: Sukarno, in relation to the planning of the National Monument1 (1961-1975), and Soekmono, in relation to Borobudur’s preservation. In doing so, I trace two parallel monumental understandings of history, architecture and modernity, formed in the shadow of war and revolution. Where architecture for Sukarno’s Socialist-leaning teleology not only brings the nation forward in historical time, but itself is a frontier in epochal development, Soekmono sees the restoration of Borobudur as crucial toward inscribing political authority and continuity of the nation state. Yet their universalist desires converged in holding to heart a nationalistic future, 1000 years on.

While the National Monument was completed only in 1975, after Sukarno was overthrown by Suharto a 1965 coup, I here focus solely on the Sukarno’s ideology towards the National Monument (Suharto’s changes will be addressed in Chapter 3).

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This chapter attempts to insert itself into the significant historiographical tradition of writing on Indonesian monuments between 1955-1968 in two ways. First, I foreground historical narrative and representational agendas. In doing so, I access a far wider range of sources than other previous scholarship, particularly for the National Monument, which has largely depended on the social interpretation of formal references.2 Second, I argue that an interpretation of power in Jakarta in establishing a “center” must be read in the context of its imagined and intended “peripheries.” The National Monument and Borobudur must be read as couple, as they are “mnemonically fused to such an extent that they cannot be accessed independently.”3 Borobudur, rather than being confined to the disciplinary strictures of heritage, continues to exert an influence over architectural history in the 20th-century, spectral and persistent.

The Architect: Historical Anxieties and the National Monument

In 1945, Sukarno (1901-1970) declared the Republic of Indonesia’s independence from its Dutch colonizers. Trained in the bouwkunde4 tradition as an engineer with a focus on architecture at the prestigious Technische Hoogenschool te Bandoeng (Technical School of Bandung), Sukarno was notoriously a terrible engineering student, preferring instead his classes on representing and drawing architecture.5 President Sukarno’s revolution would be articulated in an architectural vocabulary. In his words, I am not saying I am like the Prophet, no – I am just an ordinary human being, who, however, as an engineer, has been given aspirations by the Almighty God – high aspirations, thanks to the Lord who be praised, not low aspirations. Not aspirations that wallow in the mud, my Brothers and Sisters, but aspirations that – and why not say so – are suspended from high in the sky.6 With his God-given dreams of engineering and architecture, Sukarno articulates a nation to be built, both metaphorically and physically. In a breath, Sukarno evokes the sublime, architecture,

See Chihara Daigoro, Hindu-Buddhist Architecture in Southeast Asia, trans. Rolf W. Giebel (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996).

Ann Laura Stoler and Karen Strassler, “Castings for the Colonial: Memory Work in ‘New Order’ Java,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 1 (2000): 11.

4 Translates roughly into architectural engineering, where technical engineering is the focus of an architectural education.

This is often contrasted with the bouwkunst tradition, where the focus is design and artistry.

5 Angus McIntyre, The Indonesian Presidency: The Shift from Personal Toward Constitutional Rule (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005).

6 “Speech of April 5, 1965,” and “Speech of July 18, 1966,” in MacIntyre, The Indonesian Presidency, 193.

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revolution, the sky. Like Figure 1, a seemingly gravity-defying diamond scaffold stands amidst an open plain. Without the caption, one would never know that this is Jakarta: all we see are a dense horizon of trees. Architecture can make a world anew, to build impossible dreams not reaching from the sky but “suspended” from it.

Figure 1. “In May 1961, after measurements were taken, a steel pipe marker was installed in the middle of Independence Square to indicate the point at which the Monument would be built.” From Tugu Nasional: Laporan Pembangunan.

One of Sukarno’s first acts as President in 1945 was to rechristen the Koningsplein, the central “King’s Square” of Batavia, as Merdeka (“Independence”) Square, dedicating the very center of the square to the building of a national monument. The Koningsplein had been intended as the new 30

center of power in the Dutch East Indies after the administrative center moved four kilometers southwards from the port of Batavia. The plans for the Koningsplein, while only ever partially completed, were ambitious in breadth, rather than in height: it would consist of a series of low-rise civic and administrative buildings facing outwards to the street.7

Figure 2. 1937 Plan for Koningsplein by Thomas Karsten.

In contrast, Sukarno earmarked the center of the Koningsplein as the site for the National Monument.8 With four diagonal axes forming pathways from each corner of the site and meeting at the National Monument in the middle, the central planning of Independence Square could not be farther from the low and level colonial buildings of the Netherlands.

Setiadi Sopandi, “Indonesian Architecture Culture During Guided Democracy (1959-1965): Sukarno and the Works of Friedrich Silaban,” in Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia: Ideology, Identity, and Culture, ed. Tuong Vu and Wasana Wongsurawat (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

8 Jusna M. Amin, “Jakarta’s Monas Park Through the Ages,” Ekistics 60, no. 360/361 (1993): 204–14.

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In the politically chaotic early years of liberal democracy (1950-57), little progress was made on the National Monument.9 By 1957, however, Sukarno had consolidated executive authority in the name of establishing order under Guided Democracy (1957-1966)10. In 1961, a memo from the President’s office opens with the preamble: The Indonesian revolution has reached a new stage: the stage of building.11 The arrival of new space and new time came hand in hand for Sukarno. With Marxist ideological leanings, Sukarno always had an eye toward history: for him, art and, particularly, architecture was not merely for pleasure,12 but also had the added agenda of furthering a revolution. The battleground for this revolution was Jakarta, which Sukarno repeatedly stated had to be on par with other cities on the world stage.13 He had even appointed an artist, Henk Ngantung, as Deputy Governor of Jakarta in 1960 to achieve this very end.

Thus, Sukarno evidently had strong visions for the monument. In 1955, a nationwide competition, with Sukarno as the head of the jury, was launched. He called for the design of a National “Tugu”, a monument with the formal trappings of an obelisk. Among the favorites to win were F. Silaban,14 known for his previous collaborations with Sukarno at the Istiqlal Mosque. Curiously, no winner emerged from this competition; Silaban was awarded second prize, and two other architects were given a joint third prize. A second competition yielded no winning designs either. Sukarno’s speech

Sukarno was the figurehead president during the era of liberal democracy, which saw the rise and fall of six cabinets.

While the 1949 and 1950 Constitutions placed executive power in the hands of the Prime Minister, Sukarno still held significant moral and political authority. In 1956, Sukarno had begun openly criticizing liberal democracy. In 1957, with the support of the military, Sukarno declared martial law across Indonesia. Prime Minister Ali Sastroamidjojo handed his mandate to Sukarno, allowing Sukarno to assume the mandate of both the President and Prime Minister as Indonesia returned to a presidential system.

10 Guided Democracy was modelled after a village system of decision making based on discussion and consensus under the guidance of village elders. Critics have termed it a justification for authoritarian rule.

11 “Menimbang bahwa revolusi Indonesia telah mencapai taraf baru yaitu taraf pembangunan.” Prayogo, “Tugu Nasional: Laporan Pembangunan, 1961-1978” (Jakarta: Pelaksana Pembina Tugu Nasional, 1978).

12 Although art for Sukarno was certainly also for pleasure. The main subject of Sukarno’s Presidential art collection is notoriously nude or semi-nude women, which he would commission the presidential Palace painters to execute. See especially the work of Dullah, Basuki Abdullah and Lee Man Fong, who all feature heavily in his collection.

13 This is what Anderson has referred to as the “specter of comparisons.” See more in Benedict Anderson, The Specter of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London, New York: Verso, 1998) and in Sopandi, “Indonesian Architecture Culture During Guided Democracy (1959-1965).”

14 Silaban was originally on the jury committee for the competition and on the committee for the National Monument between 1960-1. By 1962, his name fails to appear on the list of committee members, presumably due to his opposition to Sukarno’s vision. See more in Prayogo, “Tugu Nasional: Laporan Pembangunan, 1961-1978.” 132-5.

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at the prize-giving ceremony on 17 November 1960 is worth quoting at length. After announcing that there were no winners for the competition, he says: This tugu must look like a tugu, this tugu must embody our revolution, this tugu must depict the character of our revolution, this tugu must depict the dynamism of Indonesia, this tugu must be the mirror of our dreams, this tugu must embody and depict the fire of sacrifice in our breasts. More than that, after this tugu is drawn, it must be realized in form, a form that does not change, whether the form will be in concrete, in steel, in aluminum… a dead form, a form that does not change, that will ever be as illuminating, that lasts 1000 years, but must depict events that truly move. This is the most challenging challenge.

Sukarno explains that a new epoch must have its own distinctive style. Citing the architecture of the University of Mexico as an example of modern Indian/Aztec and American form, he then comments on the importance of monuments.

Man cannot become full or satisfied with only material things, with only bread, but with spirit (“jiwa”), the spirit of the nation must have nourishment and one of the nourishments for the spirit of the nation is monuments.

If Independent Indonesia wants to be a nation filled with dynamism, a nation with impetus, ha!, move, move, move, work, work, work, create, create, create, create. Lest we forget that the need for this monument is a need.

Monuments, rather than being mere frivolity, were a “need.”15 In this speech, Sukarno defines two functions for the modern, Indonesian tugu. The first is that of “depiction,” to illustrate and formalize the spirit of the nation and its revolution toward an educational end for future generations. The second function of the monument is as a driver of history. Invoking the language of both the Hegelian spirit of history and the Javanese idea of life-force with the word “jiwa,” Sukarno saw monuments themselves as historical agents in the teleological history of Indonesia. Fascinatingly, Sukarno refers to the tugu as a “dead” form, seemingly paradoxical to the idea of revolution to “illuminate” “events that truly move.” Alluding to the death of martyrs, consigning the form of the tugu to death suggests a sacrificial possibility for it to serve as an icon: in this manner, the tugu is “suspended between life and death.”16

This echoes a sentiment expressed Giedion, Sert and Leger, which asserted that “Monuments are the expression of man’s highest cultural needs.” See more in 16 Rem Koolhaas, Preservation Is Overtaking Us, ed. Mark Wigley et al. (New York: GSAPP Books, 2014).

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There is thus a simultaneity of aesthetic paradigms at play: where, on one level, “depiction” presumes a separation between the architectural object and history as an expression of a nationalistic revolutionary spirit, on the other, the monument as historical agent is able to assert itself on this “spirit” of revolution. That is to say, the monument can bring the nation into modernity.

Recognizing the monument as historical agent departs greatly from existing scholarship on Sukarno’s monumentalizing urge, which has largely argued that these monuments were an attempt to hide the “offending ooze” of slum-like portions of Jakarta.17 Seeing Sukarno’s quest for monumentality in the context of an Andersonian “specter of comparison,” that is, the constant anxiety of being seen as adequate on the world stage, overlooks the nuances of Sukarno’s attitude to monumentality. In contrast, I argue that scholars have misplaced these anxieties: the anxiety at the heart of the National Monument is one of history.

The obelisk in the park was not an architectural language present in the Netherlands. While the first obelisks were Egyptian, they first entered the European imagination during the Roman conquering of Egypt in 30BC when they were brought to Rome as spolia, marking Rome’s turn from Republic to Empire. However, obelisks regained significant historical interest in the 16th to 19th-century in France, Italy and England. Installed in the open space of the town square, such as the Luxor obelisk in the Place de la Concorde in Paris, they were physical manifestations of the resources and scale of imperial power. Looking to these traditions, Sukarno’s insistence on the tugu can be read not only in the vein of post-independence obelisks such as the Washington Monument, but also a reconquering of the formerly imperial space of the Koningsplein, where he razed all existing buildings to build his vision of the Independence Square.

The final design for the National Monument was produced by the palace architect R.M. Soedarsono, with strict directions from Sukarno. The final design saw a hybrid monument. Rising 117m tall, a four-sided, hollow pillar that tapers like an obelisk was covered in Italian marble and erected atop an occupiable square base measuring 45m x 45m x 17m. The obelisk-like form is topped not with a pyramidion, but with a symbolic sculpture of a flame plated in gold, evocative of the eternal flame of

MacIntyre, 183. Similar sentiments are articulated in Peter J.M. Nas, “Jakarta, City Full of Symbols: An Essay in Symbolic Ecology,” in Urban Symbolism, ed. Peter J.M. Nas (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993), 13–37.

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war memorials. The square base would house the National History Museum – where the diorama is held today. The proportions chosen were a direct reference to the date of Indonesian independence: 17 August 1945 (the plinth at the bottom of the monument measures 8m wide). The final monument was the first building in Indonesia to fully use prestressed concrete. As its engineer, Roosseno, remarked, in this way, both Roosseno himself and the nation would be “an element of the modern.”18 The form of the National Monument was a clear reference to the Hindu lingga-yoni found across Hindu and Hindu-Buddhist monuments. To Sukarno, the phallic lingga was a representation of male “virility”19 – both his own and the nation’s – and the yoni was its female counterpart. As noted by many others, this clearly established a historical continuity between the Indonesian nation-state and older Javanese polities.20 Its historical links to the Hindu-Buddhist past, however, are more than a formal citation. Sculptures of the lingga and yoni traditionally mimicked the alu rice pestle and the lesung rice mortar respectively, standing at around two to three feet tall. Sukarno’s maximalist approach to form wildly exaggerated the proportions these sculptures, especially the lingga. In other words, he made sculpture architectural.

Rudolf Mrázek, A Certain Age (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010). 13.

Cited in Sopandi, “Indonesian Architecture Culture During Guided Democracy (1959-1965): Sukarno and the Works of Friedrich Silaban.”

20 First in Anderson, Language and Power, 184, and after in Kusno, Sopandi, Nas. 18 19

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Figure 3. Section of the National Monument. Image Source: Laporan Pembangunan Tugu Nasional (1978)

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In an earlier speech on 27 June 1960 at a meeting with the competitors for the National Monument design competition, Sukarno spoke of the importance of architecture, as opposed to the practice of visual art: Our nation in olden times was a three-dimensional nation… Because of that our nation built Borobudur, built Prambanan… But then we became a twodimensional nation because we suffered Dutch colonial domination for 350 years… Our art became two-dimensional art… no longer art which created on a tall and large scale. But now living as we are in the world of the Republic of Indonesia we must become a three-dimensional nation again, Brothers and Sisters.

In other words, Sukarno identifies Borobudur as an architectural – a discipline higher than art – paradigm that the current nation-state, in its “stage of building” must live up to.21 More than mere historical continuity, the National Monument is defining a contemporary age in relation to a glorious Indonesian past associated with Borobudur and Prambanan, a Hindu temple built contemporaneously with Borobudur. This critique of Indonesian architecture as overly twodimensional – as merely “decorative art” – and insufficiently architectural can be traced all the way to 1938, when Sukarno writes in a letter: In general, I am of the opinion that Indonesian architecture does not know threedimensionality. The Mendut temple, the Pawon temple and the small temple in the Sewu temple complex satisfy me in their overall conception (which is of modest proportions), but the Borobudur is only satisfying in its details. Moreover there is a problem: is not the overall conception of the Borobudur Temple (although it recalls a Stupa) a failure?

Perhaps by 1960, at the wizened age of 59, Sukarno had changed his mind since 1938. Yet the concerns are the same: in defining an architecture for a new nation, one always had to exist in relation to the Hindu-Buddhist past, always in relation to Borobudur.

It is worth at this juncture considering Benedict Anderson’s theory of Javanese power. Anderson writes that Javanese power “exists independent of its possible users… the entire cosmos [is] suffuse with a formless, constantly creative energy.”22 Therefore, power, rather than being an abstract characteristic of relationships, is concrete: objects (architectural objects included) do not merely

Sukarno, Letter to “Jth. Toean Redaksi Poedjangga Baru, Djakarta: from Ende dated 20 April 1938 in Poedjangga Baroe, Commemorative Number 1933-1938, 7 (1938[?]): 65, as quoted in McIntyre, 22 Anderson, Language and Power, 22.

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represent power but are themselves the carriers of power. This reading of power closely mirrors Sukarno’s understanding of the dual function of monuments as depiction and historical agent.

In addition, power in a Javanese sense is not infinite but limited: “the concentration of power in one place… requires a proportional diminution elsewhere.”23 In this push-and-pull model of relationships, the anxieties of the National Monument in establishing a center are even heightened: the legitimacy of the National Monument in Jakarta was contingent on the yielding of its peripheries, including a resurgent Hindu-Javanese heritage.

It is thus unsurprising that Sukarno explicitly stated that the National Monument had to be on such a grand scale as to “make Borobudur small” (see more in Chapter 2). In turn, he said, We are building the National Monument for the greatness (“kebesaran,” literally: to make large) of our People.24 The Archaeologist: Saving History

In 1953, at the age of 31, a mere two months fresh of his doctoral degree in Archaeology at University of Indonesia, Soekmono (1922-1997) became the first Indonesian Director the postindependence Archeological Service.

The Archaeological Service was a late colonial institution of the East Indies. After centuries of Dutch disinterest in Javanese antiquities, the short British Interregnum (1811-1815) sparked international recognition of Borobudur and Prambanan with the publication of Thomas Stamford Raffles’s History of Java in 1817. The discipline of archaeology germinated very slowly in the 19th century, with informal groups of amateur archaeologists taking control of narrating Borobudur: notably, the Batavia Society hired Isidore van Kinsbergen to photograph the Borobudur in 1873 (we will return to these fascinating photographs in Chapter II). The Oudheidkundige Dienst in NederlandschIndie (Archaeological Service in the Dutch Indies) was founded in 1913, born out of the Ethical Policy (1901-42) when the Netherlands acknowledged it had an ethical responsibility for the welfare

Anderson, Language and Power, 23.

Sukarno in 1963, as quoted in Tugu Nasional: Laporan Pembangunan. “Kami membangunkan Tugu Nasional untuk kebesaran Bangsa.”

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of their colonial subjects, rather than seeing the Dutch East Indies as a region purely for profitmaking.

When Soekmono was appointed the head of the Archeological Service, he thus also inherited the most high-profile project in its portfolio: the care of Borobudur. Since Raffles’s History of Java, the history of the “rediscovery” and restoration of Borobudur has been told through the lens of Great Men.25 It was H. C. Cornelius who was sent by Thomas Stamford Raffles to excavate and measure the site in 1814; J. W. Ijzerman, the chair of the Archaeological Society of Yogyakarta discovered a hidden foot of carvings in 1885; the Dutch engineer Theodore van Erp completed the first restoration of Borobudur between 1907-1911 under the aegis of the Archaeological Service, taking over the duties of the deceased art historian Jan Lourens Andries Brandes; in 1913, N. J. Krom became the founding director of the Archaeological Service and published a definitive work on Borobudur in 1927; W. F. Stutterheim followed with another tome on Borobudur in 1929. Notably, all these figures published extensively and would mostly have been known to Soekmono and his contemporaries through their writings.

Soekmono, using the same technology of writing and publication, is inserted in this lineage of great men. During the late 20th century, in his capacity as head of the Archeological Service from 1953-73 and Project Manager of Borobudur’s restoration from 1971-83, Soekmono would become inextricably linked with Borobudur.26 From 1969 onwards, Soekmono published at least 15 books on Javanese archaeology, of which at least six were on Borobudur (some works were posthumously published after his death in 1997), not including the numerous essays he contributed to edited anthologies, and reports he wrote for the Archaeological Service, or for the restoration. Quite unlike the contemporary model of the restorer-scientist being subsumed in an institution, Soekmono, much like architects in the 20th century, aimed at crafting his own narrative.

See Soekmono 1976, 1983; Miksic, Golden Tales of Borobudur, 1990 Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff, “Conserving the Past, Mobilizing the Indonesian Future: Archaeological Sites, Regime Change and Heritage Politics in Indonesia in the 1950s,” Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land- En Volkenkunde 167, no. 4 (2011): 405–36.

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Unlike the anti-Dutch sentiment of Sukarno, who clearly saw the Indonesian Republic as a break from the Dutch East Indies, Soekmono is seen in a lineage with the Dutch restorers of Borobudur.

As the preface to one of his books on Borobudur writes, If the cloak of Dutch van Erp fell with honor on his Indonesian shoulders, Dr Soekmono has truly graced the association with his skill and his deep devotion to Borobudur.27 Yet being in their lineage did not prohibit Soekmono from forming his own narrative of history.

Colonial debate was dominated with theories of “Indianisation.” Beginning from Raffles’s claim in History of Java that “natives” could not have possibly built something as magnificent as Borobudur, Dutch archaeologists have argued over how, when and which Indian influences made themselves apparent in Indonesia.28 In contrast, Soekmono, in the foreword of a 1955 high school (SMA) textbook he wrote on the cultural history of Indonesia, proposes an “Indonesia-centered” history.

On narrating cultural history, Soekmono writes: We must dare to change norms and stop using the terms “Hindu era” or “Indonesian-Hindu culture/era” and “Islamic era” or “Indonesian-Islamic culture/era.” In its development from the beginning to the present, Indonesian culture is Indonesian culture, even if its design is Hindu, Islam or even Western.

After all, these designs, even the prehistoric ones, still exist today. As a matter of fact, “Indonesian-Hindu culture” still continues in Bali, and we are still living in the “Indonesian-Islam era.”29 Rejecting the colonial periodization of “Hindu” and “Islam,” Soekmono re-inscribes the nation into the historical past, and brings it back to the present. All prior eras signify and stand for the nation.

The essential category, regardless of time and history, is that of “Indonesianness,” as the new nation endows itself with historical depth by asserting its historical continuity. Political authority is claimed in time. He is arguing not merely for the continued relevance of the historical past, but that the essence of the historical past cannot be cleaved from the present. We are still living in these “eras.”

As such, to Soekmono, the connection between himself, an archaeologist, and Borobudur was also bound up in an interpretation and narration of the past and the future. In an essay published in 1992, Soekmono reflects on the role of archaeologist. First, Soekmono identifies Indonesian candi,

Soepardjo Rustam, in Foreword of Soekmono, Borobudur (Jakarta: Buku Nusantara, 1983).

Bloembergen and Eickhoff, “Conserving the Past, Mobilizing the Indonesian Future,” 423.

29 Soekmono, Pengantar sedjarah kebudajaan Indonesia: terutama untuk S.M.A - A Djilid 1 (Djakarta: Trikarya, 1961), 3.

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Hindu and Hindu-Buddhist stone temples of which Borobudur is included, as “pusaka.” A Javanese term denoting an inherited object with supernatural powers, pusaka are often personified, many even contain spirits. He then goes on to write, A pusaka object possesses an intimate spiritual connection with its owner or custodian… If it were in danger of theft, damage or destruction he would do everything in his power to save it.30 Since candi no longer have owners, having been “forgotten” over the centuries,31 they belong to the “nation.” The “modern Indonesian archaeologist” is then identified as the aforementioned “custodian.” Pusaka objects, the earliest object carriers of power in Anderson’s conception of power in Java, were now in the hands of the archaeologists.

The responsibilities he [the modern Indonesian archaeologist] accepts are not limited to excavation and interpretation, but include those of restoration and reconstructing these ancient edifices in order to realize what we have come to know as three-dimensional archaeology. All this is in keeping with the archaeologist’s duty and obligation, which dedicate him wholly to the preservation of the candi as cultural pusaka of his nation, and to ensure that the mandate which accompanies this ancient bequest is fully and correctly executed.32 The language of modernity and nationalism as associated with “three-dimensions” is once again echoed. The “modern Indonesian archaeologist” in enacting “preservation of the candi” is also preserving “the evidence and expression of the Indonesian national character.”33 Restoring34 the monument is thus a nationalistic priority. The “identity”35 of the modern nation state thus lies in the archaeologists’s uncovering and reconstruction of an objective truth in the architectural-historical past: presenting the monument as whole would “reinforce” its “scholarly value,”36 but only if “correctly executed.”

Soekmono “Candi as Cultural Pusaka,” 51.

Soekmono, Chandi Borobudur: A Monument of Mankind (Paris: The UNESCO Press, 1976).

32 Ibid., 56.

33 Ibid., 56.

34 The distinction between preservation and restoration is far less clear in Indonesia: there is little to suggest that any figure opposed to restoration of Borobudur. In American parlance, preservationists oppose restoration, since it implies there is a past state to which an archaeologist can rebuild. See, for instance, the controversies over Viollet-le-Duc’s restorations of French monuments in the 19th century and John Ruskin’s 35 Soekmono, Borobudur 36 Soekmono, “Candi as Cultural Pusaka,” 53 30 31

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Instead of the abstract language of Sukarno’s nationalistic “spirit” of history, however, Soekmono’s horizon of time is generational. Where Sukarno’s idea of historical time emphasizes development as it arches toward a clear telos, Soekmono’s emphasis is placed far more on a continuous succession from one generation to the next. This more closely identifies his thought with a Javanese conception of “pusaka” and “warisan”37 denoting an heirloom passed between generations of a family. The nation then, is an abstracted version of the family. In an earlier publication, he writes, Any sacrifice we may make for the preservation of Borobudur is a duty, for we must pass on this priceless cultural heritage to our descendants.38 In this relationship between archaeologist and monument as heirloom and custodian, Borobudur’s dilapidated condition would not do. To Soekmono, Borobudur was a victim, and his restoration would be its savior. In 1955, when it was decided that Borobudur needed a second restoration, Soekmono described the water damage as “stone cancer.”39 The late 1960s would make this metaphor even more explicit with the international campaign to “Save Borobudur.”

Borobudur is in great danger! Borobudur must be saved! This heartbreaking cry reverberates in every corner of the world.40 It was to this end that he led a painstaking 12-year long anastylosic restoration of Borobudur, to present Indonesia’s heritage in “as complete a form as possible.” Anastylosis, first introduced by the colonial Archaeological Service with the restoration of Candi Panataran in 1917-18,41 denotes an approach to restoration that prizes original elements placed in their original positions. Soekmono’s idea of truth and “correctness” was thus bound up in material terms: otherwise, “the pusaka held high by the nation would be no better than fakes.”42 Yet the respect for original materials did not preclude new additions. With the restoration,

Soekmono, “Mewariskan warisan sebagai wajib.” Paper presented to Seminar Pemugaran dan Perlindungan Peninggalan Sejarah dan Purbakala, cited in Soekmono, “Candi as Cultural Pusaka,” 51.

38 Soekmono, Borobudur 39 Soekmono, Borobudur.

40 Soekmono, R. 1969. “New Light on some Borobudur Problems. Paper presented to the XXVII International Congress of Orientalism, Ann Arbor, August 1967.” Bulletin of the Archaeological Institute of the Republic of Indonesia/Berita Lembaga Purbakala dan Peninggalan Nasional 5,69: 1-10, cited in Bloembergen and Eickhoff 2015.

41 The Dutch East Indies’ Archaeological Service never used the term anastolysis. The practice and principles were used in the Netherlands, which was then taken up by the French in Indochina, who in turn introduced the term anastylosis for this colonial practice of restoration.

42 Soekmono, “The Candi as Cultural Pusaka,” 53 37

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It is expected that Borobudur will be able to last for another 1000 years and possibly longer than that, since it is now supported by a very strong foundation of reinforced concrete.43 It is hard not to read this statement in comparison to Sukarno’s remarks on the National Monument, which too had to last “1000 years,” and was constructed of concrete: concrete, of course, being “the element of the modern.”

While Soekmono identified with the science and rationality of the “modern archaeologist,”44 his language was often ornamented with hyperbole and urgency. In a foreword by Gerard Bolla, the Deputy Director-General of UNESCO, Soekmono was praised for his scientific rigor and Indonesian “emotion,” 45 as if the two were fundamentally at odds. This division between the rational and emotional selves clearly did not apply to Soekmono, or even to Sukarno, to whom the project of modernity was personal.

In addition to the patriotic language of nationalism, Soekmono also embraced the language of internationalism, tied intimately with the emergence of UNESCO and an international heritage infrastructure. The Indonesian government first invited UNESCO to consult on stone weathering at Borobudur in 1955, but afterwards, UNESCO had little interaction with Borobudur until late 1960s.

In fact, Sukarno had pulled Indonesia out of the UN and UNESCO altogether in 1965. While Sukarno did not oppose the restoration of Borobudur, it was not a priority during his rule. Funded by the national government, work had started to restore Borobudur in 1963, but was interrupted by the tumultuous events of 1965 due to a coup that unseated President Sukarno.

General Suharto, the general who took over the presidency, ruled Indonesia between 1966 to 1988 under his New Order. Unlike the leftist, revolutionary Sukarno, Suharto’s rule was characterized by a call to tradition, militaristic brutality and a capitalist logic of development. It is estimated that around 500,000 were killed and 1.5 million imprisoned under Suharto’s effort to control Indonesia between 1965-66. Notably, where Sukarno insisted on the parity of all Indonesian islands, Suharto explicitly Javanised political culture. Borobudur took on an even more central role in the architectural

Soekmono, Chandi Borobudur, Preface.

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

45 Soekmono, Chandi Borobudur, 3.

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imagination of Indonesia: there was little more symbolic of Java than Borobudur. Adopting Soekmono’s rhetoric, the New Order positioned itself as the new caretaker of Borobudur, physically inscribed in gold into a memorial stone next to Borobudur.

With the New Order on his side, Soekmono once again raised awareness for Borobudur’s need of assistance at the 27th International Congress of Orientalists in 1967. Couching his concerns in a moralistic voice toward an academic community,46 Soekmono and other Indonesian dignitaries continuously brought the issue up with UNESCO’s assistant director general, the Norwegian Tor Gjendal. Gjendal was even flown to Borobudur on an airplane chartered by Indonesia to visit the monument.47 UNESCO thus launched the highly public “Save Borobudur” campaign in 1968 to raise funds for the monument. While UNESCO served as a platform through which technical experts met, its role in Borobudur’s restoration was primarily financial.

Echoing the language of UNESCO promoting the “intellectual and moral solidarity of humanity,” Soekmono identified Borobudur with an abstract principle of man’s commonality: one of the titles of his books, published by UNESCO in 1976, boldly declares Borobudur a “monument for all mankind.” He writes, We requested international aid through UNESCO… so that many nations might share in the work of saving Borobudur as one of the greatest achievements of men on earth, so is the restored monument intended to be enjoyed by all.

Mankind is one. The great cultural heritages of the past belong to all mankind.

Borobudur also belongs to the world.

This parallels a trend in 1920s Europe, where academics used the language of morality in relation to the League of Nations to justify a restoration agenda. See Lucia Allais, "Chapter 1" in “Will to War, Will to Art: Cultural Internationalism and the Modernist Aesthetics of Monuments 1932-1964” (Massachusetts Insitute of Technology, 2008): 21-126.

47 Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff, “Save Borobudur! The Moral Dynamics of Heritage Formation in Indonesia across Orders and Borders, 1930s–1980s,” in Cultural Heritage as Civilizing Mission: From Decay to Recovery, ed.

Michael Falser (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2015), 83–119, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13638-7_5, 105.

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Figure 4. Borobudur is placed first on the list of the “World Map of UNESCO Conservation Missions.” UNESCO Courier, pg 8-10, 1968.

However, his internationalist rhetoric may have had a more personal agenda. In his writings, Borobudur’s importance as a national monument almost always foregrounds his internationalist exhortations. Further, texts written for an international audience (especially if published by UNESCO) tend to place more emphasis on the abstract ideal of “mankind” than his texts in Indonesian. Perhaps in part due to Sukarno’s exhortation that Hindu-Buddhist monuments were not sufficiently nationalistic, Soekmono found another avenue through which Borobudur could be “saved for future generations.”

In 1954, fresh from civil war (1945-1950), Indonesia signed UNESCO’s Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. In a yearly report, Soekmono stressed that convention was fundamental to his thinking. Not only could sites be listed as national monuments in Indonesia, but international treaties could allow sites to receive international protection in times of war.48 He no doubt had in mind the 1949 damage of Prambanan and the looting of its offices: his PhD advisor, A. J. Bernet Kempers, was at the time the head of the Prambanan office and was greatly saddened by this loss.49 Borobudur, located a mere 50km from

Soekmono, Laporan Dinas Purbakala (1954), 1962:7, as cited in Bloembergen and Eickhoff, “Save Borobudur!,” 92.

Bernet Kempers, A.J. 1954, as cited in Bloembergen and Eickhoff “Conserving the past, mobilizing the Indonesian future” 48 49

45

Prambanan, was at the time being used as a training area for Indonesian pemuda (“youth”) fighting for the Free Indonesian Republic.

Figure 5. Indonesian pemuda fighting for the Free Indonesian Republic under Borobudur under the Sang Sakah MerahPutih, the red and white Indonesian national flag. Source: Kedaulatan Rakyat (1947)

Conclusion

During the fight for Indonesian independence, Chairil Anwar’s revolutionary poem Aku was ringing in the minds of all nationalists. It set forth the horizon for the next epoch of the nation state, boldly declaring, “I want to live a thousand more years!” The universalist desires of Sukarno and Soekmono were framed always in this framework of millennial time, caught historically in this nationalistic fervor: their call to three-dimensions must be read as a call to persistence through time, a call to concrete, a call to the monument.

It was also during the late 1960s that an international heritage movement began to mobilise around “endangered” heritage sites around the world. With a receptive national government friendly with UN-affiliated Allied nations, Borobudur’s shift from being read as a purely nationalistic monument to a site of international heritage was a confluence of international institutions, individual actors and 46

transnational bodies. It is important to note, however, that Soekmono never stopped describing Borobudur in nationalistic terms although he too adopted the internationalist language of UNESCO. Borobudur was malleable enough to sustain this paradox, changing its scalar affiliation at every turn.

We will pick these questions up once more in Chapter Two.

47

48

2

50

Chapter 2: Seeing Borobudur

Figure 1. “The Inauguration of The Indonesian Armed Forces.” Diorama Source: Google Arts and Culture.

Borobudur appears not once, but twice, in the dioramas of the National History Museum. The first instance is the diorama that begins this thesis, depicting the construction of Borobudur in 9th-century A.D. The second diorama, however, leaps centuries ahead of time to 1945, depicting the inauguration of the Indonesian Armed Forces. Borobudur, stockier than usual, stands at the center of the painted dioramic perspective, receding into the background in two-point perspective. Sculptures of soldiers are lined up in front of the Borobudur, receding along with the monument into the right-most perspective point.

Notably, it was Suharto who ordered this addition to the museum.1 Like the restoration of Borobudur, the National History Museum straddled the reigns of Sukarno and Suharto (see more in Chapter 3). Suharto, who had taken power in his capacity as a general in the Indonesian

Katharine E. McGregor, “Representing the Indonesian Past: The National Monument History Museum from Guided Democracy to the New Order,” Indonesia, no. 75 (2003): 91–122, 102.

1

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Armed Forces (Tentera Nasional Indonesia, TNI), was keen to stamp the legitimacy of time and history onto both the army and his rule. This further harkens back to the imagery of the youth soldiers marching in front of Borobudur (see Chapter 1): in one swoop, Suharto claimed ownership over the Hindu-Buddhist past, the revolutionary spirit of Indonesia – tied intimately with Sukarno – and the militaristic force of the army.

It is thus unsurprising that by the early-1970s, when the dioramas were made, an increasing insecurity had penetrated Suharto’s New Order. An unprecedented growth of economic and social inequality under Suharto’s developmental policy had made a national unity – previously under the banner of revolution – increasingly difficult to sustain.2 In 1975, at the opening speech of Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, or the Beautiful Indonesia in Miniature Park, Suharto exhorted, Economic development alone is not enough. Life will not have a beautiful and deep meaning with material sufficiency alone, however abundant that sufficiency might become. On the contrary, the pursuit of material things on its own will make life cruel and painful…One’s life, therefore, will be calm and complete only when it is accompanied by spiritual welfare. The direction and guidance towards that spiritual welfare is, in fact, already in our possession; it lies in our beautiful and noble national cultural inheritance…

There was little more important in the “beautiful and noble national cultural inheritance” of Indonesia – of Java – than Borobudur. ** During the New Order, an idea of tradition as rooted in architectural origin was reborn. As Kusno argues about Jakarta, architectural tradition in Suharto’s New Order became mobilised toward the recovery of an “authentic” history.3 In that manner, Borobudur became re-mystified as an object of postcolonial curiosity: it had to be reproduced for the late 20th-century narration of a national “Indonesian architecture.”4

See more in Anderson, Language and Power.

See “Recreating Origins” in Abidin Kusno, Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture. Urban Space and Political Cultures in Indonesia (New York: Routledge, 2000).

4 See more in Iwan Sudrajat, “A Study of Indonesian Architectural History” (PhD Dissertation, University of Sydney, 1991).

2 3

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There was thus an increasing awareness that Borobudur itself as a monument could not serve as a self-fulfilling entity: it had to be a site of temporal and historical rediscovery. To reach its heights of “unity”5 in national identity and economic development, that is, to be charitable toward the emergent figure of the Tourist, a park would need to be built around the monument.

As noted in Chapter 1, UNESCO’s role in Borobudur’s restoration6 came largely in the form of fundraising assistance. The highly publicised fundraising campaign was incredibly successful.

Notable contributors include the Netherlands, the United States and Australia, but Japan was the leading donor, raising 1.8 million USD from both private and governmental sources.

It is thus unsurprising that Japan took on a leading role in the project itself. In 1973, at the request of the Indonesian government, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), in collaboration with Indonesian authorities, became responsible for developing plans for Borobudur after its restoration. Particularly active across Southeast Asia, JICA, a bilateral development organisation, was a key government agency in Japan’s neo-liberal model of “Official Development Assistance” (ODA). Charged with projects of a “technical” nature, JICA co-operated extensively with both Japanese and Indonesian private sector actors, as well as national and local authorities, toward the development of infrastructure: forestry, mining, fishing, and notably, tourism.

Based on the Nara Archaeological Park in Japan, the National Archaeological Park of Borobudur was a project seven years in the making, finalised in a report released in 1979 and with the project completed in 1983. The JICA Master Plan was developed out of two preceding studies and a series of interim reports. The report was jointly produced by Pacific Consultants International and Japan City Planning on behalf of JICA, in partnership with a Consultative Committee for Safeguarding of Borobudur (hereby referred to as C/C) consisting of representatives from the Indonesian Ministry of Transportation, Communication and Tourism (MTCT), the Ministry of Culture and the University of Gadjah Mada (UGM). The park was built for a wide variety of programs – including areas designated for documentation, administrative

5 6

1975 JICA Interim Report The total cost of the restoration of Borobudur was over 7 million USD.

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and research – but this chapter will focus on how the park treats the relationship between the visitor and the monument.

Soekmono, the head of the preservation arm of Borobudur, was notably absent from the C/C. In fact, the zoning of the park made clear that the National Archaeological Park was seen as a project separate from the preservation of the monument: while Borobudur itself would be in a circular Zone 1 and administered by the Borobudur Preservation Office, the rest of the park (Zone 2 to Zone 5), would be administered by a separate body under a government-linked private company, PT Taman Wisata. Instead, the C/C was chaired by the engineer for the National Monument, Dr R. Roosseno, and had as its members four other experts from Allied nation states. In their seventh session in 1978 on “Monumentality and Spiritual Values,” the committee writes as one of their recommendations that: Any future project should have as its primary objective the full understanding on the part of the visitor of the monumentality and spiritual values of this outstanding example of the world’s cultural heritage… Violence is caused by lack of spiritual reserve and fundamental value… Borobudur should be interpreted for the visitor with great care.

There is an implicit acknowledgement of the multiple possibilities of meaning in Borobudur: the park, it is implied, should be a spatial and meaning-laden interpretive technology. The language of war, mirroring that of Soekmono and inscribed into the mission of UNESCO, is once again employed: to arrive at a “full understanding,” one must necessarily be educated. The JICA Master Plan itself reads with the patronising tone of a high school textbook, complete with cartoonish illustrations to further its arguments, quite different from the technical writing adopted in the interim reports. Adopting the language of “development,” a hierarchy is assumed between the writers of the report, and those who will necessarily execute it. It is worth noting that the reality of the National Archaeological Park did not quite live up its ideal. This essay will predominantly concern the 1970s, and the vision for the National Archaeological Park, with only a brief mention of the chaotic implementation that followed in the 1980s.

Further, the National Archaeological Park project was under the purview of tourism, in both JICA’s files and Indonesia’s MTCT. The aim of the landscape was also to provide visitors with a “pleasant resort,” of which the “restoration and protection of the monuments are the necessary

54

points… for that purpose.”7 That is to say, the preservation of the monument was subsumed under the larger goal of tourism and the creation of a “pleasant” environment.

The main tool of this interpretation and the creation of a “pleasant” environment was the “creation of a master Image.”8 In other words, the area around Borobudur was mobilised to present particular sights not only from the monument, but also of the monument. As Barthes argues about the Eiffel Tower, this monumental vision Borobudur overcomes the “habitual divorce between seeing and being seen.”9 Its ability to oscillate between an object to see and a position to see from lends it the “power to order objects and persons into a world to be known and lay it out before a vision capable of encompassing it as a totality.”10 To that end, this chapter sees with a historian’s eye in examining this “master image.” The existing scholarship on the National Archaeological Park, like much of heritage discourse, tends to be value-based: it either holds the park up as an example of “authentic” conservation11, or denigrates it as lacking “intangible heritage.” These debates are ultimately value-judgements on the presentation of the “authentic”: I wish to altogether unsettle this idea. Rather, departing from existing scholarship, I focus on the ways in which sight is inscribed into the contemporary monument through the careful control of landscape. James Marston Fitch, recognising that preservation could only supplement architecture by installing an “unnatural interface” between the visitor and building, called this mediating aesthetic the “fourth dimension.”12 It is in the fourth dimension of representation that I thread links between three time periods: Suharto’s New Order (1966-88), the late colonial period of the early 20th-century Dutch East Indies, and the earliest views of Borobudur in the 1840s. Further, I trace the transnational entanglements that came to contend with these views, noting the crucial role of the Japan International Cooperation Agency and regional imaginations. Notably, other than a brief mention in

JICA Master Plan 110 JICA Master Plan 91 9 Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (London: University of California Press, 1979), 3–17, 4.

10 Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” 98.

11 Most notably, see Masanori Nagaoka, Cultural Landscape Management at Borobudur, Indonesia (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016).

12 James Marston Fitch, Historic Preser Built World (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 325.

7 8

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Bloemberg and Eickhoff’s 2013 article and Masanori Nagaoka’s review, little critical scholarship on this plan has been written, much less one that studies its formal lineages.

This is not an attempt to equalize the New Order with the Dutch East Indies. Rather, I show how specific narrative and formal strategies persist in possession and production of the monument, tracking the changing timbres of a universalist imagination. This chapter thus inevitably concerns colonial memory and manifestations in the 1970s-80s. Many scholars have noted the parallels between Suharto’s New Order and the Dutch East Indies, the former being marked with a nostalgia for an East Indies-inflected tempo doeloe (“past time”). Following Ann Stoler and Karen Fassler, my focus is “not only what is remembered but how.”13 Rather than seeing the movement from colonial to postcolonial in the teleological linearity, thereby precluding various cross-cutting points of reference, I argue that colonial memory in the era of Suharto is recursive. However, in addition to textual narrative of memory, I explore the ways in which architectural form is remembered and reconstruction through landscapes, as mediated by its representations. Sukarno’s call to three-dimensions as a way to direct the nation persists, transformed.

Ann Laura Stoler and Karen Strassler, “Castings for the Colonial: Memory Work in ‘New Order’ Java,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 1 (2000): 4–48, 9.

13

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“Who Should Control Which Historical Scenery in Central Java and For What Purposes?�

Figure 2. Page v and vi of the JICA Final Report on the Borobudur-Prambanan National Archaeological Parks. The uncredited image is a painting by the Dutch artist GB Hooijer.

Figure 3. Reconstructing Borobudur in its heyday by GB Hooijer. Painting (1916-1919).

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Figure 4. JICA 1976 Interim Report. Interface between monument protection, tourism development, and environmental preservation. Diagram.

The JICA Master Plan proposed to cleave a major axis into the landscape, creating an elevational linear perspective as the visitor’s first visual encounter with the Borobudur. To this end, a grand entrance corridor lined with trees was inscribed directly perpendicular to the monument. The first goal of this axis was “religious.”14 The “super corridor”15 highlights the linear axis which

14 15

JICA Master Plan 91.

JICA Master Plan 50.

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connects two smaller temples – Pawon and Mendut – and Mount Merapi, an active volcano that features highly in Javanese mythology, with Borobudur. These temples, however, would not be a part of the park around Borobudur. Instead, they would enter the jurisdiction of a separate governance body: the actual experience of travelling from one temple to another would require nagivating a curved series of roads, and paying for separate entrance tickets. It is a linearity in sight, and in the privileged eye of the planner’s map, only.

The linear, elevational approach to the monument assumes a totality of sight: the image of the monument is singular and can be consumed in a single glance.16 Walking toward the monument is thus a lesson in perspectival culture, with trees on both sides of the entrance corridor converging in one-point perspective toward the singular object on the horizon: Borobudur.

Placed on the “limit-form”17 of perspectival sight, Borobudur is made known to its visitors as an outline of its shape against an expanse of sky. The eye, rather than the body, was thus the center of experience when approaching and understanding Borobudur18: much like the experience of seeing a painting. To this end, the agricultural land surrounding Borobudur was made even through an extensive earthworking project, with the “artificial terrain of fields and paddies” to be made as “natural” as possible through a process of cutting and filing the earth.19 The smoothness of the body’s movement through space was to ensure that the experience of the image could be as “natural” as possible.

This horizonal view of Borobudur was not a new invention. GB Hooijer’s painting “Reconstructing Borobudur in Its Heyday,” reproduced uncredited in a double-page spread of the JICA Master Plan, is further suggestive of this perspectival imagination. Like the entrance corridor, it presents the a linear pathway toward the monument lying on the horizon, lined on both sides with planting: in the painting, a green field, in the JICA Master Plan providing even further defined axis with trees. While an oblique path lined with trees had previously existed

See Mrazek, A Certain Age, 14.

Dan Hoffman, Presence of Mies, 84.

18 Cf Grieve’s argument that mandalic space in Nepal is carved through procession and ritual. Grieve, G. (2004).

Forging Mandalic Space: Bhaktapur, Nepal's Cow Procession and the Improvisation of Tradition. Numen, 51(4), 468-512.

19 JICA Master Plan 16 17

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leading diagonally to Borobudur,20 the linear axis to Borobudur had only existed in print prior to the 1970s. Notably, even the face to which it presents the viewer is the same as that of the linear axis to the monument: the volcanic Mount Merapi is depicted on the viewer’s right in both instances.

Hooijer’s painting was created between 1916-1919, after the extensive 1907 restoration of Borobudur led by Theodore van Erp. By 1907, Borobudur had been largely pieced back together. Yet Hooijer implies that for Borobudur to be reanimated to its “heyday,” located in the vague mythological past, it had to be brought to life by a processional experience of walking in a linear axis toward the monument.

Hooijer’s painting itself is in a lineage of colonial representations of Borobudur. The first visual representation of Borobudur after its 1814 “rediscovery” was a drawing by the engineer HC Cornelius. The drawing was then reproduced in watercolour, uncredited, in Thomas Stamford Raffles’s seminal 1814 History of Java. It depicts Borobudur in ruins, overgrown with greenery, at the apex on a hill in elevation. Depth is here suggested by shading rather than by perspective: the object stands alone on the horizon. In Raffles’s British empiricist lens, Borobudur was a ruin among many hills, evocative of a primitive encounter made knowable thorugh elevation – as the JICA Master Plan argues, it gives us a “clear sense of space.”

As Panofsky argues in his seminal work, Perspective as Symbolic Form, perspective in the Western tradition emerging from the Renaissance is fundamentally concerned with the rational and systematic ordering of the world.21 Perspectival culture is not merely a technology of seeing but of knowing: representation is an epistemological project. If the linear axis is one of many iconographical recursions between the 1970s, 1910s and 1840s, how did the JICA Master Plan take up a representational format developed during the colonial era? We turn to the panorama.

See the photographs of Isidore van Kinsbergen in 1870s.

See Erwin Panofsky, “Perspective As Symbolic Form,” in Perspective As Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher Wood, 1997.

20 21

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Figure 5. HC Cornelius. Drawing of Borobudur. 1813-14.

Figure 6. View of the Remarkable Ruins, Boro Boedoer. From the History of Java (1814) by Thomas Stamford Raffles.

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National Historic Scenery and the Panorama

As Barthes notes, the panoramic view is marked first and foremost by time.22 This is even more true with Borobudur, where there is no single point from which one might view the landscape due to the imposing presence of the central stupa, which rises over 6 feet tall. There is no central point at which one may stand to gain enlightenment. Instead, one must necessarily circumabulate the central stupa in order to see the entire landscape around Borobudur, a body constantly in negotiation.

The urge to use Borobudur as a viewing point had come as early as the invention of the photograph: there were as many colonial photographs of the view from Borobudur as there were of Borobudur itself. Like a Mooi Indies scene (further discussed in Chapter 3), a form of painting developed during the Dutch East Indies and favored by Europeans, the “Sacred Trinity” of landscape elements would be seen - mountains, rice fields and coconut trees.23 At once panoptic and recreational, the panoramic landscape was made always in reference to an art historical medium.

In the mid 1800s, so keen was the panoptic urge to see around Borobudur that a pavilion was installed at the top of the main stupa (see Figure 8). Described as a teahouse, it allowed Dutchmen to gain a 360-degree view of the landscape without needing to walk around the monument: if the center could not be occupied, it would be conquered. By 1873, it was decided that the pavilion was too damaging to the structure of the monument: instead, a Dutch flag was mounted in its place (see Figure 9). The visual hegemony of the colonial imagination operated between these two poles: seeing, and seeing from.

Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” 5.

S. Sudjojono, “Kesenian Meloekjis di Indonesia, Sekarang dan Jang Akan Datang,” in Keboedajaan dan Masjarakat 1/6 Oktober 1939, 145.

22 23

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Figure 7. Woodbury and Page. Borobudur. 1870. Tropenmuseum.

Figure 8. Isidore van Kinsbergen. 1873

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It is thus rather surprising that the panoramic image returns with renewed importance during the 1970s, solifying and codifying the primitive panoramic encounter with the landscape from Borbudur. The land around Borobudur was divided into five concentric zones with Borobudur in the innermost area. Although the JICA Master Plan noted that this spatial form was inspired by the form of a Buddhist mandala, far more attention was paid in deciding the views from, and of, each zone. Scenery from the monument was carefully considered: in fact, the majority of the JICA Master Plan is spent achieving this goal. The Master Plan takes as its germinating principle – particularly for Borobudur – the preservation of a “National Historic Scenery.”

In deciding the National Historic Scenery, there was a deep tension between the restoration to the “original” 8th-century Borobudur, and paying homageits historic changes over time. Yet, when the villages were cleared out in order to present a pristine landscape, the effect of seeing from Borobudur is the total naturalisation of landscape: the landscape is ahistorical, and seemingly permanent.

National Historic Scenery is seen as one built out of the history of the region. The JICA Master Plan goes to great lengths in describing and elucidating the historical developments of area around Borobudur, including the movement towards agricultural use. It explains, The surrounding environments of these remains… are surrounded by beautiful pastoral sceneries and have harmonized nice sceneries. The present pastoral sceneries are those that have been descended and maintained by provincial inhabitants through various disasters and social changes ranging more than 10 generations. The whole union of both the sceneries of remains and the pastoral scenery, here we call Historical Scenery.24 Like the earthwork when approaching Borobudur, the preservation of relations between stakeholders to maintain the National Historic Scenery also had to aspire to smoothness.

The national historic environment area is the property of all people and therefore a satisfactory state of area will be formed with the safeguarding and a smooth relations between the agencies concerned in the national and provincial administration, and the inhabitants.25

24 25

JICA Master Plan 193.

Ibid., 193.

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In the JICA report, a diagram was made using photographic collages of the view around the circle terrace contrasting the landscape of an imagined post-restoration state, and the current state. The current state of the landscape, cluttered with cranes and other restoration paraphernalia, “deteriorated the scenery.” These and other “artificial elements,” such as signs, housing and roads, “should not deteriorate the scenery,”26 the report repeats. Paralelling Sudjojono’s formulation of the Sacred Trinity in 1939, the focus is on mountains (“renewing” the mountain surface to prevent “disorder”), rice fields (preserving a “first grade agricultural area”) and “coconut palms” (“harmonisation of the sorts of trees, unification of the height of trees to hide artificial elements”).27 Taking the codification of the panorama another step further, the panorama to be viewed from Borobudur was divided into three segments: the immediate view, the intermediate view, and the distant view. The immediate view required trees, the intermediate view was reserved for agricultural land, and the distant view would be that of the mountain. Each had to be clearly discernible – the Master Plan exhorts that the trees in the immediate area surrounding Borobudur should not be too tall as to block the agricultural view. A photograph by Isidore van Kinsbergen comes to mind, an expression of clear segmentation of views in the Mooi Indies: trees, field, then mountain. The eye would roll over the landscape – smoothly.

Figure 9. Panoramic view around Borobudur. Source: JICA Master Plan.

26 27

Ibid., 195-96.

Ibid.

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Figure 10. View from the Borobudur over the surrounding landscape, by Isidore van Kinsbergen. Source: Tropenmuseum.

Figure 11. Scenery Control Plan Borobudur. JICA Master Plan 202

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Making Sense of Historical Entanglements

The journey through the park was not merely for the eye, but also for one to journey through time. The subjects around Borobudur were strictly differentiated between the tourists, whose primarily space would be the Field Museum, and the local villager, whose villages were sites for control. Where the tourist became an agential subject of history, the villager had to be tamed and made object by history. We begin with the former.

A Field Museum was to be found all over the National Archaeological Park, particularly around a “ chronological mall,” where visitors could “walk back into history.” The mall would be for the “pleasure” of those who visited it. As the report describes the experience of the presumed (male) visistor, As a visitor is strolling along the deeply shaded pathway wondering, perhaps, when and how the Candi Borobudur became known to the outside world, he suddenly comes upon a brilliant display of Indonesian dynasties and construction periods… He can sit on one of the many benches or stool [sic] provided there in the shade for more leisurely perusal of the interesting information… Further along the way, he comes to an area commemorating the birth of Buddha, and then to a presentation regarding primitive man in Java in prehistoric times which marks the end of his journey back in time.28 “To avoid monotony,” while in the Field Museum, the report writes that “the historical scenes are interspersed with subtle park landscaping with suddenly opening vistas on [sic] the countryside beyond.”29 Rather than mere picturesque encounter with the monument, as suggested in much 19th-century photography of Borobudur (see Fig 13 and 14), one now encounters historical information, peppered with views of the monument or of the countryside.

Where the picturesque view of the ruin (see Fig 5 and 6) in the British empiricist was once enough to evoke a historicist view of a past firmly made past, the division between the past and the present is made muddy. No longer mere imagination, the tourist would move back through time in the “pleasant” stroll, aided by the historical information being provided around him.

28 29

Ibid., 49.

Ibid.

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After this journey through time, “to get back to the present, he [the tourist] can take any of a number of alternative routes afforded by a complex network of small paths.”30 Time is no longer purely forward moving as it was during Sukarno’s narration of history: it is revealed as malleable both backwards, and forwards, and crucially, it is mediated by space. Walter Benjamin’s flaneur, the modern artist-poet who negotiates modernism through the city, has been replaced with none other than the figure of the contemporary tourist. The tourist, in walking through the Field Museum, is made a central negotiator of time.

Figure 12. “The Borobudur.” 1900. Author Unknown. Source: Tropenmuseum.

30

Ibid.

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Figure 13. “The Borobudur.” 1900. Author Unknown. Souce: Tropenmuseum.

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Figure 14. Jan Poortenaar “Borobudur” 1920 Etching

Figure 15. Affandi. Borobudur (1985). Source: Artnet.

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In contrast to the time-travelling tourist enlightened by history, past visitors to Borobudur – mostly locals around the area – were explicitly categorised as a preservation problem. The JICA Master Plan stated that it was necessary to “demand higher moral to [sic] visitors.”31 Crucially, community engagement was a major component of the JICA Master Plan – but only as subservient to the preservation of National Historic Scenery. The report outlines that local residents, following residents in heritage towns in Japan, should have “regular conferences” with the aim of the “unification of preservation consciousness among inhabitants.”32 This would foster the “spontaneous will of local residents” to participate in preservation: the report even recommended that the residents draft and sign a declaration to proclaim their “love and affection”33 toward the monument.

Figure 16. Local Residents, as pictured in the JICA Master Plan. Page 200.

The exertion of control over the monument was not merely formal – but also would come to encompass and order a structure of emotion. As Stoler writes, the Dutch East Indies “produced

Ibid., 199.

Ibid., 199.

33 Ibid., 200.

31 32

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structures of feeling, comportment, and taste that distinguished the quality of citizens from subjects and their disparate entitlements.”34 Suharto’s monumental imagination, paralleling the Dutch East Indies, would create a hierarchy of subjects around it in its vision of the moral education of the residents around it. The moral education of the villagers around Borobudur become not only part of the purview of the National Archaeological Park, but also became an extension of a monumental regime. Monuments are not merely the rational historical tool of Sukarno and Soekmono’s realities, but as we will further explore in Chapter 3, structure affective regimes around them.

Yet the community engagement so widely touted by JICA did little to protect the residents of the two villages – Ngaran and Kenayan – that were cleared out to make way for the National Archaeological Park (see Fig 3). The second major concern of the JICA report, beyond the design of the park, was the manner in which the resettlement and land buyback of residents would be carried out.

One person I spoke to while I was at Borobudur mentioned offhand that it was indeed his village that had been cleared out to make way for the park.35 Formerly a resident of Ngaran village, he used to live with his family in what is today Zone 2 of the Archaeological Park.

Proudly, he noted that his family was the last to hold out selling their land. After resisting attempts by the government to purchase their land, he described how his father was kidnapped by the government for two weeks. The final straw for their family was the threat of being labelled PKI – the Indonesian Communist Party targeted in the 1965-66 genocide.36 They eventually gave in. In 1980, they sold their land under market price – he now lives right outside the park, near the Borobudur Market.

With a final chuckle, he added “Well, that was Suharto’s era.”

Stoler, “Affective States,” 8.

See more in Nagaoka, "Buffering Borobudur for Socioeconomic Development in the 1980s" in Cultural Landscape Management at Borobudur, Indonesia.

36 The PKI were blamed for a foiled “coup d’etat” on 30 September 1965 which claimed the lives of 6 Indonesian Army generals. Conveniently, Suharto with CIA support stepped in to “save the day” and in the subsequent purge of PKI members (real or suspected), it is believed that an estimated 500,000- 1 million Indonesians were killed.

34 35

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As Jeffrey Minson shows, this was an “attempt to reduce an ungovernable populace,” part of a “historical movement aimed at transforming highly disruptive economic conflicts and political forms of disorder into quasi-technical or moral problems for social administration.”37 As such, through the above regulations of the body in the site – coercive and otherwise – the Master Plan differentiated a clear divide between an enlightened global subject seeking to know, and a backwards local subject who becomes the object of education.

Conclusion: History and the International Monument

Explicitly defined by Suharto’s New Order as a project of tourism, Borobudur was one of the first instances where a model of preservation was exported from one country to another. As such, the idea of an “Asian” landscape management as a model for restoration came to be solidified, defined against a Eurocentric model of preservation.38 Restoration becomes the implicit site for the enactment of a clash of civilizations. Asian landscape management, we are told, prizes the “intangible” aspects of human life, such as craft, language and “traditional knowledge.” The archetypal example of Asian cultural heritage is the Ise Shrine in Japan, rebuilt on a separate site every 20 years.

Further, the attention to landscape rather than the monument is also justified under the category of “Asia.” As the basis for their intervention, the JICA team paralleled the landscape – physical and cultural – between central Java and the cities in Nara. To the JICA team, parallels included the physical natural environment, indigenous religious beliefs and mountain worship.

However, in attempting to escape a Eurocentric model of restoration, the writers of the JICA Master Plan inevitably fell into the tropes of European representation of Borobudur. In making mediating interfaces between visitors and monuments, templates are prefigured from preexisting representations. There was little interest in pre-19th century narrations of the site, in which two Javanese manuscripts refer to Borobudur as a cursed hill. Thus, as Pemberton wrote on TMII, “If contemporary international travelers visiting… discern certain postmodern effects… they may do so because the object of their gaze has already been prefigured, in part,

37 38

Cited in Tony Bennett, The Exhibitionary Complex.

Nagaoka, Cultural Landscape Management at Borobudur, Indonesia, 14-16.

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from within the postcolonial space of cultural reproduction.”39 It is no wonder that the writers of the JICA report were themselves caught in an alphabet soup of architectural jargon – where at once the National Archaeological Park should preserve a “natural” beauty and wonder, it should also aspire to abe an “International Cultural Tourism City.”

Further, the Japanese former Chief of Culture unit of the UNESCO Office in Indonesia, Masanori Nagaoka argues community engagement was particularly crucial in defining a “nonWestern” model for preservation: he tells the story of Borobudur’s landscape as the heroic ideal of the JICA Master Plan having been warped and partially fulfilled by the oppression of Suharto’s regime.40 Yet as I have shown, the division between subjects had already been prefigured within the plan itself.

Thus, while the JICA Master Plan aimed at harmoniously bringing together the “monument and nature,” Figure 17 suggests the opposite: that the “Permanent Preservation” of Borobudur, now reinforced with concrete, would allow it to outlast nature itself. This is reminiscent of the first drawings of Borobudur by HC Cornelius, where the landscape recedes into the background. In this moment of permanent time, the landscape has completely disappeared.

John Pemberton, “Rellections from ‘Beautiful Indonesia’ (Somewhere Beyond the Postmodern),” Public Culture 6, no. 2 (1994): 241–62.

40 Nagaoka, "Concept of Landscape Management at Borobudur in the 1970s" and "Buffering Borobudur for Socioeconomic Development in the 1980s" in Cultural Landscape Management at Borobudur, Indonesia.

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Figure 17. Historical Succession in the Vicinity of Candi Borobudur. Illustration from JICA Master Plan.

The JICA report is itself acutely aware of its history and aims at inserting itself in a lineage of documents about Borobudur. It writes: Just as the Ci Ampea Inscription is a message to us from the 5th century, we hope that this report will be of some help in conveying on to the 30th century and beyond, through the national archaeological parks, the message that has been passed down from the 8th century to the present day in the form of the archaeological monuments of Borobudur and Prambanan.41 Sukarno, Soekmono and Chairil Anwar’s timeline of a 1000 years is once again echoed (see Chapter 1). In the recursive, resurgent tropes that echo through Borobudur, I am reminded of the Javanese idea of sangkan paran, translating into origin and destination, but in meaning approximates: the arrival of a predestined return in the future. As Said writes, “In effect then postmodernism, with its aesthetic of quotation, nostalgia, and indifferentiation, stands free of its own history, which is to say that the division of intellectual labor, the circumscription of praxes

41

JICA Master Plan 217.

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within clear disciplinary boundaries, and the depoliticization of knowledge can proceed more or less at will.”42

Edward W. Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (1989): 205–25, 222.

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An Attempt at Exhausting Borobudur1 The Borobudur National Archaeological Park was reopened to the public in 1983.

Most features of the park have been recorded, reported, photographed, inventoried. In the next few pages I attempt to capture the rest: the skimmed over marginalia, the detritus, or what happens when nothing happens: the weather, people, colors, sky.

1Date: 17 March 2019 Time: 10:35am Location: Foyer of the Borobudur Ship Museum Weather: A bout of heavy rain.

A taxonomy of strictly visible things: - Textures: gravel ground, trimmed grass, floormats with little plastic tendrils, a crumpled poster banner hanging off the roof.

- Letters: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ plastered on a table.

- Slogans: “Welcome to the new interactive cinema Raka adventure - Samudra Raksa” - Signs: five stars, bilingual keluar/exit in green.

- Patterns: a trashcan covered in the decal of an Indonesian batik - Stones: the curbs, the pavement, the graveled ground, moss-covered walls, vessels for plants, buildings…

- Light rays beginning to emerge from the sky - A wooden pitched roof attached like a parasite to the white walls of a pavilion. A plant grows from one of its corners, wet with rot.

- People: real, and superhuman cutouts with hands larger than faces.

- A cat - Trees, plants, “plantings” - Metal: benches, the zipper of my backpack, door handles, the frame of a display, a screen looping the same video and audio of the interactive cinema experience “Samudra Raksa” again and again.

Colors pink (the inside of raincoats, the lining of umbrellas, a young girl head-to-toe) brown uniforms of a group of schoolchildren from Magelang green of a floormat, and of plants beige of the floor tiles, the off-white of the walls, the veneer of the wooden table chipped away to reveal its belly, grout between tiles, the headscarf of a woman asleep at the desk blue of the metal The smell of dew after heavy rain. Porous stone absorbing water.

The drip drip drip of rain falling off the roof, hitting the floor.

This interlude is based on Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting A Place in Paris, trans. Marc Lowenthal (Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2010).

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Streams of people walking toward the exit, just beyond my field of vision.

2Date: 17 March 2019 Time: 12:23pm Location: Entrance of the Borobudur Museum Weather: Humid. Light breeze. A temporary subsiding of rain.

Souvenirs being peddled to me: magnets; postcards; paintings on bamboo; keychains; miniature stupas in wood, stone and plastic; pens.

Just beyond the threshold lies a graveyard of stones. Mismatched stones without a home.

I take a seat inside the Museum in what is presumably the main pavilion.

A bright blue sign advertising “Fish therapy” inside the museum. Only Rp25,000 for 10 minutes.

Their benches have stupas inscribed in their center.

Big blue bins with little fish under bamboo huts.

A family is sitting on a bench, shoes off, legs crossed.

My sister, beside me, bored and playing a video game on her Nintendo Switch.

Linear arrangements bougainvillea trees lining the pavement people streaming toward the exit walkways around pavilions around a central courtyard rain falling on the ground in a 60-degree angle keyboards on a gamelan set It begins to rain again.

Two women walk by. They are both wearing red flip flops.

A disembodied voice from the PA system comes over the speaker with the jaunty jangle announcing its arrival and end.

The dull whirr of a motorbike passing in the distance.

A child runs around with a miniature parachute. He wants to fly.

A white man in khaki head-to-toe. In his hand holds a camcorder and an iPhone – he alternates his record-keeping utensils. He is accompanied by an Indonesian woman in a bright pink headscarf and a pink-brimmed hat. She holds their umbrella, a large black bag and a khaki fanny pack.

The light rain turns heavier.

A woman in a red sari and her friend.

The rain has become a thunderstorm. The breeze intensifies.

Letters: Pe-aR-Ah-eM-Beh-A-eN-A-N. The Indonesian woman vocalizes to the white man.

PRAMBANAN. Another cat. Perhaps the same one? I am not sure – I never paid much attention to cats.

A knocking sound.

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3Date: 17 March 2019 Time: 2:25pm Location: Third gallery (square) of Borobudur. At a corner, watching a stair.

Weather: Wet. Borobudur is at its most busy. Thousands of micro-events are all happening at once: in my flurry of recording, there is much that I still miss. body positions walking seated (on the steps, by the bas reliefs) standing (taking pictures) crawling (a child, with legs too short to walk up the steps) the squelching of wet shoes on the ground - perhaps wet socks within sneakers? directions up down circumambulating around an implied linearity: a paved road leading my eye from the east side of the monument directly to Mount Merapi, Pawon and Mendut – I cannot see them, but I know they lie on the same axis 4Date: 18 March 2019 Time: 5:13am Location: Main stupa of Borobudur Weather: Chilly. The sun is rising.

I try in vain to recognize people I noticed yesterday. This crowd is far different from the late morning crowd: to watch the sunrise, I had paid extra for today’s ticket.

What an extra 100,000 IDR gets you A “Borobudur Sunrise” sticker on your left breast, bearing a photograph taken from an open stupa Exclusive entry from a “VIP” “Menohatra” entrance Hushed whispers Camera flashes Flashlights (in hands, on heads) iPhone Xs Plastic covering the wet ground, for fresh pants to sit on 83

Patagonia windbreakers Languages: English (British, American, Malaysian, Singaporean, Indonesian); Japanese; French; Indonesian (broken, Jakartan); Mandarin Chinese; Spanish.

The Indonesian tour guides form a distinct cabal. we are all crammed on the east side of the top three circular rings there is not much else to do but wait and look through screens everything is awash in the blue-gray of a sun turning picture-taking body positions: scramble across the wet ground squat stand sit cross-legged and unmoving, with a phone pinched between a thigh and an inner calf. rather like the Buddhas caged in their stupas precariously hanging off the ledge, with toes dangling and heels on the top level.

I am interrupted by a request for me to take a photo. The instructions are very specific: I must squat, with the camera facing up, one end of the screen capturing the person, the other a stupa, and the misty landscape in between the two figures.

This took me around 5 minutes.

It is now 5:28am.

What did I miss in these 5 minutes?

- I am starting to see colors now: green and pink plastic covering the ground - Green: trees - Repeated, rhythmic shutter-clicking from the Japanese man beside me - A Frenchman innovating: his camera is placed on a stupa, and he moves his body into position while looking at the screen. A timer takes a picture.

A British woman, one arm and one leg cocked, getting impatient as her Indonesian tour guide refuses to forcibly hold down the flash of her camera.

A prepubescent boy with a flowery cap plastered with “Bali” The woman with Buddha-like concentration has moved her phone into the front pocket of her hiking backpack: she holds it tight to her chest: she has not moved.

I do not have her patience. My feet are starting to hurt from sitting cross-legged on the ground.

It is now 5:50am.

The sun is visible and in my eye. Communal exclamations of wonder occur all at once “Sugoi!” “wow” “amazing” A scalar trick: hands holding, cradling, consuming the sun.

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Chapter III: Dioramas, Screens and Technologies of Experience “The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.” – Middlemarch, George Eliot

Figure 1. Borobudur Temple at "Candi Borobudur Temple 824 A.D.", National History Museum. Jakarta, Indonesia.

Photo by author, Jan 2019.

When I arrived at the National History Museum in January 2019, I headed immediately to the diorama that had beguiled me for so long on my laptop screen. To my great surprise – and my inner scholar’s delight – Borobudur had gotten a facelift. The once peeling paint of the monument had been smoothened over, and Borobudur had risen from its plaster ashes. In the highly contrasting palette of dark and light greys, the monument was pictured in a state of completion, rising high above the sculptural figures around it. It seemed rather odd that a diorama depicting the construction of Borobudur would choose to render Borobudur itself in completion. Nonetheless, Borobudur, restored in central Java, also had to be restored in Jakarta.

What is in a photograph? What is in a photograph I had seen on a screen on the internet, now rendered out of date? What about the photograph of a tourist who interrupted my writing?

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** While representation has been my unit of analysis in Chapter 1 and 2, the social role of representation here comes to the fore. Since the architectural object of Borobudur itself could not travel, a myriad of representations would travel in its stead: photographs, drawings, dioramas, television programs. Borobudur’s proliferation beyond central Java is marked through its interactions with mediums. This chapter is an exploration of the “vast space of metaphorical possibility”1 between the architecture site and its representations.

In his seminal 1964 essay, Marshall McLuhan declared: “The medium is the message.” Arguing that medium “shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action,”2 McLuhan displaces the traditional focus on content to analyze the structures in which it is communicated: technologies of experience remake the world in their image. While it would be reductive to think of art, film and architecture – the three disciplines that guide this chapter – as merely messages in mediums, the focus on the social life of form through a study of medium illuminates the way in which Borobudur’s imagination collides with reality.

Therefore, following Koolhaas, this chapter shows that representations serve to renew cultural relevance.3 The form of these mediums reflects, tracks and shapes an intention around creating a historical subject through architecture: as Chapter 2 shows, embedded in form is universal desire. However, where Koolhaas sees the relevance as that which is to be aspired to, I argue that cultural relevance of representation is significant insofar as it creates new horizons for architectural experience. In that manner, this chapter is a response to the state-centered approach of Chapter 1 and 2, noting the breakdown of teleological, state-centered logics.

Contrasting the one-to-one mapping of order and behavior,4 I show that behaving around mediums is a learnt act: this chapter explores the frictions of the process of representational mediation.

Robert Smithson, “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites (1968),” in Unpublished Writings, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1996).

2 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Mentor, 1964).

3 Rem Koolhaas, Preservation Is Overtaking Us, ed. Mark Wigley et al. (New York: GSAPP Books, 2014).

4 Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 73–101.

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Ordered as a series of vignettes, I explore three adjacent mediums: the diorama, the miniature and the television screen. Studying the history of the model diorama in the Dutch East Indies, and later in the postcolonial National History Museum and the Beautiful Miniature Indonesia Park, I probe the museum space of post-independence Indonesia. Then, I study a single event: the June 11, 1983 solar eclipse, which was televised live, from Borobudur.

Colonial Pictures

The diorama as a medium is fraught with ethnological history. Descended from a tradition of 360-degree panoramic paintings in the 19th-century, the word “diorama” was built from a neologism of the Greek dia (through), horama (view). It first came to refer to Daguerre’s phantasmagoric light dioramas, patented in 1822, wherein changes in atmosphere and scenery could be produced with lighting changes and a revolving auditorium. By the late 19th-century, however, the word “diorama” had come to encompass a far wider vocabulary of exhibitions, including taxidermied animals against painted backdrops, or collectible miniature models.5 These model dioramas were used for the exhibition of natural history. The division of civilization and savagery was drawn between the industrialized, urban West and the rest of the “natural” world, including animals and non-Western peoples alike. In particular, dioramas emerged in prominence with the exhibition of peoples, especially from Africa, in late 19thcentury World’s Fairs, where they became quickly embraced as a key feature of anthropological exhibitions. More than mere tools for “entertainment” with “educational functions,”6 dioramas thus trace the line between nature and culture, ambivalent in their positions between “science” and “art.”

Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2013), 139-40.

6 See Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Bew York: Zone Books, 1997), 93-97.

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In this lineage, most existing literature on dioramas trace an American tradition of dioramamaking in natural history museums.7 In these studies, it has been assumed that the social presupposes the technical.8 Donna Haraway, in her masterful exploration of race, sex and capital in the dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History, likewise adopts this view that the model diorama evolved in response to a growing awareness of the fragility of nature.9 The technical, however, is never considered in existing scholarship to exercise agency in changing a social world by positing new ways of seeing, and thus understanding, the world.

The Dutch tradition of the diorama – and its offshoots in its former colonies – has been far less explored. The practice of three-dimensional scenic re-creation also occurred on a radically smaller scale in the making of souvenirs. The half-Surinamese artist Gerrit Schouten (1779-1839) was often commissioned by local traders to produce miniatures. Schouten’s perspectival flat boxes, often with a sloping top surface to suggest sky, were completely made with paper, containing lush backgrounds and painted paiper-mache buildings and people. Finished with a picture frame, these miniatures, retroactively termed dioramas once they entered the collection of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, were a step away from photographs to be hung at home. An 1820 Schouten miniature, commissioned by an English trader, depicts the Paramaribo neighborhood in Surinam where the trader lived. Schouten’s miniatures were thus personal objects occurring at the scale of the hand.10 By 1931, however, model dioramas in the vein of the natural history tradition had become a staple in the Dutch anthropological exhibition. At the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931, the diorama had come to replace the live exhibition of people11 as a tool for vicarious travel, providing a “quick tour of the most picturesque spots in the world.”12 Two large dioramas,

Karen Wonders, Habitat Dioramas: Illusions of Wilderness in Museums of Natural History (Uppsala, 1993, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Figura Nova Series 25); Stephen Quinn, Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2006).

8 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

9 Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936,” Social Text, no. 11 (1984): 20–64.

10 Eveline Sint Nicolaas, “William Leckie, Trader in Paramaribo: A Diorama of 1820,” The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 57, no. 3 (2009): 244–57.

11 The Dutch East Indies pavilion at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle featured a live Javanese kampong (village), complete with live music and dancers. See more in Marieke Bloembergen, Colonial Spectacles: The Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies Athe World Exhibitions, 1880-1931, trans. Beverley Jackson (Singapore: NUS Press, 2006).

12 Oettermann, The Panorama, 97.

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among other smaller three-dimensional works, were commissioned for the Exposition: one showing plantations in Bali, and the other showing the Preanger region in West Java.

Figure 2. The 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, with the diorama in the background. Photographed by Albert Chevojon.

Source: wereldculteren.nl, Object Number RV-A191-1-16.

Figure 3. Diorama “Paysage to Java�. Photographed by Albert Chevojon, designed by L.J. Eland and sculpted by L.J.T. Kamman. Source: wereldculteren.nl, Object Number: RV-A191-1-17.

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Placed among statues of Buddha from a remote Hindu-Buddhist past (of which Borobudur was the resounding emblem), visitors would walk down the hall to arrive at the diorama “Paysage de Java.” At the end of each wing of the exposition, rather than being confronted with the boundary of a wall, visitors were thus treated with the expansive sublime of the Mooi Indies, the “beautiful Indies.” A late colonial style of painting, the Mooi Indies was “often more significant than the colony itself,”13 captured in the souvenirs, photographs, dioramas brought to the Netherlands by retiring colonial officials.

The Mooi Indies followed a strict set of principles. The air, while shrouded in the mystery of haze, should remain still. The landscape was to be clearly outlined, with no hint at shadows or darkness. The painting should swell forward from the canvas in perspective, offering its viewer a complete view of the landscape, replete with mountains, coconut trees and rice terraces. As Mrazek notes, there is a “distinctive police quality in the beauty of this craft.”14 The policing of the landscape reached the content of the diorama itself. The designer of the diorama, L.J. Eland, who himself was a painter of the Mooi Indie, instructed the sculptor to modify the diorama with “terraces more marked,” “trousers inside socks,” adding “family homes,” and to “modernize [the] car.”15 The romance of the Mooi Indies Java could only be brought forth by the internal disciplining its modern colonial subjects.

In the witnessing of the Mooi Indies, one would be made aware that “Indies has three dimensions against the level and low Netherlands, which only has two.”16 The spectator, it was implied, would be sublimated into a modern subject once immersed in this vision of the colony. Seeing the Indies was the next frontier. As the artist and architect wrote Piet Moojen later wrote about the Colonial Exposition, It was deemed important present forms from a world in which the human spirit seeks to express its religious and aesthetic desires in ways other than

Rudolf Mrázek, Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism In A Colony (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 113.

14 Ibid.

15 KITLV inventory no. 6453, as cited in Bloembergen 2006 16 Van Sandick, Ganeca, vol 1, no.6 (November 1 1922), 83. Quoted in Rudolf Mrazek, Engineers of Happy Land, 113.

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those familiar to ourselves: not just more important, but also more interesting and more correct!”17 No longer would spectators need to visit Java: the “Paysage de Java” was sufficient.

The National History Museum

The history dioramas in the post-revolutionary National History Museum in Jakarta, encased in the base of the National Monument, were a conscious intervention into this colonial tradition.

Yet its aims were once again spatial: to Sukarno, as the Netherlands was to the author Van Sandick, Indonesia was insufficiently three-dimensional.18 Representing history not in the implied dimensionality of painting, but through the meeting of sculpture and painting in model dioramas, would literalize this urge.

As referenced in Chapter 1, the National Monument and its accompanying museum spanned the regimes of both Sukarno’s Guided Democracy (1959-65) and Suharto’s New Order (1966-98).

As McGregor shows, the dioramas were a site of history-making for both these leaders. First commissioned by Sukarno to represent Indonesia’s path towards socialism, the dioramas were intended to invest its visitors with a national spirit. After Suharto’s 1966 coup, however, the museum became a way to inscribe the Indonesian “universal values” of Pancasila into the past.19 Drawing from a European tradition on the social role of museums, museums were said to be “an institution which could advance civilizations.”20 All the dioramas at the National History Museum were made by Edhi Sunarso (1932-2016), who taught at ASRI, the Indonesian College for Fine Arts21 in Yogyakarta. After one of his works caught Sukarno’s eye while he was in the military, Sunarso was appointed the palace artist, designing much of Sukarno’s most distinctive monuments in Jakarta, including the Welcome

Cited in Bloembergen, Colonial Spectacles, 298.

See Chapter 1 of this thesis.

19 Katharine E. McGregor, “Representing the Indonesian Past: The National Monument History Museum from Guided Democracy to the New Order,” Indonesia, no. 75 (2003): 91–122.

20 Moh. Amir Sutaarga, "Masalah Museum di Indonesia," in Moh. Amir Sutaarga, Persoalan Museum Di Indonesia (Jakarta: Direktorat Museum Direktorat-Djenderal Kebudayaan Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, n.d.).

21 ASRI was later renamed to the renowned Institut Seni Indonesia, or ISI, Indonesian Institute of the Arts.

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Monument and Irian Jaya Liberation Monument.22 Sukarno had sent a group of artists (surprisingly, not including Sunarso) to study dioramas, first to Japan between 1962-63, and then to Mexico, to study the making of figurines and dioramas: rather than travelling to the birthplace of the diorama in Europe, they were educated in the reinterpreted traditions of dioramic models in once-colonized nations.

Yet the form of the dioramas themselves would have to imbued with nationalistic spirit. As a student at ASRI, Sunarso would have no doubt encountered the highly influential writings and artwork of Sindoedarsono Sudjojono (1913-1986). Sudjojono, known as the father of modern art in Indonesia, gave voice to a generation of artists attempting to untie themselves from the Mooi Indies, introducing a Realist vocabulary to Indonesian art. In a 1939 manifesto, he wrote, The paintings only contain one meaning and no more: Mooi Indie. Truly Beautiful Indies for the foreigner who has never seen coconut trees and rice fields, truly Beautiful Indies for the tourists who are bored of looking at skyscrapers and would like to find a new environment… If a painter dared to paint subjects other than the Sacred Trinity [of mountains, coconut trees and rice fields], and tried to sell his paintings to the art shops here, the shop owner would say, “Those are not for us, mister.” What he means is, “Those are not for the tourists or the retired Dutch people, mister.”23 To Sudjojono, it was not the Netherlands that was one-dimensional, but rather the Mooi Indies.

Instead, Sudjojono’s paintings were often awash in darkness, with wide brushstrokes separating units of contrasting colors to create form. Eschewing clarity of perspective, he rarely outlined his figures to draw boundaries and would use the white space between two forms when he did.

Cloaked in shadow, the muddiness of his work resists easy interpretation – therein lies its threedimensionality.

Sunarso’s dioramic representations were a mixture of Sudjojono’s Realist style and the inheritance of the Mooi Indies. Sunarso, while taking Sudjojono’s brushstrokes, ordered its perspectival illegibility. Built in a dome-shaped plaster shell and lit from within, these dioramas had to bend the perspectival logic of the flat plane and dimensional object into a sphere. With

22 Papua to this day still remains home to a separatist movement with frequent military conflict, while Indonesian leaders still insist the integrity of the nation sees West Papua as Irian Jaya – a province of Indonesia.

23 S. Sudjojono, “Kesenian Meloekjis di Indonesia, Sekarang dan Jang Akan Datang,” in Keboedajaan dan Masjarakat 1/6 Oktober 1939, 145.

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skies curved inward, the objects in the diorama are themselves distorted, sheared and elongated toward an implied perspective point at the center of the horizon. The figural sculptures themselves recede in scale as they approach this perspective point, creating the illusion of a scene far larger than the space of the diorama would allow. In this manner, these dioramas invoke Huhtamo’s description of the diorama as a “vision-machine” that set into wax and paint a vision, an ideal.24 A total of 52 dioramas were to be included in the museum, with 12 scenes on each wall of the large square room, and four on the central wall. Starting on one corner and walking linearly around the room, one would be guided through a teleological narration of Indonesian history.

Each diorama, identical in size and identical in symbolic weight, would depict a scene of Indonesian history. As Stewart notes on miniatures, these dioramas offer “a world clearly limited in space but frozen and thereby both particularized and generalized in time… that instance comes to transcend, to stand for, a spectrum of other instances.”25 Walking through the National History Museum thus had the kinetic effect similar to the 360-degree panoramas: yet while the panoramic painting was spatially continuous, these dioramas were discrete scenes and events linked through a processional projection of historical time. In moving through space, one would be guided through time from the “Golden Age” toward a telos of development.

The presumed viewer for this medium was thus meant to walk to one diorama, standing in the center to appreciate a totality, then walk on to the next. Measuring approximately 1.5m wide and 1m tall, the National History Museum’s dioramas – like its colonial predecessors – waver awkwardly between the scale of one-to-one reproductions ala natural history museums, and the intimate picture-boxes of Gerrit Schouten’s making. Rather, it is the scale at which the architect is familiar: the scale model. In this case, it is imbued with narrative both within the diorama and within the museum. To see it as its perspective implies, the standing viewer is presumed to be positioned at a slight distance from the glass screen directly in the horizontal center, looking through the glass to immerse their eyes in the space of the diorama. Travel was spatial and temporal.

24 25

Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion, 145.

Stewart, On Longing, 48.

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Visitors to the National History Museum, however, were not so easily tamed. The dioramas, powerful as they were, could not quite exert this disciplinary order on its subjects. When I visited, children and adults alike had their bodies pressed against each other, breaths prevented from condensing on the glass screen only through the forced separation of a metal barrier. It was difficult to get an eye level view of the diorama, much less from the restrained gaze of being a few feet away looking in. From my corner looking in to “Candi Borobudur Temple 824 A.D.,” the painting appeared before me in perspectival distortion.

Instead of looking at the dioramas, most visitors were congregated in the open space between the dioramas and the square mass in the center, housing the staircase to the peak.

Multigenerational families were lounging on the floor, with blankets and other sheets spread out across the cool marble floor, consuming lunch and hiding from the oppressive sun that shines over the largely uncovered Independence Square. Children were running around and playing around with the buttons on the vending machine. The Independence Square, intended as an open plaza for the new nation, was unbearably hot: instead, the air-conditioned National History Museum would suffice as this public space instead. Languorously surrounded with images of history, families crafted for themselves a public space in a museum. Unlike the European assumption of order in a museum,26 this audience was not hindered by the imagined reality of the state.

Recreation and Re-Creation

The recreational park as a tool of imparting history – both in the National Monument and in the Borobudur National Archaeological Park – was contemporaneous with another project with similar aspirations: Taman Mini Indonesia Indah (TMII), or the Beautiful Mini Indonesia Park.

TMII houses 26 pavilions with replicas of vernacular rumah adat (“traditional homes”) from all around Indonesia, as well as a miniature version of Borobudur, and a replica of the National Monument called the Fire of Pancasila Monument. It was built symbolically on the southernmost tip of the North-South axis of Jakarta that began with the Dutch colonial port and

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See more in Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex.”

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Old Batavia and crossed through Independence Square and the National Monument: in a lineage with the Dutch East Indies and Sukarno’s reign, Suharto was attempting to leave his mark on the urbanity of Jakarta with his New Order.

TMII was the pet project of Tien Suharto, President Suharto’s wife, purportedly inspired by a trip to Disneyland. In an interview, she says, I was inspired to build a project of the sort in Indonesia, only more complete and more perfect, adapted to fit the situation and development of Indonesia, both materially and spiritually.27 Echoing the language of development and improvement, TMII fulfilled a recreational ideal by importing re-creation into Jakarta: one now can walk backward and forward in time through the history of Indonesia right in the heart of its administrative center.

TMII was a rather unpopular project. The first open protests during the Suharto era were over the price tag of TMII: a stunning 1.5 billion rupiah – or 25 million USD in 1971. It was three times the cost of the restoration of Borobudur. Instead, Mrs Suharto urged student protestors to contribute financially to TMII, exhorting: If, in the olden days, our ancestors worked cooperatively together (“bergotong-royong”) to create Borobudur, which now commands the attention of the whole world,28 today we too can work cooperatively to build the Beautiful Mini Indonesia Project.2930 Once again, the call to history was tied to Borobudur. The one created at TMII however was rather different from the original. The 120-by-120-meter Borobudur was now represented by a miniature two-by-two-meter "Borobudur" under glass. It rests in the center in an open-air pendapha, a Javanese pavilion most often seen in royal palaces, and is in turn surrounded by eight life-size concrete Buddhas. In a storybook from the Department of Education and Culture for

John Pemberton, “Rellections from ‘Beautiful Indonesia’ (Somewhere Beyond the Postmodern),” Public Culture 6, no. 2 (1994): 241–62.

28 It is unclear if this is a reference to the magnificence of Borobudur, or to its state of disrepair.

29 Sinar Harapan, December 1, 1971.

30 Monas too was created by cooperative contribution- and thus remains a site of “pilgrimage” for people from the provinces – perhaps this is what Tien Suharto had in mind.

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use in public schools to introduce children to Indonesian culture, a group of schoolchildren fulfil their dream of visiting TMII and see the miniature of Borobudur. In an exchange: "Only now am I able to clearly understand The Borobudur," said Lina, "because up until now I've just seen its photograph."

"With a miniature like this, we can see it in its entirety more clearly. If we went to Borobudur, what would be visible would certainly be larger, the reliefs clear. But as to which door we entered, sometimes we'd get confused.”31 The Mini Borobudur was thus able to offer what the monument could only hope to achieve: clarity and control. In her now canonical book On Longing, Susan Stewart draws upon psychanalytic, Deconstruction and Marxist theories to claim that the experience of the miniature in an amusement park is always narratively concerned with nostalgia and loss. For Stewart, the encounter with the miniature in a park is “to erase their history, to lose us within their presentness.” Hence the miniature is a fiction, with “nostalgic allusions to interiority and fictiveness,” positing “a transcendence which erases the productive possibility of understanding through time.”32 Crucially, the houses and monuments held in TMII were seen as just as – if not more – authentic than their counterparts around Central Java.33 Instead of travelling to Central Java to visit their ancestral lands, residents would travel to TMII instead. Stewart’s formulation of the miniature breaks down when comes to TMII: it is a fiction that gives access to an idea of origins that is more real, more perfect, more whole.

Siswoyo, S. W. 1978. Kunjungan ke Taman Mini Indonesia Indah. Jakarta: Ikhwan [for the Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan]. 143-44.

32 Susan Stewart, 60.

33 See more in Pemberton 31

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Figure 4. General Soegiarto, with a scale model of Borobudur, under a portrait of Soeharto, reconstructing the 1985 bombing of Borobudur. Source: Bloembergen and Eickhoff, “Save Borobudur!,” 92.

The Television Screen and Eclipse Fever

By February 1983, the Borobudur National Archaeological Park was ready to be opened to the public, with only a slight delay in the workflow proposed by the Japan International Cooperation Agency.

Fortune would have it that a total solar eclipse would wash over Java on Saturday, June 11, 1983.

Having poured millions into the restoration of Borobudur, the neo-liberal New Order was keen to reap its earnings: Indonesia was quick to capitalize on the opportunity to attract domestic and foreign tourists to the site. A plethora of material tying Borobudur to the eclipse – posters, beer bottles, buttons, booklets etc. – was produced, sold and circulated. There was so much fanfare around the event that Tempo, an Indonesian weekly, described the event as “Demam Gerhana” (“Eclipse Fever”).

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Figure 5. “Eclipse over the Borobudur,� a poster circulated to Indonesian embassies and tourist offices around the world.

Figure 6. One of the many commemorative objects produced for the solar eclipse, picturing Batara Kala consuming the sun.

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A commemorative can produced by Bir Bintang, a popular brand of beer, shows Batara Kala attempting to consume the sun. Outlined in black and filled in solid blocks of red and gold, Batara Kala is depicted in a line-heavy mode of drawing mimicking traditional Javanese textiles and shadow puppets. In contrast, the sun is a floating sphere plated in gold: formless, pure form, like the circular terraces of Borobudur.34 Yet simultaneously, another major campaign was launched to caution the public from looking directly into the Sun, visually and auditorily, with posters being widely circulated and trucks blaring slogans from their speakers driving into small village towns.

Viewing an eclipse with the naked eye for an extended period of time is known to cause retinal damage, or in some cases, even blindness. Alongside promoting tourism, a campaign was launched to caution the public from looking directly into the sun out of fear of causing blindness. Although the eclipse would pass through South Sulawesi as well, local beliefs eased this urgency: tradition had it that the sun and moon were making love during an eclipse, and should not be disturbed, much less watched. The 9 million Javanese populace, on the other hand, had no such prohibitions.

Solar eclipses in Java are rooted in mythos. In the Mahabharata, a text widely adapted into stories and shadow puppetry (wayang kulit) across Java, it is that solar eclipses are caused by Batara Kala, the ruler of the underworld. Long ago, the gods and demons hatched a plan to churn the forbidden elixir of immortality out of a sea of milk, against the wishes of the Sun and the Moon. They are successful, but Batara Kala is the only demon who gets to drink the elixir before Vishnu rushes to the scene and severs his body from his immortal head. Thus, Batara Kala, the god of time and the creator of light and of the earth, today roams around without a body, a vengeful head looking to seek revenge upon the Sun and the Moon: at times, they falter, clutched by his jaws. An eclipse occurs.

The circular terraces of Borobudur are meant to represent Arupadhatu, the highest form of existence in Buddhism. It is often translated to “formless space.�

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To avoid “cataclysmic disaster,”35 Central Javanese villagers would traditionally stand outdoors and hit mortars, slit drums, or lesung (traditional rice hulling equipment) to chase Batara Kala away. This is thought to release the Sun or Moon to stop to the eclipse. Moreover, there were frequent reports of fraud, with individuals selling “gerhana glasses” (“eclipse glasses”) with exposed negative film in plastic frames, or talismans to protect viewers from retinal burns.

The paternalistic Suharto government launched a righteous crusade against misinformation and swindling: 1983 was too crucial of a year for anything to go wrong. In 1983, Suharto was reelected unopposed for a fourth term while simultaneously becoming the Chair of Golkar, the largest political party of Indonesia. This was also the year that the Indonesian parliament resolution gave him the title “Father of Development,” and also the year Suharto secured a parliamentary resolution in 1983 which obliged all organizations in Indonesia to adhere to his philosophy of Pancasila as basic principle, quelling fears from Islamic scholars who feared Pancasila might develop into a quasi-religious cult. 1983 was thus a year of consolidation – the solar eclipse was his one in a millennium chance to suggest the modernity and advancement of Indonesian subjects. They would stay indoors and not go blind.

To that end, the full apparatus of the state was mobilized. The Department of Information, Education and Health, the Indonesian Institute of Scienes (Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia, or LIPI), and the Department of Religion all launched separate campaigns against misinformation, distributing pamphlets warning of the dangers of looking into the eyes of the sun. These pamphlets were supplemented with trucks that drove through towns loudly declaring the dangers of looking into the sun. Legitimate purveyors of solar eclipse glasses even had their entire stockpile destroyed by the government36 – to Suharto, the risk was far too large. Some even warned Javanese villagers that the danger was not so much by blindness, but rather by the deafness caused by the banging of lesung. The day of the eclipse itself was declared a public holiday. Further, the Indonesian National Army and police were given patrol duties to ensure all villagers remained indoors.37

http://jateng.metrotvnews.com/peristiwa/zNP27Bgk-cerita-gerhana-lesung-dan-buto-pemakan-matahari https://tekno.tempo.co/read/738554/heboh-gerhana-matahari-total-1983-karena?page_num=2 37 https://www.cnnindonesia.com/teknologi/20160308143027-199-116096/instruksi-soeharto-buat-gerhanamatahari-1983-mencekam 35 36

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The latter campaign, instead of the former, was perhaps too successful. The response from tourists, foreign and domestic, was rather lukewarm.38 A panic gripped the nation. During the day of the eclipse itself, many Javanese indeed banged lesung, but as a warning to head indoors immediately.39 A black market had emerged for talismans to protect against the eclipse.40 As such, most Indonesians who watched the eclipse saw it on television – broadcast live from Borobudur. ** By 1981, there were 2.1 million television sets registered across the entirety of Indonesia – including the remote Outer Islands.41 This trend was only increasing by 1983, 60% of total population was now within the reach of a new satellite technology. Television, like its predecessor in radio, was seen somewhat as a public good: in 1976, public access receivers were being distributed in rural areas within the coverage of newly installed satellites under the televisi umum program (“public television,” as one would say “public space”).

Television was in part considered a public good because it was seen not only as a mouthpiece for the nation state, but also as a way of maintaining a national purity against a globalizing world.

Until the late 1980s, the state-funded national network TVRI had a monopoly on Indonesian television, with the relative creative autonomy it enjoyed in the 1960s being fully shuttered by Suharto.42 Further, in 1981, all advertising had been banned on TVRI in order to “protect and guide” its audience, and to prevent them from falling under foreign influence.43 From 1983 onwards, a series of widely reported seminars, attended by senior ministers and bureaucrats, warned that the spread of television would only exacerbate the flow of media from Western

Bryn Barnard, “Gerhana Fever” (Institute of Current World Affairs, July 1983), 7.

Ibid.

40 http://kaltim.tribunnews.com/2016/01/29/sederet-fakta-lucu-yang-dialami-warga-indonesia-saat-gerhanamatahari-total-1983?page=4.

41 Philip Kitley, Television, Nation, and Culture in Indonesia (Athens, OH: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 2000), 62.

42 Kitley, Television, Nation and Culture in Indonesia, 50.

43 Kitley, Television, Nation and Culture in Indonesia, 78.

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nations to third world nations such as Indonesia.44 It is therefore notable that the only other network allowed to film at Borobudur that day was the Japanese NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai), solidifying Borobudur as a tool of diplomacy between the two nations (see more in Chapter 2).

Unlike the diorama, wherein one looks through glass to view an image, the televised image is projected onto a glass screen out to an audience. Watching the television is thus to orient oneself to the light created from the television screen: that, in itself, is an act of spatial boundary. As Spigel argues, television merge public amusements with private spheres, creating environments where the boundaries between the two begin to blur.45 While little data exists regarding where Indonesians in the 1980s would generally watch TV, a vibrant culture of communal watching exists in Indonesia, descended from a tradition of watching wayang shadow puppets. These eight-hour long performances featuring a full gamelan orchestra and a master puppeteer were social events: people frequently move around to mingle, offering sweet tea and boiled peanuts. In archival footage of the solar eclipse, a family watches a television while sat on the floor, and in another scene, a television is set up in the hallway of a school, with benches lined in rows in front of the screen.

A stern pre-program public service announcement began the broadcast. Associated with the Department of Religion, the program urged the public not to link the eclipse to “hal-hal mistik” (“mystical things”). In a stern voice, Islam and Quranic values were emphasized instead, showing students and men praying in mosques. A special prayer would be held at mosques that day, it said, as it exhorted religious leaders to explain the phenomenon “in accordance to Quranic teachings” to their congregation during Friday prayers. In the same breath, the disembodied voice of the narrator highlighted the different beliefs and rituals associated with the eclipse across Indonesia, calling it “an evidence of the great diversity of Indonesia and thus its national wealth.” It also noted that pregnant women in particular react differently to the eclipse.

The camera cut to a pregnant woman hiding under a lounge.

Krishna Sen, “Changing Horizons of Television in Indonesia,” Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 22 (1994): 122-23.

45 Lynn Spigel, "Introduction" in Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

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The solar eclipse, while an exciting event, could not in and of itself generate 3 hours’ worth of content. Thus, on and around Borobudur, scientists from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia, or LIPI) had set up telescopes, observation towers and even plant and animal experiments.46 The experiments – especially of animals – were of particular interest to TVRI: once the commentator had set the stage for the eclipse, most of the time before the eclipse was devoted cutting between the scenes of animals reacting in cages to the change in daylight.

Among the animal subjects were orangutans, roosters and birds, each creatively bound to a stake. Five large wooden poles, each slightly warped, were staked on the ground by a corner of Borobudur. Each pole stood around 3 feet apart, each with a cage macabrely hanging from it or an animal chained to it. In English, a large sign across all five poles declared “Animals and Plants Experiment TVRI-NHK.” The popular entertainment had to be couched in the modern language of science to be rendered acceptable.

Between scenes of the animals were views of, and from, Borobudur, broadcasting the panoptic call to landscape (see Chapter 2). At least three cameras were set up, one with an aerial view downwards to film Borobudur in its entirety, one at the corner of Borobudur to film the plant and animal experiments, and one at the outermost of the circular stupa. The last camera used similarly styled shot for the majority of the program, with the camera panning smoothly and slowly in a voyeuristic circular arc, showing a 180-degree view of both the landscape and the monument. The broadcast even explicitly called for audiences to notice “the scenery around Borobudur,” evoking Sudjojono’s Sacred Trinity by pointing the camera into the distance of agricultural fields and recapitulated the majesty of the restored monument. The disembodied eye of the camera was guiding its audience.

At 9:48am, the camera suddenly cuts to the flame of the National Monument in Jakarta. The camera slowly panned out to see the National Monument as a whole, and in a continuous take

46

Archival footage from the solar eclipse was found at https://youtu.be/7XCWBIrUjbo.

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filmed a “panorama of Jakarta.” The eclipse had not even begun: but to address Borobudur, one had to address the National Monument.

Mass media embeds within it an imaginary of popular concerns and desire, revealing a set of discursive rules to think about television. The television was meant to be a tool of modernity, communicating a singular image across space, linking the nation in a myth of imagistic and temporal simultaneity.

Yet the descent into paranoia fundamentally betrayed Suharto’s aims for the event. In 2016, a partial solar eclipse once again passed over Borobudur. A resurgence of interest led to a renarration of the 1983 solar eclipse, with a great call not to “repeat the idiocy of 1983.”47 A proliferation of accounts surfaced online of individuals who disobeyed Suharto’s orders and snuck out past the patrols. Suharto’s family, to this day, denies the misinformation campaign.48 Wryly, one website called it “pembodohan massa,”49 a perpetration of mass idiocy.

https://en.tempo.co/read/752196/painters-make-art-during-eclipse-at-borobudur https://nationalgeographic.grid.id/read/13304302/saat-keluarga-soeharto-ketakutan-menyaksikan-gerhanamatahari-total-1983?page=all 49 https://www.liputan6.com/news/read/2412593/pembodohan-massa-soal-gerhana-matahari-total-1983 47 48

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Windows of the World

Figure 7. A caretaker of the National History Museum adjusts the figurine of Sukarno speaking at a meeting for the NonAlignment Movement in Jakarta (1992). Photo by author, Jan 2019.

John Berger claims that the Albertian metaphor of the window on the world is more accurately “a safe let into a wall, a safe in which the visible has been deposited.”50 In this reading, the image is kept at a distance in the same confines behind a surface, secure both from and in its position.

Yet these events above suggest that representation is far more complex. The dioramas, the miniature, the solar eclipse – these events are attempts at control and clarity in representation yet were met with a combination of ingenuity and nonchalance in state attempts to define a view of Borobudur, and therefore a view of the world. Rather than being a safe in the wall, representations take on lives of their own, intertwining, coexisting, causing panic, or perhaps even being ignored. Actors traditionally excluded in writings of architectural agency indeed appropriate sanctioned forms of representations for their own purposes.51 The myriad meanings

Cited in Jay Martin, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” 9.

Ayala Levin, “Beyond Global vs. Local: Tipping the Scales of Architectural Historiography,” ABE Journal, 2015, 2–6.

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of Borobudur once again change when they are received in the realm of the intimate, the quotidian, the personal.

My favorite scene from the National History Museum was when a caretaker stepped into a diorama of Sukarno speaking at the Non-Alignment Movement. The illusion of scale was completely shattered in that one moment as he adjusted a fallen Sukarno back to his pedestal. It is these moments that serve as reminders that when archives fall short – as in the case of much of Indonesian history – witnessing may serve as a fair alternative.

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Interlude III: Representing Borobudur

Completed with Surry Schlabs, this independent study, titled “Drawing in the Expanded Field,” takes Borobudur as its protagonist.

Starting with a series of drawings in the vein of architectural conventions - plans, section, perspective - I increasingly veer away from traditional modes of representation to explore collage, assemblage, and finally a built installation, intended as a “line in space.”

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Conclusion Over the year this thesis has been in germination, the specter of Borobudur had come to haunt me too.

2 January 2019. On an AirAsia flight to Jakarta, the red faux-leather seats in front of me are sheathed in a variety of kitschy covers advertising the wonders of Indonesia. Serendipitously, I was assigned the seat with an advertisement – not of Lake Toba, not of the Dieng Plateau, not of Mount Bromo – but Borobudur.

5 January 2019. I go to the Grand Indonesia mall in Jakarta to buy vitamins in an attempt to stave off a cold. At the foyer before the main escalator, I immediately recognize a wire sculpture around the height of my torso as Borobudur. Instead of being built from stone, this Borobudur was constructed of long wire bodies with exaggerated limbs and perforated torsos. Each body’s arms welded to the legs of the body above it, the sculpture came to a central peak of bodies arranged in the round and curled inwards. A collective coming together of arms produced the very peak of the stupa, as if clawing to be suspended from the sky.

16 October 2018. While walking back to the subway from the offices of a former professor, I see a poster pasted onto a lamppost advertising a party at Magick City, titled “Universal Love 004.”

Aimed at raising money for Love Injection, a fanzine, the party promises to lead its attendees in a “journey into consciousness.” Evoking at once the free love of the 1960s and an American neoBuddhist rhetoric of self-love, the party declares itself “the PLACE!” of “Om (Home).” A plan of Borobudur, originally from the collection of the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and now available on Wikimedia Commons, is prominently displayed in the center of the letter-sized page. The plan drawing had been doctored to reverse the figure-ground relationship of the original drawing, such that the black lines and solids were now rendered in white, and the open space of the monument was rendered in a dark poché.

Shocked, I stare blankly at the lamppost while the lights changed from stop to walk and stop again. It seemed impossible that of all people, in all places, of all times, this is where I – (me!) –

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would encounter Borobudur. I stored it in the back pocket of my mind, unsure what to make of its meaning.

28 February 2019. On a chilly night on the seventh floor of Rudolph Hall, the poster suddenly appears once again in my mind like an apparition, itching for a resolution. I find the Facebook event for the Universal Love party with ease. A quick chat reveals that the organizer listed on the event, Paul Raffaele, who also served the musical co-host of the party, was the designer of the poster. My email asking him what was in his mind, as of early April, has gone unanswered.

Momentarily in my grasp, the specter of Borobudur has once again stolen away. ** What exactly is the specter of Borobudur? How might I make sense of this invisible network of images and representations that had found – of all people and of all places – me in the US? This thesis has taken a stab at understanding on one hand, how representations have created the modern monument, and on the other, how the monument has then spawned an archive of representations. With each iteration, with each narration, both the image of Borobudur and Borobudur itself accretes an additional layer of meaning. In an iterative process of recursion, the monument is constantly reproduced both in meaning and in form (Chapter 2). Like the Javanese idea of sangkan paran, which indicates a predestined future to which we have already returned, Borobudur is engaged in solipsism. The specter of Borobudur is that which is permanently unresolved, yet already complete – an unanswered email, a poster in Brooklyn, a diorama viewed on a laptop screen.

Monuments thus posit a unique possibility into understanding the relationship between space and time, as explicated through universalist desires and representational worlds. The monument orders and systematizes a body of knowledge and experience even as contesting interpretations of Borobudur attempt to impose and re-narrate meaning upon the malleable. As such, Borobudur, and other monuments that have accrued a body of mythos, do not merely have to choose a singular interpretation, but produce a condition of all-at-once.

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The religious anthropologist Joel Robbins has argued that the “trans-” in “transnational” is the very same “trans-” in “transcendental.”1 In this reading, transnationalism always implicates an Other. Robbins argues that there is an implicit hierarchy in these formulations, where those operating on the level of the “trans” – that is, the global, the transcendental – are given a higher value than those who are unable to – the local, the mundane. Echoing Sukarno, the transcendental is located “somewhere in the sky,” 2 in the space of the skyscrapers, of “high aspiration,” of three-dimensions. Transcendental representation embeds itself into a universalist transcendental by exploiting the Kantian ontological gap between phenomena (the appearance of things) and noumena (the world as it is). In this formulation, representation mediates architectural experience. A steady stream of projects and people readily step into this role of the middleman to serve as the interlocutor of experience: this is the universal, transcendent, transnationalist subjectivity of the Borobudur Archeological Park, of Sukarno, and of Soekmono. For them, the historical subject engaged in a desire for a universal – for wholeness, for transcendental transnationalism – holds the promise of the modern. History is always becoming, always reaching.

It is easy to get drunk on universals. This thesis additionally turns its eyes to frictions as universalist desires encounter the mundane process of the everyday. When we pay attention to architectural experience – that is, the life of architectural representations – the transcendental historical subject crumbles. Transcendental subjectivity is not inherent to representation: it has been historically inscribed. In the absence of transcendental interlocutors, representations reach beyond the Andersonian imagined community of the mind into embodied affect and materialized space.3 In this light, the one-to-one mapping of time and space collapses as we know it. Rather, architecture embroils itself in the shadows of a solar eclipse, in the faint glow of a television screen, in the confrontation with a diorama, in the figure who traipses back and forth through time at the Borobudur Archaeological Park. Chipping away at linearities of time, these architectural experiences are chances to emphasize ripples, overlaps and entanglements

Robbins, Joel. "Pentecostal Networks and the Spirit of Globalization." Social Analysis 53, no. 1 (2009): 55-66.

Ibid., 55.

3 Birgit Meyer, “From Imagined Communities to Aesthetic Formations: Religious Mediations, Sensational Forms, and Styles of Binding,” in Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses, ed. Birgit Meyer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

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between objects and actors alike. Representations and actors alike contain agency in their ability to produce ontological worlds.

In Elements of the Philosophy of Right, G. W. F. Hegel famously wrote, “The owl of Minerva only spreads its wings with the falling of dusk.” Light is here a metaphor for a past to be known but never experienced. In a teleological history, the universalist promise of wholeness would resolve all antagonisms: it is only at the end of history where humans may understand history’s developmental logic.

Yet light – metaphorical and otherwise – is what first drew me to the diorama. Light is the fundamental unit of the image, positively transforming the object and agents it shines upon.

After a 19th-century dark, it was 20th-century light to which Sukarno and Soekmono built.

Suharto demanded that light be made present on the television screen in the absence of such during a solar eclipse. It was upon a lamppost that I first noticed the “Universal Love 004” poster. It is the metaphor of a cone of light that Anderson chooses in his essay on power, embracing, ordering, and unifying the state as a model of center-periphery relations and of territorial sovereignty.4 It is the lightbulb to which Marshall McLuhan refers, which creates an environment around its glow, however faint.5 The specter of Borobudur is the specter of light. It is the ever-presence and ever-absence architectural history and architectural experience, touching those who become embroiled in its universal dreams and ontological worlds. It is an affirmation that linearity, cyclicality and recursion can exist all at once in and around the monument.

It is a reminder that after the fall of dusk, the sun will rise once again.

Benedict Anderson, Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 24.

5 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Mentor, 1964), 3.

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Coda This thesis is a first draft of a project I hope will continue to haunt me. Below are some preliminary thoughts if this thesis could have existed beyond the confines of a yearlong undergraduate thesis.

Towards the end of my undergraduate education, I have become quite swayed by contemporary works of ethnography and anthropology. This thesis owes a great intellectual debt to the work of Anna Tsing, whose ethnographic writing is not merely a lesson in how to write about globalization, but how to think about form in writing. Both her content and her style in academic prose is distinctive: setting up a set of keywords, she reiterates again and again not what to think, but a way of thinking. Ethnography, for Tsing, is a gateway to structures of knowledge.

Architects, long concerned with the built form, have surprisingly neglected formal innovation in writing and research methodologies. In architectural history, the pressure to recognize agency beyond the architect has become ever more pressing: in engaging with ontologies beyond ourselves, we must think beyond ourselves. Like the rest of this essay, this is a call to attention to mediums.

Can we speak of an architectural ethnography? Anthropology’s recent philosophical turn, engaged with aesthetics, ontology and epistemology seems the closest entry point for an architectural theorist. It was my third chapter that was the most difficult to contend with considering the sources I was working with – and it is ethnography where I hope this project will next turn.

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