Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 51

Balinese Artists and Suharto’s Regime

47

taunting can provoke violence. Some of the most serious incidents were reactions
against some overzealous “color war” sorties ordered by the powerful governor of
Central Java.
Governor Suwardi gained notoriety as the most outrageous perpetrator of the
Golkar’s election tactic of painting all sorts of things yellow, the party’s political
color. The purpose of this “yellowization” campaign was to promote the government
party’s image of overwhelming power and popularity. Flash flood-like waves of
yellow paint (often applied overnight) covered such things as road curbs, crosswalks,
lamp posts, railings, flower containers, tree trunks, government buildings, and even
mosques. The most humorous strategem involved a statue of a naked (the custom
in ancient times) Olympic athlete that a Golkar supporter adorned with a canary
yellow loin cloth.
The leaders of the main opposition party in Central Java (the United
Development Party, a coalition of Islamic groups) viewed Governor Suwardi’s
“yellowization” campaign as an abuse of power and took him to court because he
had failed to get it approved by the provincial legislature. The party’s supporters,
however, responded tit-for-tat by repainting things green (their party’s political
color) or white (one of Indonesia’s two national colors). When Chinese shop owners
in Pekalongan failed to repaint their yellow store fronts green, as ordered by
opposition party militants, sixty shops were looted and burned. In Temanggung
fights broke out; eight people were injured plus seven motorcycles, a car, and a
house were damaged.'^
Tusuaria engages in the political use of color in his cartoon by making too
many things yellow: all the clothes of the villagers, the stands and most of the
fruits in the offerings on the women’s heads, plus all the banners, umbrellas and
balloons. This is calculated to annoy Balinese viewers because about 85% of them
(as indicated by the results of the “free and fair” 1999 election) favored Megawati’s
opposition party. Many Balinese, however, reluctantly voted for Golkar in 1997 to
protect their economic interests. For example, one store owner I talked with the
day before the 1997 election confided that he wanted to vote against Golkar, but
that he wanted to get his valuable business license renewed even more. He lived in
a precinct dominated by small shop owners that lived behind (or above) their
businesses. All of them were painfully aware that expedience dictated that they
vote for the Golkar party even though they resented its policies and methods—
including “yellowization”. Through his extensive use of yellow, Tusuaria is
simultaneously pleasing unsophisticated Golkar viewers—including government
censors—and fueling the resentment of the Balinese viewers. The typical Balinese
voter not only opposed the central government’s authoritarian and repressive
political rule but also the corruption, cronyism and nepotism pervasive in the way
Bali’s lucrative tourism economy has been dominated by Suharto’s sycophants.