Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 103

Indonesia Honors Political Cartoonist 99 needles, etc.) to even those innocent Balinese who retain the high degree of sexual morality their traditional standards of behavior mandate. Gun Gun’s op-art work features ugly worms labeled “AIDS” crawling put of an otherwise beautiful apple bearing an outline map of Bali. Only after discover ing its “Original Apple” title on the back of the frame did I realize that the artist had in mind the story of Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden and the concept of original sin. This inteipretation was confirmed by the following statement in a book by a French expert on tourism in Bali: Escaping all control, tourism today appears to the Balinese in the sly and fatal guise of AIDS, whose victims are starting to multiply on the island, and which is denounced as a poisoned apple brought by the visitors. And whereas formerly the Balinese perceived tourism as a bounded phenomenon.. .now they see it as all pervasive. For anyone observing the evolution of the situation over the years, it is hard to banish the impres sion that the barriers meant to contain the surge of tourism and to control its development are about to crash. Regularly predicted by the prophets of doom since the 1920’s, and always held at bay, the fall of the Balinese from the Garden of Eden looks more imminent than ever. The “Virus” of Commercialization Just as Bali’s tourism boom has created a demand for commercialized sex, so has it created a market that has commercialized Bali’s traditional arts. Paintings, woodcarvings, shadow puppet plays, and dance performances have been modified to conform with tourists’ tastes and short attention spans. In short, most of Bali’s artists are now motivated by modern economic considerations rather than by tradi tional cultural ones. In the Figure 4 cartoon, I Brewok’s love for the money foreign tourists pay to see Bali’s famous dance performances is clearly expressed. Also the female dancer’s eyes— which are an important element of Balinese dance and should be focused elsewhere—have obviously been distracted by the sound of the rolling coin some crass foreign tourist has tossed on to the dance floor. The Indonesian word for such an act is kasar, which is an extremely significant cultural concept because it means that such a person is not merely impolite but also uncivilized. How much longer will it be before some drunk, “Ugly American” type of tourist tries to insert a dollar bill into her bodice or the sash at her waist as often happens at performances by belly dancers and erotic dancers in the U.S.? Such an act would be extremely offensive by local standards at a Balinese performance.