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Indonesian textiles are known to convey messages across time and space by means of an archetypal iconography that include human figures, trees, boats, reptiles, birds and geometric patterns. These encoded images follow ancestral traditions and customary laws known as adat; cloth becomes sacred through a combination of fine spinning, dying, and weaving that creates a sense of aesthetic wonder. The famed anthropologist Alfred Gell referred to this magic state of mind as the “Technology of Enchantment,” the better the weaver’s technique, the greater the cloth’s aesthetic beauty, the more “agency” of spiritual power within an indiginous cultural context. And although we cannot hope to be able to decipher those archetypes in terms of the mindset of the weaver’s community, Gell gives voice to and validates our own experience that such cloths convey messages of wonder and enchantment to us when viewed here in the West… powerful, visually compelling and meaningful… just not the same meaning as in the textile’s original context.

This lecture will follow the themes presented in the newly published book, Textiles of Indonesia, and will focus on some of the finest cloths to come out of the archipelago, presenting each object with impeccable photographs. Geographically arranged, this lecture pays particular attention to textiles from the Batak and the Lampung region of Sumatra, the Dayak of Borneo, and the Toraja of Sulawesi, as well as rare textiles from Sumba, Timor and other islands.

Sponsored by Textile Museum Associates of Southern California  info@tmasc.org