[MSN] Indonesa. While the police are trying to nab the culprits involved in replacing the ancient statues from Radya Pustaka Museum in Surakarta with copies, it might be time for independent auditors to make an investigation into every single museum we have.

[Museum Security Network Mailing list]

Museum thefts suggest we might want to weigh the gold on Monas 

Bramantyo Prijosusilo, Ngawi, East Java

While the police are trying to nab the culprits involved in replacing the
ancient statues from Radya Pustaka Museum in Surakarta with copies, it might
be time for independent auditors to make an investigation into every single
museum we have.

If statues in Surakarta were stolen with the help of the museum curator and
copies of ancient stone carvings can be made by artisans in Muntilan, no
ancient Javanese stone statue is safe anywhere here. The type of stone the
ancients used is still routinely produced by Merapi volcano and the skill
and style of the art is still in Muntilan. How can we be sure that similar
statues in other museums are originals? 

Museums in our country are notoriously neglected by both the state and the
public. Although many museums here deserve daily crowds just for the sheer
beauty of the ancient Indonesian art collections they have, all museums have
few visitors. 

Even in the big museums of Jakarta during the holiday season you don't find
a fraction of the crowds you find in any other public space. In smaller
cities, like Surakarta and Yogyakarta, for example, some museums can wait
for weeks, even months, for a single visitor. People don't take any notice
of museums, which seem to always be understaffed as well, making them easy
targets of theft. 

Museum pieces represent a link to a past that gives us identity as humans,
but it is the fact that they are on display for the general public's
interest and education that is even more important. If museum collections
get stolen and sold into closed private collections, then to the nation they
are as good as gone. If museum staff earn lousy wages and have no career
prospects to look forward to how can they be expected to guard artifacts
that are priceless? 

With hardly any modern security equipment installed in major museums here,
the temptation to steal displays and sell them off to unscrupulous dealers
or collectors, who give top dollar for original pieces, has proven to be too
strong in Surakarta. That means that the same temptation might have proved
too strong in other museums and other pieces in the Radyapustaka museum in
Surakarta might have also been swapped with copies. 

Many traditional Indonesian arts and crafts have a lineage that reaches
right back to the 8th to 14th centuries, when many stone statues were
produced in Java. The stone carvers in Muntilan have been looking at the
work of the ancient Javanese since they were born and can produce works in
that particular style in the dark with their eyes closed. They are
experienced in making copies from photographs. 

For a couple of hundred U.S. dollars one can get a life-size deity in stone,
one that looks exactly like something from an ancient Javanese temple except
for the fresh chisel cuts on the stone. Antique dealers have techniques to
make new stone sculptures look old, and some are so good at what they do
that an untrained eye would be fooled. That is why we can never know for
sure whether an ancient statue here is original or is a copy unless an
expert gives her (his) judgment. 

The same would be true for other ancient artifacts, like keris, for
instance. Smiths in the village of Aeng Tong Tong in Sumenep in Madura,
through the generations, have been continuously making keris since Majapahit
ships sailed the oceans many centuries ago. They can make copies of old
masterpiece blades and they do it so well that experts have been known to be
fooled. 

The antique market is full of fakes of anything that sells and the best fake
can easily pass as an original to the casual observer. Considering that we
have living craftsmen with skills that match their ancestors it would
probably be possible to make a copy of most things in Indonesian museums. 

Would you like an iron cannon that could be from the fall of Malaka in 1511
or would you prefer a bronze figure of the Hindu god Vishnu atop his
peacock-like Garuda in that magnificent East Java style? I personally know
that you could get craftsmen in Tegal and Klaten in Central Java, or in
Sidoarjo in East Java, to make canons or statues like that in their backyard
smelters. 

And with the right finishing technique you can make your brand new artifact
look as ancient as it is supposed to be. This is why before an independent
audit declares the contents of our museums to be originals we can't yet be
sure that what we are looking at is what we are supposed to be seeing when
we visit a museum here. 

Our team of experts should comprise archaeologists from several respectable
universities here, but also from Holland and Britain because over the
centuries those two countries managed to amass a large collection of our
tangible cultural heritage, so the knowledge is there, and they are less
likely to accept or expect bribes. 

Beginning from the National Museum in Jakarta the team should painstakingly
examine every object in the museums' collections. The only setback is that
the job will take years and cost millions and considering our current
economic situation probably it can't be a priority. 

A simpler way would be to make just one audit, using a material object that
the nation can relate to as a spiritual symbol. There is only one object in
the country that can serve this function and this is the gold flame of the
Jakarta landmark Monas, our national monument. 

Instead of examining each item in museums in the country we could just weigh
the gold on Monas. Is it still all there? Has anyone scraped some off? We
are one of the most corrupt nations on earth, so there is a good chance that
some gold is missing; but if it is still intact, most objects in our museums
might still be original. 

The writer is a farmer and artist. He can be reached at bramn4bi at yahoo.com.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/