THE STORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF
BALINESE ART

These magnificent ornaments, perhaps the purest examples of the Balinese native art, last only for one dav, and after hanging for an afternoon on an altar or a rice granary, by evening they are completely wilted. Spies has collected every different type of lamak design for a period of years and he has hundreds of them. He claims that every community has a peculiar design not found elsewhere.

The figure of a tjili seems to have a strange hold on the im agination of the Balinese, perhaps because it is the shape of the “ Rice Mother “ (mm pantun) , a sheaf of rice dressed into the shape of a tjili. This would indicate that the mysterious figure was connected with, or derived from, the deities of rice and fertility, either Dewi Sri or Melanting, also goddesses of beauty and seed respectively. Again, the shape of the great offerings (kebogan), a pyramid of fruit topped by a fan of flowers and palm-leaf, is also a tjili, so stylized however that only the pyramidal skirt and the flower head-dress remain.

This became evident when we saw in Kesiman, alongside the usual form of offerings, one six feet tall made into a realistic tjili, her skirt of melons, ears of corn, oranges, djambu, and salak; her torso of frangipani flowers (djepon) , and her face a smiling wooden mask with great ear-plugs and a fan of flowers as a head-dress. Tjilis are often so stylized that simply a palm-leaf fan with two loops (the ear-plugs or breasts) is called a tjili. I became intensely intrigued by the persistence of this shape in so many of the ritual objects and was determined to find in it some religious significance; I asked all sorts of people about tjilis, from high priests to old women offering-makers, but they all insisted that they were purely ornamental forms appropriate for offerings because they were beautiful.

The word tjili means " small and nice," rather in the sense in which we use the term “ cute.” Whatever its origin, the tjili is today nothing more than a beautiful abstract feminine motif.

links [ 1 ] - [ 2 ] - [ 3 ] - [ 4 ]