Anthony Forge in Bali: The Making of a Museum Collection

Abstract

This article analyzes the formation of the Forge Collection of Balinese Art at the Australian Museum, Sydney, in the context of Anthony Forge's career as a visual anthropologist. His collection was made at the time of a paradigm change in attitudes toward “traditional” art, in which some scholars were discarding the old paradigms of authenticity and where much-used categories such as “primitive” and “tribal” art were being challenged by the acknowledgment that works placed in that category had long histories of articulation and that their present practitioners were as contemporary as any working in Western contexts. The article is presented in a loosely chronological manner, tracing the role that collecting played in Forge's academic life. Arguing that this collection is his main contribution to the study of Balinese art, it focuses on his fieldwork in Bali to explain how and why the museum collection came into being.