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Blind Ducks in Borneo

Judith MacDougalla; David MacDougalla
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Blind Ducks in Borneo

ludith MacDougall and David MacDougall

The appearance of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse on hand-painted window blinds
in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, presents an interesting convergence of globalization,
local entrepreneurship, and artistic and cultural appropriation. In adopting these
cartoon characters, the painter has created a livelihood for himself, but he has also
identified with them in more personal ways and found in them an artistic focus. The
result is not simply an instance of cultural hybridity but an example of the ability of
local artisans to invest the products of international capitalism with new meanings
drawn from their own experience and cultural traditions.'
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The early cartoon characters of Walt Disney are icons of global entertainment and
commerce and have become perhaps the most recognizable figures in the world,
appearing in books, comics, magazines, television programs, toys, decals, clothes,
and ornaments. Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse are animals, yes, but animals
radiating an often childlike humanity. They are the contemporary versions of a
succession of anthropomorphized creatures dating back to ancient times and
continuing on through the fables of Wsop and La Fontaine. They are distant
cousins of the animal gods and totemic ancestors found in cultures throughout the
world. Many of us who grew up in the postwar years recall Donald and Mickey as
familiar childhood companions, but they have also inspired the creation of cartoon
characters that serve as corporate mascots or appear in advertising campaigns
aimed predominantly at children. They are part of the curious muddling in the
modern consciousness of the real and the fantastic, the poetic and the commercial,
which has expanded so dramatically through the electronic media.
Usually the characters created by Walt Disney impinge upon us only in certain
predictable places and contexts: comics, television, the shopping mall, or-if we
go there-the Disneylands and Disneyworlds of California, Florida, France, and
Japan. It was unexpected, therefore, to find these characters displayed, like
some improbable heraldry, on modest, respectable cottages in towns along the
Mahakam River in East Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo [Figure 11. We first
noticed them in 1994 in the town of Tenggarong, and then in the nearby port cities

J UDITH MACDOUGALL and DAVID MACDOUGALL are ethnographic filmmakers who have collaborated
on suck films as Thewedding Camels [1977],Takeover [1980] and PhotoWallahs [1991]. Judith
is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National Uni-
versity. Her most recent film is Diya [2001]. David is an Australian Research Council Professorial
Fellow at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research. His recent films include Tempus de Baristas
[1993], Doon School Chronicles [2000], and With Morning Hearts [2001]. Address correspon-
dence to david.macdougall@anu.edu.au

1
 2 1. MacDougall and D. MacDougall

of Samarinda and Balikpapan. They were painted on ker, slatted wooden blinds
hung under the eves of houses and used to shield verandas and windows from the
sun [Figure 21. The colors were bright, and the figures of the familiar characters
stood out startlingly against these muted domestic facades [Figure 31. Most of the
images were of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, but occasionally there were
others: Minnie Mouse, Daisy Duck, the three nephews of Donald (Huey, Dewey,
and Louie), Uncle Scrooge McDuck, Gladstone Gander, and Goofy. Once one was
alerted to them, they seemed to be everywhere. On some streets every second
house had a Donald Duck blind, sometimes even two or three hung side by side
like the panels of a comic book. We wondered if they could be the remnants of a
narrative that had been scattered by the sale of individual frames. Was there a
story to be told if they could all be put in the correct order? No image was ever
repeated precisely, so they were obviously not being mass produced by someone
utilizing a screen or stencil technique.
We were immediately struck by two things: the dynamism of the figures and the
accuracy with which the painter had captured the personalities of the characters-
the brusque irritation of Donald, for example, and the friendly, slightly inane
sappiness of Mickey Mouse. There was also no doubt that whoever had painted
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them was an experienced draftsman who had absorbed the fundamental con-
ventions of the Disney style. Yet this was also clearly a local and vernacular artistic
phenomenon, if only because of the uses to which the paintings were put.
As we looked further, we found the same ker in and around the open markets,
shading and decorating the shops and food stalls, or warung [Figure 41. There were
also older, more faded examples. Some of these were quite crude. Were these the
artist's early attempts? Some seemed to share the same dynamic style of the more
recent paintings but lacked their confident draftsmanship. Quite a few warung
displayed Disney characters crudely painted on the menu or advertising bill-
boards. Some of these had no doubt been done by the proprietors and were
charmingly exuberant and na'ive [Figure 51.
In the larger cities, we found the same characters in middle-class shopping malls,
where Disney comics and books (translated into Bahasa Indonesia) were sold. In
the city markets, Mickey Mouse could be found printed on school notebooks,
stenciled on backpacks and roughly approximated in stuffed toys. Few of these, if
any, we assumed, were made under license from Walt Disney Productions. There
was even a local ventriloquist who supplemented his income by giving perfor-
mances with a Donald Duck puppet at an air-conditioned shopping center.
The Disney characters were everywhere, just as in India the Hindu gods are ever-
present in statuary, posters, and calendar art. Why were these secular characters so
popular without any apparent campaign on the part of the Disney global appa-
ratus? Intrigued by the painted ker, we tried to find the painter. There was an
address with his signature on one of the more faded paintings. We asked a group of
children to show us where it was, and they led us over hills and along overgrown
paths to the house where he had once lived. With the help of the new occupants we
traced him to his present home on the outskirts of the town. For the purposes of this
article (and to avoid unpleasantness from the Walt Disney legal department) we
will call him Yono. He lived in a few simple rooms in a one-story complex with his
wife and children. Nearby he rented an older, barn-like building to use as his studio.
 Blind Ducks in Borneo 3

Figure 1
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Figure 2

Figure 3
 4 J. MacDougall and D . MacDougall

Yono was a transmigran. He had come with his parents to Kalimantan from Java
under the Indonesian government's transmigration policy of resettling Javanese,
Madurese, and Balinese families in the less populated parts of the country, such as
Kalimantan and Irian Jaya, the western part of New Guinea. In his youth, Yono
had been apprenticed to a maker of shadow puppets used in the classical wayang
kulit theater of Java. He painted them and put on the finishing touches until, in
high school, his career was interrupted by his parents' move to Kalimantan. As an
adult, he tried various kinds of work until he discovered that painting Disney
characters on ker was a profitable enterprise, and he continued with it to support
his extended family. When we met him he was somewhat ambivalent about this
work. He aspired to be a "serious" artist and in fact did not consider his
"Donalds" to be paintings. "You must understand that this is not painting, this is
just making pictures".' But his Disney characters had brought him a degree of
prosperity, and for this he owed Donald a debt of gratitude. "Donald is my
favorite, because frankly speaking, when we were just starting out, hard-pressed
for money and in a difficult situation, Donald could be turned into money. Because
of that, I'll never give him up. My use of Donald dates from the time when I was in
a jam, so I'll always stick with him and make business with him."
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Yono invited us to watch him working at his studio, and he talked about his life
and techniques as he worked. The blinds are made from wooden slats which are
waste offcuts that he had earlier obtained free of charge from friends at a local
timber mill. But once the proprietors found out that he needed them, he had to
buy them, and recently they had even refused to sell them, saying that such small
amounts were too much trouble to bother with. Yono's assistants assemble the
blinds and apply the undercoat, and another man takes them around on the back
of his bicycle and is paid a commission on each sale. Yono can make up to fifteen
key in a day. For his early "Donalds" he used only oil paint, but later he began
laying down a background of water-based acrylic and then painted the central
figure over it in oils. This, he feels, created a greater color contrast and made the
figures stand out more vividly. For the backgrounds he uses "Paragon" acrylic
paint, commonly used by local signpainters to paint film advertisements on
hoardings. He is able to date his paintings roughly by the style of their borders
and by the color of the characters' clothing. Three years before we met him, he
painted Donald wearing a black jacket, but he changed the color from time to time
to stay ahead of imitators, and "so that people wouldn't get bored'' [Figure 61.
Yono claims to have been the first local artist to paint "Donalds," but others
have copied his idea [Figure 71. He is reluctant to criticize their work, except to say
that his own paintings can easily be distinguished from theirs. The reason, he says,
is that, being imitators, they haven't caught the "soul" of the painting. The soul of
the character is expressed through its posture, and lesser artists have not achieved
this.
Although Yono has referred to it only indirectly, one must assume that the
emphasis upon gesture in his paintings gains reinforcement from Indonesian art
and, in particular, the classic gestural iconography of wayang kulit. However, this
emphasis may also have been part of what first attracted him to Disney. In his
paintings he seems to have captured the characteristic energy and movement of
comic book art and then to have added to it. As in wayang kulit, hand positions in
 Blind Ducks in Borneo 5

Figuve 4
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Figure 5

Figure 6 Figure 7
 6 J. MacDougall and D. MucDougall

his paintings are particularly important, resembling the gestural vocabulary that
informs Javanese pictorial art, drama, and dance, the themes of which are often
drawn from Indic legends such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana. Here, gesture
and emotion become synonymous [Figure 8; see also Figure 31. It is the stance of
the figure that dominates Yono’s paintings, just as the figures in wayang perfor-
mances project themselves through their conventional styles of whole body
movement. The repetition of motifs within a specific range of variations is also
integral to both this art and Disney’s-most significantly in Disney’s work as a
film animator.
Sometimes when a number of Yono’s key are hung together they achieve the
semblance of animation, as though the figures were moving from one to another
[Figure 91. Occasionally the owners seem to have purchased several with the
aim of forming a pair or sequence, and in a few cases the paintings displayed
side-by-side seem like variations on a theme, or illustrations of a series of actions.
Yono says that his original inspiration came not from comics but from watching
Disney cartoons on television. It was only later that he began studying comics. ”I
started to get orders based on comics, so I had to buy some comics myself. I
followed the comic books in color and in line quite closely.”
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One day we walked through several neighborhoods of Samarinda, and Yono

commented on the ker as we came upon them, explaining the evolution of his
style. We found one of his earliest Disney-inspired paintings, which was still in
use shading a veranda. It showed Donald and Daisy driving in an open car,
viewed from the side and placed against a plain buff background. They are
surrounded by a frame of four bold black lines outlined in white that cross at the
corners [Figure 101. Yono said he had painted it about six years before, at a time
when his backgrounds were ”abstract”-not linked to natural surroundings or a
particular locale. Later he began including elements of the Kalimantan landscape:
trees, flowers, and water. When this painting was done he had only just begun his
association with Donald, which was to become increasingly intimate in the fol-
lowing years.

This is about six years old. I was still in my “Daisy“ phase, when the backgrounds were still
plain. And this car. . . before, in America, Donald used to like to drive really fast, and as you
know, all the cars in America are wonderful. But I made this an old car, to attract the local
customers. And it must be about six years old, because the paint isn‘t very good. I had just
begun to really care for Donald then. I had been painting him for a while, but it was only
later that I began to catch the soul of Donald. I was in that phase for about a year, but now I
have entered into the spirit of all of them, Daisy, and Uncle Scrooge, and the kids.

Donald remained the central figure among the cast of Disney characters. Yono
painted him more often than any of the others, and gradually, as with the creation
of wayang kulit, a special relationship developed between artist and subject. When
we asked which experience had been more difficult, he answered:

In my opinion it’s more difficult to enter the soul of the wayang, as I did in the past. . . . For
example, in the case of Arjuna [from the Mahabharata epic], when we make it, we really
must have our intention correct, so it will turn out like Arjuna-so that when we’ve
 Blind Ducks in Borneo 7

Figure 8
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Figure 9

Figure 10
 8 1.MacDougall and D. MacDougall
finished, it will feel right. As with the soul of Arjuna, who is a handsome knight and a vali-
ant hero, we can’t just do it any old way. I must do the same with this [Donald] too. Actu-
ally I enter the soul of all of this-one enters the soul with every brush stroke, and if one
doesn’t enter the soul of a painting, it won‘t live. That’s my opinion. In fact, I paint very
much in earnest.

In waymg kulit, where facial expressions are indicated chiefly by cut-out profiles,
gesture becomes a crucial element in communicating emotion and intent. The
same is true in Yono’s Donald paintings. He makes the point explicit in describing
a picture of Donald in an uncharacteristically ebullient mood [Figure 111:

He is very happy-shouting. Maybe because of what he has just done, he is very happy
here. So he strides along swinging his arms, very happily. He runs, happily. He’s happy
because he‘s on his way to a party. “I‘m on my way to a party”-so he’s glad. Maybe he‘s
going to a friends house.

Possibly because of his frequent displays of emotion, Donald is the most pop-
ular character Yono paints, followed by Mickey Mouse and Uncle Scrooge
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McDuck. Mickey is ever present in Indonesian markets and on consumer goods,

but whereas Donald is temperamental, Mickey Mouse is usually good-natured
and benign, personal qualities highly valued in Indonesian society. Several young
women told us he personified kindness and wisdom, and this was why he was
loved by children. But if good qualities are valued, they are not necessarily felt to
be the most interesting. In contrast to Mickey’s happy tranquility, Donald is often
frustrated and irritated, his anger simmering below the surface and sometimes
boiling over. His behavior is often impulsive, and in his violence and expres-
siveness (perhaps also in his Americanness), Donald seems free to act out forms of
behavior that are suppressed in Indonesian culture, where, in day-to-day relations,
a calm exterior and the containment of emotion are highly regarded. His
outbursts, seen in this unthreatening fictional mode, may have a cathartic quality,
as disruptive behavior viewed at a safe emotional distance. Donald is perhaps
thrice-distanced by being a foreigner, a comic character, and an animal. Yono told
us: ”People like some kind of emotion. They like [Donald] angry, or funny, or
happy. But some customers don’t like Donald when he is anxious or upset, so they
order a happy Donald.”
The appeal of Uncle Scrooge McDuck is more uncertain. Some people said they
would not want to have a ker depicting him. As a rich miser, he stands both for
someone who refuses his family obligations and who exploits the less fortunate.
He has an unsettling resemblance to those in Indonesian society who have become
rich at the expense of other people. Perhaps this is his fascination, a figure to be
simultaneously envied and disliked-like the character often played by Erich von
Stroheim in the movies of the 1920s, billed as ”the man you love to hate.”
For Yono, painting also provides a release for his own emotions. He says that he
paints according to his moods-a happy Donald if he is happy, a sad or angry one
if he is not. He comments about one painting, ”Yes, maybe here Donald is running
away from Dayaks. He is generally stressed, and at the time of painting him, I was
tense myself.”
 Blind Ducks in Bovneo 9

Another aspect of Yono’s Disney characters is their assimilation into the local
culture. Donald began as an American, but now like Yono himself, Donald is an
immigrant. The change can be traced in the details of his clothing and in his use of
local implements. A recent painting shows him charging angrily forward holding
a club in his left hand [Figure 121: ”Now this one-I think that Donald, when he
was in America, couldn’t possibly have used a club like this, could he? But here
I’ve outfitted him like a Javanese. That’s why he has a gadeh, as in Javanese wayang
plays,”
In another painting, made somewhat later, Donald is wearing dark sunglasses
[Figures 13a and 13bl. Is he still an American or now perhaps a visiting Indone-
sian? Or could he be blind?
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Figure 12

Figure 11

Figure 13b

Figure 13a
 10 1.MacDougall and D. MacDougall

Now here he’s putting on airs. Donald is stylish. He’s not blind, he‘s wearing Ray Ban
glasses. He’s a tourist. He has black Ray Bans on, doesn’t he? And this is a Dayak motif
in the border. He is just wearing his Ray Bans because it is hot. So I have made a blend
between Donald and traditional Kalimantan art. I am creating a unity between American
and Dayak motifs.

Yono has a clear sense of how the stylistic developments in his paintings should
be interpreted. He distinguishes between the ”natural” and the ”abstract” in his
work, the importance of border, figure, and ground, and how figures are placed in
space. In the beginning, he painted his figures against an ”abstract” or plain
ground, but increasingly they appear in more complex surroundings of grass,
water, trees and buildings, which he considers ”naturalistic” and expressive of the
local environment. He is aware of the work of Basuki Abdullah, a well known
Indonesian artist, whom he surprisingly describes as belonging to the ”natur-
alistic” school.
One of Yono’s paintings shows Donald in golfing kit, with a peaked cap and a
golf club under his right arm [Figure 141. In discussing it, Yono made clearer his
idea of abstraction.
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, *
This is Donald playing golf. Pethaps I didn’t have any specific conception in my mind, so
my execution is abstract, the background is abstract. It’s not naturalistic. But this makes us
focus more closely on the Donald.. . . In the full sense, Donald is just playing golf. I made
him with an abstract background so that people wouldn’t make up their minds about him
straightaway, so they could think about it. That’s what paintings are all about. So what are
you and I to imagine in the background-mountains, streams, and meadows? And maybe
he’s lost his ball, and now he‘s looking for it. If I made it absolutely clear, people wouldn’t
ask themselves, ”What’s happening here?” But sometimes if painters make abstract paint-
ings, those who don‘t know about painting say, ’What kind of painting is that!”

By contrast, he says that his most recent work is becoming more naturalistic
because the figures are incorporated into a local landscape rather than placed on a
flat background, like icons. The space is becoming increasingly three dimensional,
and in one painting Donald’s nephew is partly obscured by a tree trunk as he
reaches out for his submerged ball that has fallen into a sylvan stream [Figure 151.
Yono is especially attracted to rivers and many of his paintings include a glimpse
of water. He also sometimes paints local birds and animals in a more realistic style,
and he associates them with the local people [Figure 161: ”These are Dayak birds,
living near the river, as the Dayaks used to do. This all used to be a Dayak place
. . .so I want to bring their world in. I wanted to paint a Dayak motif to connect it
to this address.”
Yono’s use of Dayak decorative motifs, derived from local Kenyah and Kayan
indigenous art, represents another gesture of identification with local cultural
groups. Although there is very little interaction between the settlers and Dayaks, a
new sense of regional identity seems to involve incorporating Dayak symbols into
a cultural whole to be presented to increasing numbers of foreign tourists and
Indonesian visitors. In the Ray Ban picture [Figure 131, an elaborate motif in the
border above Donald’s head may indicate the attraction of such exotic elements to
tourists who come primarily to visit Dayak villages. In another painting, Donald
 Blind Ducks in Borneo 11

Figuve 14
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Figuve 15

Figure 16
 12 J . MacDougall and D . MacDougall

wears a Dayak headdress and a jacket decorated with Dayak designs on the collar
and cuffs [Figure 171:

He is dancing a traditional Dayak dance. His actions are brisk. Maybe he’s from America,
coming here as a tourist. In Dayak dancing they use that pose, with the hands pushed
straight out in front, and the men dance like that, saying “Ahoh! Ahoh!“ So that’s what he’s
doing. Probably American tourists wouldn’t understand this pose.
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Figure 17

Figure 18 Figure 19 Authentic Kackina Doll. (Photo courtesy

of Edrnund Carpenter.)
 Blind Ducks in Borneo 23

Another cultural element appears in the borders of Yono’s ”middle” period

paintings. All his ”Donalds” have a border of some kind-the earliest, simple bars
of black outlined in white [Figure 101, and the most recent, a frame of white, with a
band of blue at the top and bottom [Figures 12 and 171. Others show variations on
these styles [Figures 6, 8, 9 and 111, some using white outlining, others rounded
corners, and so on, as part of Yono’s strategy of remaining fresh and foiling his
imitators. In his ”middle” period the sides of the borders are indented. The
indentations appear at first to be possibly the edges of other images, like the
adjoining frames of a film. However, Yono soon provided another explanation.
The indentations are meant to be a Dayak motif, and taken together they repro-
duce the shape of a Dayak shield [Figure 181:

When you have a canvas you must, of course, have a frame to make it complete, and
although this is just decoration, it matters. It gives it contrast and makes the figure live. It’s
a Dayak shield, but only half of it. If you combine the two sides, it makes a frame. Without a
border a painting is no good.

Yono’s adoption of Donald and the other Disney characters represents not only
their transposition from a Euro-American setting to Southeast Asia, but also from
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the commercial to the domestic sphere. Cartoon characters treated with such
familial affection might seem to be naivetk on the part of the purchasers, but it is in
fact a matter of conscious choice and a measure of Yono’s success in domesticating
his subjects to their new environment. He has given Donald a new identity, and
unlike much appropriation in Western art, he is in no sense doing so allusively, as
if making reference to a particular cultural style, or treating it ironically. Instead,
he is making over a found object for his own purposes.
Yono’s use of Disney’s characters can perhaps be compared to the appearance of
Mickey Mouse in a Zufii Kachina figurine of the 1940s-as a reinvestiture of
values [Figure 191. His chosen subjects are no longer regarded by local people as
foreign, but like Yono himself (and perhaps like the Indian hero Arjun before him)
have proven to be successful immigrants. Their acceptance in Kalimantan mirrors,
albeit on a smaller scale, the process by which societies in the past have dealt with
the potentially disruptive culture of outsiders-by imitation, creative reinterpre-
tation, and finally ab~orption.~

NOTES

1. This article, which is reprinted with permission, originally appeared in a slightly differ-
ent version in New Heimat. [Karl-Heinz Kohl and Nicolaus Schafhausen, eds., Frankfurt-
am-Main: Franfurter Kunstvereins & Frobenius-Instituts der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-
Universitat, 2001 Pp. 56-65].
2. All quotations are from recordings made by the authors with Yono in East Kalimantan in
January, 1994. Translations are by Wendy Mukhurjee.
3. We should like to thank Robyn Maxwell and Rosamund Dalziell for reading and com-
menting on earlier versions of this article. We are especially grateful to Wendy Mukhur-
jee for translating Yono’s commentary and for her insights into Indonesian culture.
 14 1. MacDougall and D. MacDougall

Readers interested in the international Disney phenomenon may wish to consult the
recent book Dazzled by Disney? The Global Disney Audiences Project, edited by Janet
Wasko, Mark Phillips, and Eileen R. Meehan [London and New York: Leicester Uni-
versity Press, 20011, as well as the classic How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in
the Disney Comics, by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart [New York International
General, 19751.
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