Content area
Full Text
The world 's largest collection of Indonesian puppets (wayang), assembled between 1973 and 2011 by Swiss collector Walter Angst and now in the Yale University Art Gallery, is a product of a zoological passion for preserving the diversity of an art form, the ongoing modernization of puppetry in Indonesia, and the active involvement of Angst's agents in Indonesia-including both dealers and some of Indonesia 's most famous puppeteers. Drawing on Marshall Sahlins ' concept of "structure of the conjuncture, " this article looks at the Dr. Walter Angst and Sir Henry Angest Collection of Indonesian Puppets (as the Angst collection is now known) as both structure and event. In a period of increasing standardization due to the influences of media, education, and globalization, Angst endeavored to capture the variety of traditional puppet forms in western Indonesia and salvage endangered and extinct wayang arts through his collecting of representative sets offigures. His collection defines the different styles and substyles of puppetry practiced in the twentieth century, and also maps out his personal relationships with Indonesian practitioners-who were often both his employees and personal tutors in the art. While Angst expressed little interest in wayang's experimental offshoots, the collection nonetheless demonstrates how wayang has constantly responded to social change over two centuries.
Between 1973 and 2011, the Swiss collector Walter Angst (1942-2014) assembled the world's largest collection of Indonesian puppetry (wayang), comprising approximately 20,000 puppets from western Indonesia-including shadow puppets (wayang kulit), rod puppets (wayang golek), and flat wooden puppets (wayang klithik, also known as wayang krucil)-along with several thousand related objects ranging from wayang silverware to masks, lamps used in shadow puppetry, traditional weapons such as keris, paintings, and gamelan musical instruments (Fig. 1). Angst was a zoologist by profession. Wayang for Angst was essentially a hobby, supported financially by his brother, the London-based banker Sir Henry Angest. Angst's collecting was fueled by intellectual curiosity about the diversity of the art and a passion to save endangered forms from the predations of time and antique dealers. Angst took a natural history perspective on the field, looking to establish a phylogenetic tree for wayang. He took it upon himself to construct a study collection whereby major and minor regional styles and forms, and the experimental offshoots...