Bali and Angkor: A 1930s Pleasure Trip Looking at Life and Death

In 1935, social anthropologist and polymath Geoffrey Gorer went to Bangkok, Bali and Cambodia in what was supposed to be a "pleasure trip", with no work involved. However, his deep interest in ancient civilizations and the human psyche led him to take extensive notes, and finally a travel journal that brings up observations and considerations of considerable portence on art and religion.

While consulting with Conservator Henri Marchal for his thorough visit of the Angkorian ruins, the author develops his own theory about the decline and fall of Angkor, just by observing Angkorian stone carving and statuary. "Death and The Plastic Arts", the chapter devoted to Angkor, proposes several stimulating ideas:

• Khmer art exerts a everlasting and universal fascination because of its complexity: religious by not strictly so, full of sensuality yet detached from sexual pulsion and representation, repetitive but always singular, and enhancing the architectural design without being only illustrative.
• To "rational" explanations for the disappearance of Angkor -- climate change due to deforestation, epidemics, wars with neighboring kingdoms --, Gorer adds the notion of "artistic exhaustion": "the Khmer sculptors a little before the kingdom was destroyed had discovered all that anybody could know about the technique of carving in stone; but they had completely forgotten what to do with the carvings."
• Religious pursuits of how to suppress desire may partly explain the particular way of representing female beauty in Khmer temples, yet the author speculates that there is another factor: opium. "The devatas and apsaras (...) are seen with sensual admiration but with no desire, aversion rather", a "sexlessness" explained by the fact that, supposes Gorer, "the Aztecs and the Khmer artists worked through the visions induced by drugs, which renders their creations more alien to us than any other."
• "The paradox of art", writes the author, is that "art is timeless, so that the drawings of our remotest ancestors appeal to us (...); but art is timeless, because as soon as it is executed it is dead".