Professor illuminates art of friendship

The telling of stories is one of the most treasured aspects of friendship.

A.D. Pirous, one of Indonesia’s most distinguished artists, has many stories to tell: making propaganda posters during the national revolution during the late 1940s, studying abstract art with Dutch cubists, organizing Indonesia’s Istiqlal Festival of Islamic Art, trying to prevent his paintings from being faked or stolen, voicing his anguish about state-sponsored atrocities in his home province of Aceh.

Kenneth M. George, professor of anthropology at UW–Madison since 1999, has been Pirous’ friend for the last 17 years. They became acquainted when the U.S. Department of State asked George to serve as the artist’s translator during a visit to this country.

“I speak Indonesian, so when Pirous was making a tour of American museums and galleries as a guest of the government, I went with him,” George says. “He gave me my first lessons in art history during that tour, and we quickly became friends.”

In the intervening years, that friendship has come to be the driving force behind George’s research. Specializing in the cultural politics of language, religion, violence and art in Southeast Asia, George is the author of the award-winning “Showing Signs of Violence: The Cultural Politics of a Twentieth-Century Headhunting Ritual” (1996: University of California Press).

A current project is a just-published dual-language book on Pirous’ life and work, “A.D. Pirous: Vision, Faith and a Journey in Indonesia, 1955-2002.” George says it encapsulates Indonesian politics, art and life during the past 50 years, and is among a spare handful of works documenting the lively world of contemporary art in Southeast Asia.

Pirous was a pioneer in melding Western abstraction with traditional Islamic forms and themes, notably Qur’anic calligraphy, which portrays Koranic verse. Art in Muslim regions is often subject to debate, scrutiny and censorship, although Indonesia was and continues to be rather moderate, leaving Pirous relatively free to experiment.

When he began to combine abstraction and Qur’anic calligraphy in the 1970s, his influence quickly spread. “He awakened fellow Muslims to contemporary painting, and helped them think of themselves as an art-producing community,” George says.

His own interest in Indonesia predates his acquaintance with Pirous. While a graduate student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, George studied with renowned anthropologist James Peacock. “My interest in post-colonial art and politics grew out of Peacock’s study of proletarian street theater during the Sukarno era,” he says. In George’s eyes, politics and art are inextricably caught up in each other, a message he hopes his new book will bring to a broader audience.

“I hope the book will throw some light on the political and cultural strains that have been shaping Indonesia’s contemporary Muslim art over the last five decades. I would like to help deepen our understanding of Southeast Asian Islam, and Islamic arts more generally,” he says.

Showing that the scope of “Islam” and “Islamic art” goes far beyond the Middle East is an important agenda item for George. And portrayals of Indonesia’s place on the world stage often ignore its Islamic heritage or exaggerate extremist elements, he says. “Efforts to rethink Indonesia’s art history have been taking place in both dialogue and struggle with Euro-American art discourses and Arab-centered views toward Islam and Islamic art,” George says.

Pirous’ own work also has evolved in new directions. The betrayal that the artist felt when state-sponsored atrocities came to light left a pronounced mark on his painting, George says. Indeed, shared concern about the violence in Aceh and lower Manhattan and Washington, D.C. has deepened their friendship, he adds.

“Pirous was the first person to contact me after 9/11 last year. He shared the sorrow and outrage we all felt and continue to feel,” he says. “I have no doubt my research has been enriched by his friendship. Granted, there are risks — research is supposed to be detached and objective, and friendship is just the opposite. I think we need to take those risks if we are to arrive at an intimate understanding of others and their experiences.”

George has spent 10 weeks this semester helping Pirous chronicle his growth and change as an artist for his first career retrospective show, which opened last month at Indonesia’s prestigious national gallery in Jakarta. George conducted an ethnographic study of how Pirous planned, organized and launched the exhibition, and had a hand in selecting works, writing catalog copy, making a film about the artist and appearing in televised interviews.

George remains eager to help Pirous spread his stories: “Every one of his paintings contains a story. I think of them as lessons in living with the violence and uncertainty around us.”