Picturing Islam: Art and Ethics in a Muslim Lifeworld is about Indonesian artist Abdul Djalil Pirous and the many years he has spent making Islamic art. It tells a story about an artist with an anthropological and historical twist. Pirous, with his work in abstract modernist styles and modern Islamic aesthetics, has been celebrated as a pioneer of contemporary Indonesian Islamic art, and there is no shortage of newspaper articles, reviews, exhibition catalogues, and book chapters about him, read mostly in Indonesia.
This book is about a story about making art and a lifeworld Islamic. The author, Kenneth M. George, explains the term lifeworld as belonging to a long tradition of phenomenological philosophy and sociology. He uses the term as shorthand for the ongoing circumstances in which we find ourselves, culturally, politically, historically, and experientially. The author finds the term useful because he claims that it helps us avoid portraying people in the confines of an all-encompassing language or culture. Taking an anthropological view, he thinks of a lifeworld as an informal and everyday realm of thought, feeling, and subjectively meaningful activity. His larger point about a lifeworld is not set apart from collectivities and publics, but is rather the very place in which collectivities and publics work their magic—and exact their demands—on a person’s sensibility, judgment, ambition, and thought.
George claims that Pirous’ paintings, and the stories that accompany and surround them, are a bridge between the public and the private aspects of his lifeworld. He considers his art works and art stories to be a “subjective in between”—a highly political arena for the intermingling of experience and recognition.
George works in close collaboration with Pirous and tells a captivating story about the artist’s pursuit of a political, religious, and artistic identity as it emerged over the course of recent Indonesian history, from a time of revolution and anti-colonial struggle to the current period of post-authoritarian hope and uncertainty.
This book provides a compelling and richly drawn portrait of an individual artist, and contributes to a deeper understating of the cultural politics of Asia’s postcolonial art world and the creative and ethnic sensibilities of its Muslim artists. It is a must-read for contemporary art historians and anthropologists alike.
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[Review length: 368 words • Review posted on February 9, 2011]