Bahasa Agus Suwage
One of the pre-eminent artists of his generation, Agus Suwage’s oeuvre includes painting, drawing, collage, sculpture and installation. He is known for his mastery of the watercolour medium and, from the mid-1990s, his incorporation of the self-portrait as a primary motif. When combined with iconic images from Indonesian and Western art history and contemporary mass media, found objects and photographs, the resulting pastiche provides a lexicon for social- and self-critique that reveals the artist’s curiosity, cynicism and sense of humour.
In Mr C dan Gauguin’s girl 2017 Suwage appropriates Paul Gauguin’s iconic painting Spirit of the dead watching 1892 within a contemporary setting, transforming the social, cultural and historical readings of Gauguin’s work. The recumbent figure of Teha’amana, Gauguin’s Tahitian wife, who now wears red nail polish, is transposed to a pink couch in the modern interior of the artist’s studio accompanied by the lugubrious figure of Suwage’s pet dog, Mr C. Scattered elements, including a roaring tiger temporary tattoo, spirit-flames and billowing smoke, evoke contemporary urban life, the spectral realm, violence and destruction.
Suwage’s fascination with history, the role of the artist, and the similarity between the violence and struggles of the human and animal worlds come together in Fragmen pustaka #2 after Raden Saleh 2018. Set in the artist’s studio library and painted on pages from several notebooks covered in handwriting, the work combines portraits of the Indonesian nineteenth-century Romantic painter Raden Saleh and Suwage, with Saleh’s painting Kuda Arab diterkam singa (Arabian horse attacked by a lion) 1870.
Personal experience is ever-present in Suwage’s works, as seen in Tembok toleransi (Wall of tolerance) 2012, which expresses his response to the noise pollution created by numerous unsynchronised calls to prayer (azan) broadcast over loudspeakers from mosques. The issue climaxed in 2018 when a complaint about azan noise levels resulted in an 18-month prison sentence for blasphemy, creating fear and hampering discussion around the issue. Wall of tolerance anticipates this situation, presenting an audio landscape that would be accepted by all but ironically would not fulfil the purpose of the call to prayer. Consisting of a section of ordinary brick wall, usually built around residences to muffle the sounds of the urban landscape and provide safety and privacy, it is replete with gilded ears that broadcast the call to prayer so softly that it is almost inaudible.
Carol Cains
