Please remember to visit ONE research talk, a workshop, or an event at the Contemporary Islamic Art, Design, and Architecture conference held at ADM, CCA, and the National Design Center this week. Write a journal entry about what you saw and heard. Check out this web site for the schedule: http://www.ciada2015.com/index.html

Day 2 Lecture
Companionable Objects, Companionable Conscience: Ethical Pleasure, Islamic Art, and the Making of Happy Objects Kenneth George

Australian National University

The talk mostly centred on the works of Indonesian artist, A.D Pirous who does Islamic calligraphy in installations work and understanding the ideals guiding his works of art.

George highlighted an two points in the work of analysis that of aesthetic pleasure and then ethical pleasure as well, while the work is both pleasing to the eye, there is also greater meaning, an anticipation of being read in the calligraphy and then understood. A.D Pirous works then served as a time of reflection compared to merely seeing paintings as a unified whole.

George also mentioned the idea of happiness and how it sticks to an object with happy things carrying promises.

The work featured here is White Writing (1974). It’s a form of expressive calligraphy and interestingly, isn’t supposed to make sense, and becomes a form of unexpressed words but still, expressive in atmosphere, George commenting it to be an ambience of divine revelation.

It was abit certainly muddling to sit for the lecture and suddenly be bombarded with Islamic themed art, but I’ve certainly learnt more about the art scene there and also George himself had already highlighted the disparage between those who can read Islamic as compared to a legible pure image painting and how “reading is limiting in A.D Pirous’s work.”