War Paint

The tattooed, dreadlock-sporting members of radical agitprop collective Taring Padi despise materialism, and spend their days producing banners and posters urging social reform in their native Indonesia. It would therefore be a delicious irony if their work became collectable — clucked over in galleries by affluent, Shiraz-sipping dilettantes. But stranger things have happened in the world of art, and the group — with around 10 artists at its core — now finds itself enjoying a modicum of celebrity.

Taring Padi's artists have been asked to hold an exhibition at the National Gallery in Jakarta and to show alongside the paintings of the great Indonesian artist Sudjojono at a retrospective of his work in Singapore in May. The World Bank has commissioned them to produce works for poverty-alleviation and anticorruption campaigns starting later this year. The group is even making hesitant steps in the direction of merchandizing, setting up a shop near its old squat (they used to live in a derelict building on the campus of Yogyakarta's Indonesian Institute of the Arts, known after its Indonesian initials as ISI). "We can't avoid the system," shrugs founding member Mohammad Yusuf, 33, pointing out that when the group does earn money, it uses it for "collective purposes like teaching, training and buying supplies."

Taring Padi's prime mission is to campaign through art for wage hikes for workers, land rights for indigenous peoples and fairer deals for farmers. Since its establishment after the revolution that swept President Suharto from power in 1998, Taring Padi (the name means "Fangs of the Rice Plant") has produced thousands of banners and posters, mostly by hand. Until the group cobbled together enough money to buy a printing press recently, all works were etched into wood and covered with ink, then manually stamped onto cloth or paper.

Not many of Taring Padi's works survive — they are typically confiscated by police, or simply discarded after demonstrations — but the ones that do are starting to find their way onto the walls of a few hip homes. Inspired by the work of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, German Expressionist Otto Dix and Indonesian masters like Sudjojono, the etchings assault the viewer with their power and passion. Taring Padi "are the unfiltered voice of the people," says John McGlynn, who organizes monthly exhibitions of Indonesian art at his home for a group called JakARTa Kolektors.

In financial terms, membership of Taring Padi is not easy. Some of the group's peers at ISI, such as Rudi Mantofani, Yunizar and Handiwirman Saputra, have gone on to establish reputations as successful young artists, selling works for tens of thousands of dollars. While Taring Padi's members no longer live in derelict premises — disenchantment with communal cooking and an attack by Muslim fundamentalists in 2003 saw the squat's abandonment — they still lead a hand-to-mouth existence, centered on their humble atelier in the Central Java village of Sembungan. "They are a very egalitarian bunch of guys," says Heidi Arbuckle at the Ford Foundation in Indonesia. "Taring Padi has always kept a distance between art and the market."

That distance may gradually start to narrow, although the group remains confident that its growing celebrity won't affect its militant stance. "We have always taken on the status quo and that is never going to change," says Yusuf from his simple two-room bungalow, just down the hill from Taring Padi's studio. "We have been, and will always be, critical."