Ai Weiwei: Chinese artist, architectural designer, activist
from designShrine blog- about author's own essay, ""
- "Furniture doesn’t just ornament a given space; it remakes and redefines the internal boundaries of the space itself. If furniture is something that breaks up space, offering punctuated moments of rest and stoppage and giving rhythm to a room, then it can also be deliberately misused. It can be contrapuntal and off-kilter, designed against the grain of the space it appears within. Furniture can interrupt, challenge, and deform."
The rest of the text veers from David Cronenberg to geology, by way of Gerrit Rietveld and German tunneling machines, Stone Age tools and psychoanalysis.
From the essay:
"Ai’s "Furniture", subject to such interpretations, become not unlike allegories: small storylines in wood. They are narratives. "Tables at Right Angles", 1998, is really just one table that has misunderstood itself, reeling back from its own projected double. Mistaking its own eccentric solidity for the architecture that surrounds it, this table will never realize that the world it thinks it touches is just another part of itself. "I like the idea of furniture taking on its own life. My furniture piece, "Untitled Furniture, 2003" and "Untitled Furniture, Feminine 2003/2010" is an example. I think that like Fisch and Weiss, inanimate objects taking on a life of their own attracts a childlike wonder, has dark emotions associated with being human vs. not human, and speaks directly to the human body itself. All of this is definitely in my conceptual art 'bag' that i am trying to develop / figure out here in this blog.
Ai Weiwei's coca cola piece: this is too poppy for me - but i do understand it from the p.o.v. of a chinese artist and the infiltration of american corp. and pop culture across the world - esp. with their rise in capitalism mixed with their communist society.
In reading a little about Ae weiwei, his activism is definitely in ridicule - or at least questioning - of the govt. of china and their abuse to its citizens - with lack of freedom of speech etc. He has even been harassed by the police in china over his outspoken-ness.
The sunflower seeds are so amazing - they are all porcelain - i think 1 million of them or so. all handmade. There is always a nod of respect to something so obviously time consuming, handmade and larger than life. I have to also mention $ in this case - the many people it took to make it - i am trying to think of an example where larger than life does not equal money in the art world.... there are examples of repetitive, intricate, obviously loved over work in the art world and made by one person. This doesn't carry $ - it carries mundane-ness, enduring passion, perseverance and obsessiveness. That is also something that is hard to ignore.
I almost feel guilty - like i'm tricked or only praising something for this one non-conceptual reason when I am wowed by grandiosity (whether by one obsessive hand, or by many- $- hands). To be wowed by grandiosity - well, it is human. Whether it is a huge decorated cathedral worked on by the masters or whether it is ocean - to realize how small one is, to realize how unimportant, maybe, one is - that has its own magic. New York City used to do that to me. That's why i fell in love with it. It was bigger than me, more powerful than me, it never ended and held so much more than me as an individual ever could. Of course, nyc, is still all of that. But i don't see it that way anymore because I can't - I have to live my daily life here so I have to make it 'smaller' so that i can navigate it. But, in life in general, it is a beautiful moment when one realizes that they are so insignificant and so small and simply a part of something so much larger. It's spiritual.
The bicycles - I am not sure what that one is about conceptually - it can't be lopped into his other artistic pursuits either.... but i like it.
From NY Mag:
ReplyDeleteDear Jerry:
Did you get to see the big Ai Weiwei installation at London’s Tate Modern? If so, tell us about it.
—William Landau
Dear William,
I did see the Ai Weiwei, and came close to missing the entire point.
A little background: Over the past few years, Ai Weiwei has paid hundreds of skilled artisans in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen (known for its porcelain trade, now faltering) to hand-make 100 million ceramic sunflower seeds out of porcelain. He then had scores of people hand-paint every one of these seeds with three or four gray stripes of the unfired watery clay mixture known as slip. At the Tate, the replica seeds are spread out in a huge field on the floor of the Turbine Hall.
A few hours before it opened, I was in the museum looking at the Gauguin show and saw the installation from a balcony high above, as the artist was finishing the setup. Since I had another appointment, I left, writing it off as another lame installation-art gesture. I hated it.
I had no idea people were going to be allowed to walk around on it. Fortunately, I woke up the next morning feeling guilty about snap-judging such a big work (it’s a critic thing), and when I went back, I was blown away. As I stood on this field of crunchy porcelain bits, I suddenly gleaned an approximation of China itself. A hundred million seeds and the huge physical field and my tiny place in it allowed me to actually sense the billion that is China. In true colonialist fashion, I was part of the millions in the West who were now walking on the billions of the East. It was an extraordinary illustration of infinity, impossibility, life, politics, proximity, and individuality. Crowds happily walked on the seeds; it was like a metaphysical beach, or limbo. Kids ran around, played games, or buried one another. Like many others, and in violation of the rules, I took home a handful of seeds. My wife kept pointing out gray clouds that puffed up wherever people were walking. She also pointed out that our hands and clothes were covered in the dust.
I thought nothing of it.
I should have. It turns out those clouds were the gray slip being ground off the porcelain seeds as they rubbed together underfoot. Two days later authorities shut down the piece. A notice posted on the Tate’s site reads in part: “We have been advised that the interaction of visitors with the sculpture can cause dust which could be damaging to health following repeated inhalation over a long period of time. In consequence, Tate, in consultation with the artist, has decided not to allow members of the public to walk across the sculpture.” Now it can only be seen the way I saw it that first day, from above or outside. I’m saddened that you can’t see it the way I did — but the metaphor is unmistakably powerful all the same. The coming together of these civilizations and numbers produces a toxic cloud.