Thursday 7 February 2013

ai weiwei : dissident as promotable artist


There is a deeper question underlying the essay. The West's promotion of Artists who dissent. Dissent against their own governments and fit into the politics of the West against those governments.

The recent 'debate' -an attack, actually - against the Chinese writer who won the Nobel Prize without overtly writing against his Government  underlines that  politics quite clearly.  The politics of the West's Patronage of the Other.







Noble and IgnobleAi Weiwei: Wonderful dissident, terrible artist

IAi Weiwei, the much admired Chinese dissident artist, were a character in a novel, I would know exactly what to think about him. I would regard him as a fascination, at once formidable and absurd, courageous and disingenuous, unquestionably brilliant and downright moronic. I would take in stride the outlandish paradoxes that are integral to his reputation. I would cheer his stirring advocacy of the victims of Mao's successors and recoil at the terrible brain injury he suffered at the hands of the Chinese police, while discerning a streak of ugly nihilism in some of his best-known artistic acts, such as smashing an antique pot for a photographic triptych titled Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn and dipping Han dynasty vases in garishly colored industrial paint for a work known as Colored Vases. I would go wherever the novelist who had invented this fierce, funny, bearded, barrel-chested impresario wished to lead me, and in the end I would have a tremendous picture of a man with a quick mind, indomitable energy, and no particular aptitude for art.


 At times the Hirshhorn exhibition is close to pure documentary. There is a list of the names of the children who died in Sichuan posted on a wall. And Ai includes an ink-jet print of an MRI of his brain, after his beating by police in 2009. In the face of such facts, some will wonder if there is any point in discussing the art historical background or in determining exactly what belongs in an art museum. At this late date, wouldn't only a philistine question whether a list of names or an MRI of a swollen brain counts as a work of art? A work of art is whatever anybody says it is. Why even bring it up?


Ai's meditations on the nature of modern culture can also sound strangely old-fashioned, their talk of "humanity" and "spirit" a bit fulsome to Western ears. And here we come to the poignancy of Ai's situation. While Ai's socially engaged art has emerged in a country where modernism has never taken hold, he finds his most responsive audience in the West, where the core principles of modern art–its fervor, its independence, its individualism–are increasingly imperiled. So Ai turns out to be both pre-modern and postmodern, which probably explains how neatly he fits into our current artistic free-for-all, uniting as he does an early modern evangelism and a postmodern irony. 



With socially engaged art now a global phenomenon, some practitioners worry that the "activist art milieu" is all too often "simply digested by the conditions of power," as Nato Thompson puts it in a new book, Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art From 1991-2011 (MIT Press). I imagine that Ai's Fairytale might be open to this line of criticism. In the context of the localized cottage-industry character of a lot of socially engaged art, Ai has set himself apart by taking as his canvas a country even larger than Russia, which was in some sense the very starting point for modern political art, when once upon a time Tatlin, Malevich, and El Lissitzky imagined that they might unite radical art and radical politics. Remembering how the Russian avant-garde was crushed by Lenin and then expunged by Stalin, Ai's supporters can hail him as the inheritor of the socially engaged avant-garde, now rising against the inheritors of Mao's China.









http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112218/ai-wei-wei-wonderful-dissident-terrible-artist#

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