33 Artists in 3 Acts (12 page)
Though Ai has not been formally charged with anything, his design company, Fake, has been fined $2.4 million for tax evasion. The Chinese government is well known for obfuscating political matters with other types of accusation. Since his release, Ai has repeatedly asked for a public trial, knowing that he is unlikely to get one. “I am so tired,” says the artist, who has to check in with the police for further “reeducation” every Monday morning. “I sit there like a criminal suspect while the police criticize my behavior.” What’s more, Ai is not allowed to travel beyond the Beijing city limits and has been given no indication of when he will regain possession of his passport. However, unlike Liu Xiaobo, the literary critic who is in the midst of an eleven-year prison sentence, Ai has the run of his home and workplace, perhaps because the artist champions universal moral principles and, unlike Xiaobo,
avoids specific ten-point manifestos that aim to overthrow the one-party state. “The struggle for liberty is the most essential value for the young people for the future,” says Ai. “I cannot
not
talk about those things. This is my true condition.”
The artist, my daughter, and I walk into a neighboring room that I didn’t see on my last visit—a gallery space with a high ceiling punctured by grand skylights. In it are some works in progress for his solo show at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, which opens in six months. In one corner are several baskets of porcelain river crabs in different shapes and glazes. The Chinese word for “river crab,”
hexie
, sounds very similar to the word for “harmony,” a government catchphrase often used as an excuse for censorship. Ai picks up a couple of crabs, passing one to me and one to Cora, who is elated to be in an environment full of art and devoid of “do not touch” signs.
In another part of the room is a sculpture created from mangled steel rebar that was exposed when concrete buildings collapsed during the Sichuan earthquake. Some suspect that it was Ai’s campaign to name the children killed in collapsed schools that led to his imprisonment. Evidently uneasy about this sculpture, the artist stares at it. “It has no title yet,” he announces. “Maybe this political thing leads me nowhere. It is so much frustration. It ruins my family’s life. Maybe I have made my point,” he says as we walk away from the rusty, minimal metal rods. “Any awkward moment is a creative moment.”
Leaning against the far wall is
Study of Perspective
—
White House
(1995), a photograph in which the artist’s middle finger in the foreground is larger than the president’s house in the background. I assume that it will be in his exhibition in Washington DC and am surprised to learn that the curators have not requested it. The Hirshhorn show was originally put together by the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo for a Japanese audience in 2009 and titled “According to what . . .” after a Jasper Johns painting. I wonder aloud whether the title makes sense three years later in an American context, especially after all that Ai has gone through. He agrees that the title lacks relevance but fears that it is too late to change it. Our exchange reveals what a handicap it is for an artist to be forbidden to travel. Had Ai been able to spend even a few hours
with the curators in the American capital, they could have thoroughly revamped the concept and content of the exhibition.
Although Ai is committed to staying in Beijing, he is also keen to create a European base in the cellar of the Berlin studio that belongs to his friend Olafur Eliasson, a Danish–Icelandic artist. The building is a brewery that has survived two world wars. His aspiration is that the subterranean space, which reminds him of his excavated childhood home, will be renovated into something that functions as both a studio and an artwork. Thinking of Eugenio Dittborn’s studio in Chile, I wonder whether artists who have weathered hostile governments seek safety underground, then note that the cultural sphere that used to be called “the underground” has ceased to exist in the era of the Internet.
Lu Qing enters the room, accompanied by an ancient, overweight cocker spaniel wearing a T-shirt. Lunch is ready. Would we like to join the staff? Ai, Lu, my daughter, and I walk across the courtyard, through the computer-filled office, and into a plain staff room where over a dozen people are helping themselves to chicken, cabbage, and rice. Chinese American college kids and a few pasty Europeans mix with mainland Chinese. We load our bowls, then find seats. “It is very difficult to change, even if you want to,” says Ai as he takes his first mouthful. “I lost about thirty pounds when I was in jail. I have gained back every pound. Every day that I criticize the government, I realize, come on, you cannot even lose weight.”
The camaraderie around the lunch table is palpable. Ai sees his studio as akin to a class in which he is the instructor. “I tell people to do this and that, but I mostly like to intrigue them to be themselves, find out what to do and make an effort.” When Ai outsources the fabrication of artworks to potters, carpenters, stoneworkers, metal casters, cameramen, editors, and the like, the process of delegation can be delicate. The craftspeople know the nature of the material better than he does. “They have their own sensitivities about beauty and you cannot ignore what already exists in their mind,” he says. “So my role is to guide, to direct.”
Ai appears to have a successful business but it is equally apparent that he is not primarily motivated by it. His income no doubt pales in comparison to Beijing-based painters such as Zeng Fanzhi. About
such artists, Ai is at once understanding and scathing. “China and the Soviet Union had a long time of nonmaterial life because of an ideology that failed,” he explains. “The desire for commercial success is a really strong character of today’s society. Art activity is human; it is not different from other activities.” However, in his opinion, to be a “business artist” requires two qualities: “emptiness and shamelessness.” The emptiness reaches beyond mere neutrality to the “high emptiness of Chinese philosophy,” he adds, while the “shamelessness makes it very contemporary.”
Emptiness and shamelessness are not uncommon in Western art, I say. Some of the most successful artists appear to be nihilists who don’t believe in much other than themselves and the luxury goods market. Ai nods. “For them, art has become pure play, lacking any essential truth,” he says. “It is a skill of surviving. Deng Xiaoping said it doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches the mouse.”
Ai, by contrast, has the kind of self-belief that is deepened and intensified by his cause. Indeed, his belief in the right of people to pursue and speak the truth is so strong that it allows him to weather fifty interrogations. When I wonder aloud what authenticity means to him, he mulls it over. Ai used to trade in Chinese antiques, assessing their genuineness, and, of course, his company is called Fake. It is a complex issue but it boils down to one thing: candor. “It is a habit,” he says. “It is a road we are comfortable with.” On a related note, Ai tells me that the Chinese language has no term for “credibility.” In ancient times, a word related to this kind of reliable integrity existed, but it fell out of use and then was buried by several generations of coercive Communist thought control.
My daughter has been listening intently to Ai. “How do you feel about being famous?” she asks.
“It comes too quick, too much. It is kind of ridiculous but I have good intentions,” he says kindly. “Fame needs to have content. If you use it for a purpose, it becomes different. So I am very happy that I have this chance to always speak my mind.” Many Western artists squander their freedom of speech through convoluted forms of self-censorship. It is hard to resist Ai’s elation that he is not one of them.
Jeff Koons
The New Jeff Koons
1980
T
wo months later, I am invited to an odd event in the Swiss town of Basel, the day before its art fair opens. Guests will watch the premiere of
Ai Weiwei
—
Never Sorry
, a documentary film about the artist directed by Alison Klayman, then move on to a champagne reception for Jeff Koons’s exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler. While my comparison of the two artists is deliberate, this Basel pairing is no doubt accidental. The Koons show was scheduled long before the Ai premiere and the lack of direct dialogue between the film and the exhibition is marked. For different reasons, neither artist manages to attend the event.
Never Sorry
turns out to be a wonderful film. The two scenes that I find most absorbing explore aspects of Ai’s life which I haven’t seen with my own eyes. In one, Ai eats bite-size chunks of melon as quickly as his two-year-old son, Ai Lao, can deliver them to him. The little game reveals the artist as a playful dad. When the Sichuan earthquake hit, a woman with whom Ai had had an affair was pregnant with his son. The knowledge that Ai was to be a father gave him a strong sense of duty. China’s one child policy was instituted in 1979 to curb population growth. In a land of solo children, the loss of one child is the loss of a family.
In the other memorable scene, bulldozers demolish Ai’s studio complex in Shanghai. The local government had invited Ai to design the
project as part of an urban regeneration scheme but then did an about-face, saying that the building was illegal. I had heard about this incident but had never seen the jaw-dropping spectacle of its destruction.
The film also contains some explicit statements from Ai. When asked if he is a brand, he affirms, “I’m a brand for liberal thinking and individualism.” Ai describes himself as an “eternal optimist” and declares, “If it is not publicized, it’s like it never happened.” In the last line of the film, he says, “It is the responsibility of any artist to protect freedom of speech.”
The Jeff Koons exhibition, which is titled “Jeff Koons,” includes three distinct bodies of work: “The New” (1980–87), “Banality” (1988), and “Celebration” (1994–present). The room displaying the earliest series is breathtaking. “The New” comprises dozens of Hoovers (unused vacuum cleaners and carpet shampooers in mint condition), which have been placed in plexiglass cases illuminated from below by rows of blindingly bright fluorescent tubes. I had seen individual pieces from this series at auction previews but never a curated selection of the work. The large room feels like a science fiction department-store showroom, which is glorifying newness and advocating the notion that cleanliness is next to godliness. While Ai has created antique readymades, Koons here focuses on the factory-fresh.
Another thing that intrigues me about “The New” room is that it includes a light box titled
The New Jeff Koons
(1980), in which the artist has taken an old black-and-white photo of himself as a six-year-old boy, backlit it like a street advertisement, and redesignated it as an artwork. With neatly combed hair, the young Koons is carefully posed in front of a coloring book with a crayon in his right hand. He looks at the viewer with his head tilted and a well-mannered smile. It’s a portrait of the artist as a boy who understands the power of discretion.
Martha Rosler
Still from
Semiotics of the Kitchen
1975
“Y
ou don’t have to be a nice person to be an artist,” says Martha Rosler. “I’ve known lots of good artists who are bastards or crazy people that you can’t really have a conversation with.” Rosler is in her late sixties, with blue eyes and short, blondish hair. The New York artist grew up in the Jewish neighborhood of Crown Heights and now lives in half-gentrified Greenpoint. Although she spent over a decade in California, she retains a Brooklyn accent. “I’ve never questioned the need to be tough as nails and I’m sure I still come across as hands-on-hips defiant,” she explains. When Rosler was beginning her career, women artists were taken more seriously if they behaved just like the men. “We were hard-edged, fast-talking, wisecracking, heavy-drinking young women,” she says as she settles into a wicker sofa in her living room.