33 Artists in 3 Acts (6 page)
In the beginning, Dittborn used regular mail, but now he never strays from private couriers. (He is loyal to FedEx because a rival service lost a panel a few years ago.) When a museum commissions the artist, he makes the painting with the specific destination in mind, then sends it in a number of envelopes. However, institutions occasionally miss the point and return the work after a show in expensive wooden crates.
Santiago has a small art scene in which the vast majority of artists work as teachers. According to Dittborn, there is no artists’ community. “It is the contrary of a community,” he says in an accent that sounds more French than Spanish. “It’s a sort of small and ridiculous battlefield.” Consistent in his metaphors, the artist describes his studio as a bunker. Indeed, once in the basement space, you would never know you were in La Reina, a good-looking suburb full of well-kept bungalows and bougainvillea. The L-shaped, windowless room has four cement walls and two gray painted wood ones for pinning up works in progress. Drearily utilitarian, the space is the antithesis of the romantic image of an artist’s studio. “When students come here, they are very disappointed,” he says with amusement. “I’m a little bit agoraphobic,” he adds, as his hands dive into the pockets of his jacket. “I’d like to be in an envelope but I can’t fold myself.”
Like Warhol, Dittborn works with found images, and like Ai and Koons, he rarely leaves a trace of his own hand, relying on a team of others to do the physical work. One might think that the handwritten
addresses on the envelopes reveal the artist’s signature. However, Dittborn employs a man who works at the local gas station—an amateur calligrapher—and asks him to write the destinations in the style of “a nun or a polite, well-educated, Catholic woman,” as the artist puts it. What better way for his work to look like an innocent package and evade scrutiny? As it happens, the artist’s family history features its fair share of religious persecution. His Huguenot ancestors picked up the name Dittborn while on the run in Germany, and his mother’s very Catholic maiden name, which translates as “Holy Cross,” was adopted in lieu of a Jewish one during the Spanish Inquisition. “When people escape or exile themselves, they change their identity,” says the artist.
At one end of Dittborn’s studio is an archive that includes neatly stacked envelopes containing folded works, cylinders holding silkscreens, and gray metal drawers full of fabrics. Everything is carefully numbered and alphabetized. “The order is not compulsive. I’m lost without an assistant,” says the artist, who likes to hire people with a “classifying mind” but finds that they are all too often “arty.”
Dittborn moves stiffly over to a metal cupboard. He opens it and reveals a row of vintage books, many of which are falling apart. He pulls out picture dictionaries in various languages and secondhand bookstore oddities such as
Manos Arriba
, a true crime compendium depicting murderers and victims. One of the artist’s favorite books, from which he has appropriated many images, is Andrew Loomis’s
Anyone Can Draw
, a popular how-to book from the 1950s. Dittborn, who is obsessed with rudimentary sketching styles, sees Loomis’s very conventional, prescriptive methods as “the last bus stop of Renaissance drawing.”
Some of Dittborn’s imagery is commissioned rather than appropriated. The artist asked the director of a Chilean psychiatric hospital to invite patients to make drawings of faces and received about 500 in return—all done by one schizophrenic who signed them “Allan 26A.” On another occasion, the artist commissioned heroin addicts at a rehab center in Rotterdam to draw their childhood homes as well as the home of their dreams. Dittborn even got his daughter, Margarita, to participate, drawing faces in exchange for pesos when she was seven years old. (She is now an adult and an artist in her own right.)
Dittborn never makes self-portraits. With hands that shake slightly, he pulls out a drawer full of swatches of fabric upon which different drawn and photographed faces have been silkscreened. “You have to be
somebody
to make your self-portrait,” he declares disdainfully. However, the artist has created a strong but faceless entity called “Dittborn,” about which he writes in the third person. “Dittborn is not me,” he explains. “It is a market affair like Buick, Cadillac, Ford . . . Bacon or Picasso. It’s a brand in an ironic way, a joke that everybody knows the famous Dittborn.” The artist stops and troubles over his English. “Famous or infamous,” he wonders aloud. “Is the same thing?” I explain the difference. I’m intrigued by an abstract persona represented by an eight-letter word. Dittborn nods. He relishes what he calls “the self-absence of the artist.”
The artist nevertheless admits the influence of his biography. Although he delegates almost every aspect of the physical making of his work—the silkscreening, sewing, folding, envelope-making, and writing—he personally applies the liquid tincture that gives the works their color and their emotional tone. In recent years, Dittborn’s airmail paintings have become more multichromatic. The artist had several long bouts of working in black and white, which he attributes to unresolved mourning. He lost many friends during the dictatorship, in particular his psychoanalyst, whose disappearance influenced his work. “I didn’t understand it at the time,” he explains, “but unconsciously I was trying to find that body.”
Death and disappearance are key themes in Dittborn’s work. Over the years, the artist has made some twenty-eight paintings in a series titled “The History of the Human Face.” Reminiscent of Warhol’s “Most Wanted Men” paintings, the works catalogue the faces of assorted social types (such as “criminals,” “natives,” “madmen”) in diverse styles, including medieval woodcuts, police sketches, and childish drawings. “Disappearing is a problem much larger than Pinochet,” explains Dittborn as he points to an aboriginal face silkscreened on a scrap of white cotton. “Political disappearance is present throughout Chilean history. The tribes of Tierra del Fuego were almost completely wiped
out. And what about North American natives? And people in psychiatric hospitals. Many of them are ‘the disappeared.’”
Dittborn puts the fabric pieces back in the drawer and pushes them out of view. “I don’t want to be seen as a hero who resisted oppression, because it was much more complex than that,” he says. The seventeen-year Pinochet dictatorship was brutal, but the regime was shorter-lived and less thorough than the Communist “dictatorships of the people.” While the Chinese and the Soviets systematically erased generation upon generation of independent thinkers, many of the South American dictatorships overlooked enclaves of artists and writers. “Pinochet took control of theater and music but largely ignored the visual arts because it didn’t have a large enough audience,” explains Dittborn as he locks the cupboard doors that hide his books. “The most interesting artwork was incomprehensible to the army anyway.”
Ai Weiwei
June 1994
1994
A
i Weiwei has disappeared. On April 3, 2011, the artist was at Beijing airport en route to Taipei for a meeting. At border control, Chinese officials stopped him and took him away. That was seven weeks ago and he hasn’t been heard from since. No one knows where he is.
As I arrive in Beijing, I wonder: in which terminal did his arrest take place? Terminal three, which was designed by the British architect Norman Foster and built for the 2008 Olympics, has a soaring glass dome. It appears to be a national monument to openness and transparency—and to architecture’s gift for fiction.
Ai’s home/studio is located in the “international art village” of Caochangdi, near the fifth ring road on the outskirts of Beijing, not far from the airport. Until recently, the area was mostly grassland and it still feels a bit like the country. A warm, dry wind whistles through the sapling-lined streets under an overcast sky. Ai’s first architectural work was his own studio, which was built out of brick in six months in 1999. People admired its low-cost modernism so much that they commissioned him to design their houses, studios, and art galleries. In an interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ai said that building with bricks was “like using words to write something.” The village, which is dotted with Ai’s buildings, is inflected with the artist’s voice.
My cab pulls up alongside a plaque on a brick wall that says “FAKE,”
the name of Ai’s design company, which when pronounced in Chinese comes out as something close to “fuck.” The double entendre captures Ai’s desire to mess with authenticity and authority.
A young Chinese American woman opens a door cut into the turquoise metal gate. She looks both ways down the street, glances up at one of the three surveillance cameras focused on Ai’s door, then lets me in along with Emma Cheung, a friend of a friend who will translate for me today. The courtyard is spacious, with a bamboo grove, carved stone antiquities, and some large green and blue ceramic vases.
On the left side of the courtyard is Ai’s elegant brick box of a home. On the right side is the office, which I peek into as we walk past. The room is empty of life except for a calico cat sleeping on a chair. Within a few hours of abducting Ai, the police raided the whole compound. They confiscated all the computers and hard drives, accounting books, and financial files related to Fake. In the following week, four members of Ai’s retinue went missing: Wen Tao (an ex-journalist involved with Ai’s online presence), Hu Mingfen (Fake’s accountant), Liu Zhengang (a Fake director), and Zhang Jinsong (a.k.a. “Little Fatty,” a relative of Ai’s who acts as his driver). The families of these men have no idea where they are, what they have done wrong, or when they will see them again.
Now, a dozen new computers sit on three rows of tables. Lining the right side of the room, like wallpaper, is a list of 5,196 young people killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Ai’s Internet campaign to compile a list of the students who were killed in the disaster, due to the shoddy “tofu” construction of school buildings, appears to be the issue that has most embarrassed the Chinese government. On the back wall is a large photo of the façade of the Haus der Kunst in Munich when it was covered by an Ai installation that commemorated the Sichuan tragedy. Titled
Remembering
(2009), the work featured hundreds of colored school bags that spelled out in Chinese characters a quote from the mother of one of the deceased: “She had been living happily in this world for seven years.”
Lu Qing, Ai’s wife, meets us at the door of their home in a dress that looks like it was painted with watercolors. I recognize her face from an Ai photograph in which she lifts her dress, revealing white bikini underwear, in front of the Tiananmen Gate. Titled
June 1994
, the work
shows its disrespect for the Chinese government on the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen protests.
As we are introduced, she warns us that the house is probably bugged. “The police went through the building thoroughly,” she says. “They may have planted microphones as small as sesame seeds.” The main room is a double-height dining hall-cum-conference room with exposed brick walls and a cement floor that feels a bit like a Soho loft. We sit at a long wooden table surrounded by nineteenth-century chairs made in the Ming Dynasty style, much like the 1,001 chairs that were featured in
Fairytale
. Sitting in the sun on the ledge of a tall window are four large mangoes covered in black marker. Three of them bear Chinese characters; the fourth says “Free Ai Weiwei.”
Dignified and elegant in the face of palpable distress, Lu sits at the head of the table with her back to the window. A fluffy, rather dirty white cat struts the length of the table and, when it arrives at our end, rolls into a languorous stretch with its feet in the air. After offering us green tea, she affirms that Ai’s detention is illegal even by Chinese standards. The law here dictates that a prisoner’s family should be informed within forty days of their whereabouts and the reasons for their incarceration, but neither she nor Ai’s mother has been contacted. Lu hates to speculate about why he has been detained. “He’s an outspoken artist who has done work about sensitive issues . . . the earthquake is the most sensitive,” she admits with both palms up, right hand resting gently in the left.
Lu is an artist herself, but her practice has been subsumed within the larger swirl of her husband’s activities. She is the official director of Fake, as the company was set up before Ai had his
hukouben
, or license to live within the city limits of Beijing, a prerequisite to incorporating there. I tell her that I have never met a successful artist who didn’t have intelligent support. We discuss a range of Ai’s artworks. Lu’s current favorites are
Sunflower Seeds
and
Fairytale
. She likes them because they are “very Ai Weiwei,” by which I assume she means that they have both emotional intimacy and a sublime sense of the mass. Moreover, they are artworks that reveal an ambition that could move mountains.
The irrepressible dirty white cat head-butts my hand, demanding a
stroke, then lies down on my notebook. “Weiwei is a good example of what a pure artist is,” says Lu. “He is very honest. He uses art and media to express himself.” Lu believes that the Chinese public’s understanding of artists is limited. Indeed, in a country where government propaganda has reigned supreme for so long, very little value is put on the truth and many people have no scruples about bending it. Most young Chinese don’t believe Party propaganda and obtain their news from Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. However, few are staunch advocates of freedom of speech. In fact, Ai’s belief in human rights, not to mention his truth-seeking confrontational style, are perceived as un-Chinese. He is semiregularly accused of watching too many Hollywood movies.