George Lindemann Journal by Goerge Lindemann - "A Provocateur’s Medium: Outrage" @nytimes by Roberta Smith
The 2012 survey of the courageous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei seen at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington has finally arrived in New York, and is much improved. The show, “Ai Weiwei: According to What?,” which opens Friday at the Brooklyn Museum, has been beefed up throughout, but most notably by two installation pieces completed in 2013. One, “S.A.C.R.E.D.,” is perhaps the best work of art Mr. Ai has yet made.
As a result, this show is far clearer and more gripping than its original incarnation and something of a triumph. It brings many of Mr. Ai’s past efforts into focus as the juvenilia they often were, while making a persuasive case for his ability periodically to reconcile art and ideals and life — which in his case is usually, unavoidably, political — into a memorable balance.
The show originated at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, organized by Mami Kataoka, its chief curator. The Brooklyn presentation has been expertly overseen by Ms. Kataoka and Sharon Matt Atkins, the museum’s managing curator of exhibitions.
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Mr. Ai is a complex, troublesome figure: an artistic provocateur who works in several mediums, an activist and thorn in the side of the Chinese powers that be and an impresario able to marshal scores of variously adept Chinese artisans to make ambitious pieces that he barely touches. He’s also a designer and part-time architect who collaborated with the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron on the emblematic “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. And he was the darling of the Chinese power structure, until he began jumping in where he wasn’t invited.
Initially, he made his presence felt on his outspoken blog, complaining about the destruction of the old alleyway neighborhoods of Beijing to make way for the Olympics (his involvement with the Bird’s Nest notwithstanding) — until the blog was shut down by the government in 2009. That year he was beaten by the police when, in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake, he began to agitate for more information about the shoddily built schools that collapsed, killing thousands of children. Then he was held incommunicado for 81 days in 2011, and, since his release, he has been prohibited from traveling beyond Beijing.
That restriction has not stopped him from making artworks and spiriting them out of China, or from sending assistants to oversee his exhibitions.
Some Westerners may wonder why Mr. Ai doesn’t find a way to leave China (ignoring that his every move is carefully watched). But Mr. Ai is not like, say, a Russian ballet star, who can usually perform as well in London or New York as in Moscow.
Mr. Ai would be nothing without China. His country, its history, its artistic and material culture, its totalitarian government and the travails of its people drive his art. Conversely his art at its best bears witness to the often perverse machinations of the state. His recurrent theme, that of an individual wrestling with all this, is sometimes superficially touched upon in his earlier pieces and is usually detailed in wall labels. More recently, it is profoundly and frighteningly invoked.
This is the case with “S.A.C.R.E.D.,” which was exhibited at the Venice Biennale last year and is now in the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum, where people see it as they enter and again as they leave. It brackets the rest of the show.
On first sight, its six imposing iron boxes resemble a work by Richard Serra. But each box has a firmly shut door and step-size iron boxes upon which visitors stand to peer down through an opening in the top. Inside is a roughly half-scale diorama of the tiny, sparsely furnished cell in which Mr. Ai spent his 81 days of detention. Each includes a painted fiberglass sculpture of Mr. Ai performing one of his daily activities — sleeping, eating, showering, using the toilet — always accompanied by two uniformed guards who seem deliberately to crowd him.
With each successive box, we follow Mr. Ai from chair, to bed, to table, watching a government trying to break an individual without touching him. Because it is enacted in almost real space, the piece gives this tactic a visceral immediacy greater than writing, photography or perhaps even film. This makes sense: Confinement is spatial limitation. The slightly reduced size enables you take in these scenes all at once, to get the picture and empathize, but also to conduct your own surveillance.
“S.A.C.R.E.D.” sets a high standard, a level to which the other works don’t always rise. That’s certainly true of “Stacked,” the newest and largest installation, which is also in the lobby. Consisting of his signature Chinese bicycle frames, but this time copies made from stainless steel, it is the latest, extravagant expression of his continuing involvement with Duchamp’s principle of the ready-made.
The ready-made that serves Mr. Ai best is life itself. As “S.A.C.R.E.D” implies, his strength is as a kind of imaginative documentarian who figures out ways to bring reality close, sometimes unbearably so. This gift has long been evident in his photographs, which are well represented here in gritty black and white, recording his life as a young artist in both New York (where he lived from 1983 to 1993) and Beijing; and in color images papering the walls that show the building of the gigantic Bird’s Nest as well as the destruction that cleared space for the Olympic build-out.
Further color images flutter past on a dozen monitors in “258 Fake,” an ebullient document of his life centered on a studio populated by friends, assistants and cats. (Mr. Ai calls his studio Fake, and 258 is its actual street number.) The documentary impulse is also evident in the show’s increasingly searing videos, one of which follows the plight of a woman infected as a child with H.I.V. from a blood transfusion in a Chinese hospital, part of a medical system that only grudgingly acknowledges her disease.
More traditional notions of the ready-made operate in the first gallery, which concentrates on Mr. Ai’s early work of the last decade. The space is dominated by sculptures made from lustrous wood and antique furniture salvaged from houses and temples doomed by the Olympics. Especially good are his reconfigured Qing dynasty tables, their legs planted on both the floor and the wall as if under great strain. Even better is “Kippe,” an exquisite wood-pile-like mass of scraps that suggest a funeral pyre.
Otherwise, the sadness of the stories is provided by the labels, though the pieces themselves are primarily familiar forms of international Conceptual sculpture translated into local materials. You glimpse Mr. Ai’s implicit rebelliousness in his repainted Han dynasty vases and photographic triptychs showing him dropping the irreplaceable objects, shocking gestures that gain resonance from his recent work.
Two other high points are room-size installations. One is an enlarged version of “Straight,” which consists of 73 tons of rebar (nearly double the tonnage at the Hirshhorn show) salvaged from the collapsed schools of the Sichuan earthquake, painstakingly straightened so that nothing appears to have been amiss and stacked in a thick undulating carpet that visitors walk around. It suggests both a landscape and the orderliness of a morgue. Its stark density balances its tragic back story. (But a large snake made of children’s backpacks coiled on the ceiling is an earthquake commemoration whose lightheartedness is almost insensitive.)
The other work is “Ye Haiyan’s Belongings,” named for a Chinese women’s rights advocate. The government has responded to her activism with repeated evictions, the last time dumping her and her daughter on the side of a highway. Mr. Ai responded first with financial aid and then turned Ms. Ye’s hastily packed household goods into a fairly successful artwork.
Four walls of the gallery are papered floor to ceiling with images of neatly arranged possessions of Ms. Ye and her daughter: clothes, CDs, teapots, rice bowls. This rather cheerful surround contrasts with the dusty and desolate array of the items themselves, packed in shabby cardboard boxes and suitcases on the floor, along with appliances, a motorbike and a bicycle.
In these last two works and in “S.A.C.R.E.D.,” we feel the crushing vortexes that the Chinese government creates for its citizens, sometimes in groups, sometimes individually. It is not clear how often Mr. Ai will find ways to enter these maelstroms and make them hauntingly, even beautifully, visible. But for as long as he can we will be lucky.
An art review on Friday about “Ai Weiwei: According to What?,” at the Brooklyn Museum, referred incorrectly to the curator who originally organized the show at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and helped oversee its presentation at the Brooklyn Museum. The curator, Mami Kataoka, is Ms. Kataoka, not Ms. Mori.
“Ai Weiwei: According to What?” is on view through Aug. 10 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park; 718-638-5000 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 718-638-5000 FREE end_of_the_skype_highlighting, brooklynmuseum.org.
A version of this review appears in print on April 18, 2014, on page C25 of the New York edition with the headline: A Provocateur’s Medium: Outrage. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
