An Artist Depicts His Demons

Cristiano Bendinelli for The New York Times

One of Ai Weiwei’s dioramas that recreate his harrowing experiences as a prisoner of the Chinese authorities. More Photos »

By EDWARD WONG

Published: May 26, 2013

BEIJING — For a year and a half the artist Ai Weiwei and a sculptor friend oversaw a team of 20 to 30 people toiling away here in secret on one of his most political and personal projects.

Their task was to reconstruct scenes from Mr. Ai’s illegal detention in 2011, when he was held for 81 days in a secret prison guarded by a paramilitary unit. What took shape this spring at an industrial space in the Chinese capital were six fiberglass dioramas that depict, at half-scale, his often banal daily existence as a captive of the vast government security apparatus.

The dioramas were quietly transported out of China — Mr. Ai declined to say exactly how — to Venice, where they will be publicly exhibited starting on Tuesday in a church being used as an art gallery by the Zuecca Project Space, in parallel with the 2013 Venice Biennale, though not officially part of it.

Each diorama is enclosed in a 2 ½-ton iron box. There are sculptures of Mr. Ai sleeping, eating, showering, undergoing interrogation and sitting on the toilet, all under the watch of two young guards in green uniforms. Mr. Ai said the details were meticulously recreated from memory, down to his blue flip-flops and the white padding taped to the walls of the room.

Along with an obscenity-laced music video posted online last week, the dioramas are the first of Mr. Ai’s pieces to address his detention, which was the most difficult period of his life, he said.

On a recent morning at his studio and home in northern Beijing, he explained in an interview that his goal was simple: “To give people a clear understanding of the conditions.” An assistant used an iPad to show visitors photographs of the dioramas while a shaved cat padded around, looking forlorn.

Mr. Ai, 56, has another work being shown by Zuecca, one that comments on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. He also has a more conceptual piece at Venice that uses 800 small wooden stools and is an attempt, Mr. Ai said, to build a “monsterlike lively structure” that is “completely dysfunctional.” That work is part of a group exhibition put together by the curator for the German Pavilion in the Biennale, though the exhibition will be displayed in the French Pavilion as a gesture symbolizing ties between the two nations. Mr. Ai’s artwork is making its first appearance in the Biennale since his debut there in 1999.

“China is still in constant warfare, with destroying individuals’ nature, including people’s imaginations, curiosity, motivations, dreams,” Mr. Ai said. “This state’s best minds have been wasted by this high ideological control, which is fake. Even the people who are trying to use it as a tool to maintain power or stability know that this is a completely fake condition.”

Mr. Ai’s vitriol against the Communist Party has made him a polarizing figure in the Chinese art world. Many artists quietly resent the attention Mr. Ai has received from the West, as well as his occasional denunciations of other Chinese, including former friends, who are unwilling to take the same uncompromising stand against the party.

Critical reception in the West to his recent art varies — a 2010 exhibition of sunflower seeds at the Tate Modern in London was widely praised, while a 2012 retrospective at the Hirshhorn in Washington had mixed reviews.

“Can political art still be good art?” Mr. Ai said. “Those questions have been around for too long. People are not used to connecting art to daily struggle, but rather use high aesthetics, or so-called high aesthetics, to try to separate or purify humans’ emotions from the real world.”

The earthquake-related artwork in Venice literally builds on Mr. Ai’s previous political criticism. For the Hirshhorn show, Mr. Ai’s work “Straight” consisted of a pile of long reinforced steel bars from the Sichuan earthquake sites, which he collected and then had straightened. At Venice Mr. Ai is again exhibiting a pile of the bars, but double in terms of weight, for a total of 90 tons.

As earlier, the piece is meant to criticize how corruption in China has led to shoddy construction across the country and thus to loss of lives in the quake. Nearly 90,000 people were killed or missing, including more than 5,000 children who died when schools collapsed.

“It will remain for a long time to remind people what happened,” Mr. Ai said. “Until today they have never answered our questions.”

Philip Tinari, director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, said in general, “Weiwei has been looking, in the years since his detention, for a way to use art to talk about social issues in a way that still codes and functions as art.” The metal rods from Sichuan, he said, are “a good example of his search for this middle road between overtly political and purely formal.”

The six dioramas, titled “S.A.C.R.E.D,” are more personal. Since his release two years ago, Mr. Ai has been obsessing over the details of his detention and the ordeals of several friends persecuted at the same time. In late 2011 he gave several long interviews to The New York Times in which he described the conditions of his detention and his daily activities. The details in the dioramas are consistent with his earlier accounts, down to the color of the wallpaper.

“I am sure that it will be a powerful piece,” said Karen Smith, an art historian and independent curator who has seen photographs of the project. “In spite of the fact that to all outward appearances Weiwei seems to be holding up well and maintaining his focus in the period since his detention, this work suggests a need to confront the ‘demon’ that such an experience certainly represents for him.”

She added, “Although this work will seem like a very public indictment of the system, the personal aspect of the piece will no doubt be the element that lends it weight.”

Officials are still holding his passport and the police sometimes follow him to unlikely places (a ski resort, for instance), but Mr. Ai has more freedom than he did in the first year after his release. The loosening of surveillance is demonstrated by the fact that he was able to work secretly on both the dioramas and the music video, which was shot by Christopher Doyle, a renowned cinematographer, in a life-size model of Mr. Ai’s cell.

Mr. Ai said he is almost through mining his detention for his art, but there is one more project to come.

“I have a book I’m writing,” he said. “It’s already 80 percent finished. I have this terrible responsibility: I have to record every stupid detail, and it’s so dry and so boring, and to me it’s so terrible. That’s why it’s taken me two years to try to finish it. Every time I sat down, it was a struggle — ‘Why do I have to write this down?’ But I have to. This is just an obligation.”

The George Lindemann Journal

In the increasingly crowded field of stuffed fabric sculptures, Aiko Hachisuka’s stand out for their deliberation and complexity and for their sleights of hand. At first sight, the five sculptures in her New York solo debut suggest giant, colorfully glazed ceramic planters or tea bowls; their bright surfaces almost gleam.        The tactile reality of these big, barrel-like forms quickly reveals itself, however; then comes the recognition that the textiles used are all garments individually stuffed and carefully stitched together. Shirt collars and sleeves emerge, as do pant legs, the necks of sweaters and the occasional pleated skirt. Sometimes tangles of human forms are intimated: an arm flung here, a leg there. (They can bring to mind the jumbled limbs and lavishly patterned kimonos found in erotic Japanese woodblock prints.) The final realization is that the fabrics’ patterns are often supplemented by scattered shards of bright red, gold, green and other tones. These result from applying silk-screen ink to a tightly bunched garment that may then be rebunched and painted with a contrasting color. Or, after painting, the garment may be smoothed out and pressed against a second garment, making a kind of monoprint. The applied color covers the forms like a net, holding them together while also suggesting the crushed metals of John Chamberlain’s sculptures. The process of making these works is more elaborate than their content, which is to say that they verge on craft. They are also so complete that it is difficult to see where Ms. Hachisuka will take them from here, but it will be interesting to watch.

The George Lindemann Journal

By JENNIFER MALONEY

Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images

Picasso's 'Woman in an Armchair (Eva)'

As curator Emily Braun stepped inside a Zurich vault with billionaire art collector Leonard Lauder, the small painting they had come to see made her giddy with excitement.

Ms. Braun, the private curator of Mr. Lauder's world-class collection of cubist art, was encouraging him to fill a gap in the collection by acquiring "The Oil Mill," a rare landscape by Pablo Picasso painted in a Catalan village in 1909. Passed down through the family of a French collector, it hadn't been seen in public for 70 years.

Standing before it, "we just couldn't contain ourselves," Ms. Braun recalled. Still, the cosmetics magnate wasn't convinced it was the right fit for his collection. Five years later, in 2000, he came around to her thinking and bought it.

Ms. Braun, known by friends and colleagues as "Mimi," has for 26 years been at Mr. Lauder's side, helping him shape a renowned collection of 78 cubist artworks that last month he donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The works, by Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger, are valued at $1 billion.

"We formed, I think, a very, very powerful partnership," Mr. Lauder said. "She and I are joined at the hip."

In addition to serving as steward of Mr. Lauder's cubist collection, a part-time job for which she is on call 24 hours a day, Ms. Braun is an art-history professor at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has also written books, curated shows and contributed to exhibition catalogs. She is co-curating an exhibition of the Lauder collection planned by the Met next year and guest curating a retrospective of the Italian painter Alberto Burri at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2015.

Friends and colleagues say she moves effortlessly from the scholarly world, where she is known for doggedly tracking down historical details, to the art market, where she keeps tabs on which cubist works are available for sale—and whether they merit Mr. Lauder's consideration. (With Ms. Braun's help, Mr. Lauder will continue to acquire works for the collection even after it goes to the Met.)

"A lot of my job has been saying no before things get to him," said Ms. Braun, 55 years old.

To avoid conflicts of interest, Ms. Braun is paid on retainer by Mr. Lauder, rather than at a percentage of the purchase price of the works she advises on. This is in keeping with the ethical guidelines of the College Art Association. She also discloses her side job each year to the university.

Ms. Braun grew up near Toronto. She studied art history at the University of Toronto and New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, where she completed her Ph.D. on the modernist Italian artist Mario Sironi and the politics of art under fascism.

Throughout her studies, she held jobs that kept her connected to the contemporary-art world. In 1984, she was hired as a consultant to commission works by artists including Sol LeWitt and Scott Burton for the public spaces in and around the new headquarters for the Equitable Life Assurance Society, then being developed in midtown Manhattan. She was 27 years old and had a budget of $10 million.

While Ms. Braun was conducting research in Italy, her friend Dorothy Kosinski was working in Switzerland as curator of the collection of the late British art historian and collector Douglas Cooper. Ms. Kosinski, who is now director of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., invited Ms. Braun for a tour of the Cooper collection in Geneva, which included stunning Picassos and Braques stored in crates in a cold warehouse.

Not long after, in January 1987, Ms. Braun met Mr. Lauder for a job interview in New York. She had been recommended by her professor, Kirk Varnedoe, then an adjunct curator at the Museum of Modern Art.

Mr. Lauder explained that he intended to assemble a museum-quality collection of cubist art. "Very desirous of impressing him, I said, 'Oh, I think you should go to this collection that's sitting in a warehouse in Switzerland,' " Ms. Braun recalled. Mr. Lauder grinned and said: "I just bought that."

Mr. Lauder ultimately decides which works to buy. But each addition to his cubist collection has been preceded by in-depth conversations with Ms. Braun, whom Mr. Lauder described as "my partner and teacher and mentor."

While Mr. Lauder evaluates art on aesthetic grounds—looking for works, he said, that "sing to me"—he relies on his curator to weigh in on each work's historical significance, provenance, and physical condition.

Ms. Braun has traveled across the U.S. and Europe to view works that might interest her boss. Well-known as Mr. Lauder's curator, she tries not to tip her hand: When she attends an auction preview, she looks at everything, so as not to drive up bidding on a work he is after.

The first painting from Mr. Lauder's cubist collection was put on display at the Met last month: "Woman in an Armchair (Eva)," painted by Picasso in 1913 or early 1914. Mr. Lauder bought it in 1997 at a Christie's auction for $24.7 million.

Acquisitions are only part of Ms. Braun's job. As the collection's steward, she has overseen conservation efforts, arranged loans to museums and invited scholars to view works at Mr. Lauder's apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Perhaps most importantly, she has spearheaded research on every work in the collection. A trove of archival materials documenting the life of each painting and drawing—including photographs, catalogs, inventories and articles—will go to the Met along with the collection.

Historical riddles that Ms. Braun is investigating include a painting hiding on the backside of a Léger painting in the collection. At some point, the artist crossed it out with diagonal brush strokes in diluted black paint. Did he ever exhibit that side of the canvas? She is still digging to find the answer.

Write to Jennifer Maloney at jennifer.maloney@wsj.com

George Lindemann Wins Inaugural Better Beach Award

March 26, 2013

Congratulations, George Lindemann!

Partner Without the Prize

By ROBIN POGREBIN

Twenty-two years after being passed by, the architect Denise Scott Brown, 81, said at an awards ceremony for women in architecture last month that it was time she share in the 1991 Pritzker Prize that was given to her design partner and husband, Robert Venturi, with whom she had worked side by side.

 

 

 

Arielle Assouline-Lichten, foreground, and Caroline James started the Pritzker petition.

By Erika Bolstad

McClatchy Newspapers

Jean Nouvel, ante el proyecto del Louvre Abu Dhabi. / thomas coex (afp)


The Louvre Abu Dhabi is ready, two and a half years after its inauguration, to show the world the backbone of its permanent collection. In total, 130 objects from different places over the last four millennia in the exhibition Birth of a museum, which opens to the public on day 22 in the Saadiyat Island cultural district in Abu Dhabi. It is the first large-scale museum ambitious funds, the first with universal vocation of the Arab world and whose construction is based on a project by architect Jean Nouvel.

"The goal is to demonstrate the concept of universality making art objects dialogue of civilizations and eras," said Celine Hullo-Pouyat yesterday, director of the Louvre Abu Dhabi project during a previous visit to the exhibition. It is also, as stated during the presentation Emirati co-director, Hissa to Dhaheri, to "emphasize human values ​​that unite us."

Hence, the sample is divided by civilizations and historical periods, but according to anthropological concepts. This statement of intent is apparent from the first room, which is dedicated to the representation of the human figure, a taboo for some radical interpretations of Islam. In it, the Conservatives opposed the sculpture of a Bactrian princess from the late third millennium BC (one of the jewels of the collection) and a Cypriot prehistoric idol with an abstract painting by Yves Klein. The effect is amazing and encourages reflection of the visitor. To help her, also have been placed screens on which video can be put into context mute that works and pieces linked to other museums.

"The mediation effort is part of the museum's educational objective," says Hullo-Pouyat. Like the rest of the exhibitions organized in Saadiyat, Birth of a museum will be accompanied by lectures, discussions and workshops. In addition, the Louvre Abu Dhabi seeks to establish permanent links with schools in the country and become an instrument of educational support.

The exhibition is divided into six trans-chronological rooms although not a literal illustration of the future museum itself evoke their aesthetic and narrative. In the dedicated to the Ancient World, The speaker, a Roman toga first century marble, is presented alongside a pedestrian statue of a Buddha, a piece dated between the second and third centuries. It is interesting to compare the similarities and differences in the folds of their cloaks or expression. A map explaining what was happening in the rest of the world at that time. Entitled The Sacred In a Jewish Pentateuch shares from Yemen cabinet with a diptych Christian and a Koran.

Later, the eastern Image contrasts with the western look, showing a score of paintings by some of the great European artists ranging from Murillo or Jordaens to Gauguin and Picasso. The presence in these works of Venus and nymphs in the bathroom, Jean-Jacques Lagrenée, whose protagonists are scantily clad, forced ago asking if conservatives found with red lines or warnings to local cultural sensitivity.

"No," he replies without hesitation Hullo-Pouyat. "We worked on a universal concept in the context of cultural and scientific program of the museum". Neither she nor the other makers reveal the total number of pieces in the collection or its value. And also refer to this program as a reference framework for the purchase of works by the Government of Abu Dhabi, the owner of both the museum and its contents. Having decided on the target must be aware of the parts that go on sale.

"This is the challenge facing all new museums because they can only access what is available in the market against centuries collections" admits Olivier Gabet, deputy conservation French Museums Agency, whose collaboration is the result of a bilateral agreement between Paris and Abu Dhabi. Gabet highlights the "exclusivity" not only of the works presented but how to present them.

For now, when it opens in late 2015, the museum also displays the permanent collection, funds borrowed from French museums. "As you increase the collection, loans will be reduced," explains the director. The organizers will be very attentive to how local audiences reacted to this exhibition, since the ultimate goal is that the museum will attract local and regional audiences, and that they get to call their own.

The announcement that the Emirate of Abu Dhabi signed an agreement with the Louvre to help him to develop his own art gallery and planned to build the largest Guggenheim in the world was met with skepticism when it was announced in early 2007. Three years after the financial crisis forced the makers to curb its ambitions. Only recently, work has resumed. Under the new timetable announced this year, the Louvre will open in two years, the National Museum signing Foster & Partners will be ready in 2016 and the Guggenheim, designed as one would expect by Frank Gehry opened in 2017. It also plans to build an auditorium designed by architect Zaha Hadid and a maritime museum by Tadao Ando draft.

Neil MacGregor (Glasgow, 1946), director of the British Museum, popularizer radio and one of the most admired intellectual authorities in the UK, came to Madrid to celebrate more than the loan exhibition of drawings The Spanish stroke in the British Museum. Renaissance Drawings Goya. "This year marks half a century of the first time I visited the Prado. I remember it well, went with my parents, and I refused to go out to eat ... Wanted to continue seeing more rooms ". Then, MacGregor was a Scottish guy just a curious idea of ​​artistic taste: "I grew up in Glasgow, next to the home of refined Stirling Maxwell, who was one of the largest collections of Spanish art. And when he was eight, the city bought Christ of Saint John of the Cross, Dali. So at such a tender age thought that Spanish art collectors and collected them when cities bought, also were favored by their country. "

That boy became museum director, first in the National Gallery and from 2002 of the British institution that aspires to contain the world from antiquity to the present day. She also made radio history a BBC program (which became a book, published by Debate) in which two million years of humanity were explained in 100 objects. On the challenges that lie ahead for museums chatted with the country in the modern, sunny and peaceful cloister extending the Prado, a metaphor for how much they have changed in this half century galleries. "They've changed, yes, but the tables, not".

It is important not to be dependent on the private or the public

Show the past in the future. "They are still the places to understand the world in retrospect. In the Prado you realize that the history of Europe is a single, culturally and politically. We struggle lately for building a single European history when a story we've been building for centuries. The museums will allow us to understand the world. Obviously, the British is different, because it brings together objects of all civilizations. But it throws the same message: the world has always been connected. "

Free tickets for all?? "The tradition in Britain is that the museums are free, because that was the mandate of Parliament that created in the eighteenth century. They settled at no cost to British and foreign citizens. If you want people to understand the world you must make accessible and free entry. A museum is a public space of the mind and spirit that all citizens have the right to live ".

Surviving the cuts. "As in Spain, the institutions of Britain suffer cuts in public allocation. We fought using private money, making use of the store sales and sponsors, whether businesses or individual citizens. And then share our collection with the rest of the world, as I think you are doing with much discretion the Prado. On every continent right now you can see pictures of the gallery in Madrid. That, plus reaffirm that these treasures belong to the world, it also means that recipients of these collections support the museum's finances. "

"To achieve the perfect balance no formula. The British tradition has always been a mix between public and private. Half and half. I think that's a good percentage. The State guarantees the continuity and security of the collection and businesses, individuals and foreign museums help in other ways. The formula is difficult, but clear: lots of hard work. It can be a complex issue, but remember to museums who your audience is and how they should be addressed to him. It is important not to be totally dependent on the private or the public, you need to have independence when telling a story academically true ".

The pieces that were legally acquired there is no need to return them

Who does cultural diplomacy? "Depends what you mean by that concept. I do not believe in museums as a weapon of the state. Because the pieces do not belong. Now, when you travel to the works create a dialogue, a debate with people. Lately we are paying much more to China and India. They have never had the opportunity to see the pieces of ancient Egypt, for example. With them, we allow these countries to enter and interact with the story of our time, which is a global history. It is a form of communication, but should not be a subterfuge to employ Velázquez in the interest of a country or of another. "

Spoliation or property? Legitimate? "Do not believe in the return of the parts if they were properly acquired. And we know it was not always that way: there was a lot of looting in World War II. Things have not improved much in the last 30 or 40 years. But if the objects were obtained legally, as with the Parthenon, do not understand why would they return them. The same is true Flemish Paintings of the Prado, why should they be returned? Here are accessible to everyone. The great challenge is to fight against illegal excavations and be able to share these treasures with the world. These jewels do not belong to Paris, Berlin or Madrid, but that these cities should share. Religions divide, museums are world citizens ".

Challenges. "The danger for the future of museums is nationalism. The very existence of art collections is a denial of nationalism, because they provide a vision of humanity as a whole. Perhaps more important today than ever, when we see the dangers of division worldwide. These collections teach us to share. "

Is there a limit to the number of visitors? "It's a great dilemma. We have six million. There is a limit, undoubtedly. We must be able to accommodate that demand our buildings. And then we return to the idea of ​​the museum traveler, if visitors can not come here, we can send them the pieces. We must also work to make the collections accessible to all, on the web and on smartphones. And what the mobile is to make the collection accessible to all uses. "