Pittsburgh summer: the Ai Weiwei parts

It was funny to arrive in Pittsburgh back in June and find that Chinese artist Ai Weiwei had taken over the local art museums. Both the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Warhol Museum (which is member of the Carnegie family of museums) hosted work by Ai this summer. I was ready to take a break from China, and yet here it followed me home.






I was surprised how much I enjoyed Ai's work, and how much more I came to appreciate Ai as an artist, and not merely based on the other labels he bears (like activist and dissident).

More after the jump


We knew our summer was going to fill up quickly, so even with eight yet-unscheduled weeks ahead of us, we hit the museums in our earliest days in America.

At the Carnegie Museum, Ai's Zodiac Heads were assembled in a circle in the Hall of Architechture. There are twelve of these animal heads, matching up with the twelve animals in the Chinese Zodiac (Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig).




These giant bronze heads are Ai's reinterpretation of the twelve bronze heads that were once part of a fountain at the Old Summer Palace. During the Second Opium War, the Old Summer Palace was burned, and the foreign troops made off with anything they could carry away from there. This continues to be a very raw subject in China, with the return of the looted heads continuing to be a high national priority. The seven that have been recovered all sit in Chinese Museums today, though not without considerable controversy surrounding their chains of ownership and auctions.




One thing that was underscored in the accompanying video was that the original Qing dynasty bronzes had been designed by a foreign Jesuit, cast in a foreign foundry, and installed in an opulent palace for a foreign ruler. Whose treasure were they really? What would be their value, truly? For Ai, this has been a persistent question associated with his art that we would see more of at the Warhol, and his repurposing and destruction of thousands-year-old clay urns.





We posed with our corresponding animal years. Myles is a Ram; Brigid and I are Rats.





My niece Evangeline is an Ox



Randy is not a Dragon, but really found this head particularly fascinating. He and I both enjoy trying to understand the process of art, especially sculptures that are in materials similar to what we understand in our industrial backgrounds. The Dragon, of all the heads, seemed to Randy to pose the greatest difficulty in casting.



This is one of my favorite spaces in the Carnegie, by the way. It is one of those vestiges of what American museums used to be like, full of perfect casts of far-off antiquities. It seemed to be a perfect place to exhibit Zodiac Heads, and not only because of amount of room. The Hall of Sculpture is also wide-open, but the Hall of Architecture, with the collection of out-of-context columns and porches and thrones, seem to provide an ideal back drop for Ai's reimagined bronze heads.




And just when I was marveling at Ai's artistic skill and ambition on display there, I walked past this display of Ai Weiwei merchandise. Sure, he has only a limited time on this planet to cash in, but I couldn't help but think of Spaceballs.



The Zodiac Heads were so popular with Myles and Brigid that they asked to see them again before the end of the summer. By then, we had Pokemon Go, so it was our duty, too, to help protect Ai's art.




Also during our first weeks home, we visited the Warhol for the other part of the Ai Weiwei takeover of Pittsburgh. This was a large retrospective, positioning and pairing Ai's work with Warhol's.

Some of the pairings were obvious, like one of Ai's Coca-Cola Vase next to Warhol's own study of the famous logo and bottle. The Ai vase, I pointed out to the kids, seemed to represent our lives in China: glaringly Western and superimposed on top of classic Chinese.



There were several pieces in the show that involved Ai's repurposing and destroying of Neolithic and Han Dynasty Pottery (if they are real, that is). Having lived through the Cultural Revolution, Ai witnessed first-hand the wanton destruction of art and cultural artifacts. He forces us to question what makes these pieces valuable now, and worthy of protection, when they were completely expendable then? What about the abundance of convincing fakes; does that make it more or less valuable?

Ai also recreated his triptych Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn in toy bricks. I would say Lego, except Myles noticed immediately they were not Lego because the logo was absent from the studs on the surface.



Among what I considered to be among the more successful groupings were the art with flowers. Warhol's Flowers are one my favorites anyway, so maybe I was predisposed to liking these.





Ai's flowers were mostly related to his house arrest following his detention in 2011. While he awaited the return of his passport, he started placing fresh flowers in the basket of his bicycle parked outside his Caochangdi studio. Every day he changed the flowers, and documented each bouquet on his social media accounts. There were about 600 days of flowers. For the Warhol exhibit, he turned some of these Instagram posts into wallpaper in the style of Warhol's cows and Mao.



Sharply contrasting with the colorful wallpaper and Warhol's own bright Flowers were the colorless porcelain Blossoms. These, like his Sunflower Seeds at the Tate a few years back were produced for him in Jingdezhen in Jiangxi Province. On a slightly raised platform were hundreds of these fragile blooms (seen above), and there was also a porcelain bicycle basket with flowers.



There was other wallpaper, too, that came out of Ai's arrest and detention. What Ai was eventually charged with was tax evasion. Supporters of Ai pledged financial donations to help pay this bill. For those donations that were not anonymous, Ai wrote out IOU. For the Warhol exhibit, he turned these IOU into wallpaper.



The most fun part on any visit to the Warhol is Silver Clouds. Ai also found a home for some of his favorite motifs in this room. Normally, the walls are all black, and the silver Mylar balloons float around on air currents created by the electric fans. Ai transformed the space. Instead of black walls, he created another wallpaper with golden alpacas and surveillance cameras, arranged like chandeliers (another form he has played with before).



Myles took one look at the golden alpacas and gasped. He doesn't have a complete grasp of Chinese swearing, but he does know that in Chinese "Grass-Mud-Horse" is a homonym for a really filthy expression (if you are unfamiliar with it you can take my word for it or google it at your own risk). It is used often on the Chinese internet to get around heavy censorship, so it has become something of a joke to post pictures of alpacas and call them "Grass-Mud-Horse."

Regardless, the Silver Clouds could be joined by any shapes of Mylar balloons and the kids would still consider it their favorite part of the Warhol Museum.




It was inevitable to hang Ai's Mao paintings with Warhol's screen prints and wallpaper. I had never seen any of Ai's paintings up close, and I really liked how it seemed he captured a memory of the China of his youth so completely and subtlety. His more recent activist art (for want of a better term) is more obvious.



One of the most amusing unifying elements in the exhibit was both artists' well-known love of cats. Ai created yet another wallpaper of his cat drawings.




In the basement, the Warhol operates the hands-on workshop that they call The Factory. There visitors of any age can do silkscreens, or attempt Warhol's inkblot technique. Brigid tries it every time, with mixed results. Someday she might actually get a handle on it.



I was curious what sorts of special Factory activities would reflect the art of Ai Weiwei. Would we just contribute further to the Study in Perspective Series?



A lot of curatorial notes for a series of pictures of Ai flipping the bird.

Anyway, no birds were flipped at the Factory that day. At least by anyone in our party. The kids made their own baskets of flowers, like Ai's, but out of paper. There was also a postcard coloring project for cards that would be mailed to refugees, Ai's latest concern.

 

Much more than the Study in Perspective, more than the ready-mades, like Baby Formula.....




....my favorite agitation art in the exhibit were pieces like this, Surveillance Camera. It is a detailed marble sculpture.




It is just my taste, but I have always been drawn to modern art that uses some traditional material or technique but in a slightly twisted way. For me it makes the message more accessible and without distraction. But then again, the issues occupying Ai's mind these days are urgent enough that he needs the expediency of the actual things, like bags of powdered milk.

I did not get a picture of Ai's Block of Tea, but one can be found here. I was surprised that Myles later said that it was among his favorites as well. He liked the unexpected use of loose leaf tea in a sculpture, as well as wondered at how he got it to stay together.

I had forgotten that I really do enjoy Ai's sculptures that are composed of found objects, or parts that are fabricated to resemble found like some of the bicycle sculptures). This array of Qing-era stools is just fun to look at, the incomplete Möbius strip giving the impression of motion. There are always comparisons between artists like Ai and Warhol with Marcel Duchamp because of the use of found objects as art. This sculpture reminded me more of Nude Descending the Staircase.



It was a lot of art in a rather small space. I think we may not have seen everything. I have to admit that I was at first a bit suspicious of this exhibit putting Ai Weiwei on the same plane as Andy Warhol because ANDY WARHOL. However, I went into this show with as open as a mind as I could, and I learned that I really did like Ai Weiwei's art more than I thought I did. I may have reached this realization much more clearly when he was exhibited along with Warhol. Had it been a large one-artist show, I have not idea if I would have had the same response.

Among some foreign writers based in China, there is an occasional opinion offered up in Twitter or their own writing that indicates a kind of fatigue with Ai. Oh, him again? And then it becomes hard to shake this idea that maybe he is not quite the rallying presence, and more of a distraction. For instance, after the Sichuan earthquake he worked to bring attention to the preventable deaths of school children. He was trying to determine their number and record their names. It was on one of his trips to the region that he took this famous picture. What followed in the years after were his arrest, detention, and conviction on tax evasion charges. The focus by the world was more on Ai's plight than maybe on the original issue he was trying to bring to light. And now he is talking about the refugees and displaced persons in the world, particularly those pouring into Europe right now. Will he be able to keep the focus on them, or is he a personality impossible to keep in the background? This is how Ai was introduced to a Pittsburgh audience; which will it be?

(Related: this about Ai from the New Yorker in 2010 is still a great read about him. I was trying to find a place in this post to link to it, but I wasn't able to.)