February 9 to March 6, 2016
16B Orchard Street, between Hester and Canal streets
New York City, 917-533-5375, info@firewallcafe.com

Firewall Internet Café is a fascinating pop-up exhibition that allows visitors to simultaneously search images on Google and the Chinese search engine, Baidu. Americans will not be surprised to find that Baidu’s results are “filtered” but preconceived ideas of censorship, one discovers, are complicated by nuances of language and translation. “Mao,” for example, has come to mean pornography; “firewall” conjures mythological imagery; and “Ai Weiwei” results in images of Exercycles and sweethearts. (As for censorship, Google has withdrawn from the Chinese market, but Bing remains.) The Chinese-American artist Joyce Yu-Jean Lee, whose informative installation this is, has collaborated with technologist Dan Phiffer (mastermind of the “dark net” used onsite by Occupy), along with a worldwide conspiracy of proxy hosts to bring off this seemingly simple exercise. (Simple or not, it seems to have struck a nerve in China: a Chinese citizen studying here was forbidden to participate on a panel connected with the show.) Google users, theoretically unrestricted, would do well to get to know the Party-approved Baidu, now in full export mode with notable market penetration into Brazil, Indonesia, Egypt and India. Indeed, Lower East side gallery goers, whose acknowledgement of Chinatown is usually restricted to cheap food, can get a guided tour of a future cultural, economic, and political reckoning.

Comparable Google/Baidu searches:

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The Pacific Northwest is beautiful this time of year. I travel there every few years and typically end up in the area during summer, missing the rain for which it’s infamous. This year I visited Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, seeing a lot of the gallery and museum scene. The Seattle Art Fair ran during the start of August. It’s mostly a small-ish regional fair, though there were booths by Gagosian, David Zwirner, Pace, Zürcher, James Cohan, and other New Yorkers. I skipped it though, having a kind of snooty distaste for those conventions. I mean, who in their right mind would want to attend an art fair? Oof.

So I went straight for the regional institutions. There’s a lot to see. First: The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. It’s set in the city’s hip and young U district, and it’s a smartly designed, well organized space. They show emerging and established artists in a variety of media. They do not have a large space, so there aren’t clusters of galleries with an expansive selection from their permanent collection. Instead, they have well-curated exhibitions and I had just missed the school’s MFA exhibition, which runs for a month, rather than the week that many New York students get.

On view while I was there was, among other things, Martin Creed’s Work No. 360: About half the air in a given space (2015), which was comprised of a large gallery filled almost to capacity by silver balloons. Visitors could enter through one of two doorways and push their way through the claustrophobic mass, being disoriented and kind of pleasantly bewildered by the balloons’ power to constrict and delight. Also on view: a handsome retrospective for photographer Ilse Bing, a show of un-stretched and shaped canvases by Allan McCollum and Karen Carson, and a solo show by Michelle Handelman, with video and photography conflating vampirism, psychotherapy, and class-and-queer antagonism. The video draws from a Silent-Film-era series about Parisian thieves, called The Vampires, so one can forgive Handelman’s melodrama. It’s richly textured in a fetishistic way, and the accompanying photographs are exciting.

A few days later I took the train down to Portland, where I met up with artcritical contributor, publishing magnate, and poet extraordinaire Paul Maziar, and his friends, who showed me the nightlife — great host and hostesses. We remarked on the aesthetic qualities in the bright redness of neon lights adorning one of the construction cranes which has been expanding the city of late. Maziar’s been consuming Marcel Duchamp, so we say, “Sure, why not? Call it industrial-scale readymade sculpture.”

Next morning I left my kind hosts and took a long walk into downtown of the beautiful city, finishing up at the Portland Art Museum. The institution is currently hosting Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads: Gold (2010), which is displayed among the museum’s many galleries of Asian art and artifacts. The suite of 12 animal heads represents the Chinese calendrical zodiac, and is based on a sculpture formerly of an imperial garden outside Beijing, designed by Europeans, used by the Chinese elite, then looted by French soldiers in 1860. The scale and craftsmanship of Weiwei’s sculpture is spectacular, however, despite the didactics, I got the sense that I was missing something pretty fundamental about the subtleties of the artist’s choice of representation. Is it something about the Chinese government’s complicated relationship to Weiwei, to the nation’s own history, and the waves of European colonization and Chinese reclamation in these images? I can’t tell.

The aforementioned Asian art and artifacts galleries are really top rate. The layout of the building is labyrinthine, which can vary the experience between excited discovery and a confused, lost feeling.

Another exhibition, “Gods and Heroes: Masterpieces from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris,” collects more than 140 paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the school, from between the 15th and 19th centuries. I can have a hard time with some of the flowery, academic work that the institution produced and inspired, but it’s hard to argue with some of the works on view in this show. Albrecht Dürer’s The Vision of the Seven Candlesticks (ca. 1498), kind of made my jaw drop a little. And PAM also has a great selection of Modern and contemporary work, including a selection, on view now, of reductivist work by Robert Mangold, Dorothea Rockburne, Judy Chicago, John McCracken, and others — stuff that really gets me going. And there’s a large display of photographs, which the museum calls a “Fotofolio,” by Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, and Edward and Brett Weston and Minor White. Their silver gelatin prints of the American West made me wish to flee New York and find an abandoned mission on top of a mountain.

Also there, now closed, was a show of David Hockney’s print suite, A Rake’s Progress (1975), along with a set of prints by William Hogarth, made in 1733, on which Hockney’s sequence is based.

Full from Portland, I went back to Seattle. I took a breather and went to the Seattle Art Museum, at which the main attraction is currently “Disguise: Masks and Global African Currents,” which was a kind of unremarkable show about artists using the imagery of African masks in their work. The hanging was gimmicky and impoverished, and several of the artists felt slight and arbitrary (no Keith Sonnier?). But, next to it was a great, like, really out of sight display of actual African masks, along with archival footage of performers at a carnival in the Côte d’Ivoire. That stuff is way more exciting and intellectually engaging than much of the show’s contemporary work.

As well, a small but nonetheless excellent show, called “The Duchamp Effect,” rounded up post-War artists making use of Duchamp’s innovations. There was a lot of toilet humor and pointing at contradictions between image, language, and actuality. One very smart touch was the inclusion of a photograph by Louise Lawler, showing two artworks in a collector’s home. Lawler’s photograph shared gallery space with the two artworks it pictures: a painting by Jasper Johns and a sculpture by James Rosenquist.

I left Seattle’s piney metropolis for an excursion north, to Vancouver. Even Canada’s border is beautiful, with enormous gunnera unfurling at the edges of Peace Arch border-crossing park, and a sculpture by Daniel Mihalyo and Annie Han — a billboard-like form of negative space overlooking the Pacific inlet there. A few minutes away, Vancouver is a really, really pretty city, seemingly compacted into the natural concavity of the Salish Sea’s coast. There are tall skyscrapers, the city is sparklingly clean, and I arrived immediately after Pride weekend, with festive banners and the debris of feather boas all over the place. I mean, it’s a really beautiful city. And in Canada, HBO has its own regional programming, including mandated indigenous programs and movies, which are very cool and sort of an entertaining (if small) gesture at reconciliation after hundreds of years of genocide and oppression. I liked the movie Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013). It’s good.

There, I visited the Vancouver Art Gallery, which is hosting an enormous retrospective of Canadian sculptor Geoffrey Farmer, “How Do I Fit This Ghost in My Mouth?” I found myself thinking about Farmer’s tremendous archivist spirit, collecting and combining the pieces of National Geographic back issues, fiberglass sculptures, bits of signs, notes, tapes, vehicles, and all sorts of other things. It brought me back to a perpetual question in an era of explosive image production and distribution: is cataloguing and organizing one of the best strategies for an artist trying to cope, resist, or flow with such proliferation? I think probably yes. One small room held an archive of artist lectures and interviews on cassette tape, and invited visitors to sit and listen awhile.

On the ground floor was a great “show,” a display of works on paper from the museum’s collection, a trifle compared to the offerings that will be on view following the institution’s addition of a new space, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The works on paper, over a hundred on one large wall, were intended to entice viewers to see the benefits of the costly and overdue expansion. The next gallery over showed work from another collection in “Of Heaven and Earth: 500 Years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums,” with a handsome selection of paintings covering a spectacular historical range, while still appearing intellectually clear and to the point. Upstairs was a group show in several spaces, each artist given their own gallery. Called “Residue: The Persistence of the Real,” this exhibition of documentary photography studies the way that history is retained in images, as in Catherine Opie’s beautiful shots of Liz Taylor’s home and Geoffrey James’s absolutely just mind-blowing shots of Canada’s infamous Kingston Penitentiary, where inmates decorated the walls of their cells so ornately they could be mistaken for contemporary installation art.

Down the street, the Bill Reid Gallery shares the history and importance of First Nations’ arts, with a permanent display of work by Reid, one of Canada’s most famous contemporary indigenous craftsmen. Likewise, the museum promotes the continuing traditions of local tribes, including live, free-form Q & A with an artist working in the atrium. Sean Whonnock was there when I visited, and he told me a lot about the construction of regional iconography, about the craftsmanship of these artworks, his own life, and the traditions of his family and tribe. There’s a lot of great indigenous art and craft all over, and most of these museums had great collections, sustaining cultures that were almost completely wiped out during the preceding centuries.

Finally, back in Seattle, I hit up the city’s monthly First Thursday art walk, down at historic Pioneer Square. The galleries are, in many ways, like those in New York and anywhere else in the world: there are some you’d like to spend a lot of time in, others not so much. One major difference is the organization of openings, all on the same Thursday, with plenty of white and red wines, food, and live music. Totally alien, right? The atmosphere is festive and people are out to enjoy the scene, rather than trying to make the scene. I was taken by Greg Kucera Gallery, which had a diverse collection of works on view by self-taught artists, including Gee’s Bend quilts, Henry Darger paintings, drawings by James Castle and Bill Traylor, and so on. In the back was a show by Gregory Blackstock, who is autistic and creates large mixed-media drawings cataloguing all kinds of incidentals: dictionary definitions, sheepshank knots, flags of the world, rottweiler breeds. Blackstock was in attendance and was more open in his discussing his work than any New York artist you’ve ever met.

The whole trip, whirlwind that it was, showed me some new favorite art spots on the left coast. If you’re in the area, you’d be foolish to pass them up.

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Ai Weiwei at Galleria Continua and Tang Contemporary Art Center

June 6 to September 6, 2015
798 District, Beijing

It was clear that a distracted Ai Weiwei was in no mood for a formal interview. We met as scheduled at the Beijing East Hotel May 30th, which was to have been the opening day of his historic first solo gallery exhibition in Beijing. But given this date’s proximity to the 26th anniversary of Tiananmen Square on June 4th, the government had decided to reschedule the opening to June 6th^. This was intended to forestall the possibility of dissenters congregating in the 798 gallery district with his show as an unruly rallying point.

In spite of such tumultuous concerns, Ai was willing to talk informally for an hour. As conversation progressed his mood gradually lightened. He wanted to speak not only about the importance of the immediate exhibition, but about the direction of his art merging with architecture, including his clear-sighted view that, in the future, art will be shown in locations other than commercial art galleries. Wise, rational and open-minded, Ai’s delivery was filled with joie de vivre.

For more than two decades, Ai has invariably turned down invitations to participate in exhibitions of his work in China. Clearly, the artist’s decision constitutes a critical comment and a continuing standoff with the Chinese government, which now appears to have found a hiatus. On July 22, his passport was finally returned after being taken from him during his 2011incarceration. Taking the position of an artist/activist, Ai sees his art (and architecture) as being inseparable from everyday life – a life in which politics plays an incisive role. Since his return to Beijing in 1993, after more than twelve years in the United States, much of his practice has turned toward issues of free speech and civil rights. In addition to an ongoing struggle to promote the quality of life among ordinary people in China, he maintains a rigorous schedule in preparing major exhibitions being held outside China. These have included recent museum retrospectives in Munich’s Haus der Kunst, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC and the Brooklyn Museum, as well as forthcoming exhibitions originating this September in Melbourne and London’s Royal Academy of Arts.

Even so, the artist’s desire to secure freedom with relative autonomy as a citizen was persistently thwarted, until recently, by the government. This came to worldwide attention in 2011 when he was detained by government officials, ostensibly on charges of tax evasion, and subsequently held in isolation for 81 days. During this period his whereabouts were unknown, even to his close family. This occurred on the aftermath of an incident involving police brutality from which he received a serious, nearly fatal concussion. According to statements sent from the artist’s blog (later shut down), the officer’s attack was incited because of Ai’s relentless, outspoken critique of government culpability in the Sichuan earthquake of 2009 in which buildings of inferior construction collapsed, costing the lives of thousands of people, including over 5000 children buried in the rubble of government-built grade schools.

In the New York art world of 1970s, where I first became aware of political art, there was a presumption that an artist denounce aesthetics to become “political” – that the message would be corrupted if one permitted beauty in the work. In refreshing contrast to such a position, Ai carefully examines and edits every object produced in his sprawling self-designed studio in the Caochangdi district of Beijing. He is closely involved with his studio staff, supervising exquisitely lacquered hard wood furnishings, glazed ceramics, tree-cut assemblages, and various assisted ready-mades, among other works. Even the carefully painted porcelain sunflower seeds, of which thousands were sent to the Turbine Hall at Tate London, were personally inspected. The precision and accuracy of these works are intended to empower the authority and to affect his message.

Having closely observed the rise and fall of trends in Chinese contemporary art in relation to the global market, the artist openly resents the coverage being given to his sales (one of which recently passed the $6M mark). As a result, Ai has been forced to confront the often insipid and superficial marketing of his art – a market that runs on an ulterior track where qualitative standards are utterly usurped by the tyranny of branding (not so far removed from where the New York art market has been moving in recent years). For Ai, names and prices are secondary, if not misleading in relation to the more vital and challenging ideas that his work is striving to put forth. As he said in an interview with Der Spiegel in 2011:

My definition of art has always been the same. It is about freedom of expression, a new way of communication. It is never about exhibiting in museums or about hanging on the wall. Art should live in the heart of the people. Ordinary people should have the same ability to understand art as anybody else. I don’t think art is elite or mysterious. I don’t think anybody can separate art from politics. The intention to separate art from politics is itself a very political intention.

On the occasion of his first official gallery exhibition in China, the artist was given two adjacent 798 district galleries , Galleria Continua and Tang Contemporary Art Center. As a partial homage to his father, the famous poet Ai Qing, the artist visited the southeastern area of China, to Zhejiang and Jinhwa (his father’s town) in search of an Anhui-style building from the late Ming Dynasty. The building he found, the Wang Family Ancestral Hall, was originally from the neighboring Jianxi province. It had been destroyed during the previous century and was, in its current state, partially restored. This type of building was known in Chinese as a shitang, or community center, a kind of temple, which at one time had deep significance for Chinese people as a place to gather and converse. It took five large trucks to transport the 1500 wooden pieces of the building from Zhejiang to Beijing.

The reconstruction of the Anhui building within the interior spaces of the two adjacent galleries required the work of two teams of designers and several groups of experienced and specialized construction workers. In effect, the supporting wall between the two galleries was virtually destroyed in order to reconstruct this Ming Dynasty building intact and yet separated between  their respective spaces. This heroic endeavor recalls the monumental feats and aesthetic clarity that once characterized ancient Imperial building projects. Ai is careful to point out that all material aspects of the structure, from beams to joints, are entirely in wood. As the artist wants to show this shitang from the perspective of the present in relation to the past, he has painted decorative motifs in bright colors on various parts of the joinery. This immediately recalls Ai’s earlier painting of Neolithic vessels, which he dipped into large vats of enamel paint.

Although I had been invited to the original opening before leaving New York, my travel itinerary would not allow staying until the new opening date. Even so, the impression I gleaned of the frantic construction as to what was happening within and between the two galleries was extraordinary. The basic structure was elegantly pierced through the space from one gallery to the other. The foundational stones and beams were in place, but a lot of work still had to be done. Men were working around the clock; some took breaks, scattered amidst the construction detritus and remnants of materials, sleeping on canvas tarpaulins, uttering occasional exhausted moans.

Three days later, Ai’s shitang arose into prominence from the massive complexity of its construction. It was seen by hundreds of visitors, mostly younger Chinese, on opening day. The piece functions as a deeply potent symbol – a rite of passage one could say – lying at the core of Chinese culture today: how to exonerate the present from turmoil and pain associated with the previous century. The rebuilt edifice within a shared open space shines as a beacon of rejuvenation. It signals a new era caught in the throes of confronting the past while in pursuit of an optimistic, yet unknown future.

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@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz

September 27, 2014 to April 26, 2015
Alcatraz Island
Organized by For-Site Foundation: Art About Place

It was a rather bleak, chilly afternoon when I agreed to take the ferry to Alcatraz Island in San Francisco. More than 50 years ago, this anti-oasis served as a federal penitentiary for hardened criminals, most of whom carried life sentences. Originally built as a military base during the Civil War, by 1934 it had become a legendary hard-core prison later celebrated in Hollywood films. In 1963, less than 30 years after opening, it was shut down due to costly operating expenses that nearly exhausted the penal budget in the State of California. During the relatively brief time of its existence, the penitentiary at Alcatraz had few indigenous resources. The entire water supply was contingent on a single rain tower that provided inmates with regulated rations of water for drinking and hygiene. All foodstuffs, along with cooking utensils, clothing, blankets, and medical supplies, were transported weekly by boat. Inadequate and unreliable, generators provided electricity for the entire prison complex. This was its sole source of energy. Internal heating was virtually non-existent.

The purpose of my visit there was to view a series of site-specific installations by Chinese artist, dissident, and polymath, Ai Weiwei. The venue for this exhibition was made possible through the efforts of independent curator Cheryl Haines, who worked directly with the artist in collaboration with the For-Site Foundation in San Francisco, which provided the sponsorship for the exhibition. In addition, Haines maintained close contact with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. These two organizations were responsible for providing information on “prisoners of conscience” relative to a large installation, titled Trace, where portraits of 176 such prisoners were immortalized using 1.2 million plastic Lego bricks. Many of these were done outside China and outside the United States.

Alcatraz was accessioned as a national park in 1972, as Haines discovered, and is now operated within the public domain and therefore suggested the possibility of an exhibition space for Ai. Knowing the artist’s unrelenting concerns for human dignity and freedom of speech, she began a three-year project by setting forth the parameters whereby the artist could work on four interrelated installations. In that Ai is not permitted to travel outside of China because of his polemical position in opposition to what he believes are repressive policies instigated by his government, his persistent involvement with the exhibition occurred largely through telecommunication systems, including Skype. This was due to the fact that the artist has not been able to travel outside China since his incarceration for 81 days in 2011. He has no passport by which to travel.

While the exhibition was not a major work, it was an ambitious and moving one. It had its moments as in Trace and in the large fabric and bamboo Chinese dragon kite, With Winds. This was installed in the New Industries Building where Alcatraz prisoners once worked as they were scrutinized by armed guards. As one entered the downstairs corridor and walked the length of the “gun gallery,” one could view what many have conceded as the major work in this exhibition, given the English title Refraction. The work was an enormous assemblage in the shape of a bird’s wing constructed with recycled solar cookers used in Tibet, with accompanying cooking pots and kettles wedged between the panels. This suggested a possible solution — at very little cost — for ordinary people to live their lives without the burden of paying for electricity.

Walking from the New Industries Building (an ironic name given that it was built in the early 1940s largely for the purpose of making wartime accessories) down the slope away from where the actual prison cells were located, one got a glimpse of how this isolated island functioned in another era. The location offered an unusual but appropriate setting for Ai’s exhibition. The desire for freedom and the potential to live a qualitative life felt so utterly removed from these stark institutional premises.

Upon entering the port area, where the ferry loads visitors and tourists returning to San Francisco proper, the length of the sullen queues moved ever so slowly from the graffiti-ridden cement walls to an insipid barge. The mood was anything but euphoric. Later, I learned that there are seven times more prisoners incarcerated in the United States in comparison with any other country. This further incited the question as to how free Americans actually are, especially if they are not members of the white middle class.

This is the kind of question, I believe, that Ai’s “@Large” was seeking to raise on the grounds of Alcatraz in 2015.

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In an eerie augury of Hurricane Sandy’s onslaught, Chelsea galleries in October 2012 were full of art about disasters. Three separate exhibitions put viewers face-to-face with the calamities, natural or man-made, of recent years. Although widely varied in their tone, each beckoned viewers to consider themes of fragility, vanity, and culpability.

At Lehman Maupin, the Japanese artist Mr. used a room full of clutter to depict the horror and chaos left by his country’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The installation Metamorphosis: Give me Your Wings packed the gallery’s center with furniture, toys, books, boxes and chattering television sets. The artist covered the surrounding walls with graffiti and canvases painted in the Manga style. Teen magazines, thick with soft-focus photographs of adolescent girls, were piled and strewn everywhere.  With the focus on aspects of Japanese culture that fascinate Americans—the magazines and the Manga illustration—the installation seemed quite like an alternative comic book store that had been run through a centrifuge. Rather than mourn, I felt I was being asked to browse.

Not far away, Thomas Hirschhorn’s room-sized display Concordia, Concordia at Barbara Gladstone commemorated the recent cruise ship sinking off the coast of Italy. Entry to the main part of the gallery was blocked by floor to ceiling wreckage. With paintings on the ceiling, flat panel televisions on the floor, and lamps hung sideways from the wall, the whole scene was topsy-turvy. Skeins of unwound videotape cascaded over piles of orange life vests, and in a reminder of the film Titanic, heaps of broken plates. Seen under the glow of unshielded fluorescent lamps, the installation’s tawdry materials—brass, Styrofoam, fake wood paneling—were a poignant reminder of cruise ships’ paper-thin luxury. That Hirschhorn took a stand on his subject’s banal materialism made his pile of clutter more effective than the previous one.

Ejecting myself from the airless nightmare of the Concordia, I found momentary relief in a serene and spare arrangement of curved metal bars at Mary Boone’s Chelsea Gallery for Ai Weiwei’s installation, Forge. A quiet interplay of form and void focused thoughts on the granularity of matter and how, viewed from a distance, disconnected bits add up to solid forms. Little did I know that the bits I was looking at were actually rubble from the deadly 2008 Sichuan earthquake.  Ai’s two-part installation, which continues at Mary Boone’s midtown location) featured twisted rebars recovered from concrete school buildings that had collapsed on their young occupants’ heads.  The artist’s orchestrated recovery of the rebar, depicted in a video shown in the back of the gallery, brought dozens of volunteers together to painstakingly collect, clean, transfer, and hand-straighten thousands of pieces of the material. His bold maneuver was at once performance art, craft, political defiance. The undertaking’s communitarian ethos effectively condemned the enforced communitarianism of China’s overlords (who use the word “harmony” as a euphemism for censorship). It also, of course, helped land the artist in jail.

By making disaster art that was not itself a disaster, Ai captured his subject the more effectively. Whether his approach differed from those of Mr. or Hirschhorn as the result of artistic sensibility or culture of origin I cannot tell. Regardless, this multi-national array of disaster exhibitions—and the recent horrors of Sandy—remind us that disaster does not respect nationality. Where human beings presume themselves to be invincible, nature is there to show them otherwise.

Exhibitions discussed in this article:
Mr.: Metamorphosis: Give Me Your Wings at Lehman Maupin Gallery, September 13 – October 20, 2012, 540 West 26th Street;
Thomas Hirschhorn: Concordia, Concordia at Gladstone Gallery, September 14 – October 20 , 2012,  530 West 21st Street
Ai Weiwei: Forge at Mary Boone Gallery, October 13 to December 21, 2012, 541 West 24th Street/745 Fifth Avenue

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Michèle C. Cone,  Ana Finel-Honigman and Anthony Haden-Guest joined David Cohen to review exhibitions of Ai Weiwei, Slater Bradley, Sarah Sze, and Lola Montes Schnabel.

The post January 2012: Michèle C. Cone, Ana Finel-Honigman and Anthony Haden-Guest with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

artcritical’s The Review Panel  returns to the National Academy Museum January 27 at the new start time of 6.30 PM.  Anthony Haden-Guest is welcomed as a new voice on the panel where he joins veterans Michèle Cone and Berlin-based Ana Finel Honigman, and the program’s founder moderator David Cohen

Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds, installed in 2010 at the Tate Turbine Hall in London, has its first New York exposure at Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea where it opened January 7.  Slater Bradley is showing a video titled “Don’t Let Me Disappear” at Team in SoHo, which opened yesterday (January 12).  The panelists have also picked Sarah Sze’s ongoing exhibition, Infinite Line, at the Asia Society, consisting of a small display of older work and a large new body of work, and a show by the young expressionist painter, Lola Montes Schnabel, title “Love Before Intimacy,” at the Hole.

PLAY OUR NEW YEAR’S QUIZ AND WIN A DRAWING BY DAVID COHEN

artcritical takes this opportunity to wish readers and followers of The Review Panel a year of stimulating reading and impassioned debate.  The New Year’s Quiz at artcritical has this drawing by David Cohen as its prize.

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More than a couple of Chinese art-world colleagues warned me off writing about the plight of Ai Wei Wei, even in an American publication. At first I listened, but then felt pressure to speak out in defense of him because his fate sends a message to Chinese artists—indeed, all artists—who are courageous enough to stand up to a repressive government. Ai Wei Wei, who spent a number of years in America and, most likely, saw there the diversity of social expression and political activity while living in New York’s Lower East Side, is now detained incommunicado somewhere in China’s prison system. Although I have heard he is being charged for economic crimes, the truth is that he has had the audacity to challenge the Communist elite, who don’t take lightly his willingness to expose their faults.

Ai Wei Wei’s career has taken off in the West during the last five years; his recent installation of handmade and –painted seeds was a great success at the Tate Modern in London. The artist has used his good fortune to tell the truth to those in power, but things have not gone well for him, to say the least: recently, he was beaten up by thugs while speaking in a provincial Chinese city and had to be operated on in Germany. Now no one knows his fate, which operates as a warning to those attempting any criticism of a single-party system that has refused to reveal its oppressive excesses, which include the ten-year madness of the Cultural Revolution. As an artist friend here said, “We will not be hearing from him for a long time.” The artistic community is of course upset, but little if any dissent is issuing from Beijing; people are afraid that they too will be picked up simply for telling the truth.

I have spent a fair amount of time in China—five visits, three of which have been longer than two months—and I can say that the personal freedom of the intelligentsia is equivalent on some level to that of its Western counterpart. But there is no indication of an equal political expressiveness here, where artistic work tends toward the allegorical, in the hope that social criticism will be understood as generally human, as opposed to specifically Chinese. That works up to a point, after which the critique sadly fails, in part because the forced circumstances that engendered the art are precisely those enabled by a one-party system. In a gallery show that is now up, the (Paris-based) artist exile Huang Yong Ping is showing Leviathanation, a huge work incorporating an official railroad car with the equally outsize head of a fish. The word Leviathan can mean a sea monster in bibllcal use, but it also denotes an autocratic state. For me at least, the message is clear; however, its interpretation is never referred to in so exact a sense in Beijing. It amazes me that so transparent a visual statement is not reacted to simply because it involves a metaphor—in fact, a fish’s head. But then the hard left has never been known for the greatness of its imagination—or for its kindness toward the imaginative.

Much of contemporary art pursues the ideal of democritization, which is a complex reality in the realm of culture. It is also true that democracy is sorely needed here in China—on the more primary level of individual political expression. The art world remains worried; one curator I know would like to act but feels that she would potentially undermine her own freedom in light of the Communists’ vindictiveness. It is a sad and indeed a tired story; but it is one that is being challenged by brave individuals. I learned about Ai Wei Wei’s troubles through word of mouth and from contacts in the West. I hear that there is an attempt to put out a million-signature petition demanding his freedom. But China has not known political freedom for generations, if at all.  Facebook cannot be accessed. Very few artists have brought up the situation in my presence. Self-censorship is the worst kind of repression because it is instigated from within—usually in reaction to an external force. It would be easy to judge those who do not bring up the subject of Ai Wei Wei, but as I see it, the situation is tragic for the intellectuals here in Beijing. If they talk up, they are bound themselves to go to jail. If they remain quiet, they allow a great wrong to go unchallenged. Either choice is a kind of death.

As a result, a true opposition can be developed only outside China, where there are precedents for political action. The million-signature petition must carry forward, as well as other forms of social pressure. One hopes even for artistic protest, although whether individual outrage will ever reach those responsible for current machinations here is, frankly, to be doubted. The one comment I have heard more than once in Beijing about Ai Wei Wei has to do with his status as an artist. Why indeed is the government beating down an artist? He is a single voice, many understand. But above and beyond his existence as an artist of interest and note is his allegiance to maintaining public integrity—something that the Chinese government very much fears. His suffering, which will be considerable, is a lesson to us all—even in American democracy, increasingly a state controlled by huge corporations. The lessons are hard learned, but not beyond hope. Every time someone signs in favor of Ai Wei Wei’s freedom, he is signing in favor of his own deliverance. Now, all over the world, we need a language that will do justice to the experience of psychic and actual imprisonment. If an artist alone can challenge the Chinese Leviathan, then it is up to us in the West to support him. In fact, his defense surely becomes our own.

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The April 3 detention of internationally celebrated artist Ai Weiwei by the Chinese Government is a matter of increasing concern and indignation in the global art community.  artcritical applauds the leadership of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and other institutions working for his release and urges readers both to sign their online petition and to join protests, called by others for Sunday April 17 at 1pm at embassies and consulates of the People’s Republic around the world.

The petition is accompanied by a statement we fully endorse: “We members of the international arts community express our concern for Ai’s freedom and disappointment in China’s reluctance to live up to its promise to nurture creativity and independent thought, the keys to ‘soft power’ and cultural influence.’’

It is especially galling to see the artistic adviser to the 2008 Beijing Olympics arrested amongst hundreds of lawyers, activists and ordinary citizens in a crackdown clearly intended to stifle any spread of Jasmine revolution to China.  The charge of “economic crimes” cuts no muster, for Ai’s woes with the authorities are longstanding and political.  They are said to date back to the artist’s courageous stance on the Sichuan earthquake and its aftermath, and have already included the extraordinary spectacle of the government-ordered demolition of his landmark Shanghai studio.

While these actions are appalling, they also powerfully vindicate the idea that art and artists can actually matter in the minds of governments and the hearts of protesters.  China needs to get the message that persecuting its most high-profile artist directly undermines its Olympic glory.

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