Page 146 - AI WEIWEI CAHIERS D ART

WW thinks really big. He may at times employ up to a hundred people, from unskilled workers to the finest craftsmen you can find in China. He may allow a thousand and one “migrant workers” (for documenta 12) to enter into the process of art-making.
This work for documenta (Fairytale, 2007) reveals an artistic strategy that will increasingly define WW’s oeuvre. His own greatest strength, WW says upfront, is his ability “to get himself into an awkward situation”—that’s how a contradiction can arise that then calls for resolution or at least control. But this process of gaining control mustn’t be easily managed. His art must always also imply the possibility of a major mishap or else WW doesn’t feel sufficiently challenged. To take the example of Fairytale: how do you turn into a work of art the idea of introducing 1001 Chinese people to a reality that’s completely different from their own? The project posed innumerable logistical challenges such as the selection of the population sample, passports, visas, travel and housing arrangements, etc. Then, this was very important, something was to remain: the myth. Because it was neither possible nor even intended that anyone would ever get to see in its entirety this monstrous Fairytale running on many thousands of schedules. Furthermore, a great deal was supposed to happen via the Internet—WW turned it into a social medium long before the hype over social media. And then something also had to take physical form; whence the 1001 chairs were there to open up additional spaces and lend a poetic aspect to the work. Fragments of this strategy are also recognizable in the labor-intensive research actions around the Wenchuan earthquake (Remembrance, 2008–, among others) and in the large-scale installation Sunflower Seeds at the Tate Modern (2010). They all share this mobilization of immense human resources across the entire People’s Republic in the shortest periods of time, inconceivable without the Internet. It will hardly be a controversial claim to say that any other artist would have rejected the Tate’s request in January 2010 to do his show in the giant Turbine Hall not in 2012, as originally scheduled, but much earlier, in October of that same year. Assuming that one of the most prestigious, and hence also riskiest, propositions in the art world required a physically manifest work, shipping it from China and installing it alone would take three months, leaving WW six months, as of January 2010, to develop an idea, draw up a concept, and produce the work! So a 1,600 workers needed to be hired to mold, paint, fire, and glaze the more than one hundred million Sunflower Seeds. It’s crazy if you think about it. So where did WW get such a massive appetite for risk of the kind that it takes to launch such major projects, whose basic design makes them virtually incalculable? It is an aspect of his inner gambler, a no less essential part of WW’s personality than his rationalism, that was also what made him leave for the US with $30 in his pocket—plus his spiritual mentor Duchamp similarly spent the last ten years of life doing nothing but playing chess. It’s interesting to know in this context that, back in the 1980s, a limousine sent from a casino in Atlantic City pulled up every weekend in front of the basement den he shared with his colleagues. They had quite a reputation as gamblers. The savvy gambler adopts several routines: he learns to enjoy getting himself into a process whose outcome is determined to be uncertain; to be dead serious about playing the game while knowing that it’s only a game; and to be always aware of himself so that he will never lose sight of the limitations of his hand. To this day, nothing and no one has been able to break WW’s cool.
It would be surprising if WW were to accept much of this. He is a natural-born contrarian. He will, just like in his art, turn an argument on its head, deconstruct it to elegantly prove its invalidity, or make it shine by polishing it in an unintelligible transfiguration process and all at lightning speed. And when he decides to lay down his armor of irony and sarcasm, he can discourse brilliantly on anything—blessed with not having to unlearn a formal education. And it is his brilliant arguing that may ultimately gain him the most attention, certainly within China: with his blog he reaches millions of Chinese readers. On his blog he never relents in laying bare the weaknesses of the political system of China. He comments without any restraint and in no unclear terms, on subjects such as the dire consequences of mismanagement before and after the Sichuan earthquake, exposing police investigation practices in Shanghai in the Yang Jia case (which started with a trifle and led to the killing of six policemen) and ranging across broad issues of concern to the civil society of China.
But then came May 28, 2009, the day that the government cut him off from his domestic audience, which numbered in the millions: the authorities shut down his blogs. He subsequently launched a series of microblogs on the Chinese Twitter system, which limits each entry to 140 characters. The Internet police always rapidly identified and blocked them. Today, WW is active on the global Twitter. Yet his microblogging—the imposed brevity very much suits his preference for bold simplification and the frequently brute force of his words— is accessible from within China only to those who know how to overcome the “Great Firewall,” which prevents Chinese users from navigating the uncensored global space of the Internet.
So what was it that earned him the de-facto charge of subversion (because the investigators never framed it as such in legal terms) against the authority of the state? There is one word that appears in WW’s writings and in his discourse in general with significantly greater frequency than any other: to argue, argument. He positively lives to argue, he says. A leaf of grass, a tree: everything has its own form of existence—and arguing is his. More to the point, he is interested in the rational argument and how to find the best possible argument. Even in his art: it is the site of an unintelligible process of transfiguration we may roughly describe as a sort of short circuit in the cogitative apparatus of the creative thinker; but when art works out well, it will always entail an argument. Yet arguments can prevail only in a very particular ecosystem, one in which freedom of opinion prevails. That’s exactly the fault line separating his worldview from that of Official China: the communists, to use his term, never argue, not even when they appear to. They decree. Status and decrees—rather than democracy’s freedom and social contract—have defined the Chinese system of government for millennia, and the current “dictatorship of the people” isn’t any different. WW offers the interrogations after his arrest in April 2011 as an example: the investigators acted as though they were playing chess against him, but turned out to be quite unprofessional chess players, enacting a new set of rules every three moves to make absolutely sure they would win—and precisely because they always win, they can’t learn anything by playing!
Little wonder, then, that the interrogations didn’t really address WW’s actions or methodically explore the different facets of his person. He was to be convicted of tax fraud, bigamy, and other misdeeds, as the national news agency Xinhua reported, but WW
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