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Ai Weiwei is hardly the first contemporary artist to be enthralled by archaeology. Old objects have probably been inspiring new works ever since the making of art began. Thanks to modern dating methods, we now know, for example, that the authors of prehistoric cave paintings sometimes returned to the same places again and again for thousands of years; their paintings, then, must have responded to the creations of their own ancestors as well as to the living animals they drew with such uncanny precision.2 Babylon, sacked by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in 689 BCE, rose again from its own ashes a century later (ca. 600–560 BCE), with new monuments, like the Ishtar Gate (now in Pergamonmuseum, Berlin), deliberately adopting forms from the past, but Nebuchadnezzar, the king who restored New Babylon, adopted these traditions in a conscious effort to proclaim his vaulting ambitions for the present.3 He meant for New Babylon to surpass its ruined predecessor, not simply to recreate what had existed before. As for the sixteenth- century Italian artists who drew the ruins of ancient Rome with such loving attention, bringing on what contemporaries called a “rebirth” of classical antiquity—the Renaissance—almost none of them would really have wanted to live in ancient times, not when doing so would have meant giving up so many conveniences of modern life: drawing paper, trousers, cherries, banks, not to mention forsaking any hope of Christian salvation. Much of the suggestive power of ancient artworks lies in their irretrievable remoteness from ourselves, those blank spaces of separation that we can fill to our heart’s content with our own mixture of longing and imagination.
The systematic study of the past through its material remnants, the discipline we now know as archaeology, can be traced back to the Italian Renaissance, to the very moment when a resurgent interest in classical antiquity also famously, and paradoxically, inspired a new revolution in the arts (just as, at virtually the same time, Song and Ming Chinese were conceiving a similarly dynamic combination of creative invention and antiquarian study). Filippo Brunelleschi may have modeled the structure of his pioneering dome for Florence Cathedral (1436) on the ancient Roman Pantheon, but he designed that structure’s steep (and very different) silhouette to set it apart as an entirely original landmark, the emblem of a vibrant new Florence. Half a century later, another Florentine, Sandro Botticelli, eagerly explored ancient Etruscan tombs, using their motifs to give his paintings a more profoundly local character, moved by the liveliness of the figures rather than, necessarily, their connection with death.4 A generation later, Raphael’s bold experiments with space and perspective in the last decade of his short life reflected ideas gathered from his intense study of ancient Roman frescoes and sculptural reliefs, but he combined those ideas in radically novel ways. If the lower half of his Transfiguration (1520) recreates the flat planes of ancient Roman sculpted bas-relief, the upper half of the same painting depicts space as a spiraling, entirely modern, vortex: a heavenly whirlwind that carries Christ upward as it presses down on the Apostles. Michelangelo drew the epic scale of his work from the majestic monuments of ancient Rome, but he quickly shifted from imitating the ancients to an all-out effort to surpass them, and contemporaries like Giorgio Vasari were delighted to confirm that Michelangelo handily won the contest.
Archaeology, on the other hand, focuses on recreating the past as it was, and because it deals with the surviving remnants of that past, it deals almost by definition with tragedy. The forces
that separate past from present are often tragic forces: at the very least the quiet sadness of mortality, but also cataclysmic disaster: from Sennacherib’s sack of Old Babylon in 689 BCE to the volcanic eruption that submerged Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 CE to the jungle-choked ruins of Tikal, swallowed up in the Mayan collapse of the tenth century CE. One of the very first archaeologists, the fifteenth-century Italian scholar and architect Leon Battista Alberti, called the end of classical antiquity the “great shipwreck” and “the injury of time.” In part it is the quixotic attempt to heal those injuries of time that lends archaeology, that life in ruins, such an aura of romance. In part, the romance lies in archaeology’s extreme exercise of curiosity—can we really deduce a human soul from a piece of discarded pottery, a temple from a triglyph? In part, again, it is the thrill of survival: we ordinary people can stand, fully alive, on the Plain of Megiddo and experience the thundering chariots of Armageddon in our imaginations, not our bodies. We can keep watch on the ramparts of Troy without fear of the flaming destruction that will follow, eat Sicilian almond pastry in the splendid baroque town of Noto knowing that in the valley beneath us, on one terrible day in 413 BCE, thirsty, desperate Athenian soldiers gulped down the bloodied waters of the Assinaros River as the cavalry of Syracuse mowed them down. But the great shipwreck can happen again at any moment, as when Islamist militants destroyed the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan in 2001, the mosques of Timbuktu in 2012, Palmyra in 2016, or when earthquakes level cities: Aleppo in 1138, Messina in 1908, Chengdu in 2008—the earthquake that would turn Ai Weiwei into an explicitly politically active artist and, because of the international extent of his influence, “the most dangerous person in China.”5
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Ai Weiwei’s personal immersion in “the injuries of time” began when he was a child, with his family’s exile in 1958 to a reeducation- through-labor camp in Heilongjiang in China’s far north (he was one year old). His father, the poet Ai Qing, was one of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them prominent intellectuals, targeted by Chairman Mao’s Anti-Rightist Campaign. The Great Leap Forward saw Ai Qing, again with his family in tow, relocated to Shihezi, a dusty town in the high desert of Xinjiang Province, where, still forbidden to write, he was assigned to clean the communal latrines. In 1966, yet another mass movement swept China: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. For the next decade, troops of wild-eyed, mostly young Red Guards attacked people and objects with the same ferocity as the Goths and Vandals who had ravaged ancient Rome almost 1,500 years earlier. Their stated targets were the “Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas; earnest rhetoric quickly gave way to savage violence. In its own way, vandalism has always included a perverse kind of inquiry among its motives; destroyers, faced with incomprehensible complexity, can at least discover how to make things stop, or, barring that, make them ugly. In this destructive sense, the ancient Romans who slaughtered people and animals in the Colosseum, forever compromising the ecosystems of North Africa, were no different from the Vandal King Genseric and the marauding hordes who fell in their turn on Rome.
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