Page 51 - AI WEIWEI CAHIERS D ART

mixed together, each one an individual, all part of a collective. The parallels with society itself are clear enough; objects that are well on their way to becoming historical relics, before becoming downright archaeological, nonetheless contain, and preserve, an essential humanity. Both Grapes and Stools were displayed at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles in the fall of 2018, together with another series of panels that ingeniously combines three of Ai Weiwei’s longstanding—and apparently incongruous—obsessions: twelve signs of the Zodiac originally from the Yuanmingyuan, LEGO blocks, and a series of photographs in which the artist lofts his middle finger at famous locations around the world.
Strictly speaking, the photographs in this series, wryly entitled Study of Perspective (1995–) probably qualify as selfies, although selfies did not exist yet when he began taking them in the 1990s, and the images portray not his face, but rather his left hand and part of his arm (in the meantime, his right hand is busy taking the picture).20 The first photo was taken at the White House in Washington D.C., in 1995. In 1997 he cocked his finger in Tiananmen Square, aimed straight at the Gate of Heavenly Peace, carefully posed alongside the gigantic painting of Chairman Mao. He followed with photographic flip-offs of, among other monuments, the Colosseum (see p. 44–45), the Eiffel Tower, the White House, London’s Houses of Parliament, the Berlin Reichstag, the Shanghai skyline, the Sydney Opera House, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Spain’s Valle de los Caídos, Trump Tower in New York (made in 2016), and his own studio. Sometimes the camera focuses on his finger, more often it fixes on the background.
In turn, these photographic middle fingers have spawned versions in other media: a life-size cast of his gesticulating hand in rhodium electroplated onto urethane resin (2017, available in 1,000 copies) and a series of delicate bamboo and paper middle fingers created for a Paris department store window display in 2015. The targets of this perpetual sendup are obvious: Filippo Brunelleschi, who invented one-point perspective in the early fifteenth century; the world’s tourists, ever ready to snap a photograph before they actually use their eyes; and authority. One authority, the government of the People’s Republic of China, is not amused. The Study of Perspective taken in Tiananmen Square is banned within the country’s borders.21 Of all these significant sites, only the Colosseum is an archaeological ruin, but then Rome, a city dominated by ruins in a way that few others in the world are, also symbolizes the power of empire, and that empire’s notorious excesses. The Colosseum, as an arena used exclusively for gory games, thus fits perfectly into the series’ theme of insolence in the face of corrupt authority. Besides, Ai Weiwei’s most immediately recognizable alternative for Rome would have been giving the finger to St. Peter’s Basilica.
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In 2003, five years before the Summer Olympics in China, Ai Weiwei began to serve as an artistic consultant for the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron, which had won the commission to design the Beijing National Stadium in time for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Inspired by Chinese porcelain, the
distinctive openwork structure quickly garnered a new name, the “Bird’s Nest.” By the time the Games opened in August 2008, however, Ai Weiwei had distanced himself entirely from the enterprise, including the Chinese government’s draconian “cleanup” efforts to remove cats, dogs, and inconvenient humans out of the city. He had turned instead to scathing criticism of what had happened in May of the Olympic year, when a deadly earthquake struck the province of Sichuan, killing 69,000 people and leaving millions homeless. Because the tremor struck in the early afternoon, thousands of schoolchildren died when their shoddily constructed school buildings collapsed around them, victims of the corruption that enabled builders to cut unconscionable corners. Weiwei’s dramatic photographs from the epicenter show children’s backpacks scattered among the ruins of their classroom (see p. 39-40). The backpacks and rubble have become their own kind of archaeological record.22 Reliable accounts of the damage were difficult to come by, so Ai Weiwei, an enthusiastic blogger, used the Internet to set up his own Citizens’ Investigation, and visited the damaged areas in person. As he recalled in a 2018 podcast:
“I had a show coming up in Munich and decided to cover the Haus der Kunst museum’s facade with one sentence from a victim’s mother. She had written to me: “All I want is to let the world remember she had been living happily for seven years.” This beautiful little girl was just the same as any other: she liked to dance, to sing. But suddenly—because of the negligence of the government, the corruption in construction—there wasn’t a safe building for her to go to school in. The work was called Remembering. Given all our social and political investigations, it was about how, in Chinese society, with censorship and control, individuals can still take action to defend their very, very fragile rights... for Remembering, I covered the whole of the Haus der Kunst’s facade with children’s backpacks, spelling out in Chinese what that mother had told me [“She lived happily for seven years in this world.”] The design and the colours were inspired by Toys R Us.”23
On May 5, 2009, the Chinese government released an official death toll for the schoolchildren: 5,335. Twenty days later, with much less fanfare, the authorities shut down Ai Weiwei’s blog permanently.24 Remembering opened in Munich the following October, hanging from a façade that may have been designed, in part, by Adolf Hitler.25 The 9,000 backpacks used for the installation were new, but their evocation of the backpacks he saw strewn on the ground in Sichuan is unmistakable. From this moment onwards, the artist turned more explicitly toward overt political engagement, and his relationship with the Chinese government became more openly adversarial.
Another event of 2009 also caught Ai Weiwei’s attention; in February, Pierre Bergé, the partner of the recently deceased designer Yves Saint Laurent, put two Chinese bronzes up for auction at Christie’s Paris: the heads of a rat and a rabbit, relics of the Zodiac Fountain that had once formed the centerpiece of the Western Mansions of the Yuanmingyuan. Slotted into stone bodies, the heads had been designed by the Jesuit artist Giuseppe Castiglione to act as waterspouts for the famous water clock designed by his fellow Jesuit Michel Benoist: each animal of the Zodiac spat a stream of water for the two-hour period of the day it was believed to govern,
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