Page 56 - AI WEIWEI CAHIERS D ART

a Europe physically devastated by airborne bombs in the Second World War, and that experience, they affirm, underlies their joint preoccupation with destruction, memory, history, and civilization.31 After meeting at the École nationale supérieure des arts decoratifs in Paris, they began to work together in 1966; Anne would later say that they had so little experience on their own that it was natural to work together. From 1967 to 1971 they lived in Rome, and traveled as well to Cambodia, where the ruins of Angkor Wat struck a deep emotional chord.32 Their first significant project was a huge reconstruction of Ostia Antica, the ancient port of Rome (1972), an entire ruined city recreated in miniature. Unlike Pompeii, buried in a flash by volcanic lapilli, Ostia met a gentler end: it fell victim to a changing shoreline. As the centuries progressed, and the muddy river known as the “blonde Tiber” continued to deposit silt at its mouth, the port grew more and more distant from the sea, and was finally abandoned, and then gradually buried beneath the mud.
The Poiriers followed their reconstruction of Ostia with Domus Aurea (1976–77, see p. 53), inspired by the ruins of the Emperor Nero’s Golden House, using terracotta to mimic Roman brick and charcoal for the soil, and supplying these fictive archaeological sites with fictive archaeologists’ notebooks.
In 1978 they created Ruines d’Égypte, an Egyptian-themed centerpiece (surtout de table) in white Sèvres porcelain with gilt highlights, a direct riposte to Napoleon’s immense Service Égyptienne, a set of seventy-two painted plates (see p. xx) and architectural centerpieces commissioned from the same Sèvres factory in 1810–12, as a present for his ex-wife Josephine (she complained about its late delivery and severe design and sent it back to the factory).33 The centerpiece of the Service Égyptienne presents intact structures, whereas its painted plates drew on the Emperor’s vast illustrated publication, the Description de l’Égypte, which recorded the monuments of ancient Egypt in their actual state. The Poiriers’s surtout, as its name implies, presents Egypt in ruins: on one side a Pyramid of Giza partially stripped of its stones, on the opposite side a ruined statue of Amenhotep III, one of a famous pair known by later generations as the “Colossi of Memnon.” In the center, two dilapidated—but exquisitely rendered—colonnades, with incised hieroglyphic inscriptions and gold tracery, flank a mirror that mimics a reflecting pool.
Paysage Foudroyé (Lightning-Struck Landscape, 1982–84) featured another room-size rendering of an ancient classical city, with bricks and columns of terracotta and burnt cork, on a ground of glittering black charcoal granules that look like volcanic glass. Photographs of the Paysage Foudroyé usually show it in natural light in a white-walled gallery space, but when it was exhibited in 1984 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in California, the exhibition space was painted black, to reveal how the work itself glowed with tiny red lights, scattered among the sculpted ruins like still-smoldering coals. Like the Ruines de l’Égypte, the Poiriers’s blasted settlement huddles around a mirror-smooth lake, its placid surface disturbed only by the presence of a huge metal arrowhead stabbing deep into the earth: the thunderbolt of Zeus. This beautiful city, for its sins, has been destroyed by the gods. As with Pompeii or Sodom, not a single living soul has been spared the cataclysm.
Alep (2015) is the most recent of their ruined cityscapes, now laid out with the help of Google Earth. Aleppo is an ancient city, of
course, but the ruination the Poiriers record in this work is not injury inflicted in times long ago, but rather the terrible toll of the ongoing war in Syria.
The Poiriers have also worked on a colossal scale, notably with disintegrating or toppled classical columns in various media (all rendered in the ancient Greek style as a series of cylindrical drums rather than Roman monoliths): the startling slate-gray concrete Colonne (1984) that seems to be coming apart alongside the motorway between Clermont-Ferrand and St. Etienne; the steel Exegi Monumenum Aere Perennius of 1988 in Prato, Italy, whose title, a line from the Roman poet Horace, declares: “I created a monument more lasting than bronze” (and of course steel is more durable than bronze, but Horace was talking about his poetry!); and the gently disintegrating steel Tuscan column of Memoria Historiae (1989) in Munich. They have also used fragments of outsize classical statues to dramatic effect, as in the Fontaine des Géants (1985), a public fountain in the Tonkin Quarter of Villeurbanne (Lyon), where the familiar bolt of Zeus, in bronze, rises triumphantly above a pile of marble rubble. Some of the pieces, uncannily, bear outsize human features. The ancient Greeks regarded Zeus as a new god, who came to power by conquering the previous generation of divinities, the Titans, and imprisoning them beneath the earth. On the whole, people regarded the change as an improvement in the state of the world; the gods were a good deal more refined than their gigantic parents. The Fontaine des Géants, with its well-managed waters, suggests that the refinements of civility are delightful, but come at a price.
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For the Polish sculptor Igor Mitoraj (1944–2014), antiquity also comes to us irrevocably ruined. His figures, like those of the Poiriers, are emphatically classical, but they are never complete; like theirs, they seem to have undergone the same injuries of time as ancient works of art. Although his works now appear in many places, the most effective of all his exhibitions may have been the 2011 display of sculptures in bronze and stone among the ruined Greek temples of Agrigento, on the southern coast of Sicily (see pp. 50–51). The reddish, iron-rich limestone of the location provided a vivid contrast to the patinated verdigris of the bronze statues, all the more so in the early spring when the almond trees were in bloom. For all their sturdy durability, both the ancient temples and the modern sculptures, especially when seen together, conveyed a sense of the same heartbreaking evanescence as the pure white almond flowers. In front of the Temple of Juno, Hermanos (2010) portrayed the divine twins Castor and Pollux as a pair of hollow, disembodied heads, cheek to cheek, their half-closed eyes placing them on the border between sleep and death. According to myth, Castor was immortal, but Pollux was not; Mitoraj gives Castor’s face an upright position and a pained expression, while Pollux lies back in the peaceful sleep of death. At the summit of the long ridge where the ancient city raised its gigantic temples to attract the scrutiny of passing ships, a Fallen Icarus (2011) lies splayed on his side, legless, broken-winged, half-buried in the earth. Daedalus, his father, was a marvelous craftsman held prisoner on the island of
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