Page 57 - AI WEIWEI CAHIERS D ART

Crete. Eventually Daedalus devised a way for them both to fly away on wings made of wood, wax, and feathers. As he fitted wings to his son’s shoulders, the father reminded the boy to fly carefully, but Icarus, of course, like any teenager, ignored the parental advice. Flying out of control, he soared higher and higher, until he came so close to the sun that his wax wings melted and the boy plummeted to his death. The tale of Icarus must have expressed a widespread fear: he was but one of several mythic Greek boys who fell victim to the perils of reckless driving: Apollo’s son Phaethon (the name means “Flaming”) borrowed his father’s sun-chariot and drove so wildly that Zeus blasted him out of the sky with a thunderbolt. At a crossroads between Thebes and Delphi, young Oedipus met a king in a chariot who imperiously ordered him out of the way. Furious, Oedipus killed the man in one of the world’s first recorded instances of road rage, sometime around 1300 BCE; the king, to the hero’s eternal misfortune, turned out to be his own father. In Mitoraj’s sculpture as in Greek myth, pride and beauty have grown great only to be broken by superhuman forces and ground into dust. And yet the pride and beauty of these heroic Greeks and these marvelous sculptures persist even in their ruin, just as pride and beauty still glow from the derelict temples of Agrigento. Their coarse limestone forms were covered once with gleaming stucco, glittering with the twinkle of marble dust, their Doric details picked out in striking dashes of red and blue paint. The wind has long since scoured the temples back to their ruddy, rocky cores, so that they look more than ever as if they have risen naturally from the earth. The exhibition created such a seamless connection between ancient and contemporary that the sculptures looked as plausibly ancient as the buildings around them, and the temples no less strikingly modern.34
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The Czech sculptor Ivan Theimer (1944–) also draws conspicuously on archaeological forms; thus he modeled his Monument to Human and Citizen Rights (1985) in the Champ de Mars, Paris, on an ancient Egyptian mastaba and adorned it with two bronze obelisks just like the entrance to an ancient Egyptian temple. The monument, however, was commissioned to commemorate a much more recent event: the bicentenary of the French Revolution. By using such ancient forms, Theimer pleads the visual case that these rights, articulated only two centuries earlier, have existed for a far greater span of human history. Like Mitoraj, he often enlivens his larger bronzes with intricate details: animals, figures, symbols. In 2008, several venues in Florence exhibited a literal “Forest of Obelisks” (Foresta degli Obelischi) by this artist, most of them in bronze, fancifully decorated with tiny, detailed three-dimensional figures.35 With their extravagant opulence and dense symbolism, they seemed perfectly at home in the late sixteenth-century settings of the Pitti Palace, Uffizi, and Boboli Gardens, places that show how the early modern passion for ancient art and architecture only inspired contemporary artists to greater feats of wild invention.
The ancient past has always set people, especially artists, to dreaming, from Phidias in the 440s BCE imagining the primeval days
of Athens—and creating the Parthenon sculptures to depict them— to Piranesi’s phantasmagoric visions of Rome: ancient, modern, imaginary. One of the texts that forms part of Ai Weiwei’s Life Cycle quotes the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, who understands the real point of it all:
Recognize yourself in she and he Who are not like you and me.
Exploring the past, like any other travel, like art, and like literature, has greatly helped us to recognize ourselves in others. That is the true power of these things, to bring light into the house of dust.
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