Thursday, June 13, 2013

Biennale 2013: Ai Weiwei in church of Sant'Antonin


In 2011 the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, a frequent critic of his country's government and human rights abuses, was arrested under only the vaguest of charges (which were belatedly "explained" as being that of tax evasion) and held in a small room in a secret location for 81 days, during which time he was subjected to the most intimate and constant surveillance. For those 81 days he was never alone--two guards always beside him, always watching him--and the lights in his room were kept burning 24/7.

Ai's new work Disposition, on view until September at the usually closed church of Sant'Antonin in Castello, is his first detailed account of his days of captivity. Seeing it just a day after a poll was released in the US showing that a majority of respondents (56%) had no problem with unfettered government surveillance (in violation of the Constitution), I found it particularly troubling. 

The six detailed less-than-life-size dioramas are contained in an equal number of large dark weathered steel boxes, sharp-angled and blank except for the same identical door (with same room number), a small viewing window on one side, and one or two small rectangular viewing skylights on top. The work requires that each of its viewers indulge in a bit of surveillance him- or herself, peering through small openings to get a glimpse of what had been, prior to this exhibit, kept entirely out of sight.

Ideally, the boxes would have been made of lead, for its sense of heavy suffocating impenetrability, but the dimensions and surface of the boxes approximate a similar sense (with the obvious added advantage of being portable). The scenes inside of how Ai spent each of his days in detention are claustrophobic, and become more so the longer you look at them--and the longer you think about them after leaving the exhibit.

The work was created specifically for this site of Sant'Antonin, which remains--though closed and almost never the site of a mass--a consecrated church. And Ai makes explicit reference to the site with the acronym with which he describes the six scenes: Supper, Accusers, Cleansing, Ritual, Entropy, Doubt. Perhaps he means to suggest that in a Surveillance State The Lives of the Artists are prone to become too much like The Lives of the Saints, with persecution and even martyrdom the common themes. However, I didn't find myself thinking of artists in particular while I peered inside the six boxes, but of all the anonymous others--who have never lived in New York City, as Ai did for 12 years, nor even left their home countries--who have been, and are, subjected to similar treatment or worse, and who disappear without a trace.  

Of course the treatment to which Ai was subjected in his 81 days hidden away in detention was not merely surveillance, but torture.

Unfortunately, too many polls of Americans in recent years have shown a majority of respondents have no problem with that either.   








16 comments:

  1. Hi

    My wife and I just watched a program on Ai Weiwei
    and it was quite unsettling. In watching it and looking at your post I did think of how much worse it was for the the many people who are not protected even slightly by celebrity who can vanish without a trace. And I also find it disheatening that we seem to be becoming complicit in our own imprisonment was governments worldwide Canada included creating greater levels of surveillance and a greater muzzling of free speech, scientific enquiry and reasoned discussion. I am quite surprised by the use of this like venue for the exhibit which looks very powerful. Thanks for sharing this.

    Guy

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    1. Thanks for your thoughts, Guy, I've heard about a documentary on Ai but have yet to see it. I know very little about Ai, but after reading something on him in the Guardian yesterday, I noticed how many commenters on it regarded him as a much better self-promoter than artist. As you say, his celebrity gives him a special status, but I've been wondering if his art-star celebrity should matter to us when we look at this specific piece. It certainly didn't prevent you, after watching the program on him, from reflecting on those beyond him not so fortunate as he is. In this sense, art-star or not, isn't something about him still useful to giving us a sense of difficult things? I don't know. As for those in North America & elsewhere who blithely give up their constitutional rights--out of fear, ignorance of history & of the world--I don't know what to say... But creating an educational system oriented only toward taking tests and job prep, rather than critical thought, seems likely only to increase this blind obedience. Of course, I suspect that's the point.

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  2. A moving and clever exposition which shows his ritual humiliation. I hope it's still there when we come for the Salute festival in November.

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    1. The woman I spoke to in the church watching over the exhibit, who seemed to work for (or with) the church, as she knew so much about it and put me on a mailing list for a tour of it, told me it was coming down in September. I hope for your sake, Andrew, that somehow she's wrong, or I misheard, as most of the rest of the Biennale goes until late November. It's worth seeing.

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  3. Un p'tit tour à San Antonin vaudra la peine en juillet...
    Merci de nous présenter les évènements de la Biennale, cela organisera mes périples dans la Cité.
    Martine de sclos

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    1. I'm happy to think that such posts might be useful to someone like you, Martine, who is planning to visit. There's certainly a lot to see, and I hope to put up more posts on Biennale exhibitions. Thanks for you comment.

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  4. It's strange no one pities the guys who had to stand for hours and see Ai poop and sleep. I think they are all victims in these scenes.

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  5. You mean like you pity the Nazi soldiers, Sashha?

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    1. I pity all the soldiers, Andrew.
      Can I make a request, Andrew?
      Could you please abstain from addressing me in this blog, Andrew?

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    2. I also wondered about the soldiers, as it seemed a particularly grueling assignment. Was it one that was given to the "best" soldiers--meaning the worst in terms of human rights: the most obedient, the most willing to be as brutal as ordered? Or were some "bad" soldiers also mixed into the two-man teams? That is, those who, in the opinion of their superiors, needed to be "toughened up", to be shown just how far they needed to be willing to go if they were going to survive in the military, if they weren't, that is, going to find themselves in Ai's place?

      I understand the allusion to Nazis as our most prominent "test cases" of the place or possibility of acts of conscience within a brutal regime, but it seems that the more time I spent looking at those pieces the more I couldn't help but think about how suffocating & psychologically-loaded it was for everyone involved. (Though I won't, like a certain US president, ever be found placing wreaths upon any Nazi soldier tombstones.)

      Without making excuses or intending any kind of praise, I might as well admit that, ultimately, it's easier for me to imagine how a soldier can be brought around to countenancing even the worst atrocities than it is for me to understand how a comfortable suburbanite--who's more likely to be killed by a lightning strike than a terrorist--can blithely support illegal policies of torture from his or her safe comfortable entitled distance.

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    3. I'm 95% sure all this story is fictional and is just another episode of Ai’s self-promotion: the arrangements are too elaborate and look as something that is born in the mind of modern artist, not prison administrator.
      If the authorities deny the occurrence no one will be surprised – that’s exactly what is expected from the oppressors. And Ai’s got a new yarn to spin before the gullible audience.

      There are many examples of people inventing the lies that make them look more interesting – and make them money. Maybe you’ve heard of a certain Nikolai Lilin whose fake memoir Educazione Siberiana was recently made into a film with John Malkovich. He also wrote the book where he tells of his experiences as a sniper in some elite platoon in Chechnya. Well, before emigrating to Italy he never was in Siberia, in Chechnya, he didn’t serve in the army. Now he lives outside Milano and tells the public that he is a member of a clan of Siberian career criminals, the urkas, tells about their legacy and mores, Irving Welsh makes an idiot of himself praising at his The Guardian article these urkas as the prophets that can save the human race.

      When asked directly are his books a fantasy Lilin becomes ambiguous but admits that he is giving the public what the people want (to be impressed and entertained not caring too much about the truth) and that’s not a bad way to earn his daily bread.

      I think Ai also gives the public what is expected. These 6 display boxes transport his tall tale into the material realm, act like a sort of confirmation, they are not too gruesome, they are even funny – corpulent and almost amused Ai, mannequin–like soldiers, nothing really bad can happen here.

      And nothing did happen. Probably Ai spent these 81 days at some fat farm in Bali and then decided to have an additional bonus from his lost pounds and the confinement prescribed by his dietologist.

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    4. I suspect you're intentionally being a bit hyperbolic, Sasha, as from what I've seen the Chinese authorities haven't denied detaining Ai for 81 days and have asserted, instead, that they had good cause to do so. In any case, though I'd heard of Ai, I know none of his work, nor anything about him before seeing this piece. After seeing the piece, and reading a very little bit about him, I find that a lot of people have a strong dislike and distrust of him. I was lucky enough to be able to see it without knowing his "international art star" persona, and I can say that I was not comfortable with the SACRED acronym for this work, and puzzled over whether it even made any sense in terms of the work itself. I don't think it does, though if other people (like one young Italian woman I spoke with who worked at the church) want to run with it, it's fine with me. For me, though, "spirituality" these days is (to paraphrase an old saying about patriotism) all too often the first refuge of a scoundrel. I "got" the whole stations of the cross theme and found it silly enough to focus instead on other things--and other people than Ai himself, the celebrity. But it sounds like you find him as tiresome as I find, say, Bono, and his own Messiah-complex.

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  6. What a nightmare! Sweat and mess oneself. Shame inhuman regime!

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  7. Thanks for your comments Signore. I think in retrospect my Nazi comment was rather crass. We don't have enforced national service anymore so it's hard for us to understand how 'we're just carrying out orders' becomes the recipe for survival. As you say there are no winners in Ai's situation here.

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    1. Well, you didn't offend me at all, Andrew. I remember hearing when I was a kid that the draft would be ended in the US and thinking how marvelous that was. I've since come to believe that the military realized that the economy was undergoing such rapid changes from the early '70s on (in terms of decent-paying job opportunities for people without college degrees, for example) that there was no longer any need for the government to enforce compulsory service, the economy would do it all by itself (another aspect of that vaunted "invisible hand of the marketplace"?). It's worked out quite well in the US: as the better-off no longer have to worry about being called upon to serve in the military, there's far less opposition to even the most wrong-headed and/or deceptive uses of military force (few college protests etc). For the most part, the invisible underclass is designated to do the dirty work, and no one has to bother thinking about the cost to them.

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