Free Ai Weiwei! Exhibitions and Protests

Lisson Gallery, London with photograph of Ai Weiwei

Two exhibitions of Ai Weiwei’s work opened in London May 12 and 13 amidst his continuing detention in China. He had a brief visit with his wife on May 16,  perhaps in response to the international outcry about his arrest. We don’t know.

The first exhibition at the Lisson Gallery  had several media. First, it consisted of large  sculptures in wood and marble, most of them enlarged traditional furniture, like a chair or a moon chest or a door.

A second part of the exhibition were Han dynasty pots that had bright industrial color paints dripped over them.

The third part was a pair of videos, one showing a traditional housing area, the other a multilane freeway.

So each of these groups of works created a dialectic between historic China and contemporary life in different ways. The videos were the most straightforward, actually documenting the type of more intimate housing of traditional cities in China, and the impersonal scale and speed of modern urban China. The huge pieces of furniture were useless because they were enlarged to the point of exaggeration, except perhaps the coffin, but it was constructed at an angle that also made it useless.

The Han Dynasty pots painted with industrial paint  irrevocably altered an ancient pot with contemporary paint, much as China is altering its cultural history and landscape with contemporary development.

But of course it is not Ai Weiwei’s art that is the reason for his detention. It is his command of contemporary media like blogging and twittering.

His blog site was shut down in 2009, although he was twittering with 18 million people(!) right up to the time of his detention. Just before he was taken at an airport, he was tweeting about the arrest of intellectuals and dissidents in China, documenting their arrests. And of course, the Chinese government is really terrified of what has been happening in the Middle East with the people, social media and defiance of the government. The exhibition included some of the tweets as well as other media about his arrest.

Between the two parts of the exhibition was a wall of posters with quotes from Ai Weiwei. They gave out the posters in the exhibition and it is one of these that I took to the Venice Biennale and walked around with it.

Ai Weiwei has a second show in London in the courtyard of Somerset House, which also contains the Courtauld Gallery: a spectacular group of twelve oversized bronze zodiac heads called the Circle of Animals. They are based on an historic garden in China that was designed on the principle of a European garden in the mid 18th century.

The dragon zodiac head in the courtyard at Somerset House

The Zodiac heads were designed by an Italian artist as spouts for a water fountain. They were destroyed by Europeans in the nineteenth centur

Ai Weiwei lived in the US 1981 – 1993 when he met Allen Ginsberg in the East Village saw the ready made works of Marcel Duchamp.   Much was made of this connection in a discussion at the Somerset House about the artist. He has always been a radical in the Chinese art scene, as a part of the Sun and Stars group in the 1980s, and later. He was friends with Xu Bing in NYC as well ( more about that later). According to Alan Yentob, Creative Director of the BBC, he had an expanded notion of art and thought of himself as a readymade.  But his social conscience was always present, which I don’t consider at all Duchampian. Ironic he is not, detached he is not. When he was in the US he photographed homelessness. In China he has criticized the rapid growth and destruction of the land.
For me, the most significant formative  source for both Ai Weiwei’s courage and his political outspokenness is his childhood experiences. His father was part of the 100 Flowers Campaign betrayal, when Chinese intellectuals were encouraged to speak up to the government about how things could be improved and then were all sent off into rural detention. His father, a famous poet in China, and his family, were sent to live in the Gobi desert in primitive conditions. Apparently his father was forced to clean toilets.

It seems to me that Ai Weiwei could not stand by and have an easy life making money from his art. He must live his family’s tradition of speaking up to power and paying the price. While other Chinese artists are doing very well and keeping their mouths shut, he is speaking up for what is wrong. Is that Duchampian?? Hardly, but if his life and his social media and his art are all of a piece, there is a continuum that suggests erasing the barrier of art and life. And certainly his marble surveillance camera might be considered an homage to Duchamp’s use of everyday objects. But here there is no use of a real surveillance camera, only a marble one, there is no irony, no humor, only a heavy presence.

The interesting coincidence in London in mid May was that Xu Bing was also having an opening, at the British Museum, and a panel discussion. Xu Bing also spoke of honoring the past, his art work recreated a classical Chinese ink landscape using found materials in London, hemp, grass, some newspaper.

Xu Bing’s recreation of a classical Chinese ink painting by Wang Shimin

He created a shadow box and the found materials with a light shown through from the back created the simulation of an ink landscape.

But Xu Bing is now vice president of the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, he did not answer a question that made reference to Ai Wei Wei. He avoided all reference to politics, although he did say that the Cultural Revolution was disastrous, another period when China was destroying its cultural heritage. He also suggested that his art was a way of regenerating traditional Chinese culture.

There has been a lot more press about Ai Weiwei’s arrest in Europe than in the U.S. And at the opening press conference of the Venice Biennale, Paolo Barrata, President of  the Biennale, not known for engaging political issues ( he ignored a strike by workers at the Biennale in 2009), said. “To the Chinese – it would be wonderful to have happy news about Ai Weiwei. The exhibition goes on for six months, we are waiting.”

Torture and some salvation

Daniel Heyman‘s two part exhibition called

“Bearing Witnes” is at Linfield College in McMinnville Oregon and the White Box of the University of Oregon gives us unimaginable suffering and inhumanity in the first show depicting men recently released from Abu Ghraib, and some salvation in the second part about a program in Philadelphia for men released from prison who are being helped to reconnect to their children and their lives.

We know about Abu Ghraib, in media sound bites, and a few images, but Daniel has been face to face with men and women who have been subjected to the most unimaginable treatment that one person can perpetrate on another. He listened as they told in simple facts what had happened to them at the hands of the people in the prison. They had been released because it was found that they had done nothing at all.

As Brian Winkenweder, art historian at Linfield College,  stated in a conversation”The military machine does not work unless you are dehumanized” And he further pointed out that the people who were perpetrating the abuse were at the bottom of a huge chain of command.

It is wonderful that Heyman’s work affected Winkenweder as he is a specialist in the history of art criticism, a long way from torture in Iraq. It demonstrates the possibilities for political art that defies all restrictions.  Winkenweder calls Heyman a  teller of stories : I would counter with the idea that Heyman listens and records not stories, but brutal facts.

What we see, given that awareness of the monstrosity of the military machine, is that these innocent men were physically and emotionally violated in almost every way that is possible. It was lo tech, it was physical; it used  feces, urine, cold water, wet floors, wet mattresses, dogs, chains, beating, stress positions,  forced sex, raping of wives and daughter, raping of prisoners by both men and women, all of these acts are told by the recently released prisoners.

Heyman listened.

He wrote down what they said verbatim.

And he made portraits of the men. The gallery is a row of individual heads of men, they are dignified, and calm. It is hard to imagine surviving such abuse, but being able to at least say it must have provided some relief from the nightmare. The men are part of a class action suit against military contractors who were part of the abuse, you can’t sue the U.S. military.

In the second exhibition Heyman is listening to men who have also just come out of prison, in this case in the US. We learn not about their abuse in the prison, but the abusive circumstances of their lives, the rape of their very young mother, the murder of their very young father, their own efforts at bare survival; and then at the end we have an organization, the National Comprehensive Center for Fathers that has reached them and is offering some support.

Support for those who have been abused, who have lived at the bottom of our culture, with no resources, no opportunities. This is crucial. And Daniel in making these art works, these portrait galleries is giving us the faces and the circumstances of these individual men.

Each face is different, yellow, oranges, browns, blues, reds, and the color of face spills into changing colors of writing, the writing snakes around the head, waves in the space. The gouache colors are very strong.

Heyman listens, and the least we can do is listen also, challenging as it is to read these narratives.

Cultural Activism in a Time of Crisis, the exhibition

Entrance to the exhibition with Roger Shimomura visible opposite door

It is a time to return to blogging after the excitement of the book publication and the art exhibition. What better way than to analyze why the show “Cultural Activism in a Time of Crisis” is so exciting. As I have been giving people tours, I realized that all of these artists, whom I have been thinking about and writing about for several years for the book, are both deeply committed to social expressions and deeply committed to making strong art. Although I chose them to be in the book for that reason ( as well as the other 80 artists), seeing their work together in a fairly compact gallery space, where they speak loudly and clearly, each in a different medium and often on a different subject, underscores the power of their work. and the power of truly engaged artists to intervene in political discourses with new perspectives and new insights. In this time of perpetual visual imagery, visual artists are more important than ever to select and make more intense the subjects which we are all concerned about.

The installation, brilliantly resolved by Ken Matsudaira, the Director of the M. Rosetta Hunter Gallery at Seattle Central Community College, was very difficult because of the wide ranging aesthetics and topics, materials, and scale. We had glass, drawing, print making, paper, ceramic, painting, fabric, multi media installation and video. All of the work is on my website under www.artandpoliticsnow.com/exhibition. There are also installation shots on the website and a few pictures of the opening, and links to artists websites.

The topics addressed are maquiladora factories and their victimized workers, (Celia Munoz)  the unremembered Chinese railroad workers ( Zhi Lin), Abu Ghraib (Daniel Heyman, Selma Waldman, Deborah Lawrence), La Malinche with a new feminist perspectives (Cecilia Alvarez), civilian casualities in war (Gail Tremblay), appealing to peacemakers to prevent war ( Ellen Sollod), Chinese immigration (Flo Wong), Argentinian disappearances (Claudia Bernardi), racism (Marita Dingus), the oppressions of the separation wall between Palestine and Israel, (Larissa Sansour), the oppressions of  colonialism ( Maki Tamura) , the connection of past and present oppressions of native Americans in Alaska ( Tanis S’eiltin), the position of women in the midst of capitalist war(Deborah Lawrence),   South African violence (Kim Berman), and the pertinence of ancient Indian spirituality to our contemporary world (Lillian Pitt).

It is a big range, and each one includes unusual conceptualizations, rare insights, and new perspectives. This is political art at its best. It completely refutes the tired dismissals of shallow thinkers who seem to think that art that engages issues is somehow second to art that  is personal or is simply an assemblage of materials for their own sake. In fact those expressions are also political, in that the artists are choosing to deny that they live in a world with issues that are larger than they are, that affect them every day, that are part of who they are, even though they don’t know it. The artists in “Cultural Activism in a Time of Crisis” know these facts, they embrace not only who they are, but their place on the planet. That is the crucial act that all artists must follow today

At a recent “Conversation” sponsored by John Boylan, Seattle art critic, one participant, a young graduate student at the University of Washington, declared “there is no poetry in politics.” A young man who was attending and had just come from Wisconsin, said “Tell that to the people in Wisconsin.” In Wisconsin nobody is deluded into thinking that staring at their bellybutton is a way to stop the horrendous legislation that is being bullied through the state government. Being oblivious to the world means allowing the world to control you, more so every day. Exposure of wrongs and making visible those wrongs is what artists can do. The best ones are doing that.

Thousands of unions members protest budget cuts

When I went to Olympia to protest the budget cuts being perpetrated on the poorest, youngest, and sickest people of our state, at the expense of huge tax breaks for the wealthy, I saw some signs, some images, some log0s that were strong ( unfortunately I didn’t have a camera). The collective energy of 6000 union workers coming together was huge. But the most powerful moment for me was listening to the deep throbbing of a group of  Indian drummers. The use of art heightened the event immeasurably and connected the past and the future.

Indians in the Northwest are more and more frequently appearing at political events or just outdoor events, drumming, and reminding us of our spiritual roots, and the importance of fighting for the survival of the planet every day in some way that we can.

Nick Cave hits Seattle

The Nick Cave show at the Seattle Art Museum fills the entire set of galleries that were devoted to Picasso, lots and lots of space. His costumes made from recycled materials seem like creatures that are both playful and threatening. They are meant to be worn and we see what a difference it makes when they are in both the video in the gallery and in the performances staged last week.
The costumes worn by dancers were multicolored and hairy, so they swooped in and out like a live abstract painting. They seem playful and friendly. There was one taller brownish colored costume that one inevitably read as male for no good reason that became a type of playful bear like partner to the purple, yellow, green and shocking pink colors.
These costumes are a long way from where Nick Cave began.
I missed the press preview and all the lectures, so I refer you to Jen Graves for more information.
Here I will simply mention that the earliest costumes are made of sticks. There is a recreated one in the exhibition. The idea of the costume is to eliminate gender, race, age, all the markers of identity that can lead to prejudice. The wearer becomes an abstracted being. But a costume can also be threatening, as in the case of the Ku Klux Klan, which seems to be a lateral reference.

Here you see the entrance to the exhibition with this enormous bear.  He looms over us, but he is not scarey. One little girl declared “But there isn’t any zipper” !

But the artist is a dancer and a costume designer of extraordinary talent. We see him dancing in one video, trying to escape an entangling vine like enclosure. He fails, although he tries over and over. In another dance shown on video, with one of the stick costumes, or related to that, brown, with appendages, the figure is like a threatening apparition. It becomes the manifestation of our fears of dark creatures, and by extension our fears of African Americans. But the creature as it leaps and crouches seems to possess a power that goes beyond the real, a power that is shaman like, recalling the costumes of native healers or African so called “witch” doctors.
So wearing  these stick like costumes, no heads show, they are only shapes that evoke both magic, power, and fear.
But the costumes on display here are joyful, funny, noisy, colorful. They have a spirit of celebration. And then there are the costumes used in the performance.
I saw it at Remix, Seattle Art Museum’s celebration. The whole museum was alive with music, people making art with Romson Bustillo, people dancing, looking at art. Those famous cars with by Cai Guo Qiang with their leds of light shooting out, become part of the party scene ( in another context, I have spoken of those cars, also as an odd set of mixed references on this blog, are they exploding ? or are they simply fun? it depends on our mood).

So the spirit of the figures was amplified by New Orleans style jazz music, the sense of celebration. There was no sense of threat really, except that slight sense of the unusual that might set people off outside the art museum. Apparently, there are spontaneous performances planned for the streets as well, and that will be fun of course.
So has Nick Cave given up his idea of genderless, classless, etc. No, but now it is just fun, there is no sense of a deep political statement about racism in our society ( apparently he made the first costume at the time of the Rodney King incident). Of course, I, for one, always resist the just for fun. I am always wanting artists to change the way people think, because there is still so much prejudice going on, and it is only getting worse and worse. The entire union busting endeavor is an attack on women and minorities who are the majority in the public unions that are being targetted.
But we will give time for a party, and it is wonderful to have an African American artist featured so prominently at the museum (the Jacob Lawrence Galleries, intended to be for African American artists seem to be lagging a bit in terms of that commitment, but there is, finally, another major show there coming up soon.)

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: An Exhibition

Art and Politics Now Cultural Activism in a Time of Crisis is PUBLISHED

This was the big week. Seventy people at the launch at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle. The book is now available from Midmarch Arts Press, 300 Riverside Drive, New York City. 1 212 865 5509. Please buy from my loyal independent publisher!! It is not on Amazon!!

Art and Politics Now is published!

The book is launched!

Contemporary Native Artists

Lara Evans, art historian and artist, as well as Evergreen State College professor, has published with other authors a new book called Art in Our Lives, Native Women Artists in Dialog. She has also curated a wonderful art exhibition It’s Complicated – Art About Home.
The two together give us new perspectives on contemporary native art.  It is really exciting to have voices of a new generation. In the book, there are actually several generations, but the discussion  is based on a novel format, a seminar among the artists.
The essays are overviews of various themes, Art as Healing, Art as Struggle by Gloria J. Emerson, Gender Women and Art Making by Sherry Farrell Racette, Space Memory, Landscape Women in Native Art History by Elysia Poon, and  Crossing the Boundaries of Home and Art. by Lara Evans. The dialogue among these artist and others as the basis for the book. It is both personal and historical, spanning generations, and practices.

 It is a wonderful addition to writing on Contemporary Native American Women Artists. The essay by Sherry Farrell Racette was particularly provocative in its references to the history of tribal gender roles. I was a little surprised though that unmentioned was what I understood as a fact ( perhaps it is not) that settlers declared they had to deal with a male chief in negotiations with tribes that had been matriarchal, and that caused a major shift in the gender power relations in many tribes. Also, in the Northeast, it was the rights of Native women that inspired the suffragette movement to demand more rights for white women.

But certainly, gender roles vary from tribe to tribe and era to era. Also the value associated to various activities have been arbitrarily assigned perhaps by outsiders. Why is it necessarily less significant to cure and cook fish than to catch them? Why is bead work or basketry less significant than sand painting?

The fact is clearly stated that for these women, they had to move outside expectations and norms in order to be artists. And it is evident that their work is incredibly varied, intriguing, and complex, based on the magnificent color illustrations in the book (according to American Indian magazine, the pubication of the National Museum of the American Indian, the museum provided significant funding).

The work at the top of the post  is from the art exhibition. It is by Maria Hupfield, Flap Flap Flap 2004 plaster and paper mache. Hupfield is addressing ecological crisis with her dead birds, but their are so beautifully laid out on the floor of the gallery that it is possible to almost forget the actual subject. That edge of aesthetics and politics is crucial to this entire exhibition.

The artists are addressing intersections of native world views and mainstream. For example in one piece by Merritt Johnson, the animals are patching the Sky Dome, They are giving up their lives in order to keep the world going, A bear stands on top of a ladder offering  his skin. We on the other hand just go on with our same bad habits. In another work by Johnson, an  injured Turkey is protecting the sky. In a third she makes a reference to the BP oil spill

One of the themes of the art exhibition and the book is the changing relationship to the land for contemporary Native artists. But in spite of that the urban/reservation split is not absolute in any of these artists. They all move back and forth, between different realities, as does their art. That is the reason for the title of the exhibition “It’s complicated, Art About Home.

Perhaps the most compelling work in the exhibiton was by Kimowan Metchewais.
Goodwill 118 Edmonton, it is an innocuous image of the place where people drop off furniture for Good Will, but as Lara explained it, many native peoeple furnish their homes from this drop off. In addtion, this detailed and extraordinarly beautiful painting was done by an artist who lost the use of one whole side of his body.There are other works, videos, youtubes of Phoenix Arizona ( other peoples’ idea of home), a creation myth, a stunning pair of photographs by Sarah Sense.with an overlay of woven photographic imagery based on traditional weaving from the Chitimacha tribe who have a long tradition of basketry.
There are podcasts about the exhibition at this site.
Each of these artists both in the book and in the exhibition was previously unknown to me. How enriching to have this opportunity to expand my knowledge. Be sure to buy the book!

Alison Saar



Blood Sweat and Tears, 2005 wood, copper, bronze, paint and tar



Lunarseas: Sea of Serenity, 2007 copper, tin and wood



York:Terra Incognita, 2010 cast bronze

This is the work of Alison Saar in the exhibition Bound for Glory at Lewis and Clark College in Portland. The main commission was to create a statue of York, the African American slave that accompanied William Clark on the Lewis and Clark expedition. Saar’s sculpture is a permanent installation on the campus. Here is the main work and the back. Little is known about York. So the artist had to piece together ideas, but we know that a dry stream was named for him. His back as a map of scars with the dry stream marked is full of poignency. York is set in the midst of a group of granite rocks, each with a bronze tablet that inscribes the few words in the Expedition journals that refer to him.

York faithfully served Captain Clark, but he was not rewarded with his freedom. Clark was arrogant and selfish. In the statue York is holding a rifle, which he used to catch game during the expedition, but when they got home it was taken away from him.
This tragic story of inequality and abuse of priviledge is given dignity by Saar’s sculpture.

The work in the exhibition was extraordinay. An excellent catalog with an essay by Linda Tesner (doesn’t seem to be available to buy, they gave it out free at the gallery and would probably send you one if you asked) provides helpful insights into the art works, but these works are so strong and poignent that we cannot help but be overwhelmed by Saar’s work. I think she is acheiving a whole new level of intensity in these sculptures.

There was one odd comment made by Tesner with reference to Travelin’Light, a bronze life size man in a suit hanging upside down. To me he was obviously being lynched, but Tesner said, he was “a little down on his luck.” I read this three times to see if I had missed something!
But the rest of the book was very insightful. Lunarseas, Sea of Serenity (above) is  “speaks to introspection about how things come to mind in a quiet way, but also suggest thjat within the removed quietude of serenity one might verge on insanity …” Blood/Sweat/Tears at the top of the blog is self explanatory. There were many other really strong works as well.

Imaging Others Cultural Intersections in the Colonial Period

Look at this wonderful image! It is a detail of a print by the Japanese artist, Yoshitora in 1860 looking at an American couple who are visiting Japan, probably in order to trade. The artist is carefully depicting their clothes. He has done a wonderful job of observing  details and added his own subtle touch, like the woman in the foreground pointing, a very un Japanese gesture.

This is part of a a group of ukioy-e prints, called Yokohama-e because they are all based on observation of foreigners in Yokohama by Japanese artists. The work is from the collection of Professor Lenore Metrick-Chen, art history professor at Drake University. It is part of a fascinating exhibition that she has organized with Dr. John Monroe, a history professor at Iowa State University.
“Imaging Others, Cultural Intersections in the Colonial Period” is  at the Anderson Gallery, Drake University,

It includes art work from Africa, China, and Japan, as well as photographs made in the U.S. in the late nineteenth century of “others”.

The very first piece in the gallery was an African sculpture of a person with a painted white face and anglo features. It set the tone for  the surprises of the exhibition, that criss cross cultural influences to the point where all clear distinctions of gender, place, style, and power, are called into question as we look at the work.

Some of the images are familiar subjects, like Chinese railroad workers in America, and the Columbian Exposition of 1892. But then we see two men who were posing in an African display relaxing as they are not being African symbols, but just taking a break and relaxing, and of course they are just regular people.

The works span from 19c to the present. Two of my favorites were the carvings of African Missionaries, who were incredible stiff and straight looking, not a sensuous curve to be seen anywhere.

It is a stark contrast to this figure of Mami Wata, a fabulous carving based on a religion of the late nineteenth century in the collection of John Monroe, history professor at Iowa State University. The image started from a German lithograph of a circus snake charmer and was transformed into a powerful religious figure in Nigeria who went in for exotic foreign accouterments.Mami Wata worship has spread all over Africa and the African diaspora..

In the US we always look out, and assume we are the dominating culture of the world, that what we have to offer is superior and desirable to everyone else. . But in fact what we send out is alien, perhaps unwanted, and corrosive. But the cultures that we visit ourselves on send back our intrusions through cultural acts that transform our ideas with  irony, humor, and a sense of our foibles that we ourselves do not recognize..

This exhibition is entirely refreshing, and its catalog, written in collaboration with students’ questions about colonialism,  is a great format: .
Near the end,  Dr. John Monroe comments :
 “If we just reject racist images from the past without trying to work out what social, imaginative or cultural functions they were supposed to serve – which involves placing them in a broader context- we end up with less of an understanding of how and why racism emerges. It’s never something that pops up in isolation: it always exists as part of a complicated web of attitudes and assumptions that need to be untangled. That of course goes for the present as well as the past.”