MCLC: Ai Weiwei: wonderful dissent, terrible artist (1)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Lucas Klein <LRKlein at cityu.edu.hk>
Subject: Ai Weiwei: wonderful dissent, terrible artist (1)
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Jed Perl writes: "once upon a time Tatlin, Malevich, and El Lissitzky
imagined that they might unite radical art and radical politics." In the
circles of American poetry I travel in, The New Republic is known to match
liberal politics with conservative aesthetics (in the same circles, those
liberal politics are often themselves seen as pretty conservative). I
haven’t paid much attention to its art criticism, but this piece by Jed
Perl (who himself is known as rather stodgy in his tastes) demonstrates
that the same may be true in visual art, too.

Here's an example of Perl's art historical conservatism: "If the scale of
a work and the way the work is produced are irrelevant to its meaning or
its content, then what on earth is a work of art? Isn't a work of art by
its very nature a matter of particulars, of size and scale, of who does
what and how?" This seems like a question he might have wanted to ask Sol
Lewitt or other conceptual artists forty or fifty years ago. There's
always the question, Would Ai Weiwei be so famous if not for his stance
against the Chinese Communist Party? But the flip-side of that is, Would
Ai Weiwei's identity as an artist be criticized, undermined, or
second-guessed if he weren't Chinese?

I'm not suggesting that political virtue and artistic value are the same
(I've posted reviews to this list specifically stating that they're not).
But here's how it works: Art Review magazine listed him as the most
influential person in the art world in 2011
(http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2011/10/13/ai-weiwei-on-top-of-the-art-
world/). Maybe you think he's influential for his politics rather than for
his art, but then again, I can think of no other Chinese person who has
ever been considered most influential in the world in his or her métier
while alive; Mo Yan, Gao Xingjian, Bei Dao, Lu Xun, and Li Bai have never
been considered the most influential writers in the world, and hey,
Chairman Mao wasn’t even the most influential Communist in the world! For
some, what's influential about Ai Weiwei's art is that he does not want to
define his artwork only by what can be easily put on display, but rather
that his life (also on display for more reasons than one) is his artwork.

This doesn’t mean everything he does is good. I certainly don’t respond to
all his work (the appeals to the government from many mothers following
the Wenchuan earthquake, framed and hung on the wall at the Hong Kong
International Art Fair, where I saw it last May, did not move me
aesthetically, and I found his Gangnam video stupid and indulgent), but my
own take is, actually, that Ai Weiwei is a much more interesting artist
than he is a dissident. I haven’t read all his tweets or collected
writings, or even seen Never Sorry (so this is limited; please write in if
you think my judgment is hasty), but my sense is that as a political
thinker he's a one-trick pony, saying no more or less than the Party is
bad. I have seen no systematic analysis or developed perspective, but
rather sometimes who will attack from left or right depending on what he
thinks the problem is. That's fine, but I don’t think it makes a
compelling dissident (Liu Xiaobo, on the other hand, whom I certainly
don’t agree with all the time, has a consistent Liberal standpoint; a more
developed perspective gives him more range as a dissident). In Ai Weiwei's
artworks, however, I see him engaging much more fully with the depth and
breadth of the Chinese cultural and political identity, and what that
means for, as John Berger put it (quoted in Perl's piece), the "style he
inherits, the conventions he must obey, [and] his prescribed or freely
chosen subject matter." I don’t think he can articulate his aesthetics
very well (many artists cannot), but even in the poorly lit, undersized
images of his sculptures on the New Republic webpage (as if consciously
laid out to appear diminutive), I see craft and concept combined in ways I
find not only interesting and intriguing, but beautiful.

Lucas