Ai Weiwei: Personal Art as Public Art

Last September in London, two days after we arrived for vacation, Ai Weiwei and fellow artist Anish Kapoor (known in America for his Cloud Gate sculpture, or “The Bean,” in Chicago) led an eight-mile walk from the Royal Academy of Arts on Piccadilly to Kapoor’s artwork “Orbit” in Olympic Park at Stratford. The refugee problem seemed to have suddenly exploded upon Europe, and the two artists believed they had to make a statement in support of the refugees. They were joined by about 100 fellow marchers and, according to The Guardian, about as many journalists.

Fragments (2005)

“Everything is art. Everything is politics,” Ai Weiwei once said. He knows of what he speaks. His life and his art have often been ensnared in Chinese government politics. The march across London was two days before the Ai Weiwei exhibition opened at the Royal Academy. Only a few weeks before had the Chinese government granted him the right to travel to London for the exhibition.

Janet standing in front of Tree (2009-2010)

My introduction to Ai Weiwei and his art occurred in the bookshop of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Only vaguely aware of the China/Ai Weiwei controversy, I happened upon his Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants 2006-2009 during a visit in 2011. In 2006, the Chinese government had encouraged him to start a blog, and he did. What no one expected was how popular it would become, both in China and around the world. And the government certainly didn’t expect the artist to be as candid (and opinionated) as he was.

In 2009, Chinese authorities shut down his blog. Since then, he’s endured arrest, surveillance, and harassment, none of which has stopped him from speaking out. Ai Weiwei is not the only artist or citizen who’s been persecuted by the Chinese government (consider the current crackdown on Christian churches in the country), but he is likely the best known globally.

Cao, or Grass (2014)

My first direct exposure to Ai Weiwei’s art was at Blenheim Palace in 2014. The palace of the Duke of Marlborough is one of those architectural treasures that are simply awe-inspiring – the house itself is seven acres under roof. It’s also the birthplace of Winston Churchill, and he’s buried nearby at St. Martin’s Church in Bladon.

In 2014, Ai Weiwei had an exhibition at Blenheim, but it was not in special show galleries. A friend met us at the Oxford train station and together we drove to Blenheim. Instead, it was spread throughout the property, from a huge chandelier in the entrance foyer to ceramic crabs in one of the ornate 18^th century furnished rooms to a ceramic video camera in the library. It was jarring to see the juxtaposition of Ai Weiwei’s art with the architecture and furnishings of the palace, but that was likely the point.

His art is simultaneously personal and public, and “public” is often synonymous with “political.” It’s meant to call attention, not only to the artist but what the artist is saying. It’s often jarring and provocative but is always thought-provoking.

Bicycle Chandelier (2015)

The 2015 Ai Weiwei exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London included some of the artworks from Blenheim but added a considerable number of others. The show as classic Ai Weiwei: the ceramic crabs from Blenheim were clustered in a corner; one room contained hundreds of pieces of rebar assembled in a wave; a poster of names and ages recorded the lives of the children who died when a school collapsed during the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan. (I took the four photos included here during my visit to the exhibition.)

He often uses discarded and waste materials, a kind of artistic recycling project. Several of the pieces at the Royal Academy were representative of that, using castoff metal, wood and other materials.

The Royal Academy exhibition catalog

The exhibition catalog, simply entitled Ai Weiwei, is an excellent introduction to both the artist and the exhibition. In addition to the book collecting his blog posts, two other helpful resources are Ai Weiwei Speaks, an extensive interview with curator and writer Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Weiwei-isms edited by Larry Warsh, a collection of his statements on art, freedom, government, the digital world, history, and other topics.

Ai Weiwei’s statements for the refugees continue. Recently, he wrapped the columns of the Berlin Concert Hall with the discarded life preservers used by hundreds of Syrian refugees fleeing on boats.

“My activism is part of me,” he says. “ If my art has anything to do with me, then my activism is part of my art.” For Ai Weiwei, the personal is the public is the political, because that is where he comes from.

Top photograph: Ai Weiwei demonstrating what the artist does bet – looking and seeing.

Daniel Maclise and the Waterloo Cartoon

Artist Daniel Maclise (1806-1870) was one of the significant artists of the Victorian period in Britain, but he is mostly known today (at least, outside of Britain) for his drawings in the original editions of The Cricket on the Hearth and The Chimes by Charles Dickens, as well as a portrait of Dickens painted in 1839 (see below). The two had met in 1836, introduced by their mutual friend, John Forster.

Daneil Maclise, 1857

Dickens was the better known at the time they met, his reputation buoyed by the popularity of his Sketches by Boz. But by 1840, Maclise’s reputation was growing as well, particularly with his acceptance into the Royal Academy of Arts. He painted numerous works throughout his lifetime, but his two monumental achievements were two large murals in the houses of Parliament, “The Meeting of Wellington and Blucher” (1858) and “The Death of Nelson” (1864).

The two paintings are oil on glass, a technique Maclise learned in Berlin after being urged by Prince Albert (Queen Victoria’s husband) to study it. For each, though, he created monumental drawings, which were referred to as “cartoons.”

For the 200^th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, the Royal Academy exhibited the Waterloo cartoon, which is almost 10 feet tall and more than 42 feet wide. When I saw it in London last fall, it was somewhat eclipsed by the big Ai Weiwei exhibition that had just gotten underway. But I found my way to the side gallery where the cartoon was exhibited, through a doorway from the gift shop past some stairs and then across a small atrium. There was no entry fee if you had a ticket to Ai Weiwei.

The cartoon depicts the meeting General Blucher of the Prussian Army and the Duke of Wellington, shortly after Napoleon has been defeated outside Brussels. It includes a range of officers and soldiers from both sides, living, wounded and dying.

The drawing’s size is overwhelming. It’s a work of art all of its own, essentially in black and sepia tones. I had the good fortune of being there when a small group was led into the room for a special short lecture on the cartoon by one of the Academy’s curators. No one minded that I stayed to listen.

The exhibit of the cartoon closed January 3, but the Royal Academy has a special web site that allows you to explore the drawing and its background. The Academy has also published a short book, Daniel Maclise: The Waterloo Cartoon, by Annette Wickham and Mark Murray-Flutter. Murray-Flutter is the senior curator of sporting firearms and weapons at the Royal Armouries in Leeds. Wickham is the curator of works on paper at the Royal Academy, and the one whose short lecture I was able to hear. As short as it is (all of 48 pages, including illustrations), the book provides considerable details about Maclise and the creation of the drawing and the painting.

Maclise died in 1870 after a distinguished artistic career. Charles Dickens gave one of the eulogies at the banquet held in Maclise’s memory at the Royal Academy of Arts. It was Dickens’ last public appearance; a few weeks later, he, too, was dead.

Illustration: The Waterloo Cartoon by Daniel Maclise, on display at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

Art Matters: Asking the Questions No One Can Ask

We recently watched a German mini-series (English subtitles) called Generation War, the story of five young friends in Berlin and what happens to them from 1941 to 1946. Two are brothers, soldiers in the Wehrmacht, sent east to fight the Russians. One girl is a café singer with dreams of a singing career. Her boyfriend is a Jewish tailor with his own dreams of fashion design. And the fifth wants to be a nurse, “representing German women” and helping to tend the soldiers wounded at the front.

It was a riveting series. When it first aired in Germany in 2013, it caused no end of controversy, including a protest by the Polish ambassador over the anti-Semitic depiction of Polish partisans fighting the Nazis. Overall, the series renewed a public conversation lying rather dormant over German war guilt.

The series, and the conversation it inspired in Germany, might not have been possible without the paintings of Anselm Kiefer.

Breaking of the Vessels by Anselm Kiefer (1990)

Until 2014, the sum total of my knowledge of Kiefer and his art was limited to a multi-media sculpture in the St. Louis Art Museum, entitled “Breaking of the Vessels” (photograph above). Few St. Louisans know the work’s official title, but ask anyone who’s been to the art museum “Where can I find the broken glass?” and they know exactly what’s being sought. It’s currently in the main entry hall of the museum. Kiefer created it in 1990.

Last year, I was able to see a major exhibition of Kiefer’s work at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (“Breaking of the Vessels’ wasn’t included; I can’t imagine anyone shipping all that broken glass, and there’s a lot of broken glass). His work is overwhelming and often overpowering. It was the kind of exhibition, and the kind of art, you can leave as a changed person. I walked out with the exhibition catalog and a biography of the artist.

Kiefer was born in 1945, not the most auspicious time to be a baby in the wreckage of Nazi Germany. He grew up in southwestern Germany, and graduated from the University of Freiburg in 1969; he began his studies in law and romance languages but switched to painting. Through a series of art installations and also artworks presented as books, the artist asked the question that no one in the German art world was asking or even wanted to ask: what does it mean to be a German artist after the Third Reich?

Anselm Kiefer

Kiefer’s art essentially forced Germans to consider that question. It was part of a broader question: What does it mean to be a German after the Third Reich? That was the conversation Kiefer started. And it was a conversation that had to happen, or Germany and Germans would have forever lived in the dark shadow, and the dark sin, that was Nazism.

The Royal Academy exhibition included numerous striking works: A large oil and acrylic painting entitled “Interior,” representing a rather decayed and ruined version of Albert Speer’s Mosaic Room in Hitler’s New Reich Chancellery; “Man in the Forest,” a man in a nightshirt holding a burning bush in the deep forest; and “Iron Path,” showing railroad tracks through a muddy, gray landscape (railroad tracks have a special meaning in our understanding of Nazi history).

This is what art can do, and this is one of the reasons why art matters. It isn’t just about beauty and the creative act. Art can take us to places we need to go, but that may be politically or culturally difficult if not impossible. Art can force us to acknowledge that “there’s an elephant in the room.” And art can keep asking the questions, which is what Kiefer continues to do with his art today.

More on Anselm Kiefer:

Anselm Kiefer by Matthew Biro provides a good overview of the artist’s works and development.

Anselm Kiefer by Richard Davey and Kathleen Soriano, the book produced for the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Related to the theme “Art Matters:”

What I Learned from a 400-Year-Old Painting

The High Calling has a community linkup with the theme of “Art Matters.” To see what others have to see, please visit The High Calling.

Top painting: “Interior,” oil, acrylic and paper on canvas by Anselm Kiefer, 1981; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.