
Vallejo Nocturno 2012- The Exhibition
From The City Paper:
The Hirshhorn Museum’s “Ai Weiwei: According to What?” is the most
highly anticipated exhibit to come to Washington in years. The show is a
collaboration with Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, where much of this work was
shown first; it follows another collaboration with the Mori on the 2006
retrospective of Hiroshi Sugimoto, a partnership that the Hirshhorn’s
chief curator, Kerry Brougher, has said made this Washington exhibit of
Ai’s work possible. Its development began before Ai’s name rocketed into
the headlines when he was incarcerated by Chinese authorities without
explanation in 2011. But given the artist’s unusual celebrity and given
the source of it, “According to What?” has special resonance. How
audiences will view it has a lot to do with the state of relations
between Washington and Beijing, and between Beijing and Ai.
Because of that context—and because the artist remains in China, his
passport revoked—Ai and Washington turns out to be a surprisingly muted
affair. It is a first-rate sculpture exhibit, one that lets the artist’s
work stand without a sea of explanatory text. Photographs tell Ai’s
life story, from 98 snapshots taken during his decade in New York
(1983–1993) to several dozen photos of his life in Beijing. Otherwise,
there is little of the explanatory, biographical text that often glues
together a retrospective of an artist of Ai’s stature. The Hirshhorn
appears to have identified a quiet grace in Ai’s work and built an
exhibit to suit. The only problem with this approach—one that,
certainly, has resulted in a surpassingly elegant exhibition—is that it
ignores the artist’s serious penchant for cacophony, which has earned
him legions of fans across the world as well as the enmity of the
Chinese government.
The quality of the work in “According to What?”—Ai’s first North
American retrospective—can’t be overstated. There is nothing here to
rival Ai’s 2010 masterpiece for the Tate Modern, an exhibit of 100
million life-size, hand-crafted, porcelain sunflower seeds. But the same
touch is present in “He Xie,” an installation of 3,200 porcelain crabs.
Presented in a large circular pile, every one is a precious object, yet
they are all virtually indistinguishable. A good deal of Ai’s sculpture
plays on the contrast between common subject and precious material,
including, at the Hirshhorn, marble sculptures of a hardhat and a
security camera. (Two things common in Ai’s life, anyway.)
The Hirshhorn might have been built for this exhibit. The scale of the
works suits the museum throughout, from the gorgeous “Teahouse,” an
installation of improbable house-like structures, to the harsh and
minimal “Straight,” an installation of 38 tons of steel rebar. Even
“Forever,” a ring of interlocking bicycle frames, fits in the more
social space of the museum’s lobby, where art almost never feels at
home.
Not every presentation decision works. One of the museum’s first
galleries features two spheroid sculptures, “Divina Proportione” (2006)
and “F Size” (2011), both made of huali wood, a favorite Qing dynasty
building material. The sculptures take the form of truncated
icosahedrons—or Buckyballs, the molecular configuration named after
architect Buckminster Fuller, who popularized the geodesic dome. (They
kind of look like hollow soccer balls.) Along the floors and walls, the
Hirshhorn has mounted dozens of photographic prints of Ai’s most famous
work: Beijing’s 2008 Olympic Stadium, which the artist designed with the
boutique architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron.
That’s a work that Ai might rather put behind him. Ai denounced the
Bird’s Nest stadium and boycotted the Olympics, condemning them as a
state tool after authorities pursued a policy of forced relocation to
make way for the games. But the connection between the prints and
spheres is reasonable enough: In Beijing, Ai runs a small architectural
firm, FAKE Design, which has completed projects in Jinhua and Beijing.
He would be aware of Fuller’s many contributions to the form and
language of architecture; in this gallery, the Hirshhorn has made that
connection tangible, if way too busy.
What’s less clear is why Chinese authorities made the decision just this
month to shut down FAKE, citing the firm’s failure to reregister for
its business license. Nor does the exhibit demonstrate why the state has
dogged Ai with charges ranging from tax evasion to bigamy after
officials released him from 81 days’ detention in 2011. It doesn’t
really explain why the state disappeared him in the first place.
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Vallejo Nocturno 2012-cube cube