Month: February 2015

Is Ai Weiwei an Artist?

This week the New School for Social Research will host a conference in New York City entitled “The Fear of Art.” The keynote address will be delivered (on video) by Ai Weiwei, the Chinese dissident world renowned as a “contemporary artist” and “political activist.”

Ai’s reputation as a political dissident is undoubtedly well founded. It derives in large measure from his courageous activity in response to the horrific 2008 Sichuan earthquake that killed thousands of his fellow Chinese, including countless schoolchildren. In support of parents who blamed the government’s shoddy construction methods for needless deaths in the province’s schools, Ai provided an online forum on his blog for the Sichuan Earthquake Names Project. Defying government stonewalling, it served to publicize the names of deceased students throughout Sichuan province whose identity had been uncovered by an unofficial group of researchers and volunteers. Ai’s high-profile activism is largely credited with pressuring the government to release accurate figures on the death toll, which it had attempted to downplay.

But is Ai Weiwei really an artist?

That question can best be answered by a clear-eyed consideration of the work he has described as the most emotionally meaningful to him—his Snake Bag installation.

Inspired by the Sichuan earthquake, it consists of 360 grey and black backpacks joined together to simulate a 15-meter-long snake. The piece vividly represents a snake. Yet it does not function as a traditional work of sculpture would—that is, by embodying its meaning in what is visually represented. It instead belongs to the spurious postmodernist genre of “conceptual art.”

As such, its meaning cannot be directly grasped or even guessed from the object itself. Who would think to connect a snake with the Sichuan (or any other) earthquake? When one looks closely, one can see that the snake is cleverly composed of backpacks. Yet even then, how would one guess that the backpacks were meant to refer to students killed in the earthquake? One wouldn’t. The piece’s meaning is conveyed by accompanying verbal accounts, not by the work itself.

Contrast that with undisputed political art of the past—works such as Francisco Goya’s Third of May  

or Elizabeth Catlett’s And a Special Fear for My Loved Ones.

One might not recognize the specific historic event that inspired the Third of May, for example. Yet the image movingly conveys the brutal terror inflicted by a merciless firing squad. And like all true art, it therefore has significance far beyond one moment in history. So, too, Catlett’s stark image of a lynched black man, sprawled beneath the feet of his executioners, chillingly embodies the horror and inhumanity of such an event, regardless of the particular circumstances.

Why is the postmodernist genre of “conceptual art”—to which Ai Weiwei’s Snake Bag belongs—“spurious” in my view? Because it originated as one of many anti-art gestures in the 1960s, whose very inventor explicitly recognized it as something other than “art.” It is one of many ironies of today’s artworld that virtually the only “contemporary artists” who are taken seriously are those working in such anti-art genres!

Cy Twombly in Mr. Morgan's House?

Among other trends I deplore in Who Says That’s Art? is the postmodernist artworld’s growing incursion into institutions devoted to world-class private collections of the past. Such incursions—in clear violation of the founders’ tastes—are achieved by directors and curators bent at all costs on introducing “contemporary art” (a deceptive term encompassing only anti-traditional, “avant-garde” work). They could not do so without the complicity of trustees, however—some of whom collect such work. Still worse, financial support for exhibiting this work of dubious artistic value often comes from the dealers who trade in it.

Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil [more], which closed last week at the Morgan Library & Museum, is symptomatic of this lamentable trend. So much was wrong about it that I hardly know where to begin. I’m hard pressed to say which is worse, for example—the execrable work? or the inane curatorial glosses upon it?

The show’s featured work was Twombly’s “monumental” Treatise on the Veil—a 33-foot-wide expanse of gray house paint, relieved only by a strip of thin white lines. “Monumental” properly refers to more than mere size, however; it also connotes importance—significance. The significance of Cy Twombly (1928-2011) we’re told, is as “one of the most important artists to emerge in the wake of Abstract Expressionism.” What is his work noted for? Its “rich repertoire of marks, scrawls, scribbles, doodles, and scratches”—a contradiction in terms if ever there were one.

We gain a sense of that “rich repertoire” from the series of preparatory “drawings” that flanked Treatise on the Veil at the Morgan. These indeed offer “a fascinating window into the artist’s creative process.” One such “drawing” was glossed as follows:

[Twombly’s] folded strips, . . . smudges, and illegible scrawls create a rich and layered surface and reveal the artist’s pleasure in the process of making. Note, for instance, the use of different kinds of tape [used to fasten the folded strips].

I’m tempted to add: I’m not making this up—cliché though it may be.

The introductory wall text for the Twombly exhibition informed visitors that Treatise on the Veil was inspired by a “musical” piece entitled The Veil of Orpheus, by the French composer Pierre Henry. If you fail to discern the “increasingly lyrical feel” the Morgan curator imputed to Twombly’s work, never mind. You won’t hear it in Henry’s musique concrète either.

Finally, readers of Who Says That’s Art? should not be surprised to learn that partial funding for the Twombly exhibition was provided by none other than the Gagosian Gallery—Twombly’s dealer. Asked by the Gagosian’s director, Mark Francis, what prompted the exhibition, Morgan curator Isabelle Dervaux explained that it fits into the museum’s decade-long program of exhibiting the work of twentieth-century artists “for whom drawing was an important medium and who have made a particular contribution to its history.” (See the upcoming Embracing Modernism: Ten Years of Drawings Acquisitions.)

Twombly’s “marks, scrawls, scribbles, doodles, and scratches” may be Dervaux’s idea of drawing, but they were surely not Mr. Morgan’s. The trustees of the Morgan should hang their heads in shame at this latest travesty of his legacy.

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Note: For an appreciative review that outdoes in inanity even the Morgan curator’s glosses, see “Cy Twombly’s Remarkable Treatise,” Hyperallergic, December 21, 2014.