The concept of a human being, of a person, of mind and body,
of belief and memory and imagination, of feelings and emotions and good and
evil, are not normally considered to be theoretical concepts. They are not
concepts we can abandon after the manner of the luminous ether, or phlogiston.
They are used all the time, in our lives, atheoritically. The availability of
these concepts gives shape to our subjective experience. Through using them, we
are able to form articulate expression. The concepts we choose to regard as atheoretical
makes us what we are.
Weiwei takes the atheoritical objects of our physical
reality –the equivalent of these most basic philosophical concepts –and he does
things to disturb us at a profound level. He says that although we think these
objects are atheoritical, they are not. The reality we have treated for
ourselves is contingent –it does not have to be this way. I is arbitrary. There
is no inevitability to human society and culture. It is, at one level, absurd.
The ordinary things that we fill our lives with –the shoes, the chairs, the
tables –are the incarnations of a particular way of thinking and seeing, a way
of thinking that just happens, for the time being, to be ascendant. Marcel Duchamp caused people to ask ‘What Iis Art?’
Ali Weiwei causes people to ask ‘What is reality?’ And just as with his blogs,
where for eight hours a day he would add his words to the endless stream of the
internet, so too with his art he heaves his strange new creations into the ever
broadening river of reality, hoping that by doing so he will alter its course and change its volume and
depth.
After his only New York show in 1988, his work dried up. He
moved many times and every time he moved he dumped what little work he
produced. But he didn’t stop thinking of himself as an artist. The abiding
lesson he took from Duchamp was that being an artist was above living as an
artist, rather than producing some product, some work of art for a gallery, or
even for himself.
Weiwei’s father Ai Qing, one of China’s most popular poets during the revolutionary era and friends with Mao, became a pariah and was exiled to the countryside where he was forced to clean toilets. He came home – a hole-in the ground-exhausted every night, covered in shit; he lost the sight of one eye and on several occasions he tried to commit suicide. Asked how his father survived that period, Weiwei said: ‘Every day my father put all his life into his job as a toilet cleaner, applying all his strength and intelligence to the demeaning task, meticulously laying the sand and cleaning the holes, and by the end everything would be immaculate, all the sand in place, Weiwei still says that this was the greatest gift his father gave him: the example that if one is always clear and precise in thought, always sincere, then even the most humble task, even a task you have been given to grind you down and humiliate you entirely, can be dignified and redeemed in the end.
ReplyDelete"Often my creative life has seemed like a long tunnel, dark and damp. And sometimes I wondered whether I could live through it. But I did!" - -- Ai Qing
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