Global Anonymity

 

 

JR has a show at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, part of an overarching project called "Inside Out."  JR is a famous street artist from Paris, and simply typing in that bio feels kind of icky to me.  Not sure why, except that his whole gig seems to be about a sort of utopian populism in which getting your picture taken and plastered somewhere in the city constitutes -- well, I'm not sure what.  The whole endeavor is predicated on the fact that fame, no matter how it is instituted, is worth it.  The kind of fame JR deals in, sweet and esoteric and empowering, is actually the same kind of fame that is dealt out via the internet, TV, radio, and any other platform.  Your image becomes your identity.  So what is the difference between getting your photo taken by JR and his project-workers and getting it taken by paparazzi or even doing a little selfy on Instagram?  In the case of JR's project, it must be that his presence as a "famous street artist from Paris" is what makes it different.  Plus he's not making a shitload of money from the image.  Plus the image is not of someone who is already famous.  Plus it takes the concept of "selfy" and rarifies it, turns it into a status beyond self-promotion. 

 

In the case above, JR and his project workers pasted the portraits they took on the concrete around the fountain at Fountain Square.  So, I guess, people could walk on them while enjoying them.

 

Which brings me to Inside Out, the overarching project.  This is from the Inside Out website, from its "about" page:

 

"On March 2, 2011, JR won the TED prize at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and called for the creation of a global participatory art project with the potential to change the world. This project is called INSIDE OUT. Inspired by JR’s large‐format street "pastings," INSIDE OUT gives everyone the opportunity to share their portrait and make a statement for what they stand for. It is a global platform for people to share their untold stories and transform messages of personal identity into works of public art.  Each INSIDE OUT group action around the world is documented, archived and exhibited online. Over 120,000 people from more than 108 countries have participated.  The INSIDE OUT project has traveled from Ecuador to Nepal, from Mexico to Palestine, inspiring group actions on varied themes such as hope, diversity, gender-based violence, climate change..."

A project that is built around being "a global platform for people to share their untold stories and transform messages of personal identity into works of public art" looks kind of odd when executed like the picture above.  The portraits become plastered litter on the ground, peeling away from the weather and from people actually walking on the faces.  No messages are delivered this way, I don't think.  When I was looking at all the faces I just thought about the faces of missing children on milk cartons or on bulletin boards in Wal-Mart:  an anonymity intervenes.  You can't help that.  When people's images are grouped and plastered on the ground there's a sort of unintended irony, a message about the uselessness of portraiture. How does having your picture taken and then pasted on the ground with other pictures of people inspire group actions around "hope, diversity, gender-based violence, climate change"?   

Or maybe the art happens when the project happens?  When people are having their photos taken, and everyone is having a good time?  Is that the art?  Maybe the end result is just a weak echo of what actually occurred? 

Still trying to figure it out. 

I saw the Ai Weiwei retrospective at the Indianapolis Museum of Art earlier this year, and I was a lot more impressed with the way he blended art and activism.  In one elegant, epic piece he and his project-workers pounded out miles of rebar to form ocean-waves of meaning.  The rebar came from the shoddily-constructed schoolhouses in Chinese villages where kids died during an earthquake in 2008.  And in the ether inside the museum was a recorded voice reading off the names of the dead.   There's an intended irony here of course, and a seriousness about how anonymity creates throw-away lives, but then also hearing those names and seeing that repurposed rebar becomes a celestial experience:  both aesthetic and political, without indulging in fame or even rhetoric.

I don't know.  I guess you shouldn't compare the two.  But I am. 

Piano Strings

Ai Weiwei's "According to What" (currently at the Indianapolis Museum of Art) is pure perfection.  There's an Apple Store consumerist clarity to the whole thing, a clean, sleek fetishism that somehow becomes spiritual in its carefulness.  Weiwei is obviously a perfectionist, a craftsman, and a genius.  His story is told of course in the show because it has to be.  He's currently unable to leave China because of who he is and what he's done as an activist and political prisoner.  However, that biography of activism and  humanitarianism is not the biography Weiwei seems to want us to focus on.  In corresponding interviews and quotes throughout the show, he tries to reconfigure, even apologize for, his activism, for the sake of having people see and think about his art without the gloss and crutches of heroism.  It's the objects he makes that transcend biography and sanctity and even thought.  They are inscrutable, somehow cosmic, and just plain gorgeous.  The prime example is this flourish of rusty rebar pictured above.  The back-story is horrendous:  hundreds of Chinese school-children were killed in a 2008 earthquake.  The school buildings the children were in were made on the cheap, increasing the death toll.  The Chinese government has tried to cover up all of this, but Weiwei uses his visual intelligence as both testimony and transcendence.  The walls surrouding the rebar are covered in the school-children names.  The rebar used in the construction of the demolished buildings has been systemically hammered and stretched back into original longitudes, and Wewei arranges them in the gallery to mimic Seismographic readouts, oceans waves, governmental graphs, piano strings, rust-red lines of consciousness merging into amnesia... 

There's nothing you can say or do in response to what he's done here except  thank him for this proverb of both profundity and disruption.  When I walked around and stared at this installation I felt like I was leaving my body.  Art often can't get past itself, its own meanings and histories and languages, but here it has.  Weiwei has found a way to escape aesthetics through being an aesthete.  His focus provides relief from confrontation while his technique and style confront and confound.  He has created a place of pilgrimage.  And in the background there's a recorded voice saying each of the dead school-children's names.  Weiwei is not a preacher here.  He is an artist giving us an image and a moment that stretch out into eternity.  

Ai Weiwei: Don't Let It Be

I write and think a lot about "outsider artists."  I ran across an essay about Ai Weiwei yesterday and I have been thinking about his status both as an artist and activist, and how his art/activism created for him an identity that he now can literally not escape.  Weiwei is an "outsider artist," even though he is pedigreed and championed, and is shown all over the world.  Weiwei has become one of China's most visible "disappeareds."  He was detained April 3 by Chinese officials, and has not been heard from since. 

His art is humorous, sneaky, and Duchampian.  The political has given Weiwei a reason to be pissed and allows his work a vicious, smart-assed strength and validity, but he uses an aesthetic approach to both question authority and poke fun at himself as an Artist.  (Witness the perfect "Coca Cola 'Han Dynsasty'" urn above, as well as the straightforward beauty of giving the finger to the White House, part of a series of photographs that include giving the finger to the Eiffel Tower and Tiananmen Square, among other landmarks.)  His work reminds me of Jeff Koons if Jeff Koons gave a shit.

Weiwei returned to China in 1993 after going to art school in the US.  In his own country he is a prisoner for pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.  His art won't let it be.  And even though he is well-known and one of China's most celebrated artists, he is an outcast.  

"Outsider art" in this case has something to do with what artists are expected to do and be.  Weiwei's bravery, I'm sure, has been duly noted, but what I find fascinating is his need to do the art he does in a country that would rather silence him than tolerate him.  This need seems to come from a very pure place.  Maybe that's a definition of "outsider art" I can deal with:  art that needs to come from a pure place.