In 1995 Ai Weiwei held up an historical Chinese language ceramic vessel, opened his arms to let it go, and stood there because it shattered. His new exhibition about craft and fakery features a latest remake of Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn in Lego. It’s spectacular how the black, white and gray Lego bricks create shadowy Warholian photographs of the artist in three phases of smashing a masterpiece.
I really feel obliged to clarify. However I can’t, actually. I don’t really know what's intelligent about smashing an archaeological treasure – the Han dynasty dominated China when the Roman Empire dominated Europe – so I'll quote the exhibition information as an alternative: the “transformative act” of destroying a 2,000-year-old murals (remodeling it into little tiny items, I assume) “drew consideration to the Chinese language authorities’s widespread destruction of the nation’s heritage”.
And there you could have this exhibition in a nutshell: a show of typically amusing however superficial artwork that we're urged to understand as “vital” due to the artist’s unquestionably heroic political acts. Ai Weiwei is a real hero of free speech, braver than most of us will ever be, and – in his tireless campaigning for refugees – compassionate, too. I like him deeply. However this exhibition made me significantly doubt whether or not he is an efficient artist.
The issue along with his new model of Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn is that he needs to have his cake and smash it. The alleged campaigning, crucial level is the direct reverse of what it really makes us really feel. Seeing him smash an urn, we giggle. We don’t ponder the erosion of China’s heritage. As a substitute we get pleasure from seeing it occur earlier than our eyes. And remaking the unique images in Lego simply accentuates that celebration of irony, freedom, the throwaway trendy world.
I feel even that's an overreading. The gesture is – actually – throwaway. For on this present it typically appears Ai Weiwei is best at throwing ideas within the air than clarifying what he means by them, as they crash to earth.
The Lego shares a gallery with old school wood-framed show instances containing a group of historical artwork from China that Ai Weiwei purchased in 2020. It’s a mixture of kinds and durations, together with a buckled-up picture of a crouching hare in crimson sandstone and a sensual damaged limestone Buddha. The artist claims at the least 5 of those apparently time-hallowed sculptures are trendy fakes. For the forgery enterprise is so refined in modern China it's remodeling the historic report.
The gallery factors out the “fakes”. For what it’s price I feel they do look dodgy. Their surfaces are cleaner and sharper. The indicators of age seem synthetic. However maybe Ai Weiwei is taking part in with my thoughts, presenting the actual as faux, the faux as actual.
If solely I cared. The parable of authenticity, the fascination of the faux – that is the small change of postmodernism that has been round for many years now. As with smashing a Han urn, mixing actual and faux historical Chinese language artwork simply will get in the best way of any likelihood, as a westerner, I may need of responding aesthetically to this artwork. We reside in a complete world of inauthentic replicas. It's not in any respect daring or memorable to level that out, once more.
Not less than when Damien Hirst celebrates the inauthentic he does it on a colossal scale in his unhealthy style epic museum of pretend treasures, The Wreck of the Unbelievable. However I believe snooty, cosy Kettle’s Yard wouldn’t contact Damien with a surgical glove on the tip of a bargepole. This exhibition is boring as a result of its urge to impress is consistently checked by an insistence on Ai Weiwei’s ethical excellence.
I can't consider Ai Weiwei has put his title to a set of blue and white porcelain plates with infantile work of refugees on them. A helicopter buzzing a crowd! A ship full of folks – painted on a porcelain plate! It’s the form of low cost, straightforward “gesture” I’d count on of Grayson Perry. Although which may be unfair – at the least Perry aspires to satire. These well-meaning platters are merely mawkish and nostalgic. I really feel offended to have my misery on the therapy of refugees pandered to on this means.
One unhappy chance is that Ai Weiwei has the identical downside now as dissident writers who fled communist Europe within the Seventies or 80s. The actual that means and energy of his artwork lay within the sheer braveness of his opposition to China’s dictatorial state. In exile, he's adrift. Among the artwork right here muddies his beforehand clear stance for freedom by implying democracy is simply as unfree as a totalitarian state. Surveillance Digital camera and Plinth is a marble duplicate of a safety digital camera – it is likely to be anyplace, from Beijing to Cambridge metropolis centre. However the that means of those objects certainly will depend on how they're used, why and the place.
Anyway, the marble is overstated and artistically heavy. There are different on a regular basis objects imitated in stone – a marble bathroom roll, a jade intercourse toy and smartphone. Humorous for a second, however so what? Their meanings stay within the shallow finish. Marcel Duchamp, extra that a century in the past, “selected” objects from the world as readymade artwork. His levity mocks Ai Weiwei’s stone gravity. Turning readymades into marble and jade is a ponderous technique to make your level.
In one other good act of antiquity abuse, he’s painted the Coca-Cola emblem on a Han vase. It symbolises this exhibition, which itself resembles the cool Cambridge outlet of a worldwide model. However the man is phoning it in, on a jade iPhone.
Ai Weiwei: The Liberty of Doubt is at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, from 12 February to 19 June
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