The Worlds of Ai Weiwei, by Arthur I. Miller

25 February 2009

"Ai Weiwei: Four Movements" on view at Phillips de Pury & Company , London. The show is composed of four new sculpture series - "Marble Chairs", "Moon Chests", "Bubbles", and selected "Furniture" works.

Exhibition 3 - 28 March 2009
Monday-Saturday 10am-5pm
Phillips de Pury & Co.
Howick Place London SW1P 1BB

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The Worlds of Ai Weiwei
by Arthur I. Miller

To me, personally, there is a lot of Pablo Picasso in Ai Weiwei. True to his enigmatic persona he claims otherwise, citing instead Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol – Duchamp for his iconoclasm and Warhol because the measure of the man is the totality of his diverse output.

Ai’s iconoclasms are legendary. Take his dropping of a 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty urn. The act was photographed, of course - why do it if there is no one there to record it? Smashed, it acquires new artistic significance and, besides, it’s a break with the past. Instead of writing “R. Mutt” on a urinal, as Duchamp did, Ai paints the Coca-Cola logo onto yet another priceless Han Dynasty urn. Ai’s prodigious output runs the gamut from shock art, sculpture, film, editing, writing, photography, furniture making to architecture on the grandest of scales, as in the Bird’s Nest stadium at the Beijing Olympics. He is a renaissance man.

Nevertheless, Picasso's artistic practice and philosophical nuances run through Ai’s works, not to mention their multifarious shared interests. Both men sought to explore an invisible world beyond our sense perceptions – that is, the real external world. Like Picasso, Ai struggles with the meaning of reality. Unlike Picasso, Ai brings into this arena social responsibility and notions of individual creativity that ultimately give rise to an image of the world very different from Picasso's. Ai opens the curtain to the cosmos – but he finds nothing there.

How is it that Ai can employ notions of science and yet reach the conclusion that there is no objective reality, or truth, beyond appearances? After all the goal of science is to do just that.

Let’s begin with Picasso.

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907

Although he didn’t break urns, he broke rules – in particular, by reducing forms in nature to geometry. He offered this as a new aesthetic. Picasso's first painting along these lines was "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" which contains the seeds of cubism. It was so advanced in representation that close colleagues and friends thought he had gone insane. Completed in 1907, it was virtually unsellable and Picasso refrained from displaying it until 1916. It depicts five whores – with the viewer as client - in increasing states of geometrization as one looks from left to right.

"Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" is a product of Picasso's engagement with the scientific, technological and mathematical developments of the avant-garde, that intellectual tsunami that swept across Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. Traditional knowledge was questioned in all fields including art, music, literature, architecture and science. Picasso was particularly interested by geometry, although he could not understand the equations in the books which friends showed him about four-dimensional geometry.

But what piqued his interest were the illustrations generated by the equations which represented four-dimensional complex polyhedra in two dimensions. These images were a succession of different perspectives of the objects, as if the viewer were walking around them. Scientists and artists agreed that this was best way to depict the fourth dimension. But Picasso wanted to see all perspectives at once. This was the driving force behind his realization of "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon".

Among the scientists swept along by the avant-garde was Albert Einstein. Einstein and Picasso took on a basic problem – to understand the nature of space and time.They looked in particular at the simultaneity of two events that supposedly occurred at the same time or the same place. Picasso's response was cubism. Einstein's was the theory of relativity, in which simultaneity is a relative quantity. Picasso looked for a means for representing different perspectives simultaneously. This appears in the most geometrized demoiselle who is simultaneously full face and profile (demoiselle squatting on the far right). The intents of both Einstein's and Picasso's forays into geometry was the same – to be able to view all possible perspectives of a scene at once, and to discover what that means. Both men concluded that there was only one scene, no preferred way of measuring or viewing a phenomenon. That meant there was no relativity of truth, only different views of the same thing.

Ai Weiwei, "Forever" Bicycles, 2003
Courtesy of the Artist

Ai reaches a different conclusion. It is an understatement to say that he knows a lot about geometry and space. His piece “Forever” Bicycles, 2003 evokes a complex image of a structured space by assembling real – utilitarian – bicycles. Their intricate connections produce an interplay of form, changing as the viewer takes different positions. Untitled, 2006, which recalls Leonardo da Vinci’s "Divina Proportion", is a spherical shape generated by hexagons and is reminiscent of a Buckminster Fuller construction with all its delicate subtlety, trapping the space within it while producing the energy of dynamic equilibrium. The furniture figures are an ongoing theme for Ai, a means for him to play with Euclidean space, perception and gravity. He manipulates the planes that make up the furniture as if he were sculpting Euclidean space – reminiscent somewhat of George Braque’s billiard table sequence – producing Escheresque structures that mock the eye and torture common sense intuition. "Grapes", 2008 seems to promise more, with collisions among rotating stools generating more stools. Perhaps it is Ai’s homage to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN where protons coursing in opposite circular paths are smashed together. Scientists hope these collisions will generate such esoteria as black holes.

Ai Weiwei, Untitled, 2006
Courtesy of the Artist

Ai Weiwei, Grapes, 2008
Courtesy of the Artist

One of Ai’s most recent productions, "Moon Chest", 2008, – on exhibit here – is an example of his engagement with science and his fascination with scientific creativity and what it means to create. He seeks to represent observed phases of the moon using cabinets with holes that can be set towards the left of centre or right of centre, or dead centre. Each chest has four holes on the top and bottom of the front and back.

Since there are three positions for the holes on the top and bottom, there are 3x3 = 9 combinations for the top of the chest and another 9 for the bottom, giving 9x9=81 combinations in total. But there are only nine unique chests and, if one does not differentiate the chest’s front from back, thirty-six pairs of identical ones (36x2=72 and 72+9=81, the total number of combinations).

This play with numbers arises out of the intricate design problem which Ai conceptualizes as the act of adjusting material with its own objective existence (the wood). The wood of the chests could have been used for any purpose.The artist’s act of creativity is to adjust it to a certain end.The immaterial idea is given form by material.

While the material has its own objective existence, what about the eclipses which it represents? In other words, does the representation, or image in this case, have an objective existence? Ai thinks not.

Picasso sought the reality that lay beyond appearances by reducing forms to geometry, in that way eliminating subjective elements which could not be quantified.This squared with the opinion of scientists such as Einstein and such pioneers of quantum physics as Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli that there is an objective reality. Ai, on the other hand, takes the post-modernist route, impelled by his political stance. While Picasso was apolitical, Ai is anything but.

Let’s take a step back and remind ourselves of Ai’s roots. His father, Ai Qing, was a well known poet in China. He was also an urbane man, having studied in Paris.

But in 1957, coincidentally the year of Ai Weiwei’s birth, his father was denounced in the anti-intellectual campaign and the family was exiled to the barren northwest of China where he laboured at menial jobs which included cleaning toilets. For twenty-one years the family experienced extreme hardship until, in 1978, Ai Qing was invited back to Beijing where he was reinstated and much lauded. But those years in political exile and the seeming arbitrariness of Chinese political doctrine seared themselves into Ai Weiwei’s mind. He was determined to strike back. At first he did so with shock art which included the 2000 exhibition "Fuck Off". More subtly he turned to combining his notions of space, time and geometry with post-modernism in order to explore the transient nature of truth and so, too, of political systems, each of which has its own truths. In some sense he even tries to strip away scientific truth. Ai explores all this in "Moon Chest", 2008.

Ai Weiwei, Moon Chests, 2008
Courtesy of the Artist

Light comes from the moon which serves as data for the scientist who suggests that the shadow on the moon (darkness being lack of light) is caused by the earth being situated between the moon and sun. No matter how you look at it through your telescope, that’s the way the moon is.This holds for observers on the earth, but not necessarily for someone far far away, perhaps in another galaxy. They may not see an eclipse of the moon. They may see something else. So who is correct? They both are. Ai questions this with the interesting experiment in perception which is "Moon Chest", 2008.

If different people standing in different positions look through a hole they see different things. Assume that they meet and discuss what they see. They could reach two conclusions: that they saw different objects or that they saw the same object from different angles (different perspectives). Ai opts for the first conclusion. Incidentally this was also the choice of physicists before relativity theory who believed there were distinct differences between measurements of the same phenomenon and that these differences were irreconcilable. Relativity showed that these supposed differences were just different ways of looking at the same phenomenon. The unchanging or invariant quantity that permitted reconciliation of viewpoints was light, because its velocity is always the same.

Do different views represent different truths or is there something unchanging in the universe? These are deep issues that occupy scientists, philosophers and intellectually-inclined artists such as Ai.

Let us pursue this further and consider a situation in which scientists deal with systems not amenable to our perceptions – that is, that are not open to our five senses – such as subatomic particles or black holes. Scientists must make assumptions about their data and the theories they use to interpret or represent them.The biggest assumption of all is that these data tell us about things that actually exist, that the data were not manufactured by the instrument, but the instrument was a conduit for information; and that there is only one theory capable of telling us about them, which is therefore true.These are powerful statements which assert that scientists do not construct nature. Even though ideas are immaterial they are about real objects which can make their existence known by means of machines which are material. Scientific instruments and theories advise us as to what is “out there.” But post-modernism says otherwise: that science is merely a construction of machines and minds. Ai takes this stance in "Moon Chest", 2008.

"Bubble", 2008 can be many things to many people – again, it has no definite interpretation. To me they are bubble universes, each perhaps containing different decisions we have made. They are home to different people leading lives in universes of “What if…”. They are set close enough to interact with one another, maybe indicating the possibility of jumping between them, of catching a life’s opportunity gone by.

Ai Weiwei, Bubbles, 2008
Courtesy of the Artist

The question is whether science can be understood as interpretations of phenomena which can be influenced by perceptions, subjectivity, culture and politics. Post-modernists believe this. Scientists don’t. But I believe that Ai wants to look beyond this point. Like a scientist he wants to explore the world in which he lives. Scientists do it with pencil and paper as well as megalithic machines that smash elementary particles together. Ai does it by reshaping the raw material of nature or ancient artifacts. He says that he does this not for the sake of producing art, but to seek enlightenment for himself which, to him, is the same as expressing his creativity.

We can only eagerly wait to see how Ai’s fertile mind will embed these products of cutting edge physics into ancient materials while trying to understand how they sit within myth and culture, as a construction of humankind.

© Arthur I. Miller

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Arthur I. Miller writes on creative thinking and the links between art and science. He is the author of "Einstein," "Picasso: Space,Time and the Beauty That Causes Havoc." His latest book, "Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung" is published by W.W. Norton.