Ai Weiwei: Surgeon of Space, by Geoff Manaugh

17 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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Surgeon of Space
by Geoff Manaugh

Out of the wide and often intimidating variety of themes to be found in the work of Ai Weiwei– from his spatial exploration of the ring roads around Beijing to the growing collection of Stone Age tools that he has excavated from sites in the Chinese countryside– I want to focus on something seemingly rather basic: furniture. I am not one to be enthusiastic about furniture, I have to admit; under normal circumstances, I tend to view chairs, tables, desks, beds, and so on as more or less utilitarian. Even with my job as a full-time editor at a design magazine, I often find it hard to get excited about the sofas, stools, and shelves that come our way.

But furniture for Ai Weiwei exists in a very interesting space, so to speak, and it comes with compelling conceptual possibilities. Furniture doesn’t just ornament a given space; it remakes and redefines the internal boundaries of the space itself. If furniture is something that breaks up space, offering punctuated moments of rest and stoppage and giving rhythm to a room, then it can also be deliberately misused. It can be contrapuntal and off-kilter, designed against the grain of the space it appears within. Furniture can interrupt, challenge, and deform.

I’m reminded of something Gerrit Rietveld, the Dutch architect, member of De Stijl, and furniture designer, once wrote, that “Our chairs will become the abstract-real artifacts of future interiors.” (FN1). Rietveld’s own Red Blue Chair, for instance, first prototyped in 1917, has since seen its proportions, angles, and even its stylized “Rietveld joints” copied; in retrospect, it has become the originating classic of a new typology. It set off a chain of effects– the confrontational geometry of a chair against the accommodating geometry of a room– expanding to become a unique moment in spatial history.

We might say that Rietveld’s chair - or furniture itself, broadly speaking - can anticipate and even require new ways of experiencing architectural space. Furniture, in other words, can catalyze Rietveld’s “future interiors,” demanding the very room it then comes to dominate. Indeed, if furniture designed today might affect how we understand and inhabit space tomorrow, then perhaps a chair currently in development might influence the design of entire buildings in 50 years. Or even whole cities, their landscapes spiraling outward from a single, revolutionary chair in a slow and ritualistic explosion of space. Architecture - even urban planning - might thus become nothing but a distant spatial side-effect, an epiphenomenon. An afterthought of furniture.

Ai Weiwei’s "Furniture" series, 1997– ongoing, is a uniquely powerful embodiment of these suggestions. For the series, Ai has remade archetypal pieces of Chinese furniture from the Ming and Qing Dynasties through deliberate acts of intersection, overlap, and penetration. They are not furniture at all, you might say, but surgical prototypes, giving shape to spatial strategies.

Ai Weiwei, Table with Three Legs, 2008
Courtesy of the Artist

For "Grapes", 2008, Ai partially merged ten stools; they force their way into the others structure, like mutant siblings slowly fusing in the womb. Here, several centuries’ worth of artisan furniture production have been hybridized to form something altogether new. In Ai’s Table with Two Legs on the Wall, 1997, a single table has been folded in half to rear up like a horse and rest its legs against the wall. It is cousins with the centaur: a mythic being trapped between two forms, two competing versions of itself. Another table - "Table with Three Legs", 2008 - has been turned into a spidery mechanism, a low-tech machine of wood, its legs akimbo and stance slightly askew. Carefully poised, it seems so unsure of itself - yet strangely at ease with its unusual new form. Can furniture get drunk?, one might ask. "Table with Three Legs" offers an answer in its very geometry.

Far from passive inhabitants or mere decoration in a room, these pieces of furniture are more like black holes, exerting a transformational force on the spaces around them.

Ai Weiwei, Cornered Table, 1997
Courtesy of the Artist

Similarly tilted off its axis of expectation, Cornered Table, 1997 leans precariously toward the floor as if having incorrectly understood its own ground plane; a wizardry of balance arrives at just the last minute, however, to seize the table, bringing it back from imminent collapse. Perhaps if we psychoanalyzed this form we could say that the table finds its strength through hesitation: cantilevering itself into a room it then realizes it doesn’t belong within, it discovers an angelic state of grace in this most uncommon of postures. It is elegantly flawed, and aware of this fact. It stands accordingly.

Ai’s "Furniture", subject to such interpretations, become not unlike allegories: small storylines in wood.They are narratives. "Tables at Right Angles", 1998 is really just one table that has misunderstood itself, reeling back from its own projected double. Mistaking its own eccentric solidity for the architecture that surrounds it, this table will never realize that the world it thinks it touches is just another part of itself.

Of course, it would be a cliché to say that these works, thus described, are like poems - so let us instead suggest that they are screenplays: symbolically rich and heavy with implication, they have character, destiny, and tension all at once. They have drama. They can be argued about and reenacted. They have plots. Perhaps someday we might even see a film directed by David Cronenberg - based on a table by Ai Weiwei.

So how did these pieces come about, in any case? It is through sheer craftsmanship that Ai has been able to transform these historically valuable pieces of ritual furniture into exhibition - friendly works of art. In the end, it is all fine carpentry. Inspired by the Ming and Qing originals’ ability to fit together without nails - as well as to come apart like puzzles should you follow, in reverse, their careful, step-by-step sequence - Ai’s chairs, tables, stools, and desks can also be broken down and reassembled, again and again. What they now add up to is not what they once were—because Ai has intervened, taking the furniture apart and changing the pieces. At the risk of overstating the case, it’s a bit like watching a rogue architect redesign the Parthenon using the original monument’s own proportional mathematics - but coming up with something monstrous as a result. Ai’s "Fragments", 2005 comes to mind: heavy pieces of iron wood timber from dismantled temples in the Chinese province of Guangdong have been reassembled into an amorphous, Stonehenge-like series of linked gates.

Ai Weiwei, Fragments, 2005
Courtesy of the Artist

Call it furniture hacking, or furniture genetically modified: either way we encounter not just formal originality but something like a rewriting of history, with Ai Weiwei as both author and organic catalyst. Antique replicas of lost originals take their place beside brand new copies - exhibiting strange mistakes and alterations along the way.

It’s as if history, in the form of antique tables from a lost empire, has offered us a new branch of mathematics: combinatorial furniture, precise and fitted measurements of wood subject to topological rearrangement. If there is a cultural code hidden inside the design of antique Chinese furniture - a received understanding of technique and ornament - then Ai’s work is more like a computer virus, scrambling the program.

Or perhaps we should be more political about this, and say that contemporary China is suffering from a deranged application of its own past - wherein what used to be beautiful have come back twisted and malformed. Ai’s work simply gives shape to this statement.

Furniture is his diagnosis. In other words, Ai is not just rotating a table on itself so that more people can eat together at breakfast; he is twisting the very logic of a Ming dynasty meal into a new social dimension, updating it for the space of the gallery or for the art collector’s home.

Of course, this also works the other way: by bringing this referential history into the gallery, Ai is introducing viewers to a kind of replicant - even counterfeit - version of the imperial past.

Indeed, in an interview with Charles Merewether, conducted in Beijing back in 2003, Ai remarked that he had “noticed in the market that there were copies of many famous cases and Chinese imperial sculpture. But it was very difficult to tell the difference between the copy and the original. My brother is an expert in this field and he told me many stories about the very precise expertise and skills needed to make copies.To have a combination of such expertise is a most difficult task and everything must meet a certain requirement to become a reality.” (FN2) What happens if someone masters the art of copying the past - taking apart an object and reassembling it otherwise, according to its original form of construction - only to use those skills in creating a different version of history?

The "Marble Chairs", 2008 are something else entirely. An army of chairs, each weighing 55 kilograms, have been individually milled, with no joinery or separate pieces, from solid blocks of white marble.Their ornamental style, once again, refers back to the Ming and Qing dynasties, but Ai’s technique for achieving this here is something
altogether different.

These pieces are geological - they are shaped extractions of the Earth’s surface. In his interview with Merewether, Ai refers to “man-made objects related to the Earth,” (FN3) and the "Marble Chairs" seem like perfect illustrations of the phrase.

Looking at these functional sculptures lined up in the gallery like a military formation, it is not hard to wonder what other shapes and structures might someday be milled and quarried from the planet - vast expanses of rock shaved and polished into whatever objects we care to make from it.Whether that’s furniture, statuary, or simply artistic abstractions, there are an infinite number of virtual forms waiting, inside the planet, to be realized.

Ai Weiwei, Still Life and Whitewash
Courtesy of the Artist

Ai’s "Still Life" project, 1993–2000 presents an inspired inversion of this very idea: for "Still Life", Ai assembled 3,600 neolithic stone tools, including prehistoric chisels and axe heads, which he then presented laid out like a cobblestone road across the gallery floor. Wonderfully, these are pieces of technology so abstract - and so ancient - that almost all of them could be mistaken for mere rocks. But let’s reverse even this inversion, and complete the circle back to raw geology: the sight of Ai Weiwei signing these featureless stone tools - archaeological readymades - raises the possibility that some of the rocks you yourself have seen, perhaps even today, were actually works of art by Ai Weiwei. Scattered across the landscape, they simply blended in with the other stones.

Marble Chairs also relates, however tangentially, to several themes from an article published last September in The New Yorker, a profile of German tunneling entrepreneur Martin Herrenknecht. Herrenknecht’s firm - Herrenknecht AG - is the largest manufacturer and operator of tunneling machines in the world, with projects underway on nearly every continent, digging gas pipelines, cable tunnels, and subway routes beneath seven cities in China alone.

“To see a map of his company’s projects,” we read, “is to envision the planet as a porous thing - a cosmic loofah - inhabited by an increasingly hive-like humanity.” (FN4)

"At any given moment, close to a thousand Herrenknecht worms are burrowing under mountains, rivers, and cities on almost every continent.They have tunneled along the San Andreas Fault, under the Yangtze River and beside the Bosporus, through catacombs in Rome and petrified pilings in Cairo. 'We are changing the world,' Herrenknecht told me. 'We are putting it in tunnels. That is my vision.' ” (FN5)

I mention this alongside a vision of Ai Weiwei, lording over a specially built army of robotic milling and tunneling machines, excavating imperial Chinese furniture out of the surface of the Earth. Emerging from a cloud of marble dust, brushing sand and gravel from his trousers, Ai surveys a planet that he has transformed into strangely shaped chairs and tables. The mountains of Guilin are cut down to the most precisely measured facets of Ming dynasty design, becoming a new geological formation larger than the Three Gorges Dam. “We are changing the world,” Ai says. “We are turning it into furniture.That is my vision.” These projects, of course, are very different - conceptually, materially, and technically. But what they reveal about Ai Weiwei’s ability to deform space, mutate the planet, and give abstract form to history are unparalleled.

Ai Weiwei, Marble Chairs, 2008
Courtesy of the Artist

If Ai’s furniture could “become the abstract-real artifacts of future interiors,” as Rietveld once wrote - that is, the originating seeds from which a new spatial world might crystallize - then the future will be an interesting place to see, indeed.

© Geoff Manaugh

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Geoff Manaugh is senior editor of Dwell magazine and the author of BLDGBLOG. He has been called “the world’s greatest living practitioner of ‘architecture fiction’” by Bruce Sterling and one of the 50 “most influential architects, designers and thinkers” in the field today by Icon. The BLDGBLOG Book is published by Chronicle Books.
bldgblog.blogspot.com

FN1. Quoted in Sudjic, D. "The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects, W.W. Norton & Company", 2009, p. 168.

FN2. Quoted in 'Changing Perspective,' "Ai Weiwei, Works: Beijing 1993 - 2003", ed. C. Merewether, Timezone 8, p. 29

FN3. Id., p. 34

FN4. Bilger, B. "A Reporter at Large: The Long Dig," The New Yorker, September 15, 2008, p. 63.

FN5. Id., p. 63.