Dropping the han dynasty urn (1995, silver gelatin print
desire to provoke controversy. Outside his mother's home in Beijing, he dropped and smashed a 2000-year old ceremonial urn. Not only did the artifact have considerable value (the artist paid the equivalent of several thousand US dollars for it), but symbolic and cultural worth. The Han dynasty is considered a defining moment in Chinese civilization. Understandably, antique dealers were outraged, calling Ai's work an act of desecration. Ai countered by saying "General Mao used to tell us that we can only build a new world if we destroy the old one." It was a provocative act of cultural destruction in reference to the erasure of cultural memory in Communist China, an anti-elite society that carefully monitored access to information, especially about its dynastic history. In its literal iconoclasm and spotlight on hypocrisy, this smashed vase embodies the central message Ai would continue to explore.
Remembering (2009, backpacks on façade of the Haus
der Kunst, munich) Historical Note on the Haus der Kunst: The Haus der Kunst (designed by Paul Ludwig Troost, "first master builder to the führer") was sited by Adolf Hitler and sought to express Nazi ideology by using stone from German quarries and with its references to the work of Klenze and Schinkel. From its opening in 1937, the Haus der Kunst held exhibitions glorifying the "Blood and Soil" propaganda of the Nazi regime. Weiwei’s purpose of this piece was to create awareness of the government lack of interest and silence towards the lives lost during the earthquake in China in 2008. Because of the artist involvement in the government matters through his social media as well as his documentary “So sorry”, he researched by his own means the actual number of lives lost. Which such number was not disclosed by the government. The artist in his documentary explains that the government didn’t want to declare the actual amount, because it would demonstrate the lack of interest and neglect towards the already damaged structures of the schools and buildings that vanish during the disaster. The piece was extended through the facade and it was made with backpacks of different colours: white, blue, red, yellow and green. The colours as well represent the youth of the many lives lost. The backpacks are organized and forms a sentence that comes from a letter of a mother who lost her daughter during the hurricane which states: “for seven years she lived happily on this earth.” Francis Picabia Machine Tournez Vite (Machine Turn Quickly) (1918, gouache on cardboard) The proto-automatism that these works present and the use of a scathing irony refer to the Dadaist world and its attacks on any convention of the artistic tradition, but the subject has a greater irradiation. It does not seem a coincidence that after his arrival in the United States, machinist society par excellence, when Picabia began to conceive their machines. The bourgeois and positivist obsession with technical progress and the proliferation of utopias and dystopias about it are at the base of the artist's experiments which, in the case of his portraits based on mechanical compounds, walk along the diffuse boundary between the sexual metaphor and the conception of the machine as an integral part of the human being and vice versa. Will we continue to feel like orphaned machines today?
Here, this is Stieglitz here
(1915, ink, graphite, printed work on paperboard) At first Picabia worked closely with Alfred Stieglitz, who gave him his first one-man show in New York City. But later he criticized Stieglitz, as is evident in this "portrait" of the gallerist as a bellows camera, an automobile gear shift, a brake lever, and the word "IDEAL" above the camera in Gothic lettering. The fact that the camera is broken and the gear shift is in neutral has been thought to symbolize Stieglitz as worn out, while the contrasting decorative Gothic wording refers to the outdated art of the past. The drawing is one of a series of mechanistic portraits and imagery created by Picabia that, ironically, do not celebrate modernity or progress, but, like similar mechanistic works by Duchamp, show that such subject matter could provide an alternative to traditional artistic symbolism.