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SAC Notes

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.

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