Oh to be in Venice

Jeremy Deller, Ai Wei Wei...

that's enough for me to get on a plane for, only I only just found out. far too late.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2013/may/29/venice-biennale-ai-weiwei-best-pictures#/?picture=409708053&index=15

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/may/28/venice-biennale-jeremy-deller-british-pavilion

I am stuck here, not just through poverty, but also by commitments to supporting projects for Convoys Wharf, ie Build the Lenox and Sayes Court Gardens and I haven't made any art recently except some lino-cutting....

Future Cities who have sketched the 'Creative Vision' that seems to be the only driving force for Convoys Wharf, will no doubt have first class hotel rooms in Venice as I post this.

If only Jeremy Deller knew what was going on here in Deptford, if only Ai Wei Wei knew what was going on here....along the same stretch of river his British agent placed him when he was with Albion and the story is here...http://thewillowpatternproject.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/ai-weiwei-irony-at-albion.html

Made In Britain and China's PM visit

Great programme with the lovely Evan Davis, looking at the British economy, and in particular what is going on in China. Of the mighty sale price of the iPhone, most goes to the retailer and pays for the components, then $85 goes to Apple, and $5 to the Chinese company who assembled it.
Pointless making a link to i-Player, but anyway...Made In Britain.

Meanwhile, the Chinese are in town for trades deals, shaking hands with Cameron and getting the old horse guards parade treatment.

PM signs China deals but urges respect for human rights (link here to BBC report)

"After meeting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao for talks, Mr Cameron hailed what he said was a 'deeper dialogue'. But he said political and economic progress must go hand in hand as respect for human rights was 'the best guarantor' of prosperity and stability.

"Mr Wen urged co-operation and dialogue over the issue, not 'finger-pointing'.

"During talks in Downing Street, the two leaders signed bilateral trade agreements worth £1.4bn and restated their desire to double the value of two-way trade between the countries by 2015...."

BBC News reported this without irony and seemed at a loss as to what Mr Wen might be inferring, what with their piling up of political prisoners such as Ai Wei Wei.

Could it be, ahem, the British treatment of the Chinese some 200 years ago or is more likely, ahem, our treatment of terror suspects? Or could it be, ahem, our government's enormous disregard for trades unions, and the voice of protest (the same voices so right about Iraq)? Pointing the finger indeed, Mr Cameron, as you close down education, libraries, the health service and the arts, and cut local authority grants to ribbons, for the sake of your banker mates.

In his speech about how different our countries and cultures were, Cameron failed to refer even briefly to our shared history – why, for fear of shaming the Chinese? Or because, when the Chinese have been bank rolling the Western world for ten years now and is about to become the No.1 economic power in the world, it is hugely embarrassing to speak of an once vain glorious, now inglorious past.

It's not in the school curriculum, that's for sure.

Ai Weiwei 'disappeared'...

Actually Ai Weiwei was arrested on his way to Hong Kong and hasn't been seen since.

www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/apr/08/our-fears-fate-ai-weiwei

The above plea signed by various British arts representatives refers to a previous report in The Guardian:

"Chinese police are investigating outspoken artist Ai Weiwei for "suspected economic crimes", the state news agency, Xinhua, has announced. Authorities had not previously acknowledged police action against the 53-year-old, who went missing on Sunday after being stopped by officials at Beijing airport.

The single-sentence report, deleted shortly after it appeared, did not explicitly refer to his detention, and there was no word on his friend Wen Tao, 38, who has also been unreachable since his reported detention on the same day.

"Earlier, outgoing US ambassador Jon Huntsman had raised the artist's case in a strongly worded speech in Shanghai, describing him as one of the activists who "challenge the Chinese government to serve the public in all cases and at all times".

"The artist's detention has sparked an international outcry, with the US, Britain and the European Union criticising a crackdown on dissidents and activists. Germany's foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, has summoned the Chinese ambassador over the issue.

"Police visited Ai's studio three times in the week before he went missing. "He felt a premonition that he would be detained," his wife Lu Qing told AP. "He told me something might happen to him."
She said she was particularly worried about his health as he takes medication for several illnesses.
While Ai had repeatedly clashed with authorities, friends had already warned that this case appeared more serious because police had removed dozens of computers and documents from his studio and had questioned his assistants.

"Earlier in the day, Ai's mother, Gao Ying, told Reuters: "I think they detained him for a reason. If they think they have something, it's certainly a fixed case, an injustice. I think they'll concoct some things against him."

"Gao said she had been "filled with a bit of dread" since Ai angered authorities by listing the names of children who died when schools collapsed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Officials censored discussion of the subject after public anger developed over shoddy construction.

"On the Sina microblog, China's domestic equivalent of Twitter, censors deleted many messages about Ai, and a search for his name produced a warning that results were not shown due to local regulations. But internet users fought back with typical ingenuity. Several used the words "ai weilai" or "love the future" – which looks and sounds similar to his name – to call for his return. One wrote: "I really don't dare believe that in this society, even love for the future can disappear." "

Ai Weiwei - Without Fear or Favour

Just watched Imagine... on BBC1 – "Alan Yentob reveals how this most courageous and determined of artists continues to fight for artistic freedom of expression while living under the restrictive shadows of authoritarian rule."

It was a good show. Covered a few things I didn't already know...Afterwards, they set up a Live Chat with Ai Weiwei on the Imagine page of the beeb online. This is pretty similar to what you can do at the Tate – well, really, it's the only thing you can do at the Tate now we can no longer walk on the sunflower seeds...

One of the comments was "How do you feel that the Tate stopped letting people be with the sunflower seeds 'for health and safety reasons'?" and Ai Weiwei said "The Tate and I are still trying to find a way to make it possible for everyone to enjoy the work." 

I posted a few comments but they didn't come up and didn't get answered. I got a bit political... 
"Were you aware that when you showed your work at the Albion Gallery in Battersea in a brand new Norman Foster building, that Foster had spent years trying to get rid of an artist who lives and works on a barge moored on the riverfront of the building?" *
When that didn't get answered I posted,  "Help me Ai Weiwei, the BBC are censoring me!"

* see my original post on Nasty Norman here

Ai Weiwei's Tate show closes to public

Unfortunately I was too late to walk over Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds. I didn't get there till Sunday, the news having broken on Thursday that the Tate had decided to ban people from walking through the work, due to the Health & Safety risks incurred by the porcelain dust created from so many people visiting the show.

I suspect most people would be more than happy to wear a mask and even pay for it, so I'm inclined to think the closure is more to do with the amount of thieving going on...

I don't mind too much. The idea is mind blowing enough on its own.

Jonathan Jones writes in The Guardian here: "There is more to art than interaction, after all. Personally I quite like just looking at stuff. The imperative to slide down slides or lie on the floor to see yourself in a reflective ceiling has always seemed to me a distracting eccentricity of the Turbine Hall installations. The reason Ai Weiwei's work is among the very best of them is because he wants to make us think – about the individual in the crowd, the ocean of humanity, the incalculable numbers of people on this earth – and their fragility underfoot. That last point is obviously weakened when you can't get close.

"Surely this might have been foreseen? And is there a solution? Porcelain is fragile. Maybe visitors could simply be requested to remove their shoes? Perhaps in future the Tate should get the site-specific art experts Artangel to help with these commissions. Artangel have organised events involving toxic substances that passed health and safety. Anyway, this remains a serious and imposing work of art. Why not contemplate it like a philosopher standing on the shore imagining the immensity of the grey sea?"

The photo above by Tim Ireland accompanies a Guardian report by Mark Brown here.

Ai Weiwei at Tate Modern 2

 

Photo: Lennart Preiss/AP (from guardian.co.uk)

Adrian Searle's review (Guardian, May 11 2010)

Tate Modern's sunflower seeds: the world in the palm of your hand
Courtesy of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, the Turbine Hall is now carpeted with a million hand-painted seeds – an image of globalisation both politically powerful and hauntingly beautiful

At first sight Ai Weiwei's installation Sunflower Seeds presents us with an undifferentiated field of grey, filling the space between the bridge and the end wall of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. It is almost disappointing. The late Felix Gonzalez-Torres's piles of cellophane-wrapped sweets, which he showed in the 1980s, were prettier, and you were free to eat them (the American artist liked the idea that people could leave his shows with a nice taste lingering in their mouths). But the sweets were also metaphors for the Aids crisis, and much besides. Nothing in art is what it seems. And you can't eat a single one of Ai Weiwei's sunflower seeds, any more than you could Marcel Duchamp's marble sugar cubes. They'd break your teeth.

But you can trudge over them, walk or skip or dance on these seeds, all of them Made in China. Or scoop up handfuls and let them run through your fingers, in the knowledge that someone, an old lady or a small-town teenager in Jingdezhen, has delicately picked up each one and anointed it with a small brush. Every seed is painted by hand. The town that once made porcelain for the imperial court has been saved from bankruptcy by making sunflower seeds. It is absurd.

I love this work. It is a world in a hundred million objects. It is also a singular statement, in a familiar, minimal form – like Wolfgang Laib's floor-bound rectangles of yellow pollen, Richard Long's stones or Antony Gormley's fields of thousands of little humanoids. Sunflower Seeds, however, is better. It is audacious, subtle, unexpected but inevitable. It is a work of great simplicity and complexity. Sunflower Seeds refers to everyday life, to hunger (the seeds were a reliable staple during the Cultural Revolution), to collective work, and to an enduring Chinese industry. But it is also symbolic. It joins several previous Turbine Hall commissions – most recently Doris Salcedo's 2008 Shibboleth and Miroslaw Balka's How It Is – in a dialogue about the social and cultural place of art.

The meanings are as multiple and singular as its form. Ai Weiwei has taken the lesson of Duchamp's readymade and Warhol's multiples and turned them into a lesson in Chinese history and western modernisation, and the price individuals in China pay for that. Every unique seed is homogenised into a sifting mass. Most contemporary Chinese art is a product made for western consumption, just as willow-pattern plates or porcelain vases were shipped out in huge quantities for the western market.

Ai is the best artist to have appeared since the Cultural Revolution in China. He has smashed ancient vases, taken a thousand Chinese citizens to a small town in Germany – his contribution to the five-yearly Documenta contemporary art show in Kassel in 2007 – made works about the Chinese government's response to the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, and the social crackdowns during the year of the Olympics. Ai takes on the world through an attitude, rather than a style. With his blogs and tweets, he is a constant communicator. However absurd his works might appear to be, he understands the place of the artist, recognising that his work exists in a global world of social, cultural and economic relations. He has a sort of social engagement Duchamp lacked, or couldn't have, and that Warhol dissembled.

Ai's field of sunflower seeds is both contemplative and barbed. Generous in spirit, everyone can get it. It will no doubt have a huge audience at Tate Modern, one that might see it as no more than an entertaining spectacle and treat it like a day at the beach. Yet Sunflower Seeds is contingent, oddly moving and beautiful. It is like quicksand.

More pictures from the Guardian site here.

Ai Weiwei at Tate Modern

I knew it would be brilliant....


This video comes courtesy of The Telegraph. If it defaults to something else, please go to YouTube here.

I posted about Ai Weiwei here....

Meanwhile, The Guardian (Charlotte Higgins, guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 October 2010 17.41 BST)

People power comes to the Turbine Hall: Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds
It took an army of 1,600 Chinese artisans to create Ai Weiwei's 100m handpainted porcelain 'seeds', which are scattered over the floor of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall

The floor is entirely covered with a deep layer of what appear to be grey pebbles. It is like a bleak Suffolk beach, and a toddler, getting into the spirit of it, has shed her shoes and is having a sit-down in her stockinged feet. Adults are not so comfortable: as if caught out by a freak snowstorm in the wrong shoes, several are picking a distinctly wobbly way over the crunchy, uneven surface, suddenly looking out of place in autumnal London clothes.

This is the latest installation in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall – a series of wow-factor installations that have, over the past decade, included Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth, a deep fissure running through the concrete floor of the building, and Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project, which filled the space with mist and mirrors.

There is more to Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's installation than meets the eye, however. Bend and pick up one of the "pebbles" and you can see that it resembles a sunflower seed encased in its striped husk. In fact, each one – and there are 100 million of them, covering an area of 1,000 square metres – is handmade from porcelain and has been individually handpainted.

Ai – a bearded, impassive, black-clad figure, who snapped the photographers surrounding him at today's press view almost as busily as they did him, and posted the results on Twitter – had the "seeds" made in the southern Chinese city of Jingdezhen.

"Historically, the town's only activity has been making porcelainware for over 1,000 years. The super-high-quality skill for generations has been making imperial porcelainware," he said. "In modern days, however, it has become very commercialised."

Harnessing traditional craft skills, each seed was moulded, fired, and painted with three or four individual brush strokes, often by women taking the objects home to work on them. One thousand six hundred people were involved in the process. "Even taxi drivers were talking about it," he said.

"I tried to explain to [the artisans] what we wanted them for, but they found it very difficult to understand," said Ai. "Everything they usually make is practical, and the painters are used to creating classically beautiful flowers using a high degree of skill."

He said that the workers had been paid a living wage – in fact slightly more than customary – to work on the project. "Now they are asking when we can start again," he said. "I shall have to think of a new project."

Sunflower seeds, he said, had a particular significance in recent Chinese culture and history. During the cultural revolution, Mao Zedong was often likened to the sun and the people to sunflowers, gazing adoringly at his face. But sunflowers were also a humble but valued source of food in straitened times, a snack to be consumed with friends.

Ai also likened the artwork to Twitter – a vast sea of ideas and communication contributed by individual people. Ai now uses Twitter regularly after the blogs he kept were in turn censored by the Chinese authorities. One of his online projects has been to amass the names of those killed in the Sichuan earthquakes of 2008.

What if the temptation to put one of these lovingly made objects in your pocket becomes too great? Smiling, he said: "They might also want to eat one, and that would be a safety issue for the museum." He added: "If I was in the audience I would definitely want to take a seed. But for the museum, it is a total work, and taking a seed would affect the work. Institutions have their own policies. But I know I would want to take a seed."

A spokeswoman for the museum confirmed that they would be "encouraging people not to" depart with a souvenir. After the installation at Tate Modern is closed (it is on show from tomorrow until 2 May) the seeds, which weigh 150 tons, will be shipped back to Ai's studio in Beijing, where he will think about using them for another project.

Did he make any of the 100 million sunflower seeds himself? "I made three or four," he said. "But none of them was any good."

More about Ai Weiwei in The Observer here.

Ai Weiwei - The Irony at The Albion

It was the first time I'd heard of the Albion Gallery in Battersea. It's a HUGE space, housed on the ground floor of a massive development by Norman Foster.

It struck a strange chord, coming across this riverside development having read about Ai Weiwei's protests at the uprooting of Beijing's communities to build the Olympics. I wondered if he was aware of how this is going on in London all the time now - and particularly near the Olympic area. OK, it's not so much whole communities uprooted along the river here, but I bet this new development at Albion Wharf (which the building is named after) replaced something already here that was perfectly fine, thank you, before Norman Foster came along.

I noticed there were some barges moored by the riverside right opposite the gallery and I could see some people standing outside on one of them, but I couldn't see where the access to the barges was. I thought, how nice that there's still some life on the river here, next to this sterile monster. You can just see a mast to the left in this picture...



I didn't hang about long enough to find out but I did notice the Royal College of Art's Sculpture studios (unobtrusive) on the walk back to the car, and fancied there may have once been warehouses on the riverside that housed artists who probably had to bugger off when the new Albion building came along.

Deyan Sudjic writes: "Everything that makes London look like London is being destroyed" in his 2003 Guardian article "Sold down the river".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2003/may/18/urbandesign.communities

Says Sudjic: "Now developers, driven by soaring land values to extract the most out of every inch of riverside, build as close to the river as they can. Whole stretches are now lined with apartment blocks, built to take advantage of the views of the river, but the result is to offer residents spectacular views of all the other ranks of balconies on either side of them, and on the other side of the river, looking back at them. In the process the Thames has been turned into something very much like a very long thin football stadium."

How true indeed. Come to Deptford and see what a mess they are going to make of it here, those money-grabbing bastards. Anyway, so what was here at Battersea before Norman Foster? A little research turned up a not too disimilar story from the one I'd imagined...What's this from 2004? "Foster vision could sink an art gallery"...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article486844.ece

Those barges I saw, could these be the very same? Jonathan Leake's report for The Times says: "The Couper Collection, a charity supported by the Prince of Wales and Ken Livingstone, the London mayor, says it could face the removal of its barges, containing works designed to introduce youngsters from local schools and estates to modern art...For several years, while Couper lived on his barges with his collection, the adjoining land was occupied by a steel-yard and a disused bus garage whose owners paid him little attention."

"Hutchison Whampoa, one of China’s largest multinationals, had acquired the derelict bus garage and asked the architect to replace it with a luxury riverside complex of 200 flats, suites and upmarket shops."

Couper and a neighbouring boat owner had laid claim to ancient mooring rights for his bit of the riverside with the Land Registry. So Whampoa Hutchison and Foster laid counterclaims with the Land Registry and engaged top lawyers Farrer & Co to take on the boat owners, and got the Port of London Authority which controls river moorings to revoke all ancient moorings and make Couper apply for a license.

But this from Guy Adams in The Telegraph, 2002, shows how long this saga had already been going on:

THE dispute between developers loyal to Lord Foster of Thames Bank and a Jubilee art gallery has escalated into a minor diplomatic row.

Last month, I revealed that Hutchison Whampoa, the Chinese developer which is building a Foster-designed block of flats in Battersea, had threatened to cut off the Couper Collection's water and electricity. Last week the head of the Foreign Office's China section, John Virgo, interrupted a meeting between the Couper's trustees and Edmund Ho, Hutchison Whampoa's European boss.

"Mr Virgo telephoned to say Jack Straw was concerned that the matter should be settled before the Golden Jubilee celebrations," says the gallery's chairman, Canon Ivor Smith-Cameron. "I am told that he did not want to see the dispute marring relations between Britain and China."

In 2005, The Observer reported that new residents of the Albion Riverside, including Ruby Wax no less, were complaining to Wandsworth Council about the "ugly" barges and were objecting to the Couper Collection's plans to build a disabled ramp. Alice O'Keeffe reports: "Opponents of the gallery include the art dealer Michael Hue-Williams and the former chairman of Railtrack, Sir Robert Horton."

However, this good news from Tim Walker in The Telegraph in March 2007:

Argy-bargy

Having rejoiced in the title Lord Foster of Thames Bank since he was made a peer by Tony Blair in 1999, the celebrated architect now appears to be taking a proprietorial attitude to the London waterway.

Norman Foster, who is best known for the wobbly Millennium Bridge and the "Erotic Gherkin" in the City, has submitted a dossier to his local council objecting to the presence of an art gallery housed in nine barges in front of one of his most prestigious buildings. The architect claims that the Couper Collection, a charity supported by the Prince of Wales, should be refused permission to improve disabled access because the gallery's "presence on the river is unneccessary".

His company, Foster & Partners, says the barges' presence in front of his gleaming Albion Riverside apartment block in Battersea is "unsightly" and "unacceptable". He suggests that the charity, which introduces disadvantaged local children to art, moves elsewhere. "There is no reason why the Couper Collection should qualify as a river activity," he says.

Happily, Wandsworth council's borough planner has discounted Foster's objections and recommends that the gallery is given planning permission at a meeting this week."

HURRAH! THE PROJECT SURVIVED THE BASTARD MONEY MEN!

Here's the Couper Collection's website:

http://www.coupercollection.org.uk/index.html

And no surprise that The Albion is the new gallery of Michael Hue-Williams Fine Art, he who objected to The Couper Collection. It is an impressive space because of its size. But Adrian Searle reviewed a show there in 2004 and said of the Foster building and the gallery within: "This is architecture as novelty prize marrow."

Oh well, here's a link to the Albion anyway since Hue-Williams' remit is to show artists "who provide a world-wide view of social and cultural issues", and he has championed the marvellous James Turrell, among other artists.
www.albion-gallery.com

Not a very active site considering the money that must be washing about behind it... Oh, but what's this? Maybe his money is all tied up in a lawsuit against artist James Turrell whose work he has been promising to buyers and collecting payments for without Turrell's authority, ie, a proper contract...See this report from James Turrell's lawyer:

http://www.uslaw.com/library/Copyright_Law/Seeing_understand_upset_sorry_jumped_gun.php?item=193623

I wonder what Ai Weiwei would think of all this...perhaps he would say that it's a small matter compared to the actions of the Chinese state...

Ai Weiwei

On the eve of Barack Hussein Obama's election victory on November 4th, I went to Battersea to see the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei at The Albion Gallery.

Whichever way you do it, Deptford to Battersea is not easy on a week day. I drove, it took ages, and when I looked for The Albion at its address in 'Hester Road' I found this is no longer an accessible road, but a pedestrianised walk that leads to a new Norman Foster building by the riverside. I had to park a couple of streets away.

I had come because I'd read about Ai Weiwei in both Time Out and in The Sunday Times (which a friend had given me because of the feature on Damien Hirst's wife in the mag section)...Waldemar Januszczak (formerly of The Guardian) wrote the review and you may still find it here:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article5050070.ece

Ai Weiwei, a Chinese dissident, was the original artistic consultant to Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium, which was designed by Herzog & de Meuron (who commissioned him, rather than the Chinese government), architects of Tate Modern and Deptford's very own Laban Centre. Despite (or in spite of) his role in the design, Ai Weiwei has continued to protest about the destruction that was being visited upon Beijing by the Olympics — the communities that were bulldozed and the 'undesirables' who were removed from the area - a familiar background story, perhaps, to any Olympic city story...

I went because I saw a picture of the work in Time Out that included blue and white porcelain. The large scale work on show at Albion featured huge structures made of ricketty scaffolds of floor-to-ceiling bamboo (similar to that which would have been used as scaffolding in the construction of the Birds Nest) arranged at tottering angles - in one room with bamboo chairs and stools added to the bamboo structure at intersections, and in another room bamboo poles are capped at either end by blue & white porcelain urns.

Ai Weiwei re-appropriates ancient cultural icons into contemporary artforms. Here's another link:

http://truthinart.wordpress.com/2008/11/04/ai-weiwei-in-itself-to-become-the-other/

His own site strangely doesn't work very well, so to get an idea of his work it's best to do a Google Image search. He also showed in Sydney Australia earlier this year at Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and there's a good piece about him on their site:

http://www.sherman-scaf.org.au/exhibitions/ai_weiwei_under_construction1/