The Way of Weiwei

China has given rise to one of the world's great artists ... too bad they don't know what to do with him.

Let's get the building out of the way first. Miami's newest art museum, the Perez, abbreviated PAMM, is housed in a really stunning home designed by Herzog & de Mueron, the architects of the "bird's nest" olympic stadium in Beijing. It's constructed -- I almost want to say "crafted" -- of textured concrete with teak details. Outdoor spaces feature tubular hanging gardens that were still being installed during our first visit today. And it's sited with a view directly down the channel where cruise ships and seaplanes launch themselves toward the Caribbean islands. Not bad at all. You can even get there via the people mover that deposits you right across the street.

I wish everyone could go, at least in the next couple of months, if only to take in the opening exhibit of work by Ai Weiwei (who also served as artistic consultant for that olympic stadium). I went with an open mind, but honestly knew only two things about his life and work: (1) That he was famously arrested and "detained" by Chinese authorities for his outspoken social views. (2) That he deliberately broke a valuable Han Dynasty vase in a work of conceptual art. But I stuck around and soon found I was having an experience that went beyond the aesthetic and penetrated some higher realm.

My first clue that we were in for something different came before we even got inside. The sculpture garden featured twelve tall bronzes featuring all the animals that give names to the Chinese lunar years. This prompted us all to look up a calculator online and find out what animals we were. (Me: boar or pig. I prefer the boar.) This ran so counter to anything I expected that I felt sure more surprises were in store.

Inside, the vase incident was represented in the form of three larger than life photos of Weiwei demonstrating the before, during, and after of the dropping of said artifact and its reduction into fragments. I was struck by the look on his face, impassively straight on into the camera, at once confronting, questioning, daring you to react. Do you react differently knowing the economic value of the object? Its age and history? Exactly why is that? And is not the future continuously destroying the past in the shattering of the present moment?

So you see there is always a subtext to this body of work. It's a text that grows and reflects on itself the more you absorb. It is, in addition to everything else, literary in nature.

Perhaps it's no accident that Weiwei has become known equally through the statements he has published through social media. These were representing in a silent, endlessly repeating montage on a screen in the spacious theater (incorporated brilliantly alongside a majestic flight of stairs leading to the second floor gallery). We quickly found we had to take seats, the better to appreciate the content. One by one, the aphorisms -- sayings? sound bites? tweets? -- built into a rambling monologue about freedom and human dignity, and the impossibility of keeping it forever contained. This is the very stuff that landed him in so much trouble. I got a kick out of what he says they kept asking him in detention: "Weiwei, how did you get like this?" The picture conjures up Winston Smith deep in the bowels of the Ministry of Love, only perhaps this time there is a happy ending. Ai Weiwei is still at liberty, and still at odds with the powers that be in his native land.

I could have sat there for a very long time, but eventually an urge to see the work overcame me. Besides the vase there was a selection of ninety other photos taken during the ten years he spent in New York City in the 1990s. He loved "every inch" he says, and described it as "a monster." Included is a wonderful photo of Ai with Alan Ginsberg, both seated in identical meditative postures. Ginsberg, who did a lot to bring the East to us back in the '50s, had the East come right back at him. He had traveled to China and met Weiwei's father, Ai Qing, who was a noted poet, so the son was returning the visit. "When I got home from New York," Ai says, "I had no degree, no wife, and no money. From the Chinese perspective it was a complete failure."

As for the other pieces, I think they can best be described by sets of directions you would have to follow to recreate them ...

• You know that Chinese tea that comes pressed into little bricks in the shape of a house? Make a few of them, but 1 meter square, and arrange them on a field of tea leaves.
• Assemble a dense block of hardwood taken from some old destroyed temples about five feet tall and wide, then carve the outside of it so it assumes the shape of an extruded map of China. For extra credit, add a couple of freestanding columns beside it to represent islands. For even more extra credit, hollow out the center of a twelve foot long log in the same shape.
• The "pearl of great price" is an archetype for the value placed on something rare and unique. What if you make it a cultured pearl? Ok, how about collecting enough of those to fill a huge bowl about 1 meter across? Then, just to show there's nothing unique about that, put another one beside it.
• Since that broken vase was so shocking, how about collecting some other ones, then painting the Coca-Cola logo on them? Hey, they're not broken, so what are you complaining about?
• Since you're so upset about vases, how about taking a bunch of antique three-legged stools, cutting their seats a bit so they sort of melt into one another, and making an arching spherical shape out of them with legs radiating outward in all directions.
• Think of a surveillance camera. Yes, we all know what they look like. Now make one, actual size --. out of marble. For extra credit, also make a hard hat and a piece of twisted rebar out of marble.
• Ah yes, the rebar. Lets say you get incensed about something like, say, the collapse of a lot of poorly built schools that claimed the lives of over five thousand children in an earthquake. Besides complaining to the authorities, go and collect tons of twisted rebar from the debris of the schools, then hire a crew to laboriously straighten them out by bending and striking each piece hundreds of times with a hammer, by hand of course. Then carefully sort them by size and arrange them on the floor in a pleasing rectangular pile that seems to evoke the shape of waves. Call it "Straight." For extra credit, display on a wall nearby the names and dates of birth of the five thousand children.

So you get the idea. It goes on, a wonderful imagination at work in a wonderful mind, being put to wonderful uses. Sculptor, photographer, social activist, philosopher -- dare we add poet? I came away with a powerful impression of a truly world-scale talent, equally at home making Chinese double-entendre out of crabs and internet censors as in making allusions to Andy Warhol.

I came away feeling that this guy is the real deal, and in his way might be a harbinger of real change soon to come. Do you remember when we all thought the Soviet Union would be around forever? Then something happened.

Weiwei poses this intriguing question: "What if the system of hate all around you suddenly disappeared one day and it was because of things you did. Would you be excited?" Forget China for a moment, and ask this question about wherever you are.

I leave you with this glimpse inside a forest of bicycles -- all identical, all the same Chinese brand ("Forever"), conjuring up images of those Mao-era streets full of cycling commuters, an era that is passing now as everyone buys cars. They're assembled together geometrically, shaped to tower over you and surround you. You can step within and become lost in the machine. You can almost hear the ball bearings in the spinning wheels. But they're not spinning.

[More of Ai Weiwei's work, including the China map and bowl of pearls, can be seen here.]

"Art" In Very Public Places

Recently I posted this photo to my facebook pages as an example of what can happen when committees respond to a government mandate to put "art" in public places. Pretty awful, huh?

This glorified hitching post stands about four feet tall at the corner of a medical arts (no pun intended) building in South Miami. Even as a phallic symbol it's pretty wimpy and disgusting. A dish of water at the base seems to allude to it being a fountain, but it more closely resembles some kind of monumental pet feeding station.

You only have to go a few blocks further east to find another such example. When this twenty-foot tall construction was first unveiled -- or perhaps a better word is "installed" -- it was instantly dubbed "The Giant French Fries," or, even better, "MacDonald's After The Blast."

We're told that its real name is "Patience," though there is no explanation of why. Oddly enough the name acquired additional meaning when the, um, sculpture was lost and we had to wait a long time to get it back.

How could we lose something so large, you ask? Simple. Just remove it temporarily (hold that thought) while the ground it was on got razed in preparation for building a low-income housing project. Unfortunately, the contractor involved pocketed most of the money he was supposed to get while going no further than scraping the dirt and putting a chain link fence around it. By the time he'd been prosecuted, the whole idea of putting low-income housing on the site had been abandoned. (Obviously it was way too expensive!)

The earth turned and revolved about the sun, the years passed, and those crumpled Golden Arches became no more than a fond memory. Are you still holding that thought? Then where would YOU put a ton of steel "temporarily?" Give up? So did everyone else who worked for the county.

One day an inspector doing an inventory of the county's art collection discovered the piece had been lost. Then it was miraculously found in a scrap yard, identified as "rusting pieces of metal." To make up for this embarrassment the county took down the fence around the weed-grown construction site, covered it with grass, and placed the prodigal artwork, now decked out with a new coat of yellow paint, on a concrete and gravel pad. This part cost us only $40,000 -- surely a bargain.

Oh, and the place is now called a park. "Patience Park," of course.

Renaissance Florence had the Medici and Leonardo, but we've got Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places and the Professional Advisory Committee to insure that 1.5% of the construction cost of our public buildings goes to acquire, well ... art. Enjoy!

Letting Go

When the weight of the past turns out not to be so heavy ...

One of the few things I wanted to collect from my sister's house after her death was a stone sculpture that had been sitting in the yard for over 30 years. A seated Buddha, it represented an ambition of peace and calm that my mother, who commissioned it, had always aspired to but never achieved.

The artist is also long gone. My friend Richard Sevigny gave it up to heart failure in the back of an emergency vehicle while he was preparing to move from what turned out to be his last home. He was just a few years into his 50's, but had lived hard and with scant regard to his health for most of his life.

He left behind a significant body of work including many drawings and paintings, and a number of other sculptures in wood, marble, and feather rock, but this was his only piece in limestone. The Buddha measured only about 20" tall but weighed a lot. I could still remember grunting as I lifted it out of my car to deliver it into my mom's yard when I was a lot younger and stronger than I am now. I was not looking forward to wrestling with it again, but it was important enough to me that I felt I had to try.

The more I thought about it, the heavier it got. I looked for my back support belt so I could protect my troublesome L4 and L5 vertebrae. I wondered if I should take some long boards so I could try to roll it up into the car if I couldn't lift it. In the end I imagined I wouldn't be able to budge it at all, that it would rest embedded in the earth as if permanently attached.

Then when I got there ... it was gone.

Not just gone as in recently stolen, but long gone. I found where it used to be, but there was not even an impression in the undergrowth to mark the spot. There was nothing to do but let it go. Just like that, the imagined weight was lifted. The only trace of it was a few photographs, as light as feathers.

In its place I brought back a whole trunk full of stuff that weighed just a few pounds: Two paintings by my grandmother, one by my sister, one by my ex-wife, a stack of family photo albums, and a metal file box full of documents.

Among these treasures were the manuscript to my dad's poetry book with his hand-written edits, a lock of my sister's hair from the age of 4, a US flag saved by my great-grandfather from the day he became a citizen, and a long manuscript in my mom's hand (she belonged to the age of beautiful penmanship) dated 1975 and titled "Who Am I?" in which she set down all her thoughts about life, identity, and religion.

Quite a trove. You never know what you'll find when you let go of the weight, real or imagined, of the past.

Draw Me!

I may not know what I like, but I know art when I see it ...

One of my favorite scenes in the film I, Robot is when the robot, "Sonny," tries to tell the investigating officer about his recurring dream. A picture being worth a thousand words (even to a robot), he proceeds to make a drawing to convey the scene. However he draws it like a robot might, in a series of rapid horizontal scan lines like the ones on a TV tube (remember them?) or an old dot-matrix printer. The result is uncanny -- an artistic rendering generated by a machine.

Like most science fiction this robotic trick has been quickly surpassed by reality, as you can see in this news item about Aikon, a machine that not only can draw, but does so by looking at real objects and imitating the same techniques of seeing and modeling that might be used by a human artist. I suspect that Stephen Hawking, who is himself assisted to communicate by a computer speech synthesizer, welcomes being a subject for such an experiment, as you can see in this example.

Back in the early years of computers (the 1950's) many people felt that in spite of their wizardly ability to perform mathematical calculations, there were other types of thinking that a computer would never be able to do. Alan Turing, whose work in mathematics and logic laid the groundwork for the development of the first computers, disagreed. He could find no difference in principle between what was happening in his mechanical "children" and what takes place in a human brain. Turing was one of the first to predict that computers would not only reach but surpass the abilities of those who invented them.

Oddly, in retrospect, the game of chess was sometimes sited as the kind of thing humans would always be able to do better than machines. As we know now, the opposite is true. Only the top grand masters of the game stand a chance against IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer, and most of us can't defeat a toy that sells at Radio Shack. Chess is trivial to computer analysis, and the amazing thing is that we can do as well as we do while lacking the ability to see as many moves ahead as our automated opponents.

So I for one am not the least surprised to see a portrait of Hawking that could be easily mistaken for the work of a human artist. If you play with Photoshop, or one of its alternatives like the open source GIMP, you may be familiar with the filters that can be applied to a photographic image to make it resemble an oil painting -- even to resemble a particular school of art like Impressionism or Pointillism. What Aikon does is far beyond that, actually reproducing at least some of the creative process to compose original work.

What's that? You say Aikon doesn't feel anything? That what it produces doesn't mean anything, either to itself or those who view it? That to be art it has to convey something about human experience?

Maybe you should have another look at the work of Piet Mondrian, compare it to the Hawking portrait, and ask which of them looks like it was done by a human being.

Or maybe you think that feeling and expression are the kinds of things machines will never be able to do?