Ai Weiwei Art of the Deaths of Children in the Earthquake
How exercise we honor the dead? How do we commit them to memory? And how do we come to terms with the way they died?
To start, we can name them. At least, that's the idea backside two installations at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. The first lists information — including names and ages — nearly the thousands of children who were killed in a massive earthquake in Sichuan, Prc, in 2008. They're printed in Chinese on white newspaper that takes up an entire wall. In the second, those names are read aloud through speakers. The audio takes 3 hours and 41 minutes to play through.
Both are part of "According to What?" — an exhibition that showcases the piece of work of Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei.
To compile the listing, Ai ran afoul of Chinese authorities by having citizen investigators collect the names of more than than five,000 children who were killed when their schools complanate in the earthquake. He also asked his Twitter followers to record the names of the dead and email them to him, assertive many to exist the victims of shoddy structure.
When Ai published those names on his popular blog, regime censors shut information technology downward. A few months afterward, he was beaten by police and had to have emergency brain surgery.
The Useless Basic Of Sichuan'southward Collapsed Schools
No. two,241 on Ai's listing belongs to Liu Qiang, who was killed when the Juyuan Middle School collapsed.
I was at that ruined school in Sichuan the night of the convulsion and watched every bit small, limp bodies were carried out of the wreckage.
I met Liu Qiang's grieving family unit at their home a few days afterwards. His ashes had been placed on a makeshift altar in a pocket-sized box, wrapped in a white silk scarf. His stepmother handed me his school ID, which showed him wearing a white dress shirt.
I went to "According to What?" to see how Ai has turned that earthquake — and these thousands of deaths — into fine art. In detail, I wanted to run across a massive floor piece titled, simply, Straight. Information technology's twenty feet wide and 58 anxiety long.
I picket museum visitors crouch downwardly and get shut to see how it'south put together. When asked how they would draw it to someone who hasn't seen it, their responses range from the literal to the deeply interpretive.
"It's like a giant array of rusted rebar, steel rebar poles," says visitor Tom Carter. His wife, Karen, describes it as "38 tons in this kind of undulating shape."
"Information technology's not tall," says Marian Holtz. "Information technology's shut to the floor, merely it has a rolling effect."
Cathy Carver/Courtesy Hirshhorn Museum
"If you lot looked at information technology from the side, information technology would look like a Richter scale graph of an earthquake," Tom Carter adds. "There'southward sort of this seam downwards the heart that actually looks a fault line in the earth."
"It looks similar a fault, an earthquake fault," says Anh Nguyen. "That's what information technology reminds me of."
"It'south a beautiful piece," says Helen Dickerson. "And it'south too that sense of helplessness. Considering here you take all this textile, and what did it do? It caused no protection for anybody. Information technology'south frightening when you lot await at information technology that way."
The Wenchuan Rebar, 2012
Ai Weiwei YouTube
In a video that plays at the show, Ai explains how he made the piece: After the earthquake, he went to Sichuan and bought tons of the mangled rebar that I had seen everywhere during my visit. It was function of the convulsion droppings, the useless bones of all those schools that collapsed.
His workers pounded the twisted rebar straight, slice by piece. They kept on hammering, even when he was detained for most three months by Chinese authorities.
When he was released, Ai mapped the rusted rods into stacks of varying heights — from a few inches to a foot or so off the floor.
Straight forms a 38-ton carpet of steel that i of the show's coordinating curators, Kerry Brougher, says was tricky to install.
"We actually had to do a lot of technology on this slice considering the actual weight is considerable and the floors volition simply hold so much weight," he explains. "So we had to take engineers involved to run into how high we could get with the stacked rebar."
An Ai Weiwei quote on a nearby wall echoes the championship of the slice: "The tragic reality of today is reflected in the true plight of our spiritual being. We are spineless and cannot stand up straight."
"That says to me that people are not continuing up to abuse; they're not standing up for human rights; that our politicians don't always do the right thing," Brougher says. "We take to end being so spineless, and we accept to stand up straight against corruption. That's what this piece is ultimately about."
Straight Travels With Bulletin, But Without Creative person
Ai has said that his art flows from his search for the value of life and individual rights. Perhaps he would be pleased with the way that Rashita Connelly, an M.F.A. student at Howard University, interprets the thousands of steel rods that brand up Directly.
"[I'chiliad] just noticing each bar. ... They're all different shades and tints of dark-brown. ... None of them look alike. It reminds me of individuals," Connelly says.
"Commonly when something happens en masse, people tend to just grouping it together and forget about it," she continues. "Merely the creative person doesn't want you to forget what happened. It'south a piece that you tin can permit it simmer and call back nearly it and come up dorsum and look at it a couple times."
Subsequently "According to What?" closes in Washington on Feb. 24, it will travel to Indianapolis, Toronto, Miami, and Brooklyn, N.Y. But Ai can't travel with the evidence — Chinese authorities accept seized his passport.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2013/01/23/169973843/in-according-to-what-ai-weiwei-makes-mourning-subversive
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