Reflections on an Exhibition: Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei
One of the miracles of the modern is consistency. The fact that there is McDonald’s in Delhi, New York, Beijing and also the little towns — Moree in norther New South Wales Australia and Murmansk in Siberia is one aspect of this marvel. Yet the consistency is found everywhere in all branded products. It was the miracle of repetition that sold the first Industrial Revolution to the British working class: suddenly they could own a set of china cups and spoons that where identical! To a world so accustomed to the irregular, odd, partial, handmade this was astounding. Yet by the mid-20th Century the glamour was wearing off. The quest for the unique began to gain speed.
The National Gallery of Victoria is currently running an exhibition of work by Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei. These artists have in their own way capitalised on the tension between repetition and difference. There is something in the human psyche that delights in uniformity: the predictability of it. Yet we are terrified of it too! We like to think of ourselves as unique and uniformity (aka conformity) threatens this self-understanding. Warhol offered us the delight of Campbell soup cans and Weiwei the rich exotic textures of bunches of flowers. Both offer a critique of utopic dreams of the perfect society defined/achieved via order and replicability.
At the heart of their work is a quest to redefine meaning. Meaning relies on the intelligible emerging from the chaos of unmediated perception. Culture has always offered the security of meaning — we see gods in the stars and accord agency to the wind and waves. There is pattern there we say. Yet we impose the pattern and this is what Warhol and Ai Weiwei are pointing to. A critique of the politics of pattern lies at the heart of their work: this is especially so for Weiwei. They are saying that modernity has imposed order on the wild places of the human heart and the natural world. Weiwei in particular is pointing out that there are escape routes to pattern. These lie in accessing the patterning of individual and collective actions and the sense making this elicits. To disturb a given pattern is to challenge a used future.
Yet how much freedom from conditioning can we cope with? We exist emotionally and spiritually in between the given and the possible; the pattern and the patterning. All yearn to express something of our deeper potential in what we do, how we engage in the activity of patterning and yet we have cultural moorings. Culture tells us who we are and what we are capable of: mostly! It offers us potential patterns to follow, it provides imaginative scaffolding and sets of images to work with, it structures our realities and offers us pleasures and consolations a plenty. Our images of the future are curated by the media and assembled via biography and aspiration. We are each and every one of us a living breathing exhibition of pattern and patterning. Weiwei captures the tension in culture between past and present with his Neolithic Vase series on which he inscribes the Coca-Cola logo.
Yet the future beckons and to reach the futures we yearn for we must break the strangle hold that the past imposes on us as cultural beings. We must break the past, but not erase it, as Weiwei does in shattering the Han Vase. Yet we must give the breaking meaning and that is the trick. How do we make meaning in a way that nourishes and nurtures? Perhaps such a step lies in becoming aware of our own complicity as culture makers. We all actively participate in culture just as Warhol demonstrates in his photographic series of images of cultural icons: in these images culture is the mask of the individual. We are also invited by Weiwei to be cultural activists who reinscribe meaning and challenge the given cultural patterns repetition imposes on us: see Weiwei’s Study in Perspective or his Ai Weiwei in Tiananmen Square in 2009.
I see this activism beginning with our embodied sense of potential. The body as a conditioned cultural artefact is the first cultural domain to reclaim. It is the aesthetic site of our principle self-identification and the vehicle of any self-becoming. It is both a map and a poster for our spiritual journey. Perhaps this is why there is an explosion of tattooing and body art going on at present? We write on the body and announce our pattern to the world and to the other bodies we dance with.
Modernity’s commitment to repetition has sought to discipline the body via the repetitions of induction into the modern community. Schooling and the nuclear family are principle vehicles of this patterning of the modern body. Yet culture (and modernity too) understand the evolutionary demand for difference. It is the bug in the system that allows in new modalities of pattern. Without mutation there is no future. Warhol and Weiwei offer insights into this fact.
Difference and Repetition
The ticking clock of culture hypnotizes us
seeding memory’s game of story
re-telling, crafting time via repetition.
Our voices chant: echoes of the past, echoes of the future.
Did the Trojan Horse really humble Priam’s people?
Tick! Tick! Tock!
Mutation is the gift that frees or shackles.
Did Nero play that fiddle?
Whose song does this story satisfy?
Where does repetition end and difference begin?
Does Deleuze know? Does Homer? Augustin?
Weiwei plays with repetition
Taking comfort in it
Gleefully puncturing its smooth face
Tick! Tick! Tock!
Culture will find an escape route
Every so often
Our sense of yearning will see to it
Tock! Tick! Tock!