Bad Art: Ai Weiwei Breaks Stuff
Reprinted From the Bad Art Newsletter.
Bad Art: Creative work that messes with people and then they get worked up and have things to say. Hilarity ensues.
I can go on and on about Ai Weiwei so I’m going to try and be brief here and talk just about him breaking things. And then somebody else breaking something else because Ai Weiwei broke something.
In 1995, Ai Weiwei dropped and shattered a Han-Dynasty urn. The performance, which he calls a “cultural readymade,” is titled, well, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995). Duh.
Here’s what he said: “Chairman Mao used to tell us that we can only build a new world if we destroy the old one.” Which is true. During the Cultural Revolution in China from 1966 to 1976 the idea was that China had to do away with its “old” culture. Antiquities were demolished as a result. So this was an updated version, destroying something considered to be of monetary value.
Even more fun, this was the second urn he destroyed — because the photographer messed up and missed the first one.
And even funner than that, in 2012 Swiss artist Manuel Salvisberg photographed the world’s biggest collector of contemporary Chinese art, Uli Sigg, dropping Coca-Cola Urn, a piece by Ai Weiwei in which he had stamped a Han dynasty urn with a Coca Cola logo. They called that work Fragments of History. Here’s what that looked like:
Now, Ai Weiwei and Uli Sigg are friends. But when Sigg was asked if he had gotten permission to drop the piece, he countered by asking cryptically whether anybody had gotten the artists’ permission to do anything with the Han Dynasty urns at all. Which of course they didn’t, being antiquities.
I know. It’s so meta.
I’ll leave you with one other thought on smashing things: In Seattle at the Museum of Pop Culture (MOPOP), they have a whole exhibit of guitars Kurt Cobain smashed. On stands with labels showing when and where the thing met its destruction. So here’s all this stuff, carefully placed in glass cases, because at some point a dude pounded the crap out of them. It’s a really peculiar mix of extreme care and extreme not-care in the same place. I have mixed feelings. On one hand it kind of defeats the whole vibe of smashing a guitar to then treat it like a precious museum object and put it in this incredibly static setting. On the other hand, the splintered bits kind of become artwork in themselves. Like, a painting is a recording of brushstrokes. These are a recording of a concert moment.
May you only smash the things that you mean to, may you find something interesting in a drawer, won’t you be my neighbor?
— Betsy
Betsy Streeter is a cartoonist and artist and writes about Bad Art in her spiffy email newsletter.
