Ai Weiwei

Daily Serving recently published a post reviewing Ai Weiwei's works with ancient urns. In its secret complexity and seeming simplicity, in the potency and cruciality of its gestures and its tragic irreverence, these works, as they say, speak to me. For me, there is a deep sadness in this work that is linked to social questions we will never be able to resolve, and, among other things, the work raises questions about living that emphasize the necessary futility of our constant inner struggles as manifested into physical objects.

There is so much to discuss when dealing with this work, and I won't attempt to cover it all here, but I will begin by arguing a little bit with the Daily Serving blogger. The article posits that "Urns of this vintage are usually cherished for their anthropological importance. By employing them as readymades, Ai strips them of their aura of preciousness only to reapply it according to a different system of valuation....Working in this manner, Ai transforms precious artifacts—treating them as base and valueless by painting, dropping, grinding, or slapping with a logo—into contemporary fine art." Certainly, Ai's actions treat these cherished object as base and valueless. They undergo cheap processes of being painted or destroyed unbefitting the value they have been assigned by our culture. But do these actions truly strip the objects of their aura or rather do they magnify that aura? In the end, the painted and crushed and broken urns do not function as objects independent of their original identity -- they function BECAUSE of their original identity. We gain an added layer of consideration, as viewers, when confronted with the altered urns, but that consideration relies on a primary consideration of the objects' intended purposes and calls on our deep social attachments to the myth of these objects. They become even more precious because our reaction to these works is initially to believe that they are being mistreated. Therefore, Ai cannot divorce the aura from the object - and from looking at the work, I'm not really sure that was even his intention.