This was originally submitted as an assignment for my Methodologies of Art Writing class on November 13, 2014. A longer essay will follow shortly. 🙂
The most conspicuous aspect of Ai Weiwei’s island-wide installation on Alcatraz is the very choice of venue. Alcatraz is arguably the most infamous prison on the planet, owing to its unique location, rich history, and famous inmates. The venue is for all intents and purposes a tourist locale, catering to 1.3 million visitors every year, and this works heavily in the exhibition’s favor. Advertisement around the bay area is minimal, and by installing this exhibition on Alcatraz, Ai Weiwei is reaching an audience that is not necessarily an art-seeking or politically motivated one. Unsuspecting viewers are drawn in to the stories of political prisoners that they otherwise may never have been aware of, and his approachable aesthetic compellingly sells the tragic message of political imprisonment. In this way, Ai Weiwei is bringing more awareness to the prisoners he features and hopefully more voices into the dialogue. The interplay between the aesthetic (colorful, beautiful, melodic, delicate) and the tremendous weight of the subject matter prevents a sort of “compassion fatigue.”
The work never entirely forgoes the stark reality of political imprisonment in favor of appeal, and is very careful not to be off-putting. While the political has always informed Ai’s work (he and his family were victims of the cultural revolution). This is a huge departure considered against his earlier more confrontational works like Study in Perspective (1995-2003, in which he took first person photographs “giving the finger” to various famous monuments including the White House and Tiananmen Square), and Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995). His work appears to take a more compassionate turn in 2008 following the massive earthquake in the Sichuan Province. Responding to the lack of information being disseminated by the governement, he launched the Citizens Investigation and made pieces commemorating the thousands of schoolchildren killed during the earthquake. It was his activism here that ultimately lead to his imprisonment in 2010, and while he is no longer under house arrest, his experience as an activist and prisoner no doubt informed the development of this exhibition.
The sheer size of the exhibition suggests scale of political imprisonment happening worldwide— this is not a message that could have been delivered with just one art piece. It is an overview, consisting of multiple stories which require multiple works. The exhibition is overlaid on 5 areas of the prison. The New Industries Building, at the northwest end of the island, houses three pieces: With Wind, Trace, and Refraction. Cell Block A, in the Main Prison building, contains the sound installation Stay Tuned, scattered amongst a dozen or so different cells. The Hospital Wing, located on the floors above the dining hall, houses the multi-room installation Blossom. Within the Hospital Wing are two Psychiatric Evaluation Rooms, containing the sound installation Illumination. Finally, the Dining Hall has been repurposed into a quiet space for the interactive piece Yours Truly. Because of the vastness of the exhibition, this review will focus on the pieces in the New Industries Building.
Within the New Industries Building, the first piece that a viewer will encounter is With Wind, aptly named because of the use of kites throughout. The building itself was a space for inmates displaying good behavior to work off some of their sentence “an average of two days ‘good time’ for a month’s work” of laundry and manufacturing. A technicolor dragon made of paper, vibrant gouache, and other traditional Chinese materials circles the entire room, some of his scales painted with quotes from past and present political prisoners. “My words are well-intended and innocent…” reads a scale quoting Le Quoc Quan, Vietnamese activist and human rights lawyer currently serving a 30 month sentence in Hoa Lo Prison for tax evasion. The dragon and is joined by other kites in the shapes of birds hanging through the structure, eliciting the notions of birds as symbols of freedom. Each bird kite is slightly different, and each is representative of a country holding political prisoners, including the United States. It is difficult to decipher which country each of these kites represent, save for the one blue kite in the shape of a six-point star, which strongly evokes the Israel-Palestine conflict. The kites are colorful and suspended across the high ceiling as though they were in flight. The effect is highly suggestive of the collocation of the language of freedom and the symbology of birds.
The next room in the New Industries Building houses the gigantic Lego brick installation, Trace, which consists of 170 individual portraits of past and present political prisoners. Among the selected are the artist himself; Russian artist Andrei Barabanov; Bahraini human rights activist Naji Fateel; American whistle-blowers Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning; Nelson Mandela; Martin Luther King, Jr.; and Tibetan musician Lolo, who is also showcased in the Stay Tuned piece. The number of individuals represented (each with a small biography), the number of blocks, and the size of the installation is overwhelming, and when those aspects of the piece are taken into consideration, that is when the reasoning for the choice of Lego brick as material becomes more evident. The intention is to overwhelm, to illustrate the magnitude of the imprisonment being inflicted around the world. None of these 170 garishly colorful faces is accused of having committed a violent crime, yet the sentences that some carry are extremely harsh.
Beneath Trace and With Wind, in the “lower gun gallery where armed guards once monitored prisoners at work,” lies the gigantic wing sculpture Refraction. Composed of steel and solar panels manufactured in Tibet, the piece again evokes the symbology of birds and freedom. The piece itself weighs 5 tons, meaning that flight would be impossible. The positioning of the viewer to the piece is a rather interesting play on power dynamics between prisoners and guards. The narrow walkway through which visitors can view the giant earthbound wing, was, as mentioned, the same that was used by armed guards monitoring the prisoners. The wing is imprisoned and under observation by participants, who have no way to access the wing and see it up close. This forced alienation of the viewer from the art object creates a lack of empathy between guard and prisoner— a notion that has been played out over and over again following the famous Stanford Prison Experiment.
Ai’s selection of Alcatraz as a venue for his exhibition highlighting and in support of political prisoners was a very calculated decision. While the prison is most famous for its hard-core criminals housed there during the 20th century, the facility was previously used for prisoners of conscience. Beginning in the 19th century, in an effort to destroy indigenous cultures, Native American children were taken by force from their homes and forced into boarding schools for “re-education.” As reported by the National Park Service, “The education of children was the centerpiece of a U.S. government policy of Manifest Destiny, and it was fiercely resisted by Hopi people.” Following years of coercion, the US military was unable to force many Native Americans into submission, and on November 25, 1894, 19 Hopi men from various clans were captured and sent to Alcatraz for a year. Perhaps it was this history that most attracted Ai Weiwei to the island, his own family victims of oppression by a new regime.
Works Cited:
“History: National Park.” Alcatraz History. Accessed November 13, 2014. http://www.alcatrazcruises.com/website/history-national-park.aspx.
Ai, Weiwei. “Citizens Investigation.” Ai Weiwei. May 12, 2008. Accessed November 13, 2014. http://aiweiwei.com/projects/5-12-citizens-investigation/.
Spalding, David, ed. @Large: Ai Weiwei On Alcatraz. San Francisco: Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, 2014. 51.
“Lê Quốc Quân.” Wikipedia. June 11, 2014. Accessed November 11, 2014.
“Stanford Prison Experiment.” The : A Simulation Study of the Psychology of Imprisonment. Accessed November 13, 2014. http://www.prisonexp.org.
United States. National Park Service. “Hopi Prisoners on the Rock.” National Parks Service. November 13, 2014. Accessed November 13, 2014. http://www.nps.gov/alca/historyculture/hopi-prisoners-on-the-rock.htm.
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