Desire Lines: Essays on Art, Poetry & Culture

By Ewan Whyte

Desire Lines features an eclectic collection of Toronto writer/poet Ewan Whyte's astute essays and reviews on art, poetry, and culture, both high and low. Among the subjects included: the Roman poet Catullus, the bondage photography of Maria Coletsis, the rain paintings of Viktor Mitic, Ai Weiwei, Vladimir Azarov, Anne Carson, Leonard Cohen, Christopher Logue's Homer, Janet Cardiff, Alex Colville, Pasolini, Priscilla Uppal, Anish Kapoor and Canadian performance artist Istvan Kantor, better known as Monty Cantsin. Spontaneous and contemporary, essays for those who like to re-think.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica Editions Inc
• Release date: Jan 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781771831819

Ewan Whyte

Ewan Whyte is a writer and translator. He has written for the Globe & Mail and The Literary Review of Canada. He is the author of Entrainment, a book of poetry, and a translation, Catullus: Lyric, Rude and Erotic. He makes his home in Toronto.

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Art & Politics

Ai Weiwei

According to what?

Ai Weiwei’s exhibition According to what? (worldwide travelling art exhibit 2013–2014) is a collection of some of his relatively recent artworks, mostly from 2008 till the present. A social activist and an intensely political artist, Ai Weiwei claims art can only be political, and has even strongly questioned the importance of art intended just to be beautiful. Ai Weiwei is also a very influential human rights activist in China.

Ai Weiwei has made some strongly democratic statements, including:

My definition of art has always been the same.

Freedom of expression, a new way of communication.

Art should live in the heart of the people. Ordinary people should have the same ability to understand art as anybody else. I don’t think of art as elite or mysterious.

And:

In China they treat art as some form of decoration, a self-indulgence. It is pretending to be art. It looks like art. It sells like art. But it is really a piece of shit.

(Both quotes from an interview with Der Spiegel)

Ai Weiwei was born in 1957. His father was Ai Quing, a well known communist, a personal friend of Chairman Mao, and a famous poet of communist political poetry in China. Ai Quing was banished along with his family to a communist labour camp in 1958 for the crime of defending the Chinese writer Ding Ling, who had previously won the Soviet Union’s Stalin Prize for Literature (in 1951). Ding Ling was accused of being a rightist and expelled from the communist party before also being sentenced to labour camps herself.

Ai Weiwei grew up in a labour camp in far northwest Xinjiang province and in 1961 he was further exiled with his family to Shihezi for 16 years. It must have been an intense childhood. His father reputedly wished he could take his own life but he could not bring himself to do so. This personal experience has influenced Ai Weiwei at the deepest level.

In 1978 Ai Weiwei enrolled in the Beijing film academy where he studied animation and was a founder of the art group called The Stars. In 1981 he moved to the United States. He lived in New York from 1983–1993.

Ai Weiwei’s ten years in New York really enabled him to understand the West to an extent that would have been difficult from inside China. He is able to appeal to Western sensibilities in a convincing way through his understanding of the Western art world, and has used his understanding of liberal humanism as a social activist by paralleling Western examples in China.

On China, Ai Weiwei has famously said:

When you make somebody disappear and you don’t announce it to the family, what is this? You make people desperate and bring them close to death. If our cat or dog is lost, it makes us desperately want to know where it is — so for humans disappearing, you can barely imagine the pain. What kind of society is this? If a society cannot even support somebody like me, then people ask: Who is under protection then? That’s why there is such support for me. It is not because I am so beautiful or I am so charming. People feel: This guy is fighting for us.

(From an interview with Der Spiegel)

Ai Weiwei has run afoul of the Chinese government for his public views on domestic policies. He also espouses many causes in China. One was publically pointing out the effects of the devastating earthquake that hit Sichuan province China in 2008. It killed as many as 70,000 people with thousands more missing. Chinese government officials refused to release information about the number of deaths. In response to this, Ai Weiwei started a citizens’ investigation with the intention of bringing public notice to this event and to honour the more than 5,000 schoolchildren killed in this earthquake. Most of these children were in very poorly constructed state school buildings at the time of the earthquake. These buildings were built under contract to the Chinese government and collapsed at a much higher rate than other buildings around them, strongly suggesting that they were not up to building safety codes.

Weiwei, along with a team of volunteers and helpers, collected the names of 5,196 children who died. These names were printed out in Chinese beside the birth date of the child. Its grid-like black and white list covers the whole wall it is displayed on. It is a very powerful piece called, Names of the Student Earthquake Victims Found by the Citizens’ Investigation, 2008–2011. A work called Remembrance is an audio recording playing beside it of volunteers reading out the names of the children. The running time of the recording is over thee and half hours. Its slow pacing with different voices elucidates the visceral impact of this tragedy. On this, Ai Weiwei said:

Can these facts be altered? The hearts stopped beating, their limbs decayed, and their shouts disappeared with their breath, can these be returned? Wave upon wave of mighty propaganda from the national state apparatus cannot erase the persistent memories of the survivors ... People’s hearts will call out each of your names; the name that belonged to you will be remembered. When it is called out again, you will rise from the dead and be contented spirits.

In addition to this, in 2009, Ai Weiwei had a large sculpture of a twisting snake made, called snake ceiling. It is constructed out of over 400 gray, black, and green backpacks of different sizes like those commonly used by children all over the earthquake affected area. This piece is on the ceiling in front of the entrance to the exhibit, According to what?

Ai Weiwei — "Names of the Student Earthquake Victims Found by the Citizen’s Investigation," 2008–2011

Inkjet prints, Dimensions variable, Installation view from the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, 2012–2013

Ai Weiwei — "Snake Ceiling," 2009

822 backpacks, Dimensions variable: 12 (h) × 33 (w) × 591 (l) inches Installation view from the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2009

If it were not for his extraordinary father Ai Quing, Ai Weiwei would very likely not be in the position he is in today, being an artist within the system. Even though his famous father died in 1996, it looks like at least some influential authorities try to go out of their way to give Ai Weiwei a considerably longer leash than other artists of his generation in China.

Much of Ai Weiwei’s art is for our time and our place in history (with little concern as to its lasting appeal).

His assemblage of baby formula tins on the floor arranged in the shape of a map of China is one of many examples. In China, many Chinese do not trust their government’s assurances that Chinese baby formula is safe. This is due to the well known and well established kickback system in China. The food has been tested and found to have impurities in it due to lack of minimum health standards in foreign tests. Chinese people sometimes go to considerable lengths to get foreign baby formula. In 2008, 6 babies died and 300,000 were made sick from tainted infant formula.

Weiwei’s map of China in this show is cut out of Hua wood from an old Chinese temple beam. It includes the disputed regions of Tibet, Taiwan and Xinjiang. In this exhibit his installation called Straight is 5000 metal reinforcing bars or rods from the buildings to match the 5000 names on the wall beside it. It is moving to see these two pieces together.

Ai Weiwei’s desire to smash a Han dynasty pot in a performative piece and record it is following that ubiquitous tradition in art of smashing something from the past in order to replace it. Its import is obviously more than art but is almost cliché at this point. In the case of China and its past traditions, it seems the Cultural Revolution broke from much of China’s past so thoroughly that a recovery to those former traditions would be doubtful even if it were desired. Smashing a Han dynasty vase was already literally and figuratively done so well by the communists in their Cultural Revolution it seems a redundant joke. The tradition of Buddhism which came from India to China and then to Japan was extirpated from China during the Cultural Revolution to the extent that if someone is studying Chinese Buddhism on an academic level they inevitably go to Japan and study it there, piecing it together as it was in China.

It may be that much of China’s past for better or worse is completely irretrievable as living traditions. There may be some transplanting of these traditions from Taiwan or Tibet but it will be a different tradition with a doubtful reintroduction. Weiwei playing with China’s past sometimes seems as if it were for the West — or is it for a Chinese audience that still admires at least parts of the Cultural Revolution?

In China he is well known for the series of photographs with his fist outstretched giving the finger to buildings of symbolic and political power in the background. Although as one offended viewer complained, it is on the level of a ten-year-old. The rude gesture is playful and fun at the same time and goes with his revolutionary politics of public expression and freedom of expression. Revolutions seem to turn into something else, something else very ugly and Weiwei is justly concerned with this idea. The implementation of any new revolution would be truly scary in a country of 1.4 billion people.

Rae Johnson

Interiors

The dream-like spaces Rae Johnson paints in her series called Interiors (Christopher Cutts Gallery, Dec. 2015) are like inner rooms with human figures defined in the limited detail of liminal consciousness. The figures here are ghostlike, occupying something similar to Buddhism’s Bardo state of in-between lives. Her created world in this series is a visiting of her dreams and imagination.

Her large painting Red Restaurant Interior is a room of otherworldly figures headed on a journey in a Hopperesque old-fashioned train car diner. Out the window is a blurred green landscape with a small patch of blue toward the tops of the windows which has the same intense red in it as the room. There is considerable move-ment in the composition of this painting. The row of stools from the front right leading down to the figures in the back, the swirls along the length of the countertop are similar to the curves in the rounded figures and are in opposition to the straight lines along the ceiling and both sides of the room.

This work points to another plane that does not have to adhere to the rules of our conscious world. The perspective is off, things are twisted. There is a surprising amount of light entering behind the three figures at the end. It is almost as if something has exploded behind them or