Ai Weiwei
The moment in which art and life collide is the moment in which art becomes unpredictable -- or, better still, dangerous. Perhaps no one knows this better than the artist Ai Weiwei, the freshly bona fide political dissident whose current “detention” in a Chinese prison qualifies him as the contemporary art world's reigning badass (even if the official charges against him are supposedly tax-related).
How else to describe an artist who has consistently served Chinese authorities a serious dose of their own mind-fuck tactics and lived to blog the tale? Weiwei's relentless baiting of the Chinese government (he once held a party while they razed his new studio) suggests that his recent arrest might be more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than would be tactful to suggest. And yet there is an undeniably Ghandhi-esque masochism about the whole exchange that's difficult to ignore.
Most of us would have called it quits after receiving the kind of brain hemorrhage that Weiwei recently suffered at the hands of the police. But not Weiwei. Is he tempting fate in order to sculpt it? And if so, should we interfere?
Which brings us to the more pressing question: What can be done immediately on the artist’s behalf? Protest? A boycott of products that are manufactured in China (is this even possible anymore)? Or, for the time being, do we choose rather to understand, and perhaps even to celebrate, albeit cautiously, Weiwei's choice not to flee China years ago, and to leverage his personal liberties (and perhaps much, much more), as the calculated, and extremely ballsy sacrifice of a master tactician intent on revealing his opponents’ ugly side? One thing is certain: Weiwei's arrest has put a floodlight back on to China and its lousy human rights record.
In an eerily prophetic interview with Dan Rather just days before his arrest, Weiwei described recent nightmares in which “tourists” looked on, as if at an exhibition, while he was tortured and imprisoned, a disclosure that suggests he was acutely aware of both his impending arrest and its potential for status as a kind of gruesome art work (more dangerous than Chris Burden's Shoot, more claustrophobic than Tehching Hsieh's One Year Performance).
Even stranger: members of China's online 50-Cent Army (so named for the half dollar they earn per pro-CCP comment that they post) claim that Weiwei masterminded his own arrest and that it is indeed a work of art, a suggestion that gives the whole affair a kind of Enter Through The Gift Shop -- by way of Kafka -- vibe.
As the grandson of a political dissident -- a journalist, who, like Weiwei's poet father, also spent the better part of seven years in Communist prisons and forced labor camps -- I understand, if only by proxy, Weiwei's desire to push it all to a head, to force the hand of his enforcers. My grandfather ultimately escaped to Canada, where he was allowed to wage his battle for democracy and free-speech unhindered, but he too seemed to feel that even his time in prison was somehow a necessary evil.
"Sometimes I wish they would take me away," Weiwei said recently; "I'm getting old." We can only hope that his time in “detention” is brief. He has made his presence and message felt, even in absentia.
BOZIDAR BRAZDA is a New York artist and writer.
