A media overkill accompanied the largest solo exhibition to date of Ai Weiwei’s work in Berlin, fueling the fear that an excessive personality cult could obscure his oeuvre—the SCHIRN MAG sought out the art behind the artist at the Martin-Gropius-Bau.
Ai Weiwei Superstar: a previously unknown amount of hype around the Chinese conceptual artists recently led to an impressive demonstration of media diversity when the lead articles of all three major German art magazines featured the same artist (Ai Weiwei) at once, all of the nationwide newspapers conducted either an interview with Ai Weiwei or had covers designed by … who else?—it is very likely pure coincidence that the magazines Bäckerblume and Medi & Zini were not granted an audience in the artist’s studio in Beijing. So what happened? And how could an artist who was so convincing, in particular in terms of content, in 2010 at the Tate Modern London, in 2009 at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, or with his contribution to documenta 12 set off a media avalanche that even upstaged Matthew Barney’s recent colossal show in Munich?
It is impossible to make a separation between Ai Weiwei’s life and work, at the latest since he was banned from leaving the country, as the Private exhibition at the SCHIRN two years ago so impressively presented in photographs that meticulously captured his private idyll and government repression. The artist has since used his personal situation to expand the myth surrounding him: while Jeff Koons is stridently criticized for his egomania, one is more subdued when it comes to Al Weiwei, because as a revolutionary he fights for the freedom of speech, the division of power, and multiparty democracy instead of for image, mammon, and market value. Instead, the yellow press dutifully stands in line and gives thanks in the form of human interest stories that compare him with do-gooders such as Wolf Biermann or proclaim him to be the Buddha of the future. This causes as much damage to the image of the independent artist as his instrumentalization as a political issue. As an affair of state, the Ai Weiwei case, including a signature campaign and an appeal by Monika Grütters, Germany’s commissioner for culture and the media, fueled the thrill in the run-up to the exhibition even more with the domineering question: Is he coming, or isn’t he?
However, so much was apparent at the press conference that was closed because of overcrowding: the artist is not present, but his spirit is floating over everything in the Gropius-Bau and once again charges each of the objects on display with meaning and integrity. But can the works stand the test even without the aura of their ubercreator? After all, Ai Weiwei’s last contribution to the Venice Biennale already had little to counter the hype in the run-up to his participation in the German Pavilion in the form of a mobile consisting of wooden stools, and remained almost unnoticed from then on.
Those stools, six thousand of them, collected in abandoned homes in North China, also greet visitors to the atrium of the Martin-Gropius-Bau and initiate a course that runs through eighteen rooms with around forty works, almost all of them produced in the past seven years; a few ready-mades from his period in New York have to serve as representatives of his early work. Its effect is impressive to brute, and it works particularly well when Ai Weiwei fuses the present with the past of his country as simply and effectively as he does in his antique vases dipped in metallic automotive paint.
The exhibition becomes pretentious when the artist makes his tale of woe the theme of his works and has it stand for an entire population: the reproduction of the cell in which he was imprisoned for three months in 2011, or the handcuffs recreated in jade become the props of his own biography. What is left is to wish the artist and his art that the martyrdom imposed on him by the government soon comes to an end, but until it does, the never-ending Ai Weiwei story goes on.