Grayson Perry: The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman

At the British Museum in January we purchased advance tickets for the Grayson Perry exhibition, not really knowing what to expect. While wandering around the museum, we came upon a pink and blue motorcycle with a sort of shrine on the back. The label indicated that the motorcycle was tripped out for Grayson Perry's trip to Germany and that the shrine was for his teddy bear, Alan Measles. While we found some of the details amusing, I was quite repelled by the idea of a grown man so dedicated to his teddy bear, and anticipated the exhibition with considerable trepidation.

The next day we appeared for the exhibition and very quickly I found myself totally fascinated by the stunning objects Perry had chosen from the British Museum collection and somewhat interested in many of the items he had crafted for it. And I was completely taken by the statement "Hold your beliefs lightly," which was repeated several times in the installation. Several of the texts accompanying the objects were thoughtful and enlightening. Wanting to remember these objects, and photography being prohibited, I purchased the exhibition catalogue.

A month later, thinking I would write something here about the exhibition, I opened the catalogue, but couldn't find many of the objects that had so fascinated me. The texts did not replicate the exhibition labels (they rarely do in catalogues), and even the Perry works were difficult to comprehend. For example, I had been amused by walking around the vase titled "Your Are Here," and discovering people's quoted reasons for coming to the exhibition - "I'm into beat stuff," "It's on my A level syllabus, my tutor told me to come," "I had a free ticket" - but the catalogue's two views could only remind me of the experience of amused discovery, not replicate it.

The catalogue emphasizes Perry's works and does not include all the British Museum objects. Of his works I recall especially his "Map of Truths and Beliefs," 2011, some of the ceramic jars, and the complex pilgrim figures of "Our Father," 2007 and "Our Mother," 2009. I tried to ignore the omnipresent bears, and "The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman" itself was a letdown both in the exhibition and the catalogue, a lot about not much.

After we saw the exhibition I enthusiastically recommended it to a London art colleague; she expressed total lack of interest, saying "Grayson Perry is all about Grayson Perry." The catalogue bears her out, but the exhibition was more of a wunderkammer, its mostly anonymous objects unexpectedly beautiful, powerful, amazing and amusing.

Since Perry is a Turner Prize winner and certainly an eccentric personality, there are many websites that reproduce images of his work. For example, the Saatchi Gallery website illustrates some vases, one with the excellent comment, "People say, ‘why do you need to put sex, violence or politics or some kind of social commentary into my work?’ Without it, it would be pottery. I think that crude melding of those two parts is what makes my work.”

What enchanted me about the exhibition was the beauty and the power of the objects Perry chose from the British Museum's collection. I think some of them were the Haida argillite carvings, Japanese and Indian portable shrines, a Kongo Power Figure, a Russian pine and ivory model of a sled, the print of the Chevalier d'Eon (an 18th century cross-dresser), an etching of multiple methods of torture, and Chinese earthenware statuettes of women. Most of these were three-dimensional; they lose presence in two-dimensional photographs. Photographs also diminish the size differences, so photographs of tiny things sit next to those of huge things and both lose some of their wonder.

This was another example of how an artist can be the curator of a fascinating exhibition drawn from a museum collection; and it demonstrates again why I try not to look at catalogue photographs of objects after seeing a particularly stunning show.

Soumaya, Mexico City

We're just back from a 9-day trip in Mexico City and some historic cities in Mexico - Guanajuato, San Miguel Allende, Queretaro, Tepotzotlan. One of my goals was to visit contemporary art museums and new museums in Mexico City, a city with enormous artistic wealth and more fine museums than you can possible get to in a week. We were a group of 14 interested, and interesting travelers.

The first thing I will say is that we were completely safe at all times. We happened to be in Guanajuato when the 7.4 earthquake hit in the Oaxaca area. It was felt in Mexico City, but all we saw was a slightly swinging chandelier in the Teatro Juarez. We saw families in museums and on outings everywhere, people seemed happy, and in general Mexico City seemed prosperous. The only evidence of the narco wars was an art exhibition that addressed it in the Siqueiros Polyforum.

Soumaya ramps

On our first day we visited Soumaya, Carlos Slim's museum for his personal collection. Our group had differing views. Upon leaving, one person suggested that with all his money, Mr. Slim might have hired a professional advisor to help him get better art, that the museum seemed like someone's attic. Although I can understand that "take," and it reflects what I think I've seen in the general press about the museum, I had a completely different impression. I also disagree quite vehemently with those who call the museum's architecture derivative of the Guggenheim. It is not circular and you do not have to view the art on ramps with uneven floors. Fernando Romero, the architect of this imposing structure, did not waste the huge interior space at all. Ramps lead you from one floor to the other and some of them have timelines or information about artists posted on the walls. I saw many people carefully reading these materials. The exterior is cloaked with octagon-shaped metal units, likened by my chemistry professor colleague to models of carbon atoms. It looks much smaller on the outside than on the inside, although the outside is large enough to be difficult to capture in a photograph. And it's on top of a sort of pedestal, making it visible from farther away.

I started at the top, which has marvelous complicated natural light and only displays sculpture. The 'hook' is Rodin, and there are many. But I also found Camille Claudel and other contemporaries of Rodin, as well as quite a selection of amusing sculptures by Salvador Dali. The gallery was full of families and young people talking about the sculpture, or just enjoying it and visiting with each other. Some of our group thought the space looked like a rummage sale, and the people were certainly enjoying it as much as they would a sale. I'm not sure what the organizing principle is for this gallery, but I also enjoyed just walking around and seeing what wonders there are there. A small bronze of Napoleon by Vincenzo Vela was featured in the museum brochure, and took me back to a grad school friend who did her dissertation on Vela. Famous artists, unknown artists, interesting subjects, strange subjects. People were having a good time here. And I was among them.

Jesus de la Helguera, (Chihuahua 1910-1971) Indian Love, 1954. Coll. Fundacion Miguel Aleman.

The next floor down combined ancient Mexican  artifacts and 20th-century Mexican painters. I was taken by the Totomixtlehuaca Codex, dated 1570 from Guerrero, a detailed large sort of map in charcoal on cotton, as well as by paintings by Rivera., Siqueiros and Tamayo. A group of extremely kitsch subjects also caught my eye, and I took a snapshot of Amor Indio, (Indian Love), 1954.  They remind me of Bouguereau and of Luis Jimenez; they are probably not what a respectable art museum would show, but also indicative of some popular taste and amusing. I can imagine being fascinated by these paintings as a child, as I once loved Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.



Joaquin Sorolla, Head of a Boy, 1911



Selections of an unusually dark portrait of a boy by Joaquin Sorolla, a Modigliani portrait of a male printer, early Van Gogh peasant paintings that could have depicted Mexico, and a Rivera seascape among French seascapes in the 19th-century galleries gave the strong impression that Slim is putting Mexican art into its European context and connecting famous European artists with Mexico. I had the sense that general visitors here would find the art easy to relate to and specialists might find paintings in styles and subjects they did not expect. Of course, the "quality" of these works might have been mixed, but the little Sorolla transfixed me, as did many of the other works by both Mexican and European artists.

The collection includes very good and representative works by many of the most famous Mexican artists of the 19th and 20th centuries. Three paintings are below:

Joaquin Clausell (Campeche 1866 - Zempuaola 1935), Night Seascape, early 20th century

Gerardo Murillo, Dr. Atl (Guadalajara 1875 - 1964 Mexico City), Landscape with Volcano, 1946

Jose Maria Velasco (Temascalzingo 1840-1912 Mexico City), Ahuehuerte Trees in Chapultepec, 1875

The collection is enormous and there's plenty to delight anyone; as I said, I saw many delighted people. Usually I really want a chronologically arranged display, but here I just found things I liked at regular intervals and was happy with the very general organization by floor. I even began to understand why there are copies of Michelangelo's Vatican Pieta and the ancient sculpture of the Laocoon in the lobby, an opportunity to experience in the round objects that aren't readily available, as plaster casts have been used in other museums. You can't get that close to the real Pieta any more, so even in bronze, it's interesting to experience the work spatially.

On a Saturday the museum was full of people and it seemed clear the Carlos Slim intends it as an entertaining and enlightening gift to Mexico City.

Identity Gift

Several years ago, I started receiving friendly emails from strange (to me) sources - Miles Kimball, the University of Iowa, Medscape Psychiatry, Iowa politicians. Sometimes they addressed me as Albert and Dorot, but usually they just seemed to understand me as a past customer, alum, or subscriber. It's kind of irritating to be recognized as someone else. When I called Earthlink to see what was going on, they had no way of correcting the situation, so I never knew if Albert and I shared an email address of if somehow he'd mistyped it and the mistake got passed on. I've made several attempts to remove these Norrises from my own identity, but with limited success.

It wasn't difficult to get off the University of Iowa mailing list. When I tried to unsubscribe to Medscape Psychiatry, however, I got all kinds of questions as to why, and then it kept coming to me anyway. Eventually I identified the people for whom these emails were intended, and I found their address. I wrote to them, telling them that I was getting order confirmations and offers that were intended for them. It may be that I wrote at a bad time, because no one ever answered. So I kept getting things. Miles Kimball once sent me a confirmation for something Dorothy had ordered. There was nothing I could do about it. It seems that a dishonest person with some interest would be able to take advantage of this identity gift.

Several months ago I got a message from Carousel Nissan in Iowa, inviting Dorothy to come in for a special deal, and I called the dealership. The woman said those emails don't come from them, but from the corporation and she couldn't tell me how to stop them. But she did look in the phone book and found Dorothy's name. And after that call I was inspired to do some internet research and found that Albert had died a couple of years ago. Albert Stanley Norris was a psychiatrist who apparently trained in psychiatry the University of Iowa and lived in Cedar Rapids at the time of his death. He was from Canada originally. In his picture, he looks like a nice man, but not like the Norrises I knew.

Obviously as a psychiatrist, he would subscribe to a psychiatry journal; Medscape Psychiatry seems to be a pretty conservative one.  After reading his obituary, I was able to find online a newspaper article Dr. Norris wrote a long time ago about how marijuana is more dangerous than cigarettes. He had little concrete information at that time and seemed to be extrapolating from the general concern about drugs. Albert seems to have been a member of something called U.S. English, because they send messages asking for his membership renewal and support.  And during this election cycle, starting in the summer, I've been getting messages for him from Michelle Bachman,  pleading for Albert to send more money to her campaign, first for president, then for Congress, and most recently just a couple of days ago expressing great fear about the "Occupy Wall Street" supporter who is running against her in the primary.

I don't own a Nissan, love the idea of an Occupy candidate for Bachman's seat, and have mixed feelings about English as a national language, since that type of organization is often also anti-immigrant, or at least anti-immigrant from the south. The email messages I've received have enabled me to get a picture of the Norrises that I'd imagine they wouldn't want a complete stranger to have. I wonder if this unsolicited gift of information happens to other people.

I've finally stopped getting the Medscape messages. Some of the businesses have now just substituted my name for theirs in response to my 'unsubscribe' request. And I will tell Michelle Bachman that Albert is no longer available. More that two years after Albert Norris's death, I'm still getting email for him. 

Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, at the National Gallery



Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Head of a youth with ivy wreath, ca. 1491-4
Metal point of grey prepared paper, Florence, Uffizi

We went to London specifically to see the exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan. My dissertation was on Gian Cristoforo Romano, a sculpture who worked in Milan during part of the time Leonardo was there and in 1988 I organized an exhibition, The Sforza Court: Milan in the Renaissance 1450-1535. In graduate school I took a course abiut Leonardo taught by Ludwig Heydenreich, a scholar whose biography of Leonardo presents the artist in all his aspects, demonstrating the interconnectedness between his mechanical studies, his nature studies, his anatomy studies, his sculpture and his painting. This book appears to be out of print and forgotten, but from it I came to appreciate Leonardo as an archtypical Renaissance Man and have believed that his painting was only a part of his significant research and thinking.

In the course of studying Renaissance Milan and its court, I also became somewhat familiar with several artists of considerable ability who were working there before and during Leonardo's sojourn. Among them Vincenzo Foppa was probably the major figure before Leonardo arrived. An image of Foppa's Young Cicero Reading fresco of 1464 gives an idea of the subtlety of his modeling with light and shade, his ability to create sophisticated complex poses, his interest in perspective, and a bit of his landscape style. The court to which Leonardo arrived was extremely rich and quite sophisticated and it might have offered Leonardo some learning opportunities. The London exhibition continues of the tradition of presenting Leonardo as the sole genius around whom skilled but inferior followers were working. It does this even while exhibiting some gorgeous and inspired drawings and paintings by Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (c. 1467-1516) that actually challenge the National Gallery's attribution of some of works hanging near the Boltraffios.

I do understand that art politics often affect the way objects are identified in museums. The National Gallery exhibition is very impressive just for bringing together about 8 paintings attributed to Leonardo, plus a few attributed to his followers and a good number of drawings related to the paintings. The negotiations must have been difficult and I'm sure the curators had to make changes related to what loans were available.

My primary reason for going to the exhibition was, of course, to see the London and Paris versions of the Madonna of the Rocks  and the exhibition was of great value just in making that possible. I think everyone expected that the two paintings would be shown next to each other, but the curators opted to have them facing each other across a modest-size gallery. Nonetheless, walking back and forth between them, I was able to make some useful comparisions.  A very nice and straightforward discussion of the two paintings is in the review by Charles Hope in the Feb. 9, 2012 New York Review of Books. Hope concludes on the basis of the documentation that the London version must be by some artist in Leonardo's shop.  I agree on stylistic grounds as well. The New York Review article provides a good pairing of photographs of the paintings.

I've always thought the London version of the painting was rather harshly modeled, much more like marble or porcelain sculpture than human flesh. I think I had also noted that the London vegetation looks far more schematic and stiff than the flowing, organic plants in the Paris version. This is quite easy to see even through the thick and darkened varnish of the Louvre version. The baby Jesus in London seems freakish, with a strangely bald head and overarticulated muscles. When I notice that the Louvre Jesus has very similar modeling, it then reinforces the impression that the London copies the Paris one, and sometimes the copyist doesn't quite understand his source.

The figure that struck me the most in the in person comparison, though, was the angel. In the Paris version, the angel has no attributes and has a rather odd pose, suggesting that it is leaning forward or, it always seems to me, that it is actually a sphinx figure. I've wondered if that could be a reference to the Old Law, with the pre-Christian figure predicting Christ's salvation. The London figure is definitely an angel, complete with halo and wings. But when one tries to see how the upper torso is connected to the legs, there seems to be a break between the figure and the drapery over the legs. In photographs one just imagines that the figure is there in the shadows, but in person I couldn't find the figure. So there's an erect figure and then a little behind it, painted drapery suggesting backside and legs. I imagine that the painter of the London version was trying to reconcile this angel with an underdrawing, a sketch, or a memory of the Louvre angel.

The halos in the London version, and St. John's cross, also strike me as something an artist would add who wanted to be sure we knew who the people are, who didn't trust the viewer to understand. In the Louvre version the sphinx-like angel looks at us and points to St. John, who worships Christ, who blesses him back. The Virgin, with her arm around St. John, reaches out in blessing. I had never thought before that she may refer to the Madonna della Misericordia, the Madonna of Mercy, symbolically embracing all humanity under her robe and promising everyone salvation. In London her arm and robe still encircle St. John, but without the angel's gaze, we are not invited into the scene, another change that seems to make the painting less innovative. Rather than perfecting Leonardo's idealism, as the exhibition texts suggest, the London painting hardens the modeling and simplifies the subject, as a copyist (and someone obeying the wishes of conservative patrons) might do.

There's more about this exhibition that puzzled me. The labels suggest that Leonardo went to Milan as a musician, connecting that idea with the portrait of a musician attributed to him in the first gallery. I purchased the catalogue just to confirm that the point of the curators was really to focus on his music and painting, mentioning but disregarding the famous letter Leonardo wrote to Ludovico Il Moro, recommending himself as an engineer of public works, and inventor of weapons, and, by the way, a painter and sculptor. The exhibition includes many drawings, but does not mention all of Leonardo's scientific studies, to my mind thus omitting major aspects of his art. Of course, referring to Leonardo as a musician and to his delivery of a silver lyre to Ludovico Il Moro, one perceived reason for his move to Milan, sets up the viewer for the portrait of a musician that follows.

There are other oddities about the installation. The first major painting on view is the Portrait of a Musician, which is here strongly attributed to Leonardo but has been frequently doubted by other scholars. Its label suggests that the painting is hugely innovative in depicting the man in three-quarter view rather than profile. I had just noticed the New York Times article about the Italian portrait exhibition in New York, illustrated with Andrea del Castagno's three-quarter frontal Portrait of a Man, dated ca. 1450, which demonstrates that this format was pretty well established by the time whoever painted the Portrait of a Musician. What puzzled me, though was that two other portraits of men were compared to the Musician, but one was next to it and the other, quite similar, was around the corner in the next gallery. The exhibition attributed these two works to Leonardo's followers Boltraffio and Marco d'Oggiono, but it was hard for me to confirm that they were not by the same artist, probably because both had similar hair styles and bloodless lips. It certainly would have been interesting to be able to see them together. And this might have been a good time to introduce these two artists as documented members of Leonardo's studio in Milan.

I think everyone loved seeing La Belle Ferroniere and The Lady with an Ermine in the same room, two gorgeous paintings. I love the backlighting on La Belle's chin and the soft modelling of her very regular features. At one point I thought maybe I could get a better idea of the texture of her dress by looking at the giant photograph near the entrance to the exhibition, but the photographic process flattened and blurred all the detail. Seeing the paintings in person really makes a difference. The Lady with an Ermine had me looking around the room to see if any of the women there had shoulders that slope as much as hers do, almost as if she herself is ermine-shaped. While her hand is lovely and expressive, it also looks too large and a bit distorted.

I notice that Martin Kemp has raised the question about the Madonna Litta from the Hermitage, which is attributed to Leonardo in the exhibition catalogue entry, but attributed to Boltraffio everywhere else in the catalogue. I keep puzzling over the assertion that the Leonardo drawing of a beautiful, idealized woman served as the drawing for the Madonna Litta. (The link to this drawing also takes you to an article with good images of many of the works in the show, by a scholar who accepts the National Gallery's attributions without question.) They both look down to the left, but their eyes are completely different. I can't judge the attribution of this work, but I do question whether Leonardo remained so ignorant of anatomy as to place the Virgin's breast just under her neck and joined to her shoulder. A drawing attributed to Boltraffio of the infant Christ and another of drapery seem closer to this painting, although the drawing is fresher and more lifelike. (I would love to post images of these, but the system is too slow and I'll have to try later.) This is, of course a common characteristic, that drawings seem fresher and livelier than the paintings that follow them. It is also difficult to prove that the drawings are FOR the painting rather than AFTER the painting, but others do think the Litta Madonna is by Boltraffio.

It's here that I started asking myself whether the paintings are wonderful rather than whether they are by Leonardo, since people seem to be swayed by famous names and attribute greatness to a work just because a name is connected to it. I just read a British newspaper review that unfavorably compared the Litta Madonna to Boltraffio's Madonna of the Rose, saying that it confirms that Leonardo is the greater artist. But if the Litta Madonna is by Boltraffio, then maybe he's pretty wonderful also? And the Madonna of the Rose is a wonderful painting, much more subtle and touching than it looks in reproduction.

Boltraffio as presented in the exhibition seems a really wonderful artist. If you Google images by him, you get a wide range of paintings and they don't look all that great, although some of them are also thought to be by Leonardo. But the drawings in the National Gallery's Leonardo exhibition and the few paintings exhibited there suggest that he had a really great ability to represent human feelings and tenderness and a lively drawing ability. The Madonna of the Rose from the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan and the drawings associated with it, as well as the drawings shown with the Litta Madonna make me want to know more about Boltraffio and see a more careful assessment of his work.

Finally, the exhibition brings up questions about Leonardo's workshop. There are at least a dozen Milanese artists called "followers of Leonardo" and apparently his notebooks list multiple assistants whose work is not known; Kenneth Clark conjectures that these were various craftsmen and machine makers. Two painters, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco d'Oggiono are named in documents and have surviving work, which is probably why they were included in the exhibition. Another assistant, Giacomo Salai, is famous for being a rapscallion but no paintings have been associated with him. While Marco d'Oggiono's works are not particularly interesting, Boltraffio's are, and I would like to have seen more about him as a personality. His drawings and paintings seem almost to have slipped into the exhibition perhaps to fill the spaces between the Leonardos, rather than to call our attention to his ability. Perhaps the idea of "followers of Leonardo" is still awaiting the kind of  reassessment that Rembrandt's have enjoyed in recent years.

In retrospect, now I'm thinking again about the several Boltraffio paintings and drawings that were displayed quite near the London Madonna of the Rocks. These particularly caught my eye as lovely images and I wondered then why the curators had chosen to display them in that location. I imagine they thought it would demonstrate Leonardo's influence, but now I'm wondering also if Boltraffio may have been one of the painters of the London painting, especially when a drawing in the exhibition is compared in the catalogue to the golden swath of drapery across the Virgin in the London version. In any event, while the exhibition celebrated Leonardo's painting, it also revealed something of the delight of Boltraffio's work.

Looking for Ai Weiwei at the V & A

My reason for going to London was the Leonardo show at the National Gallery. But the other thing I really wanted to see was an Ai Weiwei exhibition listed on the Victoria and Albert Museum website. Tom and I went to the V & A and dutifully attended their big Postmodernism show, which he found interesting and I found confusing. We both were delighted to see a video and some material about Karol Armitage, called "the punk ballerina," in the part of the exhibition that actually connected to my own idea of Postmodern.  She's from Lawrence; we really like her parents and have enjoyed meeting her as well.

After checking out two other exhibitions, we left the museum, rushing to get to the theater; only later did I realize that we hadn't seen Ai Weiwei or anything about him. So when we returned to London a week later, the show was my first priority.

There was no signage at the Museum entrance and no listing in the exhibitions section of the events calendar. I asked the information booth person and she pointed me to a listing at the BACK of the calendar, where I also saw listed an installation about Jingdezhen , the pottery-making center in China, which had also interested me. The information person directed us to the floor where the Ai Weiwei show was. But when we got there, the ceramics galleries, there was again no sign and no indication of Ai. So we wandered a bit. I found some pottery and a video from Jingdezhen and thought maybe that was the show, but it wasn't. The video included a Chinese man carrying lots of unfired porcelain on two trays suspended from a pole across his shoulders; I thought it was a charming image. I also photographed a tall vase that was made in sections and joined together, a technique I had never thought about. There was lots to learn on this floor. Our friend Robert was busy on the gallery computer designing the most hideous teapot possible.



Neolithic jar, Victoria and Albert Museum

 Finally I decided I needed to scope out the floor and walked all the way to the end, where, to my delight, I found an exhibition of works by Ai Weiwei. It is titled Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn, and focuses on Ai's ceramic work. His photographs of Dropping the Urn are much larger than I had imagined, the famous three-part image of him dropping a Han vase. There's a video of Ai dipping Neolithic jars in house paint, and a large group of them on view, brightly colored and "modernized," but also destroyed as historical artifacts. The ancient jar with "Coca Cola" written across it is there, with a comparable jar from the V & A collection next to it (without the inscription, of course).

More objects related to China's destruction of its own cultural heritage in the interest of commercial growth and modernization included Souvenir of Beijing, 2002, a treasure box with a brick from a destroyed traditional home, Untitled, 1993, a Song Dynasty ceramic figure in a Johnny Walker Red Label Scotch bottle (identified one of Ai's earliest ceramic experiments), and Dust to Dust, a glass container of powder, the remains of a Neolithic jar that Ai had ground up. The label suggests the range of ways to think about these objects. While the vase is gone, the clay dust remains as a physical object, so the vase has been transformed into something else, not destroyed. The brick, although of no particular artist value in itself, is a treasured bit of history, preserved as a reminder of neighborhoods destroyed as China modernizes its housing. The figure in a bottle seems a reference to the commercialization of Chinese antiquities; the historical treasure as part of a salable knick-knack. (It also reminds me of Yinka Shonibare's ship in a bottle on the Fourth Plinth at Trafalgar Square, the four-ton sculpture of Nelson's ship with sails made of African cloth in a giant glass bottle. Both have historical political ramifications, but I suspect to quite different purposes.)

On the other side of the installation are a variety of traditional-looking vases in blue and white porcelain. But Ai again is encouraging the visitor to think about old and new, traditional and modern. He commissioned copies of famous vases that look quite similar to the masterpieces; I ask myself why it matters that one is new and one is old.

Ai Weiwei, Blue and White Vase, 1996
 Porcelain painted in underglaze cobalt blue, Jingdezhen, China

Long-necked vase, Qing dynasty, 1736-95,
Porcelain painted in underglaze cobalt blue, Jingdezhen, China
Victoria and Albert Museum 424.1931

For other vases he had the artisans paint the blue and white design inside the white jar, nearly hidden from view. He puts a blue and white jar inside a very large pure white jar. And the V & A includes some examples of blue and white Chinese pottery and porcelain from their collection so the visitor can compare Ai's commissions with the highly valued older versions.

Finally, there is a pile of porcelain sunflower seeds, a sampling of the 100 million he had installed in the Tate Modern last year. They are amazingly accurate and their labor intensity is daunting. These new objects, including the sunflower seeds, were made in Jingdezhen, that pottery capital.

Ai Weiwei, Kui Hua Zi, 2006, unglazed porcelain

Of course, since then I've notice that enormous numbers of the major Chinese porcelains in museum collections were made in Jingdezhen.

What do I think about these works? Dropping the Urn has made a number of people angry at Ai, and I found it rather horrifying when I first saw it. But it made me think about what China is doing all the time, destroying its past to create a future. And it's what we do when we destroy a work of architecture to make a new building, as I recently learned of the plans to destroy Mario Botta's once hated but now iconic staircase in the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco in order for Snohetta architects to construct a large white, rather bland new lobby entrance. It's analogous to ignoring the old objects in museums in favor of the more exciting contemporary art, or ignoring the permanent collection and only going to "new" exhibitions. Seeking the new, we overlook and destroy the old all the time, celebrating renewal and regeneration and mourning death and loss.

While I think Ai is protesting or embracing modernization in China, his work makes me think about what it means to modernize and how we should feel about destroying anything old. I always wonder if there are hundreds of thousands of Han Dynasty vases, for sale in shops and markets all over China, as well as filling museum storage areas all over the world. Was the work he destroyed unique and truly precious or was it just old? That's what we should be asking when we update or renew anything. Are we advancing or destroying our culture? Throwing out the excess trash or losing our heritage? Is it always a little of both?

The Jingdezhen blue-and-white objects make me think more specifically about value in art, as the labels suggest -  are they original, copies, or forgeries? The old works are of extraordinary value, while the new ones may be quite reasonably priced, the price no doubt enhanced by Ai's involvement in their conception.  Are they new versions from Jingdezhen of the old objects, copies of old objects, fake old objects, or Ai Weiwei contemporary conceptual objects? They don't look exactly the same, as a connoisseur  of this material would tell us, but to me they're all pretty beautiful. How should we value them?

The sunflower seeds can represent both the incredible productivity of the Chinese and their immense workforce, as well as their amazing skill in imitating real sunflower seeds. The exhibition label says that during the Cultural Revolution the Chinese people were likened to sunflowers turning toward the radiant light of Mao Zedong, so these individually painted objects may also intend for us to think of more than just the numbers of artisans in China.

Venice Biennale 2011, Spanish Pavilion

There were a few pavilions that piqued some interest, although I never figured out what they were about. One of them was the Spanish Pavilion, called "The Inadequate" with big letters announcing that title on a platform that may sometimes have served as a stage, but was essentially unoccupied when we were there. I came upon a display of books and memorabilia about the Triestino author Italo Svevo, who was a relative of a long-ago friend in Italy. The material in the display connected Svevo with James Joyce and Sigmund Freud, both of whom also had connections to my Triestino friend. It occurred to me that I would like to read, or re-read, some Svevo. But I couldn't ascertain what Dora Garcia, the artist of the Pavilion wanted to say via or about Svevo.

On the platform I noticed a young woman typing. Then as I wandered around, I found a projection of typewritten text in Italian. Idly reading it, I realized that it was describing me walking past the typist and I spun around to look at her. Shortly after, the text recorded that the woman in the blue top [I] had turned to look at the typist and took a picture of her. I found it quite fascinating that someone was recording what she saw in the gallery and projecting it, keeping an account of routine daily activities in the gallery. My companions did not find it interesting at all, and we left.

I've done a little hunting around about this pavilion, but have only been able to find the press release, which refers to an  Erving Goffman phrase from 1961. Fine, but no one seems to connect the text to the installation (and performance? maybe you had to see some other performance.....).

Venice Biennale 2011 - Giardini

The Venice Biennale turns out to be kind of like the elephant that the boa constrictor swallowed in Le Petit Prince, just daunting to digest. So, now, after the biennale has been over for two months, I'm going to finish it and get on to the many other subjects that have been waiting.

The main thing I've been thinking it is important to mention is how much the place changes after the opening, so the reviews you read in major news and art publications assume availability that doesn't exist after the first week, and they don't see the changes that are inherent in some of the work. I've mentioned my curiosity about what would become of the half-melted-in-July works by Urs Fischer by November. I don't know, although there may be pictures on other sites. I imagine there's nothing, or just a small pile of wax. Two years ago several pavilions were closed because the tech stuff didn't work.

In the American Pavilion (Allora and Calzadilla) you saw a couple of worn out airline seats in two of the spaces. I'm not sure if the gymnasts ever performed on them any more after the opening week, but we saw a posted sign that "the performance" was scheduled for 2:15 in the afternoon. So one had to schedule seeing the American Pavilion, more like theater than art, not necessarily available for all visitors. We returned at 2:15 and saw the guy up on the tank. He turned it on and I was surprised that the treadmill started running, so it controlled his speed on it. I had somehow imagined that the runner controlled the treadmill. What I also noticed was that the sound of the tank spread throughout the Giardini, analogous to the way everything the United States does reverberates throughout the world. You could hear it from the restrooms across the grounds. I went inside the Pavilion while he was treading, but there were no people on the airline seats, so I gave up on that. They were not interesting by themselves.

It was great fun to demonstrated the organ to the other puzzled visitors. I got 50 Euros from it, with a great church-like organ sound. Others stuck their cards in to start the music, but didn't get money. Tom and I had a big argument about the music. He thought it should be musical comedy,  playing something like "You're in the money," and I thought the very serious, almost ominous Church of Money sounded about right.

What else did we like in the Pavilions? Not much. I liked the flower army camoflauge in the Korean Pavilion.

I loved Maurizio Cattalan's stuffed pigeons lined up on pipes and perching on whatever they could in the former Italian Pavilion. In my photographs they sometimes seem to share my quizzical feelings about the art below.  

It's all over now, but some of the artists will stay in memory. We've seen works of some again since the Biennale. Most of it is gone and I don't even recognize my photographs.