A Monumental Problem

"Discovering Columbus," an installation by Tatzu Nishi featuring the 1892 Columbus Circle statue by Gaetano Russo. (All photographs by James Panero)

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 25, 2012

A Monumental Problem
by James Panero

Through late November, visitors to the southwest corner of Central Park will have to say "Goodbye, Columbus." That's because Gaetano Russo's 1892 statue of the explorer, usually visible for miles around, will be covered in scaffolding that all but removes the monument from public view.

The Columbus Circle monument covered by "Discovering Columbus"

What looks like restoration work is really much more: A Japanese artist, Tatzu Nishi, has been commissioned to decorate an elevated shed enclosing the statue so that, instead of looking out over Columbus Circle atop a 60-foot column, Columbus now appears to be standing on a coffee table, surrounded by couches, lamps, a television set, red window curtains and pink-and-gold wallpaper printed with pictures of Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mouse and Michael Jackson. Admission to this spectacle is by a free timed ticket, with at most 25 people at once allowed inside the 800-square-foot space.'Discovering Columbus' encloses the explorer's statue at Columbus Circle in an 800-square-foot living room.

Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mouse and Michael Jackson: custom wallpaper covers the "living room" of "Discovering Columbus"

The installation, "Discovering Columbus," has been produced by the Public Art Fund, a nonprofit championed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Dedicated to offering the public "powerful experiences with art and the urban environment," the fund's other projects have included bringing Jeff Koons's topiary-puppy sculpture to Rockefeller Center and Rob Pruitt's statue of Andy Warhol to Union Square.

Like much of what the Public Art Fund promotes, "Discovering Columbus" can seem like campy fun—a million-dollar confection brought to you by the city's billionaire mayor. Yet the hijinks of "Discovering Columbus" come at the expense of the Columbus Circle monument itself, which must be kidnapped to take part in the party. The offer of the organizers to restore the monument at the end of the show—with Parks Department funds—implicitly acknowledges the disservice done during the run.

A television inside "Discovering Columbus" is tuned to CNN

The temporary hijacking of Columbus Circle is but the latest chapter of a monumental problem. Part of this story is the unease, bordering on contempt, with which cultural progressives regard traditional monuments. Outmoded in both form and content, Columbus Circle was ripe for ridicule. Even if most New Yorkers find little fault with it, this classical monument to a questionable figure in our history has become embarrassing to the city's cultural establishment. "Discovering Columbus" therefore appropriates and recasts it at the exact time of year when it is valued most. This Columbus Day, the Italian-American groups that traditionally lay a wreath at the base of the monument can lean it against a purple sofa in Mr. Nishi's ersatz living room.

Columbus Circle, ca. 1907

As power changes and the memorialized fall out of favor, the forces of history have destroyed monuments almost as fast as they go up. The cultural war on monuments, however, only officially began in 1871. That was the year Gustave Courbet, the celebrated Realist painter then in his early 50s, found himself at the center of a 72-day utopian experiment known as the Paris Commune. This failed attempt at autonomous rule became the model for many later idealist uprisings, from Soviet Communism to the student riots of 1968 to Occupy Wall Street. "For Courbet, the Commune was, all too briefly, the fulfillment of his dreams of a government without oppressive, domineering institutions, the Proudhonian Utopia of social justice come true," explains the art historian Linda Nochlin in her book "Courbet."

Paris Communards pull down the Vendome Column, 1871

As head of the Commune's Federation of Artists, Courbet quickly suppressed the city's traditional art schools: the Academy, the École des Beaux-Arts, and the Schools of Rome and of Athens. He then turned his attention to the Vendôme Column, a monument modeled after Trajan's Column in Rome that Napoleon had erected at the center of Paris to memorialize the French victory at Austerlitz. Courbet derided it as a "mass of melted cannon that perpetuates the tradition of conquest, of looting, and of murder." The Commune agreed and set about undermining its foundation and pulling it down with cables. As a band performed for an assembled crowd, the column came crashing to the street, breaking into several pieces. Three years later, after the collapse of the progressive Commune and the restoration of a traditionalist government, the French courts fined Courbet in exile to pay for the column's restoration. As his assets were seized and sold at auction, Courbet drank himself to death.

Following Courbet, the monumental fight between progressives and traditionalists hasn't gone much better. In the case of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, now planned for Washington, a progressive design has faced a traditionalist backlash. In what critics have called a closed selection process, the Department of the Interior, working through the General Services Administration, chose the architect Frank Gehry to undertake the design for a 4-acre site on Independence Avenue. Rather than a classical design in line with the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, Gehry proposed a progressive design that he said would seize on Eisenhower's modesty. It would feature a small statue of the president as a young boy sitting under 8-story-tall wire screens painted to resemble pictures of his childhood home in Abilene, Kan.

Frank Gehry's initial design for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial

A traditionalist group called the National Civic Art Society has led a campaign to scrap the plan. Its Chairman, Justin Shubow, has testified before Congress against it. Léon Krier, a traditionalist architect and leading critic, has called Mr. Gehry's plan "An anti-monument if there can be such a thing." The antimonumentality of the design is no accident. Writing in the Washington Post, the architecture critic Philip Kennicott defended Mr. Gehry's design for inverting "several of the sacred hierarchies of the classical memorial, emphasizing ideas of domesticity and interiority rather than masculine power and external display." But he goes further, praising Mr. Gehry for having "'re-gendered' the vocabulary of memorialization, giving it new life and vitality just at the moment when the old, exhausted 'masculine' memorial threatened to make the entire project of remembering great people in the public square seem obsolete." Ridiculous as this may sound, Mr. Kennicott's essay nonetheless serves a useful purpose in laying out the postmodern perspective on memorials. In his view, the purpose of the contemporary monument is antiheroic: to debunk, diminish and ensure that equal time is given to the subjects' more mundane qualities.

Progressives want monuments to be radical. Traditionalists want monuments to be classical, arguing that anything newer becomes a monument to radicalism and its designer rather than the people who are memorialized. Unfortunately, most of us get caught in the middle. We don't care about "regendering" our supreme allied commander in Europe and 34th president. At the same time, we may find the neoclassical design of the National World War II Memorial by the Austrian-born Friedrich St. Florian, or the new memorial to Martin Luther King Jr by the Chinese artist Lei Yixin, uninspiring.

Monuments give form to memory. They allow us to reflect upon our history, values and experience. Unfortunately, we no longer share a consensus on what that history, those values and that experience should be. We barely agree on what we should remember rather than forget, and we share no common understanding of what form our memories should take. That all helps explain why neither the progressives nor the traditionalists excel at monument design on their own—and why the bad designs and the ridicule of monuments seem bound to continue.

A version of this article appeared September 25, 2012, on page D5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Monumental Problem.

The New Political Art

Ai Weiwei, September 2009, © Ai Weiwei.

Note: an adaptation of this article appeared on September 6, 2012, on page D6 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal with the headline "American Punk's Unheralded Impact"

THE NEW CRITERION
September 2012

The New Political Art
by James Panero

Political art is usually terrible, or good for bad reasons. The Death of Marat, Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 painting of the French revolutionary murdered in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday, may be a masterpiece, but its politics led to the guillotine. Reproduced by the Jacobins, Marat became an image used to incite The Terror.

Do the arts offer special access to political truth? History would say no. Following David’s example, political art has mainly meant the seduction of art by the state. In the twentieth century, the arts were used to advance regimes that sought to oppress the very freedoms that had given rise to their artistic champions. Communism and Fascism each used art to destroy art. Meanwhile, in the free world, with a few notable exceptions, art that has been “politically engaged” has most often been directed against those who defend freedom while either ignoring or praising those who oppose it. Or politics has been used as a selling point, offering art with the illusion of controversy while merely reiterating the assumptions of the buying public.

Is the Chinese political artist Ai Weiwei any different? Not on the face of it. When I first saw his work at Robert Miller Gallery in 2004, the exhibition announcement featured a photograph of Ai’s neon-lettered sign spelling out “FUCK.” Meanwhile the gallery window displayed a self-shot photograph of Ai giving the middle finger to the White House.

Ai could have been just another political artist flipping off the usual suspects, but as I wrote in these pages at the time, “Ai Weiwei is a more complex artist than this one piece leads you to believe.” He was an equal opportunity offender. Ai gave the Eiffel Tower and other world monuments the same treatment. As part of this series, which he called a “Study of Perspective,” he also photographed his middle finger directed against the portrait of Chairman Mao in Tiananmen Square.

Obviously the perspective he was studying was not foreground/background. The study was a perspective on the political implications of each image. Raising the middle finger against the (Clinton) White House may be a silly but harmless act. For a Chinese artist living and working in Beijing, however, to flip the bird at Mao from the site of the Tiananmen Square massacre had a different implication. So too the photograph Ai took of his wife, Lu Qing, raising her dress and showing her underwear before the Chairman—a light-hearted provocation directed at the icon of an unsmiling regime.

In the United States, the ability to criticize the government is a birthright if not a national pastime. In China, Ai was already dancing on “the red line of Chinese law,” as state newspapers later described him. Determined either to push it back or cross it, Ai has never backed down from his criticism of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), even while working from within the confines of its “open” closed society.

Since 2004, Ai has found ways to amplify his criticism with a volume that nobody expected. He has shown that political art can be more than just another form of propaganda. It can act against propaganda to become the conscience of reform. The objects of this art may be transitory, but the freedom of art can be a leading edge advancing the freedom of others. In addition to his exhibitions and his tireless self-broadcasting, his story now comes together in Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, a documentary by the young filmmaker Alison Klayman that will serve to broadcast his work to an even wider audience.

Ai Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing, was a well-known Chinese poet. Originally trained as a painter, in 1929 he moved to Paris and fell under the spell of Émile Verhaeren, who used poetry to describe the harsh realities of the modern city. Ai Qing also became a follower of Mao. When he returned to China, he was imprisoned by the rival Nationalist Party.

It wasn’t long after his release that Ai Qing suffered the fate of countless intellectuals in Mao’s China. A fellow poet accused him of falling “into a quagmire of reactionary formalism.” In 1958, he was sent off to Xinjiang, China’s “Little Siberia,” where he cleaned the toilets of a labor camp. As part of his punishment, youth gangs poured ink on his face and pelted him with stones. For a time, the family inhabited a cave dug in the earth. Ai Weiwei, born in 1957, lived here in the provincial city of Shihezi with his father and mother, Gao Ying, for the next fifteen years.

Ai Weiwei returned with his family to Beijing in 1976, the year of Mao’s death. He enrolled in Beijing’s film academy and became part of an avant-garde group called “Stars” at a moment of cultural thaw known as the “Beijing Spring.” The Stars group was named “in order to emphasize our individuality,” said its central member Ma Desheng. “This was directed at the drab uniformity of the Cultural Revolution.” After being denied entrance to the official exhibition of contemporary art, the Stars displayed their work on the street. When this show was removed by police, they organized a demonstration demanding democracy and artistic freedom and eventually won permission to have an exhibition of their own. The Stars also participated in Beijing’s “Democracy Wall”—a brief state-
sanctioned attempt at recognizing the party’s new policy of “seeking truth from facts.”

The removal of Democracy Wall by the CCP in 1979 closed the doors on the country’s brief experiment with artistic freedom. Two years later, Ai moved to New York and enrolled in Parsons School of Design. He lived in a basement apartment near East Seventh Street and Second Avenue. Ai’s resources were meager—he supplemented his income by drawing portraits of tourists and gambling in Atlantic City (he is recognized in blackjack circles as a top-tier player). His apartment nevertheless became a hub for Chinese artists plugging into the East Village art scene.

Ai spent thirteen years in New York before returning to Beijing in 1993 to be close to his ailing father. His artistic output during this period was modest, but the influence was formative. Modern history has often been shaped by foreigners absorbing the intellectual culture of the West’s great cities. Ai was fortunate to find himself not in the Marxist circles of Paris but in the alternative punk scene of New York. He inherited its art of provocation and its anti-authoritarian philosophy. (He later demonstrated his affinity with the city by marrying his wife, Lu Qing, at New York’s City Hall.)

Back in Beijing, Ai sharpened his tools. The punk tactics he saw employed against New York’s police department in the Tompkins Square riots of 1988, which he photographed, he directed against the CCP. As he lodged his dissent at a political party ungoverned by the rule of law—“Kafka’s castle,” he called it—he used the freedom of art to get his message out while also insulating himself from state reprisal. The avant-garde neighborhood that first attracted him was nicknamed Beijing East Village.

Ai began his new career in Beijing by publishing illicit books and establishing an architecture firm, which later earned him an advisory role in the design of Beijing’s Olympic Stadium, dubbed The Bird’s Nest. With the rise in prices of contemporary Chinese art, the CCP saw how art could be used to advance the interests of the state. By and large, China’s newly profitable avant-garde did not “share either the political intent or the reckless bravery of the Tiananmen organizers,” wrote the critic Richard Vine. “The cruel lesson of June 4, 1989 is that repression sometimes works.” (See my article “Made in China” from The New Criterion of December 2008 for more.)

With his confrontational art, Ai was different. At the time of his exhibition in 2004, Ai was China’s sanctioned provocateur, but he soon began stepping over the red party line with historic intensity. He criticized the Olympic stadium he helped design as a “fake smile.” He then used his blog, which he started in 2005, along with homemade video, to document the 5,200 children who died when faulty government buildings collapsed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. When the government shut down his website in 2009, he turned to Twitter, using proxy servers to bypass The Great Firewall of China.

Ai often spent eight hours a day on Twitter. Volunteers came from around China to join him. Each day, his office tweeted the birthdays of those students who died in the quake. For an exhibition at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, he built an enormous screen of school backpacks that spelled out, in Chinese characters, “She lived happily on this earth for seven years”—the message of a mother whose child died in the quake.

As Ai’s provocations accelerated and the government increased its surveillance of his activities, he filmed the state looking back. When he went to testify in the trial of Tan Zuoren, an earthquake activist, he broadcast his own arrest and beating at the hands of police. This assault of August 2009 gave Ai a subdural hematoma that required emergency surgery. As he convalesced and filed claims of police brutality, he again turned documentation into art. “I want to prove that the system is not working,” he said to Evan Osnos for a profile in The New Yorker in 2010. “You can’t simply say that the system is not working. You have to work through it.” Ai followed this same documentary practice as the government demolished his studio building in Shanghai.

In 2010, Ai’s international stature reached new heights when he installed 100 million handmade ceramic sunflower seeds in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Nevertheless, the CCP determined that the threat he now posed outweighed the repercussions of silencing him. In April 2011, the party apprehended Ai and held him for eighty-one days in two secret locations. As the CCP charged him with everything from tax evasion to harboring pornography, the party subjected him to over fifty sessions of interrogations. Two guards were never more than a few feet from his side.

Since his release, the CCP has been waging a propaganda campaign against Ai both at home and abroad. Suspicious comments with knock-off American idioms have appeared beneath articles about him, such as this one in The New Yorker: “Were he a US citizen, pari passu, he would be languishing in a Federal penitentiary for acting as an undeclared (well paid) foreign agent. Or for failing to pay Federal taxes, another big no-no in The Land of the Free.” Meanwhile China’s Global Times has declared that “the law will not concede before ‘mavericks’ just because of the Western media’s criticism. . . . The experience of Ai Weiwei and other mavericks cannot be placed on the same scale as China’s human rights development and progress.”

The promise that his jailers made has become CCP strategy: “You criticized the government, so we are going to let all society know that you’re an obscene person, you evaded taxes, you have two wives, we want to shame you.” Yet the art of Ai Weiwei has demonstrated how a single individual can also shame the state. His example is now closely followed by another punk-inspired act, the Russian band Pussy Riot. The three young women of this group have been sentenced to two years in prison for challenging the corruption of the Orthodox Church and the thugocracy of Vladimir Putin. As John O’Sullivan recently wrote at National Review: “The Pussy Riot girls are seeking to protest not oppression by religion but the oppressionof religion by the Russian state.”

An American expert on China recently explained to me how the CCP can tolerate anything but criticism of its own authority. Since the Communist Party believes that such criticism is a threat that must be suppressed, it seeks to eliminate it early and save the Chinese people from a larger conflagration. Ai Weiwei has put this oppressive logic to the test. His art has shown how a state without dissent is the greatest threat of all.

American Punk's Unheralded Impact

Ai Weiwei, Study of Perspective - Tiananmen Square (1995-2003) 

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 6, 2012

American Punk's Unheralded Impact
by James Panero

Political art is usually terrible—rotten in message and form—or good but with a beauty that misleads. "The Death of Marat," Jacques-Louis David's 1793 painting of the French revolutionary murdered in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday, may be his masterpiece, but its politics led to the guillotine. Reproduced by the Jacobins, "Marat" became an image used to incite The Terror.

Following David's example, political art has mainly meant the seduction of art by the state. In the 20th century, Communism and Fascism each used art to destroy art. The Italian Futurists, the Mexican Muralists and the Russian Suprematists advanced regimes that sought to oppress the freedoms that had given rise to their artistic champions.

Meanwhile in the free world, with a few notable exceptions, art that has been "politically engaged" has most often been directed against those who defend freedom while either ignoring or praising those who oppose it. The 2011 Venice Biennale offered one recent example. There the artistic duo Allora and Calzadilla instructed an athlete to run on a treadmill atop an overturned allied tank as a parody of U.S. power. This installation, mockingly called "Gloria," was sponsored by our own State Department. Or politics has been used as a selling point, offering art with the illusion of controversy while merely reiterating the assumptions of the buying public. Consider the spray-can polemics of Shepard Fairey, who, through a political publicist, designed the "Hope" and "Progress" posters for candidate Obama in 2007 and 2008.

The latest wave of political art has proved the exception to the rule. With charged political works, the Chinese conceptual artist Ai Weiwei and the Russian performance artists of Pussy Riot are bad for good reasons. By broadcasting the abuses of the authoritarian states in which they live with work that can be aggressive and crude, they have shown that political art can be more than just another form of propaganda. It can act against propaganda to become the conscience of reform. The objects of this art may not be masterpieces, but the freedom of this art can be a leading edge advancing the freedom of others.

What connects these artists and distinguishes them from earlier generations is the underrecognized influence of American punk.

The son of Chinese dissidents, Mr. Ai moved to New York in 1981 and enrolled in Parsons School of Design. He primarily lived near East Seventh Street and Second Avenue, where his basement apartment became a hub for Chinese artists plugging into the burgeoning East Village art scene. Mr. Ai spent more than a decade in New York before returning to Beijing in 1993. While his artistic output during this period was modest, it was a formative moment in his career.

Modern history has often been shaped by foreigners absorbing the intellectual culture of the cities of the West. Mr. Ai was fortunate to find himself not in the Marxist circles of Paris but in the alternative punk scene of New York, where he immersed himself in the neighborhood's culture. Through thousands of photographs he took during his stay, many of which were on exhibit at New York's Asia Society a year ago, he documented and studied the city's punk and alternative spirit: from concerts at CBGB's and the Pyramid Club to the East Village's colorful street life and the social unrest of a gentrifying neighborhood.

Back home, Mr. Ai directed against the Chinese Communist Party the punk tactics that he saw protesters employ in the Tompkins Square Park riots of 1988—where the New York Police Department overreacted while (justifiably) enforcing a curfew on an Occupy Wall Street-like encampment. As he criticized a government ungoverned by the rule of law—"Kafka's castle," he calls today's China—he used the freedom of art to get his message out while also insulating himself from state reprisal. The avant-garde neighborhood that first attracted him was nicknamed Beijing East Village.

Mr. Ai's artful criticism of the Communist Party has employed every medium at his disposal—from sculpture to Twitter to video to his own body. After a Chinese policeman assaulted him in 2009, an attack that left him with a life-threatening brain injury, Mr. Ai turned the images of his convalescence into a symbol of state brutality—a "Marat" of our own day, but one designed to criticize rather than incite.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot in the cell in a Moscow courtroom. Photo by Maxim Shemetov

This example is now closely followed by the punk-inspired act Pussy Riot, which was modeled on the feminist punk bands that emerged in the Pacific Northwest during the 1990s, such as the Olympia, Wash.-based band Bikini Kill. Performing in unorthodox—or, rather, ultraorthodox—venues, Pussy Riot has used aggressive lyrics, brash presentation and bold-colored balaclavas to broadcast its dissent.

As is by now widely known, in February three of its performers—Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich—briefly performed a "punk prayer" in front of the altar at Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. With a song that appealed to the Virgin Mary to "cast Putin out," the women, documented on video, protested the co-opting of the church by the Russian state. After a show trial this summer, they were each sentenced last month to two years in prison. The images of them imprisoned in a glass cage during their trial, broadcast to the world, have now become icons illuminating the corruption of the Orthodox Church and the thugocracy of Vladimir Putin.

Punk is politically antidoctrinaire. While many who follow punk hew to the left, Johnny Ramone, one of the founders of the seminal punk band The Ramones, called Ronald Reagan the "best President of my lifetime." What they all share is an art of provocation, an antiauthoritarian philosophy and the energy to put their skepticism to the test.

While at times misused within Western culture, the mixture when employed against oppressive regimes can be potent. In 2011, after the Chinese government apprehended Mr. Ai and held him for 81 days in two secret locations, the Communist Party charged him with everything from tax evasion to harboring pornography. "You criticized the government," his jailers told him, "so we are going to let all society know that you're an obscene person, you evaded taxes, you have two wives, we want to shame you."

Yet as Ai Weiwei and Pussy Riot have demonstrated, the art of individuals can also shame entire states. Their work has brought international attention to oppression and become a rallying point for internal dissent. And for that we should all say a prayer for punk.

A version of this article appeared September 6, 2012, on page D6 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: American Punk's Unheralded Impact. This essay is adapted from a longer article in The New Criterion's September issue.