–UMB/PT
As I voiced this opinion, I was emotional as always. My only weapon was my sincerity." —Hrant Dink [1]
It has been 11 weeks since the detention of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei by official authorities in an unknown location. The same amount of time has also passed since the sudden disappearance in Beijing of four of his close companions: journalist Wen, his driver Zhang Jinsong, his accountant Hu Mingfen and designer Liu Zhenggang. The same week Ai Weiwei was arrested at Beijing's airport, two alarming incidents took place in other parts of the world: 1) Israeli-Palestinian activist, filmmaker, and theater director, Juliano Mer-Khamis, was shot by a masked gunman in front of his Freedom Theater in the West Bank; and 2) Jack Persekian, director of the Sharjah Biennial Foundation, was fired by the Emirate of Sharjah after displaying an artwork in a courtyard close to a mosque and deemed as "offensive."
Despite the differences in cultural and geopolitical circumstances surrounding each of these cases, something symptomatic is shared: the silencing of unwanted voices.
How can it be that an artist can be arrested in public at an airport? How could it be that Ai Weiwei was under arrest for so long when Chinese law prohibits citizens from being held more than 30 days without charges? Who is responsible for the violent assassination of filmmaker Mer-Khadis in the middle of the day on a public street? What legitimizes the sudden firing of the director of the Sharjah Biennal Foundation, someone who has been instrumental over many years to inscribe Sharjah on the map of the global art scene?
The practice of free speech, of parrhesia, in art/cultural production is facing a cruel response by various "authorities" that fear artistic intervention might indeed "interfere" with local hegemonies. The global cultural community has remained silent for too long. Parrhesia, as an "activity of truth-telling," requires individuals to stand up rather than delegating such acts to someone else (or to an "authority").[2] We are indeed not "free" subjects as we are speaking from the position of our affiliation to various institutions. Therefore, we are ourselves confronted with the danger of silently taking part, through self-censorship, in suppressing our own freedom of speech. What is our responsibility, as representatives of cultural and educational institutions? Shouldn't we have the responsibility to break the complicit silence of the institutions with which we are affiliated? Shouldn't it be our task to protect the "organic intellectuals" [3] beyond institutional affiliations to secure freedom of speech and critical inquiry through their public speech acts?
This question became posed at a recent event at Harvard University. Ai Weiwei's work was part of the exhibition "The Divine Comedy" [4] located at various sites on Harvard's Campus. Although Ai Weiwei was not expected at the opening on April 8, his absence at the opening and the artists' talk that night was indeed poignant because the news of Weiwei's detention had already spread through the news. So how does one react in such a moment of uncertainty about the well being of one of the participating artists: as curator, as colleague, as member of the public?
At the artists' talk that evening at the Piper Auditorium at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, several people in the audience took it upon themselves to engage in a "silent" protest performance. One person placed an empty chair on the stage beside the three chairs occupied by the curator and the other participating artists, and placed a green Chinese military coat on the chair [5]. One at a time, other protesters went on stage and walked away with the coat, as another person came forward to place yet another green military coat on the empty chair.
As those silent interventions became increasingly irritating, more direct comments on Ai Weiwei's arrest from the panel took place, but the whole situation felt as surreal as the inability to react to the sudden disappearance of a world-known artist.
A video of this artistic intervention appeared online under the label "silk coats collective." According to another video, a second intervention was carried out in the form of a "silent" picnic at Harvard on May 1. The picnic took place at Ai Weiwei's contribution "Untitled" (2011), an installation of several large-scale cubes in front of the Harvard Science Lab. The cubes were constructed of 5,335 identical black and white patterned school bags that felt like a reminder of the so-called "white noise" flickering on a television screen when there is no signal. The exhibited amount of schoolbags represented the exact number of children killed during the 2008 earthquake in the Sichuan province in China. The poorly constructed buildings, cynically called "tofu-dreg constructions," became death traps for thousands of school children when they collapsed subsequently to the quake.[6] Weiwei's work "Untitled" comments on the thousands of lives that could have been saved if the school buildings would have been properly constructed. This work clearly points out local corruption, but what is even more scandalous, the cover-up by the Chinese government.
The voice-over to "'Untitled' Picnic for Ai Weiwei at Harvard University" is an audio track by Ai Weiwei titled "Remembrance" (2010), in which various voices recite the names of the children that died in the collapsing school buildings. The names were researched by volunteers who shared Ai Weiwei's attempt to give each child a name. A close-up shot shows a copy of "Missing," the announcement written by Weiwei's sister and mother. Several people in green military coats put those flyers into the backpacks of Ai Weiwei's Harvard installation.
The military coats themselves not only remind us of Chinese soldiers but also of the no longer "missing" Ai Weiwei himself. In the early eighties when he lived as a young artist in exile in New York City's Lower East Side he was often to be seen wandering the streets in such a green coat. It was then when Ai Weiwei discovered the energizing power of unruliness and civil disobedience—a source of energy that we need to rediscover today.
Ute Meta Bauer is Associate Professor and Head of MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology.
Pelin Tan is a Postdoc Research Fellow at MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology.
Notes:
[1] Hrant Dink, "A pigeon-like unease of spirit"; Editor/author Hrant Dink was shot in front of his office in Istanbul on 19 January 2007. Just a week before he published this text in Agos Newspaper. www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-turkey/pigeon_4271.jsp, republished at Muhtelif contemporary art magazine #2, Istanbul.
[2] Michel Foucault: http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/foucault.DT1.wordParrhesia.en.html
[3] By using Gramsci"s definition of "organic intellectual", we consider here the artists and cultural producers as organic intellectuals.
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-gram.htm
http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2010/10/06/gramsci-formation-intellectuals
[4] Along with works of Olafur Eliasson and Tomas Saraceno, curated by Sanford Kwinter. http://thedivinecomedy.org
[5] The coat was one that had been modified by a Cambridge-based artist who had previously worked for Ai Weiwei in Beijing.
[6] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-R9-FwPJrE