Say It With Flowers

From the series "Study in Perspective” (1995-2003) © Ai Weiwei.

Over the past week or so, The New York Times has run two stories [1] [2] on the floral war Ai Weiwei is waging against the Chinese regime. At issue is the fact that the government has impounded Ai's passport, preventing him from traveling. It seems that the flowers carry pretty much the same message as the photo lifted above.

Say It Ain't So, Jackie Chan!

Among my fondest memories from the years when my oldest sons Jeffrey and Douglas were little are of watching Jackie Chan movies. The movies are so goofy that they'd send the boys into peals of joyous laughter.  Turns out that Jackie is considerably less critical of the Chinese regime than is Ai Weiwei, and their differences are making a bit of a splash in the press. Like here at The Guardian. I have to say this is disappointing. But it won't stop me from watching Chan's movies with August and (soon enough) Esme.

Amnesty International Graphics

I have noted here repeatedly campaigns that Amnesty International has run using provocative, creative imagery. Today on my news feed, this compendium of posters - including the ones I've lifted here - from various AI campaigns.

How China Sees the World

The cover of current issue (17 June 2013), art by Ai Weiwei. Let's put aside the idea that China is a homogenous locus of sensory capacities and hence able to see anything. Apparently the government might well see the world as coming up roses.

Birdhead?

I came across this interview at The Brooklyn Rail with a Shanghai-based photographic duo (Song Tao and Ji Weiyu) known as Birdhead. I read the interview. And, I confess, I found literally nothing interesting in it. What am I missing?

A Charter for the 99%

In the mail today arrived the current issue of Dissent, which contains a very short piece by Todd Gitlin, whose provocative assessments of Occupy I've mentioned here before. Unfortunately, Dissent has imposed a firewall for most of the essays in their print edition. Fortunately, Gitlin has posted this slightly less elaborated version of the essay at the magazine's blog. The thrust of his argument is the same. As you'll see, he draws a link between Occupy and one possible future it might assume and the Chartists of early 19th C England. This is fortuitous from my perspective not just because in a good portion of the thesis (oh those many years ago) I was preoccupied with Chartism, but also because there are other historical precedents. One is Charter 77, initiated by Václav Havel, in response to the persecution of the Plastic People of the Universe by Communist authorities in Czechoslovakia. I drew a parallel between that episode and the response to OWS on the part of progressives in the US here some time ago. A second precedent is Charter '08 which was circulated in China demanding democratic political reforms and which I mentioned here several times. His efforts at circulating Charter '08 are among the 'offenses' that brought Liu Xiaobo the ire of the Chinese authorities and praise from those who bestow the Nobel Peace Prize. That is ample political precedent. There surely are other relevant episodes. You should read Gitlin's essay.

My two cents? Any such campaign should include a demand that the right to vote be written in to the Constitution and that the now nearly moribund first amendment right to free assembly be rehabilitated.

Jonathon Keats on Art & Politics

A short while ago I wrote this post prompted by an an essay in (of all places) Forbes by critic Jonathon Keats. In the meantime I have come across two more posts by Keats on the intersection of art and politics that also are smart and provocative. The first - here - is an astute analysis of the ways Pussy Riot traverses that intersection. The second- here - is takes up contrasting modes of "pragmatism" at work in the flamboyant politics of Ai Weiwei and the more easily assimilated performances of Cai Guo-Qiang. Both offerings are highly recommended. I admit that I am not a regular Forbes reader. Keats may change that.

Photographs of Silenced Critics

In The New York Times you can find this Op-Ed and this one on the political travails that have descended on Chinese novelist Mo Yan who has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The essays warn against a too easy moralism - especially when exercised from a distance - in judging Mo Yan. And it must be said that upon winning the prize Mo Yan spoke out clearly on behalf of imprisoned Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo.

On the eve of the Prize announcement last week, Reporters Without Borders released this video clip of Liu Xia, wife of Liu Xiaobo, who herself has been under house arrest for the past two years. Liu Xia is a writer and photographer. Her detention and nearly total isolation is a case of extrajudicial harassment, likely aimed, according to this report from the BBC, at inducing her husband to agree to accepting exile. As you will discover, the clip - from which the silhouette above was excised - is silent, except for the chirping crickets.

Ai Weiwei Tweets

Here is a set of self portraits that Ai Weiwei recently has tweeted; you'll note that he is dressed in a slightly ill-fitting police uniform. According to this report in The New York Times, the tweets are prompted by Ai's ongoing legal battles with the Chinese tax authorities. Ai has been physically prevented from attending the proceedings. Essentially, the Chinese government (as I've noted here before) has adopted the Al Capone strategy - when you have a "trouble maker" charge him with tax fraud rather than with some substantive sort of wrongdoing.

Passings ~ Fang Lizhi (1936~2012)

Chinese physicist and political dissident Fang Lizhi has died. An obituary is here at The New York Times, another here at The Guardian.

Thoughts on Apple

“I actually think Apple does one of the best jobs of any companies in our industry, and maybe in any industry, of understanding the working conditions in our supply chain . . . I mean, you go to this place, and, it’s a factory, but, my gosh, I mean, they’ve got restaurants and movie theaters and hospitals and swimming pools, and I mean, for a factory, it’s a pretty nice factory.”~ Steve Jobs (2010)

Manufacturing #11. [Cafeteria at] Youngor Textiles,
Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, 2005.
Photograph © Edward Burtynsky.

Manufacturing #10AB. Cankun Factory, Xiamen City, 2005.
Photograph Edward Burtynsky.

I use an Apple MacBook Pro. It is a nice, but hardly flawless, machine. While using an Apple gives me something in common with Lisbeth Salander, it does not make me cool (that is really difficult to imagine) or especially insightful. In fact, her Apple laptop it is not what makes everyone's favorite, slightly wacked, avenging anti-heroine cool either.

I have written, mostly critically, about Apple and the impulse to canonize Steve Jobs here on several occasions since I became un-PC. ( I will say for the record that when, during the State of the Union Address earlier this week, our Hoper-In-Chief pointed out Jobs's widow, I wondered how she must've felt about being invited to the official ritual to serve as a prop.) But Apple has been in the news lately for its knowing complicity in highly exploitative environmental and labor policies. In particular you should read this extensive piece in The New York Times earlier in the week. Alternatively, Apple hipsters might download this segment from This American Life and listen to it on their iPods as a podcast.

What is the point? Surely not that Steve Jobs (or any of the other Apple execs) is a bad man. He may or may not have been a nice fellow or a jerk, honest or duplicitous, caring or oblivious, and so forth. Character issues are a sideshow. Surely not, also, that Apple is the only company knowingly complicit in environmental degradation or exploitation of workers in the developing world. The report in The Times makes it crystal clear that that hardly is the case. So too do Burtynsky's images of nice Chinese factories. (If you don't care for Burtynsky on all this, try Chris Jordan or Pietr Hugo.)

So, here are some points to take from the recent revelations about Apple.

First, a cool logo and image does not make a corporation less capitalist, less preoccupied with profit. Apple differs not at all from Wal-Mart in that respect.

Second, there is little room for moralism here. Using this or that product or brand does not make you guilty or culpable any more than abstaining from doing so absolves you of guilt or culpability.

Third, as the This American Life segment I link to above makes clear, lots and lots of things are "hand made"; that, for instance, probably includes your cell phone. When labor is very, very cheap "handmade" loses its romantic connotations.

Fourth, it is not just manufacturing that has been globalized. So too has environmentalism. And recycling of high tech gadgets (with its attendant health disasters - think carcinogens, heavy metals, etc.) is done by hand too. On this it is important to go back and read the earlier comment on moralism. Recycling your electronic toys as you engage in planned obsolescence does not make you a better person. It simply means that somewhere in China, or another developing country, people are taking your junk apart by hand.

Finally, all this news about Apple suggests that voluntary standards - whether for fair labor practices or environmental protection - are a joke. Companies will fabricate vacuous criteria that they will then work around. And they will turn a blind eye to the evasions. That is how capitalism works.

So, even if - as Jobs opined - the Cafeterias are nice, making iPhones-Pads-Pods by hand is a pretty crappy way to make a living. Apple ought to do better, but they won't. That is how capitalism works.

China Recycling #12. E-Waste Sorting, Zeguo,
Zhejiang Province, 2004.
Photograph © Edward Burtynsky.

Manufacturing #16. Bird Mobile, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, 2005.
Photograph © Edward Burtynsky.

You've Heard of Naked Self-Interest? Well, Here are Instances of Naked Solidarity

Self Portrait © Aliaa Magda al-Mahdy

This is an image Aliaa Magda al-Mahdy, a young Egyptian woman living in Cairo, recently posted on her blog. You can find a report here at The New York Times and another here at The Guardian. Unsurprisingly, she has received scant support from any end of the political spectrum in Egypt. Conservatives are pressing charges, liberals are running away fast and far. But she has received solidarity from this group of Israeli women.

Israeli women posing for a photograph in Tel Aviv, to show
solidarity with Egyptian blogger Aliaa Magda Elmahdy.
Photograph © REUTERS/Anat Cohen.

And this, apparently is simply one instance of a virtual epidemic of such bare solidarity. In China, authorities have accused Zhao Zhao, an assistant to artist Ai Weiwei, of possessing pornography because he had pictures on his camera of Ai naked with several women. And today, his friends and supporters stripped in support of the artist. You can find reports here and here in The Guardian. And here are, respectively, the offending photo and a sample of the the subsequent expressions of solidarity.

The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei poses with nude women in Beijing.
Photograph © Afp/AFP/Getty Images.

Listen, Chinese Government： Nudity is not Pornography

Ai Weiwei as the Al Capone of China

It is well known that the U.S. Government convicted mobster Al Capone of tax evasion when they couldn't get him for running liquor during Prohibition. Well, the Chinese government has convicted Ai Weiwei of tax evasion too rather than charge him with some nefarious political infraction. Now, according to this report in The New York Times, Ai Weiwei also is head of something like a money laundering gang!

COAL+ICE

At The New Yorker you can find this report on what looks to be an exciting exhibition opening in Beijing (In know! Not exactly my neighborhood.) The show, curated by Jeroen de Vries and Susan Meiselas is called COAL + ICE and includes work by a bunch of remarkable photographers from both China and abroad. It tries to establish visual links between various links in the process of extracting and using fossil fuel - specifically coal. So, we have images from mining to pronounced, large-scale environmental change. The exhibition is up through November 28th.

He's Baaacck!

Those afraid of Ai Weiwei must be dismayed. His tweets apparently have resumed.
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Update (12 August): There is a further, more recent, report here.

Death and Taxes or, The Evolution of Show Trials

It is interesting to witness the evolution of show trials - back in the Stalinist days, Soviet officials were compelled to admit to various counterrevolutionary deviations. And then they were exiled to rot in the frozen waste or simply executed. If we are to judge from the recent experience of Ai Weiwei the Chinese seem to have refined the process in a contemporary way: no executions, just forced detention, a "confession," enforced silence, and then . . . a visit from the Tax Collectors. Of course, there is still the persecution of Liu Xiaobo and many other critics. So, perhaps the regime has not gotten more refined after all.

Anish Kapoor, Leviathan & Ai Weiwei

I know British sculptor Anish Kapoor exclusively because pictures of his work grace the covers of some recent CDs by the talented and intriguing pianist Vijay Iyer. Here are a couple of examples:


And here is an enthusiasm I posted a while back indicating why I think Iyer is an intriguing fellow. This is a guy I'd like to talk art and politics with some day. All that, however, is something of a diversion from the more pressing matter at hand.

Recently Kapoor has been in the news for having installed a massive sculpture at the Grand Palais (Paris). He calls the piece "Leviathan" which is appropriate in multiple ways; first because, like fantastic monsters of the deep, it swallows up visitors, but also, in a Hobbesian vein, because Kapoor has dedicated the sculpture to Ai Weiwei, the artist/provocateur who has been detained incommunicado by Chinese authorities for a month. Earlier posts on Ai, his arrest, and some of the response to his predicament are here. Like Kapoor, who urges habeas corpus on the Chinese authorities, The Guardian rightly asks: Where is Ai Weiwei?
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P.S.1: I find it ironic that right-wing outlets, normally viscerally averse to the intermingling of art and politics, apparently find it wholly laudable in this instance. Need a good example? Read this missive from The Wall Street Journal.

P.S.2: This is a post that the blogger folks disappeared and that I have tried to reconstruct. It may differ from the the initial version in marginal ways.

Who Is Afraid of Ai Weiwei?

I posted last month when the Chinese government arrested artist and political critic Ai Weiwei. You can find in depth coverage of the situation surrounding Ai Weiwei - including reports on the detention of his associates and other critics of the government - here at The Guardian. You might also check out this trailer for a forthcoming Frontline documentary on Ai Weiwei.

It seems appropriate today to raise questions concerning Ai Weiwei's whereabouts. Why? Because today a set of his sculptures will "open" in Central Park. You can find a story here about Ai, his art, and his politics; npr broadcast it yesterday, using the New York City "opening" as a pretext. Rather than lift a picture of Ai or of his works, I thought it more appropriate to pilfer this image. What you have is a photograph of a projection that, according to news reports, an artist operating under the pseudonym Cpak Ming surreptitiously made late last week onto the exterior of the Barracks of the People's Liberation Army in the center of Hong Kong.* The projection depicts Ai and asks rhetorically "Who Is Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" Asked and answered?
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* The same image reportedly (look here too) also is being stenciled elsewhere in Hong Kong.

Chinese Authorities Arresting Critics

According to these reports in The New York Times, Chinese authorities are more or less systematically detaining critics, notably artists and writers. Prominence seems no longer to afford any protection, as the regime has detained even the very visible artist Ai Weiwei. (This helpful post at The New Yorker provides some context. This is not the first time he has had run-ins with the authorities - you can find a digest here at The Guardian.)

Ai Weiwei on Democracy and Development

Ai Weiwei ~ White House (1999)

"You cannot simply give up fundamental beliefs in human rights for a short-term gain.

This kind of thinking will cause tragedy in the future. It is going to be a strong challenge for the nations of the world to survive economically and at the same time protect civilized values, which come from the long struggle of science and humanitarianism.

We see the tendency in the world to criticize democracy and sometimes even to say that authoritarian countries like China are more efficient. That is very short-sighted. China looks efficient only because it can sacrifice most people's rights. This is not something the west should be happy about. In a town like Guangzhou there are thousands of workers who suffer injuries such as losing fingers in work accidents. They are on low salaries. They have no future.

Since the global economic crisis began, the change in global attitudes is clear to see – and I think it is pitiful. Barack Obama came to China and he is probably the only president of the United States never to mention the words "human rights" in public. You see it in France, with Hu Jintao's visit last week. How can people be so short-sighted? How can they betray those basic values?" ~ Ai Weiwei (7 Nov 2010)

The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has been in the news both in Britain [1] [2] [3] [4] and back home [1] [2] [3] over the past several weeks. He has taken it upon himself to not only challenge his own government, but to characterize in a straightforward way the craven behavior of Western politicians - "pitiful." His outspokenness has gotten him warnings from the Chinese authorities. Just as an aside, Ai seems to be yet another of the architects who, in one or another way, weave art and politics together as they encounter the world.