Ai WeiWei: According to What?
Ai WeiWei: According to What?
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario
August 17—October 17, 2013
Ai WeiWei came to town. Or, more accurately, Ai WeiWei’s art came to town, the artist himself is still under house arrest back home in China, owing to his activities as a dissident and critic of the government (which almost cost him his life several years ago when he was badly injured in an apparent police beating). Crowds were good at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) for According to What?, the only Canadian stop on this, the first major North American tour of his work, which also included an outdoor component installed in the wading pool at Nathan Philips Square right in front of Toronto City Hall.
WeiWei’s art — and of particular concern here, his sculptural work — forces an up-front engagement with issues that are always boiling up around the larger, historical place of aesthetic things: that is, how can critically important contextual meaning hang-on to, and continue to inform and shape, an aesthetic artefact as time passes and new cultural, social, political and aesthetic contexts arise around it? How can a sculptural object retain its originative meaning and place as contextualization continually shifts, completely changes, or even just erodes away? How can meaning cling and hold fast under such pressures?
Such questions began before even entering the set of AGO spaces given over to WeiWei’s work. Snake Ceiling (2009) sculpturally introduces and
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