Consequential Aesthetics: The Redemptive Work of Ai Weiwei & Theaster Gates

Theaster Gates, Itinerary for silver hill, 2010 Silver and gold leaf, neon, wood, acrylic (two elements) Pulitzer Foundation 2010

It is written that without a vision the people perish. Fortunately, there continue to be artists in our time who project for us a picture of what is possible. Artists have always done this, but today we find artists whose value is in how they live and not just in what they make. In their living we not only have a vision of the future, but a model for how to get there.

In terms of my own life, I often think about the word “consequential.” What does it mean to live in a way that is significant in the world and to the world? My pursuit of art and admiration for artists generally has to do with finding answers to these questions.

At the time of this writing it has been almost 1000 hours since Ai Weiwei and, later, four associates disappeared.  Ai’s political engagement with the Chinese government is well known. He has suffered life-threatening abuse and risked personal safety in order to set up new questions. Ai uses art as a tool to create basic structures that can be open to new possibilities. It is therefore appropriate that the forthcoming documentary film by Alison Klayman, Ai Weiwei Never Sorry, asks the question, “Can an artist change China?” A similar question is being asked of Theaster Gates, “Can an artist change Grand Crossing?”

The difference in circumstances of these two artists hardly needs to be mentioned. That they originate from different generations, geographies and genealogies is also obvious. To assist us in understanding the new function of the artist and art in society, we should focus our attention instead on the symmetry of their inquiry and their agency with respect to social problems.  It is this picture that can model the modern moment to which we should aspire.

I met Theaster Gates recently in Chicago at a dinner hosted by Artadia Board Member and Chicago-based art patron Larry Fields. I quickly learned that the Theaster Gates “whole person” approach to life very much mirrored my own and his work seemed like mathematical proofs for my private theories about why art matters.

When approaching the work of Ai Weiwei and Theaster Gates, descriptive terms like “cross-disciplinary” or “inter-disciplinary” are unhelpful. To think in terms of disciplines or worse – medium – with respect to these artists is to completely miss the mark. We have to look deeper in them to understand anew what an artist is and what it is that an artist can do.

The quality and manner in which these two artists matter requires a new and distinct discourse which I am calling “consequential aesthetics.” I use the term to describe the practice of a type of artist exemplified by Ai and Gates.  They are interested in and investigate traditions of the beautiful in art, but situate the production of art objects and circulation of related ideas in ways that impact the lives of people outside institutionalized contemporary art discourse. The result is that the artist through his art practice becomes a transformation agent in society capable of creating a new reality through subversive interventions in the status quo. (See this month’s ARTnews profile on Ai Weiwei by Barbara Pollack, Crossing the Line in China.)

“[Y]ou cover something so that it is no longer visible but is still there underneath, and what appears on the surface is not supposed to be there but is there.” ~ Ai Weiwei on his ceramic works, Colored Vases

Gates generously agreed to spend some time walking me through his current solo exhibition, An Epitath for Civil Rights And Other Domesticated Structures, and his nearby studio/workshop. It’s two weeks later and I am just beginning a process of understanding how to think about what I saw and learned. Yes, I said “beginning a process of understanding how to think about”…

In An Epitath, Gates raises the question of political potency: “How do we think of the history of Black political engagement that required acts of unrestrained heroism and life-threatening engagement? What is the state of Civil Rights, especially now that there are splinters of class-based need, new marginalized groups, and the ever present belief that things are better for all because of the election of 2008?”

This inquiry relates in clear ways to the Arab Spring and upheaval in many other parts of the world we are all witnessing. While Gates is dealing with the failure of the Black middle class to address issues of the Black poor, he has also placed a specific African American historical narrative in relationship with contemporary acts of “life-threatening engagement.”

If you have not previously thought about these artists in relationship to each other, consider their shared interest in ceramics. Both understand what Gates describes as “the function of craft to carry culture.” Their ceramic work deals with ritual, ceremony and history transformed by an artistic act that invites the audience to travel from the old into the new.  See Theaster Gates at the Milwaukee Art Museum, To Speculate Darkly: Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter, April 16 – August 1, 2010 and Ai Weiwei at Arcadia University Art Gallery, Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn Ceramic Works, 5000 BCE – 2010 CE, February 24 – April 18, 2010. In these exhibitions the art object becomes a device for intervention and interruption in ways of thinking.

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In their artistic practice, both artists engage in acts of demolition. Ai destroys antique ceramics of actual (and even greater symbolic) value.  Gates demolished the insides of abandoned buildings which have neither actual or symbolic value as raw materials. Both artists play the role of redeemer by transforming these old objects. As contemporary art the old object is infused with new value, becomes worthy of museum exhibition and commands a high price because of its association with the artist.

Importantly, however, Ai and Gates go beyond the Duchamp slash Warhol conversation their work invites. The very making of the work is used to meet the basic needs of people living in communities far and away from the museum and the art fair. The objects are part of what Gates describes as an “ecology” that unifies fine art making, exhibiting and selling with the redemption of discarded materials, people and places.

Ai Weiwei employed 1600 grateful citizens in the small city of Jingdezhen to produce 100 million ceramic sunflower seeds for his exhibition at The Tate Modern. Theaster Gates’ exhibition at Kavi Gupta Gallery is similarly note worthy for having involved the employment of an ex-offender who is being re-enfranchised through his making of art. As artists, Ai and Gates have successfully transformed circumstances for groups of people who had no previous relationship to contemporary art practice.

In another clear and specific parallel, both artists are challenging the political structures that produce shoddy buildings. According to Ai, political corruption among the Chinese ruling class led to bad construction of school buildings, causing the deaths of children in the 2008 Szechuan earthquake. According to Gates, moral corruption (my words) among the African American professional class led to the removal of intellectual and financial resources from neighborhoods causing blight and the collapse of builds, ruining lives.

These are new equations for artistic practice that stand in opposition to (or maybe they are an evolution of) 20th century inventions like relational aesthetics. And whereas social sculpture  celebrates the idea that art has the potential to transform society, consequential aesthetics actually causes the imagined transformation.

Within consequential aesthetics a new level of artist engagement with the world is occurring. This engagement extends beyond the privileged discourse of the art world, which often amounts to little more than a private conversation among elites. Ai and Gates successfully deploy a language and context for their work that suit traditional art institutions and operators. But they also extend themselves personally through a material engagement with public life.

Their art objects are symbolic, loaded with meaning and at the same time beautiful. Artists like Ai and Gates embody the best of conceptual art practice combined with reverence for materials and artistic skill. But the wholeness of their identity, and thus the significance of the works, can only be appreciated when the objects are brought into view with the artist’s participation in communities. Ai’s political activism through social media and Gates’ neighborhood revitalization through urban and cultural planning model a new standard for moving and being in the world as an artist.

Earlier this weekend on Twitter I was asked, “What are you seeing today that you think might be the beginning of something new and big?” I didn’t realize it at the time, but my answer set the framework for this post in 140 characters. I tweeted: We will see a shift from what is made to the maker. The future is for the artist whose entire life is the work.

This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: “Go down to the potter’s house, and there I will give you my message.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him. ~ Jeremiah 18:1-4

Why Firehoses?

Why Sunflower Seeds?

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Posted in: Ai Weiwei, Theaster Gates