History of Art

ARTiculation

Last November, one of our History of Art studetnts, Lucia Hodgkinson, competed in and won the ARTiculation prize held at the Royal Academy. This is an excert her speech:

“Ai Weiwei, the artist, is a Chinese contemporary artist who has been heralded internationally for his challenges against the Chinese authorities, as well as activism against establishment worldwide. He is known as a “dissident artist” following his 2011 arrest and exile from China as well as moving his family to Berlin. He is also internationally renowned, despite being censored out of Chinese society with many public figures refusing to acknowledge his existence. In 2008 the artist filled London’s Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.

Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds (2008) filled the vast industrial space with 100 million hand-painted porcelain seeds. The Chinese artist’s intention was for members of the public to “walk across,sit down, roll in and even play” with the seeds, meaning Ai Weiwei invites the viewer to have a multi-sensory experience, where visitors can touch and walk on the seeds, and listen as they shift underfoot, making art which is not limited to visuals. He offers an experience. Ai Weiwei’s work is not only effective as a social commentary on historical China, it also serves to comment on China’s political situation today. But more importantly, its power lies in the strength of its aesthetic simplicity, as you are able to appreciate a sense of mass vs single seed, and density vs detail, without knowledge of context. This is what makes it so successful.

Ai Weiwei’s intention for interaction reveals a paradox; conceptually, to walk on the sunflower seeds places the viewer in a position of physical power or dominance over the seeds below them, yet simultaneously the viewer is at one with the artwork as they move through the work, and the status of the exclusively “viewing viewer” is questioned. Unfortunately, only ten days after the exhibition opened, the Tate closed direct access to the seeds as the dust generated by the friction between the porcelain had posed as a risk of respiratory problems for viewers. Interfering with how Ai Weiwei’s work was experienced transformed the interactive installation into an object to be observed from a boundary line. This is where the transition from installation to sculpture begins, and one could suggest that this viewing position becomes a metaphor for the West viewing China from a removed and restricted standpoint. This act of mini-rebellion is something that one can imagine Ai Weiwei enjoying. Ai Weiwei grew up during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, otherwise known as The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, experiencing his father’s displacement to rural China to carry out hard labour.”

Lucia Hodgkinson, Year 12 A fabulous book for those interested in History of Art

The Goldfinch’ is a 2013 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Donna Tartt, which chronicles the life of an adolescent boy whose life descends into chaos when his mother dies in a terrorist attack. The eponymous ‘Goldfinch’is a 1654 painting by Carel Fabritius, which the protagonist takes with him as a reminder of his mother, and symbolically carries with him throughout his ensuing teen and young adult years.

Tartt takes a unique perspective on the power of art in our every-day lives and its ability to transcend language and centuries to make its mark. Fabritius was an important artist of the Dutch Golden Age, who trained in an art studio with Remembrandt in Amsterdam. He famously died at the age of in a tragic explosion at a gunpowder warehouse; this tragic context may have influenced one of the novel’s most iconic quotes: “Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only - if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things that they connect you to some larger beauty?”