Artistic Practice in Ai Weiwei & Jackson Pollock's Work

Material and conceptual agencies of the art world sustain a significant relationship which reflects the final outcome and concept of the artwork. Art has incessantly served to reveal the inextricable link between the artist, audience and the world through the material practice and techniques utilized in the artmaking process. In contemporary society and specifically, artists cultivate and communicate their social, religious and political standpoint and perspective or values through incorporating traditional techniques. Artists such as Ai Weiwei or Jackson Pollock successfully communicate their beliefs to the audience through their artmaking practice and subjectivity.

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese activist and post-modern artist who engages in sculpture, photography and installation as a way of preserving his Chinese culture in a society that is progressing away from it. Weiwei’s works comply with his heritage as well as dispute political and governmentalized conceptions of his culture, employing the freedom he possesses as an artist to communicate these ideologies. He’s often labelled an ‘iconoclast’ as he designates himself as the vocalizer of traditional Chinese activists. His artwork, ‘Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn’ (1995) is a triptych of photographs that capture him holding a traditional, priceless and culturally valued urn, the urn mid-air, and the urn shattered on the floor respectively. The artwork symbolized the suppression ad engulfment of Chinese beliefs by consumerism and commercialism – or the habitual progression and steering from culture. The smashing and shattering are a connotation of the brutal eradication of his heritage as a result of the inevitable pursuit in hedonism by the collective society. The artwork also projected Weiwei’s intense desire to court controversy; the destroying of something so priceless and valuable to the Chinese culture allowed a social contention that provided a platform to vocalize his ideas that generally revert back to cultural damaging. Whilst the artwork was somewhat considered a revolutionary ‘collaboration’ with ancient artists as a way of reminiscing a culture once so prominent, many critics perceive what he called heritage preservation as a subtle misappropriation. On either hand, the dispute indirectly induced a greater conversation revolving the loss of culture. Due to the act of destroying the historical artefact, the images/artwork became more valuable than the original object, confronting audiences with a redefinition of the past, reminding them of the little care they had. The images not only instigated a further preservation in the culture, but also an exposure of its development, specifically in the communist regime.

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Ai Weiwei’s suggestive artwork, ‘Sunflower Seeds’ (2008) is a sculptural installation of over a hundred million porcelain sunflower husks, apparently identical but realistically unique. Far from industrially produced, ‘ready-made’ or found objects, they have been intricately crafted by hundreds of skilled artisans. Being poured into the interior of the Turbine Hall’s vast industrial space, the seeds form a seemingly infinite landscape that is ironically confined by four walls, mimicking the cultural and traditional suppression of Chinese heritage. This combination of mass production and traditional craftsmanship invites audiences to look more closely at the ‘made in China’ phenomenon and the politics of cultural exchange currently. The utilization of porcelain and the survival of its production within the artmaking process alongside its early traditions of mass production and global export are still accepted as a cultural artefact in China today. The fragility of porcelain, causing its deregulation in the 1980’s, allowed Weiwei’s artwork to be perceived as unusual and ambiguous. Despite this, sunflower seeds parallel the growth of materialism, globalization and mass production in China and the progression from traditional marketing. Furthermore, as sunflower seeds are a Chinese delicacy, he allows the interactive facet of the work to evoke a sense of nostalgia and reiterate a yearning of cultural preservation. The audience’s or rather, responder’s requirement to walk on the seeds is Ai Weiwei’s representation of society’s impact or ‘footprint’ on the heritage and its capacity to deteriorate. Moreover, as each seed may be considered an artwork within an artwork, it becomes a poignant commentary on the relationship between the individual and collective consciousness. Moreover, the sunflower seeds are a potent symbol of the Cultural Revolution, emblematic of the sunflower’s faithful tendency to face ‘Mao’ or the Sun. this cultural narrative carried heavy associations with disappointment and opposing, hope. It is believed that the decision to ban the walking on the seeds due to the toxicity of porcelain dust, is a reinforced allusion to cremation and a sense of sorrow and stillness; growing tensions between the individual and collective in Chinese society as the field of seeds laid dormant. In essence, ‘Sunflower Seeds’ generated a nostalgic mood and also reiterated the ancient culture in order to preserve the heritage.

Jackson Pollock is an abstract expressionist, post-war artist who developed his own semi-figurative language that allowed on aesthetic reflection of the vibrancy and vitality of American culture through time. Pollock mobilizes the personal expression of self and emotional and creative intensity to generate originality and ‘reinvent’ the art world. He cultivated countless modernist ideals into his work; the avant-gande notion that created new styled and the revolutionary extension of art that invited a psychological and philosophical interpretation. His work ‘Blue Poles’ (1952) is an abstract expressionist work that involved layers of erratic splashes of paint intended to communicate his emotions at the time of his creation. It was an ‘action painting’, meaning he painted it in a heightened state of emotion, and without an easel – the subtle rejection of traditional artistic conventions. The work not only demonstrated intuition and spontaneity through the ambiguous depth of the paint layers, but also rhythm and pattern as the repetition of the blue poles lay still amongst the ‘movement of the splatters’. The splatters and layers of color created variations that ironically externalized his internal conflicted psyche as an alcoholic. In the early stages of painting ‘Blue Poles’, Pollock was joined by Tony Smith and Barnett Newman, although it was not critically considered as Pollock covered their contributions with layers of paints and green washes. Pollock built up a web of rhythmic linear accents using yellow, orange and aluminum paints. He then left the canvas to dry. When he next worked on the painting he added in the blue poles, apparently using block of timber as a straight edge, creating unusually definite forms in the ‘all over’ configuration of the work. The worth includes fragments of broken glass and subtle footprints as a result of a drunken encounter only furthering his presence in the artwork as an alcoholic artist, allowing the responders to feel a deeper connection with him upon analyzing it.

Pollock’s work ‘Pasiphae’ (1943) is an abstract expressionist painting that is designated to provoke a sense of chaos and struggle, mimicking the essence of war in an unfamiliarized expression. The painting offers a compositional structure through rhythmical brush stroke patterns, its geometric foundation creating a complex of ‘automatic’ flourishes. These flourishes were designed to mimic the mythical ‘human truths’ that drove the post-war society – the free form abstraction reminiscent of early tribal carvings. Pollock incorporates two ‘sentinel-like standing figures’ at the left and right of the painting in order to visually demonstrate his own novel interpretation of the surrealist practice of ‘automatism’, using his subconscious as a foundation. In order to animate and extend the power of his drama, he paints straight out of the tube and with palette knives as well as brushes. Pollock paints with washes and opaque layers of paint with rare dramatic linear accents to establish independent rhythms. The painting connoted another dimension of his persona and psyche, wildness, sensitivity and spontaneity, ultimately exploring a psychoanalysis of his unconscious mind.

In essence, the material practice determines the ways in which conceptual practice is perceived and reflected, as demonstrated through the varying practices of Ai Weiwei and Jackson Pollock.