"1001 Chairs for Ai Weiwei," New York, April 17, 2011, 1 pm

1001 Chairs for Ai Weiwei, April 17, 2011, 1 pm, organized by Creative Time, outside the Consulate-General of the People's Republic of China to the United Nations, 42nd Street and the West Side Highway. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Most of the few hundred people who gathered to protest the arrest of Ai Weiwei were sitting in chairs outside of China's UN consulate by 1 pm this afternoon, the official start of the action. They were there for 1001 Chairs for Ai Weiwei, an event suggested by curator Steven Holmes as a tribute of sorts to Ai's installation Fairytale: 1001 Qing Dynasty Wooden Chairs, which featured just that number of wooden chairs and was staged in 2007 at Documenta 12.



Reports had come in throughout the morning of successful protests elsewhere in the world, including in Berlin, Hong Kong, and London. (As New Yorkers gathered, Greg Allen was on the scene in Washington, D.C., at the Chinese Embassy.) The local nonprofit Creative Time — whose director, Anne Pasternak, had sparked Holmes' idea while soliciting responses on Facebook — took the helm of the protests in New York, assembling a fairly sizable turnout given the short notice. (The official announcement went out only four days ago.)


One group offered an unusual twist on Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs (1965).





Those accustomed to seeing Falun Gong protesters assembled directly on 42nd Street, across from the consulate may have been surprised to find that the protest had actually been situated across the West Side Highway because of the size of the expected crowd. The consulate was located diagonally across street, making photo-ops of the masses and their chairs somewhat tricky. Some people marched, trying to win attention from passersby, while others sat comfortably in their chairs, reading books, playings with their phones, and speaking with — and making — friends.

After negotiating with the police, Pasternak led everyone with chairs just a few feet north, almost directly across the highway from the consulate. She held a black chair that had actually been used by Ai. "Leave it to Alanna Heiss to have a chair by Ai Weiwei," Pasternak said, holding it aloft, referring to the P.S.1 founder who had supplied it. She placed it down in the front of the seated crowd, letting more than a dozen photographers get to work.





Then, at the suggestion of a man among the protesters, the crowd stood up, leaving their empty chairs, a partial, temporary re-creation of Ai's Documenta piece.



A few hundred people in New York are, of course, not going to free Ai, but the mood seemed cautiously optimistic. Still, in a city with thousands of artists, curators, and people working in various ways in the arts, one person wondered aloud, why weren't there thousands of people out today? And will this momentary action actually amount to anything?

There were long walks to the subway and long bike rides ahead for many in the crowd. People picked up there chairs and started off, discussing what had just happened. Not far from my home, I was passed on my bicycle by a gentleman, pictured below, who had smartly perched his small seat on the back of his bike, a visible reminder that each chair from today's protest is safely on its way back home right now.

PLOT09: This World & Nearer Ones - Part 2 of 2 [Review]

Guido van der Werve, Number Seven: The clouds are more beautiful from above, 2006. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

Part 1 of our PLOT09 coverage, a series of photographs, is also available.

In the press release for their 1978 exhibition Art on the Beach, Creative Time quoted O. Henry’s on Manhattan: “It’ll be a great place if they ever finish it.” They were showing art on the Battery Park landfill, the center of the island’s latest transformation, created with dirt excavated for the building of the World Trade Center. Thirty years later, the organization has organized PLOT09 on Governors Island, just four hundred yards away from Battery Park in New York Harbor. A former Army and Coast Guard site, it is everything that Manhattan is not: pastoral, isolated, and historically static.

Curator Mark Beasley invited nineteen artists to contribute work for spaces on the island, and, perhaps not surprisingly, many of their responses attempt to puncture the island’s impermeable cultural wall, challenging the bureaucratic structures that underpin much of its past. Teresa Margolles contributes a bullet-ridden wall from her hometown of Culiacán to a quiet field. In a great photo-essay on the show Carefully Aimed Darts describes it as “bloodstained post-minimalism,” which is a neat summation. Violence, weapons, and death, all absent from this former military complex are brought into view.

Video scores the greatest triumphs and failures. In the former category, Bruce High Quality Foundation’s zombie film Isle of the Dead, shot on the island, is hilariously sublime, as is Judi Werthein’s The Land of the Free, which shows Colombian musicians, who have fled drug violence, singing their own translation of The Star-Spangled Banner. Presented inside an old Victorian house a quick hop across the water from Ellis Island, it merits repeat viewings. On the other hand, Adam Chodzko’s documentary about an imagined potlatch among children of military families stationed on the island, is a mess of ideas that never quite coheres.

Reviewing PLOT09, Roberta Smith wrote, “The world has an endless supply of sites, but more and more the specifics look very much the same,” arguing that some of weaker entries amounted to “garden variety Conceptualism … a tad obvious or exploitative." This could include Edgar Arceneaux, who channels low-frequency sounds through subwoofers, gently shaking the walls of one of the old mansions. Experiencing it is as exciting as listening to a washing machine run.

Insular Act, a piece by the collective Tercerunquinto, is at least a bit more curious. The three artists decided to throw a rock through the window of one of old administrative buildings for their contribution, documenting the act in drawings and a video. Happily, they first dutifully received all of the requisite governmental permissions. Institutions once vigorously resisted such institutional critique, as when the Guggenheim rejected Hans Haacke’s 1971 exposé on its trustees. Now they know it’s better simply to play along with the harmless fun. The window was replaced at a cost of $2,500, and the work amounts to a farce on the way in which bureaucratic institutions have come to operate in the service of purportedly radical, often-banal conceptual agendas. One hopes the satire is intentional.

One of the best moments comes from Tue Greenfort’s Project for the New American Century. To view it, one walks or bikes through Brick Village, a condemned field of tract housing straight out of Dan Graham’s Homes for America. Rounding the corner of one brick house, in the middle of this manufactured suburbia (slated for demolition to make way for recreation grounds), one encounters the logo for William Kristol’s organization emblazed across its side, along with a plaque celebrating its cause. It is a perfect tribute to its location and our uncertain time.

The real surprise, though, comes from Patti Smith and her daughter Jesse Smith, who proffer a fifteen-minute recording to listen to while exploring the exhibition. Over a slow, drifting piano accompaniment, Patti Smith recites a panegyric to the beauty of Governors Island, the soldiers and families it held in isolation, and the sacrifices those that passed through the area over the past centuries endured. In a field enamored of dissonance, it is a rare call for a sincere commitment to engaging the island’s complex historical legacy. This seems essential. Crowds from across New York are flooding the ferries. Large swaths of buildings will be razed over the next few months. The artist’s interventions will be removed and shipped away. Governors Island is finally changing. There are things worth remembering.

PLOT09: This World & Nearer Ones - Part 1 of 2 [Photographs]

Lawrence Weiner, AT THE SAME MOMENT, 2000. Photos: 16 Miles [more]


Teresa Margolles, Muro Baleado / Shot-Up Wall, 2008.


Guido van der Werve, Number Four: I don't want to get involved in this; I don't want to be part of this; talk me out of it, 2005.


Edgar Arceneaux, Sound Cannon Double Projection, 2009. CD players, subwoofers. Dimensions variable.


Tue Greenfort, Project for the New American Century, 2009.


Brick Village on Governors Island, site of Tue Greenfort's Project for the New American Century, 2009.

AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs, Invocation of the Queer Spirits (Governors Island), 2009.


Mark Wallinger, Ferry, 2009.

PLOT09: This World and Nearer Ones
Curated by Mark Beasley
Governors Island, New York
Summer 2009
Photographs: 16 Miles [more]

Buying Sehgal's Kiss, Funding Mass MoCA, etc.[Collected]

Yayoi Kusama, Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity, 2009. Photo: 16 Miles

“Buying Kiss was a huge ordeal,” Biesenbach reports. The negotiations involved a dozen different people, including lawyers, curators, dealers, conservators, and an “interpreter” for Sehgal.

- Linda Yablonsky, on collecting the ephemeral, in ArtNews. More of this, please.

• Mass MoCA now has cash. For its first ten years, not so much.
• Holland Cotter highlights some a Pictures Generation cover-up noted by CAD.
• In other Met news, a Dutch Vermeer is coming to visit.
• Anaba was up in Hudson, New York. I want to see Pettibon and Okon in Venice Beach.
• Creative Time is bringing contemporary art to Governors Island.
• Jerry Saltz is not starting a blog, and this is why.
• Tracey Emin always looks like she's having fun. Lots of fun.