So scary I nearly walked out.
I’d read a book, or rather, attempted to read it. Too frightening what people are capable of in the name of repressing opinions that are contrary to their ideology. The book went into some detail about what regimes do to political prisoners, the torture, both physical and psychological. Pure horror, the blackest of nightmares.
I didn’t know what to expect this evening, when I went to see the play entitled #aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei. I didn’t expect physical torture, obviously. They wouldn’t show anything so graphic in a British theatre. Or would they?
What I got instead was interrogation that strayed into the absurd. Outlandish. Surreal. One moment it’s all shouts of “confess your crimes!”, the next moment a discussion on a recipe for noodles. One moment it’s about “you’re a murderer”, then it’s “you’re a dadaist”.
Disconcerting. But the real Ai Weiwei was tortured nonetheless. And if you keep that in mind, the play’s closing monologue, in which the actor smashes an antique vase and talks about freedom in a passionate way, is not at all rhetorical. We Westerners, so used to personal freedom that we’re even a jot jaded about it, can quickly forget how precious it is.
But another theme emerged in the play, which intrigued me more than the baffled reaction of the Chinese state towards Ai Weiwei’s claim to freedom: the clash between the Party’s definition of art (something beautiful, uplifting, like peonies, trees, a mountain or a woman), and Weiwei’s impassioned, sure response. He states that ancient art is inadequate at representing contemporary life, what we feel now, what the world is like now. He was once an architect, he used to admire things of beauty, but those ancient objects don’t express or even describe what people feel in the present world. He says that now the beauty is no more in the art, but inside the viewer. His conceptual art aims at drawing out feelings from deep inside people, it can change the world by making people look at it differently.
I’ve always had difficulty in appreciating contemporary art, because I tend to start with the beauty and then try to understand it and the environment and artist that produced it. But Ai Weiwei is right. Although there is definitely a space today for ancient art, there is also a legitimate space, and a reason, and relevance, for conceptual art. For art that is unsettling. For art that provokes and engages the mind. For art that breaks the rules: not only social and political rules, but also the individual rules and limitations that each one of us imposes on oneself.
I’m having huge problems with ideology at the moment. Lately, I’ve been on the receiving end of repressed, obsessed, stupidly backward fundamentalism. I am a free spirit, and although I have nothing against people who want to follow an ideology, I have everything against people who try to make me follow their ideology. So I sympathised with Ai Weiwei this evening. But I think, nay, I know, that I would not have his courage, therefore I will remain deeply entrenched in the West, or at least in places where I can be myself. Not all of London is that free, unfortunately…..
