The Interview Redux

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg should turn their talents to taking aim at the good guys like like Ai Weiwei or even Michael Moore, just to demonstrate to Kim Jong-un what democracy is all about. Can you imagine a scene where Michael Moore is captured coming upon some injustice in the automotive industry (Roger and Me) and gleefully commenting to his producer how the expose is going to fatten his wallet? Imagine Ai Weiwei provoking cops and then getting all the girls. Imagine an orgy in his Beijing studio with posters of his famous Fuck Off exhibit plastered across the walls. There are so many historic figures who would be ripe for parody from Gandhi, who was supposed to have tested his ability to control his desires, by sleeping next to naked young girls, (“Thrill of the chaste: The truth about Gandhi’s sex life,” The Independent, 4/7/10). Show him failing the test. And what about Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King and the Buddha? Turns out Buddha mind is dirty and that all along the Buddha has been undressing adherents in his head. In piece entitled “The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side,” (The Atlantic, 12/14), Mark Oppenheimer showed how life can easily mirror art in this very respect. What happens when good guys who don’t do things like hiring hackers to shut down major industries in their adversary's countries, get pissed? On a micro level take a look at the countroversy which occurred many years ago when the a writer for Lingua Franca actually pulled one on the editor of the more edgy Social Text, in the form of producing a nonsense paper that got accepted for publication. One would suppose that the deconstructionist crowd at Social Text didn’t like being the laughing stock. However, there were no death threats and no bookstores refused to carry the magazines. If anything the controversy probably drove up sales for two otherwise moribund publications one of which (Lingua Franca) no longer even exists.

China Dentata

The Times reported that Wang Lijun the police chief and former associate of Bo Xilai, the disgraced former Communist party leader, was sentenced to 15 years for “defection, abuse of power, taking bribes and bending the law for personal gain” (“Police Chief in Chinese Murder Scandal Convicted and Sentenced to 15 Years," NYT, 9/23/12). Bo Xilai wife’s Gu Kailai was given a “death sentence with a two-year suspension which means she will probably end up with a long prison term” and the fate of Mr. Bo, once in line to becoming a major figure is still undetermined. The case, involving as it does both the murder of a British businessman, Neil Heywood, and an ambitious Chinese politician, epitomizes the seemingly conflicting forces in Chinese society. China suffers from cultural and economic schizophrenia. Its economy is a juggernaut, powered by free market capitalism and private enterprise. Yet it still has a powerful Communist Party which operates in a clandestine manner, taking back freedom as fast as it gives it away. Usually freedom of expression and free market capitalism co-exist, but in Chinese society the two are often at odds. Will we really ever know the real story of what accounted for Bo Xilai’s fall from grace? During the cold war the two Germany’s exemplified warring ideologies. In today’s China, the same conflict exists under one roof. It serves China’s purposes to give the impression of being a dynamic and open society, but the reality is often otherwise. Alison Klayman’s documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, demonstrates how the Chinese government gave the prominent artist just enough rope to strangle himself with. When Ai Weiwei out lived his use and his outspokenness no longer was a source of useful publicity, he was silenced. China has enormous resources, but true freedom is the one thing that money (and the prospect of increasing economic expansion) is still not able to buy.

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

The city of Chengdu is a significant venue in Alison Klayman’s film about the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei,  Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry.  During the film Ai Weiwei makes a public appearance at a restaurant where he and his associates film police functionaries who are trying film and silence him. Wang Lijun, the chief of police of Chongqing who blew the whistle on the ill-fated Bo Xilai sought refuge in the US consulate in Chengdu and it’s the city where a plant making products for Apple was cited for abuses of factory workers. Thus Chengdu is assuming an almost mythic status, a lesser though more updated Tiananmen Square, where the economic (Apple), political (Bo Xilai) and cultural problems (Ai Weiwei) of modern China coalesce. Ai Weiwei became a controversial figure after he repudiated the 2008 China Olympics and its stadium, the famed  "bird’s nest," which he helped design.  Next came the Szechuan earthquake where he publicized the doublethink which characterized the government’s response to the tragedy involving poorly constructed schools. One of his art works, “Remembering” from the exhibit “So Sorry” which was displayed at the Haus der Kunst in Munich is composed of 9000 backpacks, which memorialize the thousand of students who died. As Klayman portrays him Ai WeiWei is an outsized figure, a master of agit-prop, who produced an exhibition in the year 2000 entitled Fuck Off.  Ai Weiwei has assistants who execute all his works including one which is composed of 100 million porcelain sunflowers. But as portrayed by Klayman, Ai Weiwei is curiously retrograde, a kind of artistic Jerry Rubin or Abby Hoffman (who himself wrote a pamphlet called Fuck the System). If Ai Weiwei didn’t have the opposition of a repressive society, what would the substance of his art be? He’s both a master of the social media, like Twitter, and a product of it. The Chinese government was and is the Larry Gogosian to his Damien Hirst. The film makes Ai Weiwei out to be rather clever. However one wonders if the authorities weren’t one step ahead of him. The movie alludes to how the artist performed a useful function showing how far Chinese society had come (in allowing a controversial figure to gain prominence). Once they’d made their point they quickly levied a huge fine and silenced him. Corinna Beltz’s Gerhard Richter Painting is a film about a totally different artist, an abstractionist whose art eludes any of the political issues that pervade Never Sorry. However, the two films are oddly similar to the extent that they exhibit the modern artist as super media figure and promotor, a maker of commodities who becomes a commodity him or herself. The Chinese have developed enough liberty (at least from the economic point of view) to beg the question of when they will have freedom. That’s the profound question Ai Weiwei’s persona and by proxy Klayman’s film explores.