Praeterita

On November 9th, the day after the US presidential election, I had just arrived in England to attend a conference, and I spent the first few hours wandering around in a daze at the unexpected result. "These are dark times, these are the dark times" was a phrase I kept repeating in my head. They are from a poem by Bertholdt Brecht that seemed appropriate for the occasion: Truly I live in dark times! An artless word is foolish. A smooth forehead Points to insensitivity. He who laughs Has not yet received The terrible news. The translation is by Scott Horton, from 2008, and his discussion of the meaning and context of the poem is unsurpassable, so I recommend you follow this link and read what he had to say. My personal knowledge of this poem ('To Those Who Follow in Our Wake,' from 1939) goes back to a long phase of devouring Brecht's plays and poems when I was in my twenties. This poem, from his Svendborg poems, was one of the only German poems that I cou...

This is a little late, but I thought I'd link to it anyway: film of a recent event at the Tate Modern, London (courtesy of the excellent Tate Channel ) in support of Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei during his imprisonment by the Chinese authorities.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

On Andrew Sullivan's blog , he links to a report about 'flash graffiti' appearing around Hong Kong in support of artist Ai Wei Wei, who has been held, whereabouts unknown, by the Chinese security forces for nearly two weeks. Some enterprising, courageous, and foolhardy people are projecting Wei's images around the city, even onto the sides of a PLA barracks (above). Link to my video on Ai Wei Wei here . Link to online petition calling for Wei's release here .   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei was arrested by the Chinese authorities last week, when he was trying to leave the country, possibly to set up permanent base in Berlin. He's the most well-known out of scores of artists and dissidents who have been rounded up since the unrest in the Middle East commenced. It's a reminder that the regime that we in the West depend on to supply our consumer economy, and which the international art market somewhat disgustingly relies on to keep its own oily wheels turning, is still at heart a brutal dictatorship. I am reposting the web-talk I did about Ai Wei Wei, above. Here is a link to an online petition you can join, calling for the release of Ai and the other detainees: http://www.change.org/petitions/call-for-the-release-of-ai-weiwei   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

I paid homage to Ai Weiwei, the Chinese installation artist and all-round provocateur, in one of my web-talks a few months ago . Despite being one of the most celebrated and successful of contemporary Chinese artists, possibly more outside his home country than within it, he's constantly getting into trouble with the Chinese authorities. It seems that he refuses to play the assigned role of an artist in modern China: a few gestures towards revolution in art, while staying quite safely within well-trodden paths of Western art, but otherwise keeping away from making real trouble in the political sphere. Well, the government evidently grew tired of him, and they sent in the bulldozers in the last few days to completely demolish his large studio buildings in Shanghai. Here is an interview he gave to the Tate Channel about a year ago, in which he talked about the time he spent in New York City as a young man.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

As a coda to my Meditation yesterday on Ai WeiWei's installation 'Sunflower Seeds', here is the man himself talking about it for the Tate Gallery. Watch this now before it gets taken down by the powers that be:   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

To the person(s) in China who is/are reading my blog: Nimen hao! (Thanks to my Mum, who used to live in China, for teaching me at least that Romanized form of the greeting.) And here is a YouTube video of Chinese artist Ai Wei-Wei's installation in the massive turbine hall of the London Tate Gallery:   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader