This art installation in New York by Ai Weiwei from last year is a moving and powerful reminder for the necessity of public art.
ART REVIEW
From China’s Artist-Activist, a Citywide Great Wall
Ai Weiwei has endured frequent gripes that his activism has got the better of his art. That gripe is unfounded.
Ai Weiwei lives his life in public: blogging his anger at the Chinese government, transforming his detention into harrowing dioramas, and now Instagramming up a storm from his exile in Berlin. Over the last two years, the world’s most famous artist-activist has been traveling to refugee camps from Greece to Iraq and Gaza to Myanmar, documenting the displacement of millions and the borders they are desperate to cross. Others might have stayed behind the camera. Mr. Ai, now a refugee himself, puts himself right in front.
The worldwide refugee crisis is the subject of “Human Flow,” Mr. Ai’s new film, and it also informs a gargantuan undertaking of new public artworks in New York, running from Harlem to Flushing and united under the title “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors.” Put aside its cheesy title, cribbed from Robert Frost, and there is a fair deal to admire in this new endeavor, which consists of new sculptures in the form of steel barriers; hundreds of lamppost banners of refugees past and present; and interventions at bus stops across the five boroughs.
Remember the 1990s, when the hawkers of globalization told us this century would see borders fall? In fact construction of international walls and fences has surged worldwide to deter unauthorized migration; Europe’s borderless Schengen zone is under existential threat; Brexit promises to divide Ireland once again; and, if someone has his way, a “big, beautiful wall” may rise south of here soon. Mr. Ai saw those barriers firsthand while filming “Human Flow.” Now he has brought them to New York, where they fit in with alarming naturalness.
There’s a similar tension between menace and shelter in a series of fences and barriers erected in the East Village and in Harlem. [...] The strongest of Mr. Ai’s new sculptures is “Gilded Cage,” standing 24 feet tall at the southeast entrance to Central Park. This elegant, quietly ominous pavilion consists of an inner ring, inaccessible to viewers, fenced off by hundreds of soaring arched steel struts. A small section of the inner ring has been cut out, so you can walk into the heart of this threatening pergola. Look up from inside, and Mr. Ai’s sculpture resolves into abstract beauty; look into the central ring, and you’ll see its symmetry disrupted by turnstiles familiar from the New York subway, or United States-Mexico border crossings. [...]
The counterpart to “Gilded Cage” is the even taller “Arch,” which occupies nearly the whole space underneath the marble arch in Washington Square Park. This simpler, unpainted steel cage is pierced by a mirrored opening, its form suggestive of two conjoined figures. They may appear to bystanders as weary travelers, though mega-fans of Marcel Duchamp will pick out the reference: The figures quote the French-American artist’s 1937 design for the entrance of André Breton’s Paris art gallery. Mr. Ai’s invocation of the Master in this location has a sideways political salience, if you know your downtown history. During World War I, Duchamp and his buddies broke into the Washington Square Arch and proclaimed an “independent” Greenwich Village republic, not subject to the laws and borders of the world outside.
Compared to the sphinxlike “Gilded Cage,” “Arch” wears its convictions more publicly. This is a big, public ode to freedom of movement, yoking America’s first president (a dissident) and most influential Dadaist (an immigrant). The test of a work of art’s success, though, is not how fluently it communicates a single message; the test is how forcefully it reflects, unsettles, and transforms the world in which it intercedes. By that standard, “Gilded Cage” stands as the greater achievement, enfolding inside and outside, warden and captive, into a single, synthesized public form. “Arch,” by contrast, offers less, and risks being remembered only as a selfie backdrop for woke narcissists. [...]
His art turned to direct advocacy in 2008, when he began his essential “Citizen’s Investigation” of the death toll of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, whose results are on view at the Guggenheim. Since then he has reoriented his sculpture, videos, and social media accounts to serve almost as a broadcast medium for Chinese and global freedom — and, as a result, he has endured frequent gripes that his activism has got the better of his art.
I’ve always found that gripe to be unfounded. Like his hero Duchamp, Mr. Ai has wholly erased any border between his art and his life — and there are some emergencies, among them the displacement of more human beings than any time since World War II, that this artist can only address with bluntness. That sometimes lends itself to less challenging sculpture, like in Washington Square, or simple boosterism, as in the refugee portrait banners. Step back, though, and look at the project in aggregate, and “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” displays all the confidence and moral passion of his most important later projects.
Passengers waiting for the bus on 125th Street behind Mr. Ai’s barricades went right on with their commutes. Tourists in Corona Park were taking their selfies with a fence in frame. At Cooper Union and in Washington Square, metal barriers from the N.Y.P.D. echoed the artist’s own. South of “Gilded Cage,” shoppers on Fifth Avenue wended through ad hoc concrete obstacles around the president’s own tower. Mr. Ai’s citywide checkpoints are a hundred muted bells that add up to a deafening alarm: We have accepted so many physical and political limits that new ones go unnoticed, and we may not protest our shrinking freedom until it’s too late.
"Good Fences Make Good Neighbors" Thursday through Feb. 11, at more than 300 sites across New York City. For a list of sculptural installations, www.publicartfund.org.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C18 of the New York edition with the headline: Still Manning the Barricades.
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