Beyond Bars and Broken Wings: A Review of @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz

Who could be more appropriate to create an aesthetic meditation on imprisonment than Ai Weiwei, a contemporary artist whose critiques of the Chinese government have led to his arrest and the seizure of his passport? @Largewas initially proposed in 2011 by Cheryl Haines, founder of the For-Site Foundation, an organization that sponsors site-specific art projects, following Ai’s eighty-one-day detainment. Over the next three years, after clearance from the State Department, negotiations with the National Parks Service and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, and raising four million dollars in private funds, Ai designed seven artworks from his Beijing studio without being able to visit Alcatraz, the installation site.

Despite these challenges, the exhibition featuring those seven compelling works marks a laudable achievement. An underlying theme of @Largeis that freedom prevails in the face of repression. At times, however, the urgency of the political conditions to which the work responds becomes enmeshed with the aesthetic spectacle of the work itself, leading to a troublesome conflation of art with an abstract and universalized concept of freedom.

This conflation inspired questions over whether visitor interaction with the works would undermine the exhibition’s larger goals of engaging viewers in questions around freedom, human rights, and individual expression. Specifically, did the work rely on visitors stepping beyond the paradigm of the museum-goer-as-consumer, or the Alcatraz-visitor-as-tourist? The exhibition tried to facilitate this shift by creating venues for viewers to learn about and involve themselves in ongoing political struggles. In one piece, titled Yours Truly, the success of the work relied on visitors writing postcard messages to a portion of the nearly two hundred prisoners of conscience incarcerated worldwide who are represented throughout the exhibition. Although museum directors and curators have written about the challenges of facilitating meaningful visitor engagement, the unpredictability of audiences was recently evidenced after the spring 2014 installation of Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby. The work stood as “an homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant” in Brooklyn, New York. ¹Much like Ai, Walker’s piece consisted of a site-specific installation that drew massive crowds into a defunct space. A Subtletyraised evocative questions about the violent and exploitative history of sugar production.

Walker’s work, grand in scale and located in a condemned site, compelled attendees to photograph the work and circulate the images on social media platforms. However, many of the photos merely revealed their creators’ racial blind spots in posing near the breasts and genitals of the large sculpture of a sphinx with caricatured features of a “mammy” figure. Though the ignorance of some viewers cannot be a measure of the work’s success, it demonstrated (unsurprisingly, for many) a casual disregard for black bodies and the traumatic histories they carry at a moment when black Americans are subject to ongoing racial violence.

It did not seem impossible, then, that some viewers might overlook the exhibition’s larger political context or simply find it uninteresting. As one critic noted, the United States’ reputation of having the world’s largest prison population casts doubt on Americans’ investment in questions about justice. ²This contradiction was implicit throughout the exhibition and raised the question of whether the installation privileged a particular condition of imprisonment as unjust in place of critiquing the institution itself. However, envisioning the abolishment of prisons would have posed a formidable challenge when the circumstances of imprisonment are the catalyst for the work’s creation. Consequently, it is perhaps necessary to first think beyond the prison’s walls, even as one is enclosed within them.

When Alcatraz operated as a prison, the...