Public Art Dialogue

ISSN: 2150-2552 (Print) 2150-2560 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpad20

Public Art, Public Feeling: Contrasting Site-Specific Projects of Christo and Ai Weiwei

Erika Doss

To cite this article: Erika Doss (2017) Public Art, Public Feeling: Contrasting Site-Specific Projects of Christo and Ai Weiwei, Public Art Dialogue, 7:2, 196-229, DOI: 10.1080/21502552.2017.1343612 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21502552.2017.1343612

Published online: 02 Nov 2017.

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Download by: [University of Notre Dame] Date: 09 November 2017, At: 07:58 Public Art Dialogue, 2017 Vol. 7, No. 2, 196–229, https://doi.org/10.1080/21502552.2017.1343612

PUBLIC ART, PUBLIC FEELING: CONTRASTING SITE-SPECIFIC PROJECTS OF CHRISTO AND AI WEIWEI

ERIKA DOSS

In the summer of 2016, The Floating Piers opened on Italy’s Lake Iseo, about 100 kilometers east of Milan. Designed by American artist Christo (b. Christo Vladimirov Javacheff in 1935 in Bulgaria), the temporary work of art consisted of 5 kilometers of shimmering golden orange fabric, much of it covering a floating footpath formed from interlocking plastic cubes (Figure 1).1 Linking Sulzano and Peschiera Maraglio, small resort communities usually connected only by ferry, The Floating Piers was a free public art project that invited participants to bob, sway, and quite literally “walk on water.” Over 1.2 million people did exactly that during the installation’s 16-day span (June 18 to July 3, 2016), striding along the floating “yellow brick road” that bridged the two small towns, hugged the rocky shoreline of Lake Iseo, and circled a private island owned by Beretta, the gun makers and arms manufacturers (Figure 2). A few years earlier, similarly large crowds flocked to @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, a temporary exhibition on Alcatraz Island, the former federal prison located north of San Francisco Bay. Designed by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (b. 1957 in Beijing), @Large was open for seven months from September 2014 through April 2015, and was visited by almost a million people. The project featured seven different art installations in four sites, including spaces normally off limits to Alcatraz tourists. Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 Walking from one section of the 22-acre prison campus to the next, from Alcatraz’s industrial workshops and guard towers to its dining hall, hospital ward, psychiatric observation rooms, and solitary confinement cells, @Large visitors interacted with sculpture, sound, and mixed media art that addressed issues of human rights, freedom of expression, and the global realities of incarceration. Trace, for instance, featured large-scale “floor portraits” of people from around the world who have been imprisoned or exiled because of their political or religious beliefs and affiliations (Figure 3). Stay Tuned, a sound installation in Alcatraz’s A Block, a “disciplinary barracks” where political prisoners were held during World War I, featured the music of Tibetan singer Lolo and the Russian

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Figure 1. Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The Floating Piers. Lake Iseo, Italy. 2014–16. Mixed media installation. Aerial view of project. Photograph: Geoffrey Thrumston.

feminist punk rock collective Pussy Riot, among other artists jailed in recent years for protesting against authoritarian rule and corruption in their native countries. Both The Floating Piers and @Large were designed by ambitious, well- known, and highly acclaimed contemporary public artists; indeed, in 2016, Christo and Ai were included on an exclusive list of “the most influential living artists.”2 Both projects were temporary and site specific, designed expressly for their short duration in particular places. Both were also designed for sizable public audiences, and both engaged particular ideas about freedom and mobility, although from radically different perspectives. While Christo and Ai were both Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017

Figure 2. Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The Floating Piers. Lake Iseo, Italy. 2014–16. Mixed media installation. Photograph: Geoffrey Thrumston.

197 Figure 3. Ai Weiwei. Trace,in@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz. Alcatraz Island, California. 2014–15. Mixed media installation. Photograph by the author.

born and raised, for example, in Communist regimes, their ideas about Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 government authority and the role of the artist in contemporary society are profoundly dissimilar. Expanding on these themes, this essay compares the affective contexts of these site-specific projects, considering how each artist solicited and sustained participant experience on physical and emotional terms. Foregrounding affect, or public feeling, as a fundamental factor in public art, it considers how strategies of emotional engagement were employed in each project, and what each yielded in terms of audience response.3 From the beautiful landscape of the Italian lake district and the private island of an arms manufacturer, to a chilly U.S. prison, site was central to the concept and design of The Floating Piers and @Large. But site is only one factor in the

198 larger, more complex, typically transient, and often unpredictable social world — or “network”—of public art, which includes the feelings that unfold when humans and “non-human agents” interact.4 Both Christo and Ai Weiwei used specific sites to engage public feeling. Both chose highly affective sites — a picturesque lake, a forbidding prison — to develop public art projects that were explicitly attuned to the somatic and emotional states that such places and spaces often evoke. Both turned to temporary installations to activate the affective states of these sites and to manage their intended effects within specific frames of time. Each did so, however, for profoundly different reasons: for Christo, to mobilize public feelings about beauty and creative control; for Ai, to mobilize public feelings about government authority, censorship, and injustice. The following discussion takes up each public art project as a separate case study of social dynamics, and closes with a consideration of their shared, and disparate, approaches to public feeling.

THE FLOATING PIERS

The Floating Piers was the 22nd short-term, site-specific artwork realized by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, his project collaborator, manager, and wife, who died in 2009.5 It may have been their last: in mid-2017, their website featured only one “Work in Progress,” a permanent piece titled The Mastaba, Project for the United Arab Emirates which, conceived in 1977, is intended as “the largest sculpture in the world.”6 For 50 years, Christo and Jeanne-Claude organized temporary and massively scaled public projects that centered on the manipulation of space and the disruption of conventional, or familiar, views of places, objects, and ideas. These ranged from Wrapped Coast (Little Bay, Australia, 1969) and Valley Curtain (Rifle Gap, Colorado, 1972), to Running Fence (Marin and Sonoma Counties, California, 1976), Surrounded Islands (Miami, 1983), The Umbrellas (Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan and Tejon Pass, California, 1991), Wrapped Reichstag (Berlin, 1995), and The Gates (Manhattan, 1995). Typically taking decades to Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 realize and costing millions of dollars, the projects never lasted more than a few weeks and were always organized in line with Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s aesthetic and financial interests. “We borrow space,” the artists were fond of saying, “and create gentle disturbances for a few days.”7 One of their early “disturbances” was Rideau de Fer (Iron Curtain), on June 27, 1962. The project consisted of building a wall out of 89 oil barrels in a narrow Parisian street (the Rue Visconti), and using the barricade to disrupt traffic on the Left Bank for about six hours. Referencing the Berlin Wall (erected in August 1961), the strategic and symbolic barricades used by Parisian street fighters from the French Revolution to recent battles for Algerian independence, and the

199 increasingly charged geopolitical conditions of modern oil production in the Middle East and Africa, Rideau de Fer deliberately interrupted rote and uncritical assumptions about mobility and passage in public space. Public response was fast and furious: angry taxi cab drivers and other motorists caught in the gridlock generated by the oil barrel wall honked their horns and hurled insults at the crowds who turned out to see Rideau de Fer (thus further clogging the street), while local residents trapped inside their blockaded apartments flung bottles and debris down at them.8 Subsequent projects built on the idea of temporarily disrupting specific spaces in order to provoke new or alternative understandings about them. But Christo and Jeanne-Claude veered away from more blatantly “oppositional” projects informed by a “certain political subjectivation.”9 Instead, they began disturbing selected sites with visually compelling monochromatic forms — like The Floating Piers’ swaths of golden orange fabric — that they offered as tourist attractions and free “gifts.”10 In stark contrast to the public fury that greeted Rue de Fer, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s later projects aimed for public feelings of awe, amazement, and gratitude. The artists emphasized that public art dialogue was integral to their contemporary art practice. As Christo remarked in 1982: “A new element emerges from every place, every city, every space, and one has to start from scratch to discover how to get the project accepted. The essential thing is to remain humble, to listen to all advice, for you never know in advance what is the right approach.”11 He and Jeanne-Claude tended to downplay, however, direct associations between their public art projects and local social and political conditions for sweeping statements about freedom, beauty, and creative independence. Artistic self- interests discounted the terrible histories of certain sites: Christo and Jeanne- Claude were apparently unaware that Sydney’s Little Bay, where they constructed Wrapped Coast in 1969, was where thousands of Aborigines died from smallpox brought to Australia by the British First Fleet in the late 1780s.12 Interests in spatial disruption, creative freedom, and financial control were shaped by Christo’s upbringing in communist Bulgaria. Fleeing the Eastern bloc in Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 the 1950s and settling in Paris in 1958, where he met Jeanne-Claude, Christo embraced particularly libertarian ideas about freedom, mobility, and artistic independence. In a 1989 interview, for example, he asserted that his temporary works of art were “the idea of one man,” adding: “I do not do commissions; I decide my projects and how to do them. The projects continually translate this great individualism, this creative freedom.” Christo reiterated his beliefs in freedom of choice, individual judgement, and self-determination — the core principles of libertarian political philosophy — in 2011, observing: “I want to create pure poetry and not propaganda. I left a communist country to have that irrational freedom of the artist.”13

200 His ideas about artistic freedom extended to those about free enterprise. In interviews and on their website, Christo and Jeanne-Claude repeatedly related that they did “not accept grants or sponsorships of any kind.” Each public art project was personally funded, usually from sales of Christo’s preparatory studies, drawings, collages, and scale-models.14 Their entrepreneurship was realized by their incorporation as a “for-profit entity.” In 1969, they formed the CVJ Corporation (named after Christo’s initials), which allowed them to secure lines of credit (bank loans) for each multimillion-dollar public art enterprise, and to pay the teams of curators, lawyers, scientists, engineers, construction workers, and security guards who worked on them: $26 million for The Umbrellas, $20 million for The Gates, and $17 million for The Floating Piers (which employed more than 700 people). According to a Harvard Business School case study, Christo was the first artist to “do business using the corporate form.” He and Jeanne-Claude operated independently in the art market: buying and selling Christo’s work themselves, dealing directly with collectors and museums, and setting prices “based on what they felt the market could bear and how much they needed the money.” While employing hundreds of people to make their temporary projects, they were always in charge of their own independent “corporate structure.”15 Libertarian ideas about freedom of choice modeled their public art installations. “Our projects,” Christo remarked in 2015, are totally useless, and totally irrational. These projects only exist because Jeanne-Claude and I want to see them: the world can live without them. They exist in total freedom, nobody can buy them or own them, or charge tickets. This irrationality, this uselessness, is part of the work: that is why I’m very much against art that has a cause. Because art with a cause is always propaganda.16 Of course, in order to actually realize their costly and complicated art enterprises, Christo and Jeanne-Claude were beholden to multiple social dynamics: laws, ordinances, agreements, permits, policies, friendships, connections, and so on. Moreover, by choosing to make public art, they committed to a socially constituted network, even if their commitment was never fully (or unambiguously) Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 acknowledged, or was couched in the language of choice and self-determination. Christo and Jeanne-Claude first developed site-specific public art projects to challenge what they considered the limitations of the art world, from its authoritarian command to its consumerist focus. They were persuaded by Minimalist artist Robert Morris’s argument, as relayed in his “Notes on Sculpture” essays in Artforum (1966), that modern art was processual: less the making of isolated, self-contained material objects for a rapacious art market than a creative process that engaged “space, light, and the viewer’s field of vision,” among other formal, cultural, and social relationships. “The object,” Morris wrote, “is but one of the terms in the newer aesthetic.” Critiquing the shortcomings of the standard

201 gallery space, from the “white cube’s” literal containment of art to its profit-based exhibition and sales strategies, he added: “Why not put the work outside and further change the terms?”17 Early site-specific sculptures, from Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) to Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981–89), countered these art gallery “terms” by being inextricable from the landscapes in which (and in some cases, of which) they were built, thus seemingly becoming non-movable and non-sellable as art market commodities.18 Their “newer” site-specific terms additionally refuted limited formalist and market understandings of contemporary art by emphasizing factors of perception and reception, or the ways in which audiences perceive, experience, and respond to art. As art historian Miwon Kwon explains, site was mobilized on “discursive” terms: the distinguishing characteristic of today’s site-oriented art is the way in which both the art work’s relationship to the actuality of a location (as site) and the social conditions of the institutional frame (as site) are subordinate to a discursively determined site that is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange, or cultural debate.19 In The Floating Piers and other public art projects, Christo and Jeanne-Claude drew in particular on the discursive terms of confrontation, persuasion, and reward. Each project began with the artists provoking audiences with outlandishly disruptive spatial intentions. Next, they lobbied, often for decades, for project approval. Finally, they “gifted” their audiences with gigantic, colorful, and temporary works of public art that, Christo remarks, were “stimulating distraction[s] from the trivial troubles of the everyday.”20 Consequently, the affective contexts of their projects usually progressed from outrage, suspicion, and resistance to grudging acceptance and then, when they were finally seen and experienced, deep feelings of awe: to feeling physically and emotionally overwhelmed by their enormous size, their incredible disruptions of space and site, and “the scope of human capacities” they embodied. Installed in beautiful and often highly symbolic sites, from Lake Iseo to the Reichstag, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects were a “contemporary form of sublime art,” Sandra Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 Shapshay suggests, that exemplified the “human ability to behold, shape, and imbue the environment with meaning.”21 Of course, the affective contexts of their public art gifts were shaped by multiple psychological, social, and political conditions. Awed reactions to their temporary art left some audiences dazed and dumbstruck: defamiliarized views do not inherently spark enlightenment. Likewise, influential friends and wealthy patrons were often crucial to the realization of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s public art projects, which unfolded in the social dynamics of “real time/real space.” Further, the paradoxical nature of the “free gift,” sociologist Marcel Mauss argued, is that gifts are never free and that gift-giving is usually a matter of reciprocal

202 social exchange: benefits given are typically the result of benefits received.22 From The Gates to The Floating Piers, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s public art gifts came with strings attached. The Gates, realized in New York’s Central Park in February 2005, triggered audiences to think differently about public space and freedom of movement in a city still traumatized by the terrorist attacks of September 2001. Named after the gateways (also called “interruptions”) that perforate the stone walls designed in the 1850s by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux to enclose the park’s 843 acres, The Gates featured 7503 portals: each a 16-foot-tall vinyl frame, 6–18 feet long, draped with a billowy panel of saffron-colored nylon fabric (Figure 4). Intended as a gift to the city where they settled in 1964, Christo and Jeanne- Claude lobbied for 26 years to realize The Gates, and only met success after meeting Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire businessman with a sizable art collection. “Luck and contacts are fundamental” to the development of their projects, Christo admits: “In the mid-eighties, we made friends with a businessman who had just founded a small agency specializing in financial news. It was only when this person became mayor of New York [in 2001] that we were finally able to realize the project. He was Michael Bloomberg.”23 Announcing city approval of the project at a press conference in January 2003, Bloomberg remarked: “The Gates” represents the latest provocative and innovative addition to our City’s grand tradition of public art and will contribute immensely to New York City’s status as the world’s cultural capitol. I thank Christo and Jeanne-Claude for their masterful exhibit and invite all New Yorkers as well people from around the world to experience “The Gates” and appreciate its splendor and beauty.24 Two years later, on February 17, 2005, Bloomberg officially opened The Gates in Central Park, setting in motion a temporary two-week public art project that attracted 4 million people (1.5 million from out of town) and pumped an estimated $254 million into the local economy during a traditionally slow tourist season. Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 Sold as cultural capital and civic spectacle, The Gates was visually compelling: a startling blend of shimmering saffron forms amid snow-covered landscapes and blue skies. The project had no particular start or finish, which allowed audiences to meander through the park, unencumbered by directional or durational imperatives. Despite bitterly cold temperatures, millions experienced The Gates’ “gentle disturbance” of a familiar site, walking under the fluttering orange sculptures or sitting on benches and looking at them — and the crowds they attracted. While never intended as a 9/11 memorial, The Gates invited audiences to “reimagine the spatial and visual dynamics of the park and the city” on highly affective terms.25 Indeed, the most commonly expressed response among

203 Figure 4. Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The Gates. Central Park, New York. 2005. Mixed media installation. Photograph by the author.

audiences at The Gates was not about the size or color of the 7503 portals but how the public art project made them feel, and how in particular it helped them reimagine themselves and the world after the traumatic disruption of terrorism. The Gates “put New York City in the international headlines for something hopeful for the first time since 9/11,” the city’s deputy mayor later recalled.26 Temporality further conditioned public feeling about The Gates. As Christo and Jeanne-Claude remarked in 2005: The temporary quality of the projects is an aesthetic decision. Our works are temporary in order to endow the works of art with a feeling of urgency to be seen, and the love and tenderness brought by the Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017

Figure 5. Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The Floating Piers. Lake Iseo, Italy. 2014-16. Mixed media installation. Photograph by the author.

204 fact that they will not last...We want to offer this feeling of love and tenderness to our works, as an added value (dimension) and as an additional aesthetic quality.27 Insisting that their public art projects must be seen because they “will not last,” as if ephemerality is inherently exigent and the urgency of experiencing temporary art automatically signifies its importance, Christo and Jeanne-Claude qualified public feeling in terms of positive emotions of “love and tenderness.” As art historian Patricia Phillips argues, temporary public art projects can serve as critically engaged social sites by engaging “difficult ideas and current issues in ways that more enduring projects cannot.”28 The Gates is a good example — yet not because Christo and Jeanne-Claude orchestrated these ideas and issues, but because of the social dynamics that unfolded when audiences and art interacted in a specific site (Central Park) at a particular moment (post-9/11). Public feeling at The Floating Piers was similarly shaped by the specifics of site and by current events, most notably the European migrant refugee crisis and the increasing dominance of neoliberal economic and political policies. The project itself was conceived earlier, in 1970, when the artists envisioned installing a 2000-meter-long inflated pier on the delta of the Rio de la Plata, in Argentina. In the mid-1990s, they considered a similar pier project in Tokyo Bay. Unable to obtain legal permissions for either site, neither project was pursued. In 2014, through the connections of Germano Celant, Artistic Director of the Prada Foundation in Milan, and Giuseppe M. Tobias Faccanoni, President of the Lake Basin Authority of Northern Lombardy, The Floating Piers was quickly approved and very quickly developed, coming to fruition in just 22 months. Christo’s personal determination to quickly realize the project — he turned 80 in 2015, and is rueful about the number of public art projects that he and Jeanne-Claude were unable to complete — triggered questionable choices of patronage and huge public demand, costs and effects that he unfortunately discounted in deference to the generosity of his “gift.” Franco and Umberta Gnutti Beretta, “longtime friends and collectors of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work,” donated the use of San Paolo, the private Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 island that the Beretta family bought in 1916 and maintains today as a summer residence. In addition to letting The Floating Piers circle their island, the Berettas helped Christo’s team “obtain the necessary permits from local authorities, including renting the lake’s waters and redirecting its ferry traffic.”29 The oldest industrial firm in the world, a family run empire founded in the early sixteenth century and headquartered near Milan, Beretta is especially known for its firearms, including the custom-made $250,000 shotgun that CEO Franco Beretta gave George W. Bush at a National Rifle Association gala in 2010: a “gift” that acknowledged the former U.S. president’s order of 500,000 M9 Beretta pistols as the standard issue sidearm for the American military.30

205 In recent years, Beretta has expanded into specialty markets for luxury clothing, top-of-the-line binoculars, and high-end real estate, promoting “Italian flair and style” at #berettalife. Contemporary art, monetized as a site of investment and a source of profit, also fits the contemporary Beretta profile: as Franco Beretta told a reporter, “We’ve been very involved with Christo on this project and we’re truly excited about it.” The day that The Floating Piers opened, Beretta boasted on its company Facebook page: “A small island, belonging to the Beretta family, plays a leading role in an art installation. Next time someone tells you guns don’t make art...”31 The Floating Pier’s industrial production began with the manufacture of 220,000 high-density polyethylene cubes, which Christo’s CVJ Corporation commissioned from four different Italian companies. About 20% larger than the hollow plastic blocks used in modular floating dock systems for marinas and fishing piers, the cubes in The Floating Piers were also lighter and more buoyant. In 2015, workers began assembling the Lego-like plastic blocks into 50 £ 330 ft sections, and then connecting them with plastic pins and rope to the 200 concrete anchors (5.5 tons each) that underwater engineers sunk into Lake Iseo (which has an average depth of 406 feet). Once fixed in place, the cubes — raised about 20 inches above the water, with sloping sides for runoff — were covered with a layer of felt (for cushioning) and with a million square feet of nylon fabric made by Geo-Die Lutfwerker in Lubeck, Germany.32 They had no guardrails, but their attachment to the concrete anchors prevented any dramatic lateral movement from waves or wakes. The Lake Basin Authority’s ordinance banning boats in the area during the two-week installation kept the waters calm. Deemphasizing The Floating Piers’ impressive engineering and technological details, as well as its debt to corporate largesse and local political interests, Christo described the public art project as “very painterly, like an abstract painting.”33 He imagined it in terms of purposeless mobility: the freedom to move, the freedom to be moved. “People come from everywhere to walk to nowhere,” he remarked, “not to shop, not to meet friends; they just walk, to nowhere.”34 And he underscored its totalizing experientiality: “The art is not just the pier or the color or the fabric, but Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 is the lake and the mountains. The whole landscape is the work of art. It’s all about you having a personal relationship with it. You in it, experiencing it. Feeling it.”35 Viewed from a distance (from a hilltop above Sulzano, for instance), the project was breathtaking: a visually compelling composition of vivid orange lines against a blue-green background. Experiencing The Floating Piers, however, was often uncomfortable and claustrophobic, more of an arduous journey than an especially pleasurable or edifying encounter. For many of its 1.2 million visitors, The Floating Piers experience started in Sulzano, a village on Lake Iseo’s eastern shore, and extended to Peschiera Maraglio, a port on Monte Isola, a fairly large (4.9 square miles) and car-free

206 island in the middle of the lake that hosts a few small villages, about 2000 inhabitants, and a shrine to the Madonna della Ceriola on its steep hilltop (1969 feet above sea level). After taking the floating footpath to Peschiera Maraglio, visitors walked west on the golden orange fabric walkways for about a kilometer, following the installation’s trajectory along the narrow pedestrian paths of Monte Isola’s waterfront. The Floating Piers then jutted in two directions toward San Paolo, which let audiences walk toward and around the Beretta family villa (where entry was strictly off limits) in one direction, and head back toward Monte Isola on a different track. Most visitors took about three hours to lap around the project’s five-kilometer stretch. While some sat down on the rafts to take photographs or snap selfies, there were — in contrast to The Gates — no benches or resting spots. Likewise, if The Gates and Wrapped Reichstag encouraged unrestricted movement and relaxed moments of reflection, visitor experience at The Floating Piers focused on purposeful walking to reach the finishing line — landfall at Monte Isola or Sulzano — rather like competing in a race. The installation was often so crowded that the golden orange walkways were barely visible under the feet of thousands of people (Figure 5). Christo imagined The Floating Piers as an interactive abstract painting, a temporary canvas of felt experience. He visited the project many times, walking on it or riding nearby in a boat with various members of his team, exuberantly talking with reporters about The Floating Pier’s “incredible joy.” As he stated, Our works require very physical relations to the things, not only seeing. It’s not about “attention,” like looking at a painting or a photograph; no. The Floating Piers is about walking, not only watching, and you need to walk it barefoot to feel it even better. This project is unbelievably sexy. Basically we are making fabric on a huge scale that allows us to translate the fluidity of the motion of the water to fabric, and then into your body.36 Many visitors did stroll on The Floating Piers with their shoes off, enjoying the sensual feel of the catchy (not slick) industrial fabric between their toes, bouncing Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 a little on the softly padded walkways. But when temperatures climbed into the high 90s, the floating footpaths became too hot to walk on barefoot. And as the crowds grew larger and larger, most people kept their shoes on to avoid getting their feet trampled. Crowds were more than double the anticipated attendance; expecting 40,000 visitors a day, The Floating Piers attracted well over a million people during its two-week run. Italy’s lake district is a prime vacation destination, of course, and the Northern Lombardy tourism industry heavily promoted the project with posters and brochures announcing: “Monte Isola is the beating heart of Christo’s piers which will enable people to get to the island walking on water. Everybody

207 will become part of this masterpiece and of the landscape suspended somewhere between heavens and land, immersed in a natural scenery.” Special train fares advertising “A once in a lifetime event...A once in a lifetime trip,” offered a family day pass for €26. Enticed by a miracle — walking on water! — and a “free gift,” thousands flocked to The Floating Piers, and the region and the project buckled under the strain. Piers-bound cars crammed local roads, creating traffic jams that Italian newspapers branded “disaster” in bold type. The Brescia train station was swamped with travelers trying to get to Sulzano — normally a 30-minute ride, which wound up taking hours longer due to overcrowding. After they arrived, many visitors were corralled into parking-lot pens designed to hold 11,000 people. Some waited for up to five hours in the pens before being allowed to start shuffling across the first leg of The Floating Piers to the port of Peschiera Maraglio. The walkways were so crowded at certain chokepoints that people were stopped in their tracks, unable to move. Some suffered from sunstroke and heat exhaustion, requiring emergency medical care. Restaurants and food stands along the Monte Isola waterfront were overwhelmed by demand; the numbers of portable toilets proved inadequate. Within just a few days, the project’s vivid golden orange fabric began to look worn, and in some spots, stained and ripped. While Christo had promised a 24-hour experience, after a few days The Floating Piers was closed from midnight to six a.m. to allow clean-up crews to remove tons of garbage, and maintenance crews to attend to wear and tear. As the head of the project’s security force, Brescia prefect Valerio Valenti, remarked, “We’re managing a mass of people which is incompatible with the site.”37 His comment might also have summarized Italy’s management of the “mass of people” simultaneously crossing the Mediterranean in hopes of political asylum and economic opportunity: more than 153,000 landed on Italian shores in 2015, and 70,000 from January to June 2016, mostly from Nigeria and Eritrea.38 Seen from afar, Italy looks auspicious, an aspirational ideal that often falls short when (and if) migrants make landfall. In recent years, tragic images of desperate refugees dying at sea have propped hysterical newspaper and television accounts Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 of an African “invasion.” Racist right-wing political parties like the Northern League, capitalizing on Italy’s economic unrest and high unemployment (11.5% in May 2016), have spiked in the polls and gained seats in the Italian Parliament with rabidly anti-migrant platforms.39 They are hardly unique to Italy: on June 23, 2016, five days after The Floating Piers opened, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, in part because of widespread anti-immigration sentiment. Though a set piece of temporary duration, The Floating Piers mirrored Italy’s refugee crisis in its similarly huge numbers and limited spatial resources, and also in its site-specific and symbolic embodiment of anticipation. Asylum seekers in

208 Italy and visitors to The Floating Piers alike shared expectations of hopeful alternatives and meaningful possibilities, of experiencing something better, something amazing. Staging The Floating Piers in an exceptionally beautiful landscape, Christo directed visitors to think about mobility, freedom and the enticing transcendence of walking on water. The project’s specific siting in Lake Iseo was aimed at redirecting their visual gaze to new, or expanded, views of space and place; the floating walkways were intended as conduits that, quite literally, encouraged feelings of awe. But only privilege gets to walk on water, much less cross it without drowning. The visitors at Floating Piers were there because they chose to be, and could afford it: a concept of freedom that is central to neoliberal political and economic assumptions that publics are essentially self-interested consumers and as such are free to exercise personal agency, to move freely and choose wherever and whatever they want as a matter of merit and entitlement. Today’s global refugee crisis belies those assumptions: refugees seek freedom as a necessity, not a consumer choice. Their freedom of movement, however, is denied by increasingly restrictive migration policies, including systematic detention for months and sometimes years in refugee prison camps. The Floating Pier’s overcrowded conditions and forced directional imperatives mirrored the crisis of contemporary migrant experiences in Italy and Europe — and around the world: in 2015, the global population of forcibly displaced people reached 65.3 million, or one out of every 113 people.40 Further, those conditions and imperatives stymied the affective responses — the public feelings — of “love and tenderness” that Christo and Jeanne-Claude had always insisted were critical to their temporary public art projects. Perhaps without Jeanne-Claude’s managerial expertise, Christo was unable to reckon with the real-life, real-time problems that come from tempting large crowds with promises of beauty, freedom, and independence. Perhaps he was unaware of the striking similarities, as many visitors noted, between the orange fabric he chose for The Floating Piers and the color of the life jackets worn by refugees (and the jumpsuits worn by “non- compliant” prisoners at the US-run Guantanamo Bay detention center). But by Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 accepting the patronage of an arms manufacturer and centering The Floating Piers around the Beretta family’s private villa, and by framing this public art project as an impossibly “free” gift, he knowingly aligned his grand creative vision with neoliberal conceits that worked against the public feelings he intended.

@LARGE: AI WEIWEI ON ALCATRAZ

@Large, the temporary art installation designed by Ai Weiwei at Alcatraz, also focused on concepts of freedom and mobility in a highly affective site: a notorious

209 federal prison that opened in 1934 to confine America’s most disruptive and dangerous felons. The penitentiary closed in 1963 when the financial and symbolic costs of criminal containment, including “allegations of brutality and corruption,” were deemed too high.41 @Large specifically engaged the site of the former prison to critique the contemporary conditions that restrict and constrain political activists and prisoners of conscience around the world. As with The Floating Piers, site was used to prompt particular emotional responses and affective conditions. Different from Christo’s public art project, however, @Large intentionally engaged public feelings to raise political consciousness about government censorship and issues of social justice. As Ai remarked in 2017, “An artist is a mover, a political participant.”42 From September 27, 2014 through April 26, 2015, Alcatraz’s dank prison was transformed by art installations addressing themes of flight and self-expression, from hand-painted kites decorated with images of birds to songs protesting government and military oppression. Unlike Christo, Ai was unable to experience his site-specific installation. Held under house arrest in Beijing, he designed @Large from the outlook of his own imprisonment, branding the exhibit and his absence with a logo referencing his face, his unkempt hair, and the “@” symbol of social media communication (Figure 6). Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017

Figure 6. Ai Weiwei. @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz. Alcatraz, California. 2014–15. Exhibition banner. Photograph by the author.

210 Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986, Alcatraz is a popular tourist destination visited by more than 1.4 million people each year and managed by the U.S. National Park Service (NPS). Situated about a mile from San Francisco and surrounded by frigid, shark-infested waters, “The Rock” is reachable only by boat. Formerly a military fort and then a prison that held Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War, Hopi Indians resisting federal policies of allotment and assimilation during the Indian Wars of the 1890s, and conscientious objectors during World War I, Alcatraz was where the nation’s dissidents were contained and controlled. That symbolic significance was disputed from 1969 to 1971, when Native American activists occupied Alcatraz seeking political redress; likewise, it was at the core of @Large’s critical engagement with the site.43 Alcatraz became a military fortress and then a maximum security prison because it was exceptionally inhospitable — almost entirely made of rock, with no source of potable water — and seemingly inescapable: the perfect site to contain notorious American felons like Al Capone, Robert Stroud (the “Birdman of Alcatraz”), and James “Whitey” Bulger. Today, Alcatraz is a major site of “dark tourism,” a category of popular travel to places associated with horrific atrocities and human suffering, from Auschwitz to Tuol Sleng.44 Decommissioned prisons are a growing niche in the dark tourism industry, and grim jails and forced labor camps like Eastern State Penitentiary (Philadelphia), Perm-36 (Siberia), Robben Island (outside Cape Town), Sinop Fortress Prison (Sinop, Turkey), Seodaemun Prison (Seoul), and Kilmainham Gaol (Dublin) are among hundreds of penal institutions that operate today as tourist attractions. The United States leads the world in such venues, not surprising, writes legal scholar Michelle Alexander, since it also “has the highest rate of incarceration in the world,” surpassing even “highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran.”45 In 1972, 350,000 inmates were held in U.S. prisons; in 2016, more than 2.3 million, a majority of them people of color. As newer and bigger jails have been built to accommodate the thriving economy of the U.S. prison industrial complex, older ones like Alcatraz have been revamped as popular “prison museums.” Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 Audiences visit them for various reasons: drawn to their imposing architecture, lured by sensational narratives about crime and punishment. Like all dark tourism sites, the affective responses they trigger hinge on their seemingly authentic embodiment of violence, pain, suffering, and death.46 Some prison museums feature ghoulish “death row” displays, complete with electric chairs nicknamed “Old Sparky” and vitrines exhibiting the syringes, saline drip bags, and IV catheters used for lethal injection. Some feature prison “sleepovers” and Halloween theme nights. Some visitors pose as felons, pretending to be “locked up” and taking selfies inside cells. Tours at Alcatraz depict it as an “inescapable experience,” catering to Hollywood’s image of the place as a “hellish” island.”

211 San Francisco Chronicle writer Caille Millner describes Alcatraz as a “monument to depravity porn.”47 Sociologist Michelle Brown argues that the largely uncritical terms of “penal spectatorship” at Alcatraz and other prison museums distract visitors from the realities of human suffering under incarceration, and serve to sanction and justify America’s escalating culture of punishment.48 Alcatraz tourists, for example, pay from $40 to $100 for a ticket to the island, an economic demographic alone that separates them from prisoner populations. As Brown remarks, Because the axis of penal incarceration in the USA extends along distinct race and class lines, a privileged group of citizens (white, middle-class and politically powerful) have remained carefully removed from the experience of penal incarceration even as they have supported and sustained the largest punitive political turn in history.49 Ai’s public art project @Large challenged the psychic and emotional distancing of Alcatraz’s visitors from the contingencies of incarceration, and questioned their uncritical support for its contemporary conditions. Described as “an irreverent maverick with a cast-iron social conscience,” Ai is internationally renowned for his politically potent artwork.50 The son of revered poet Ai Qing, a former favorite of Chairman Mao who was named an enemy of the state during China’s “Great Leap Forward” in the late 1950s and subsequently censored, imprisoned, and exiled, Ai grew up in a labor camp in Manchuria. When China’s political climate changed in the late 1970s, he attended film school in Beijing. Between 1981 and 1993, Ai lived in New York, studying art at Parsons School of Design and working as a photographer. Returning to China when his father became ill, Ai was invigorated by the student-led anti-government protests of 1989 and the challenge of making politically transparent art in a Communist state undergoing dramatic economic transformation. As journalist Evan Osnos remarks, “Transparency is to Weiwei what liberty was to another generation. That is his battleground. And the question of what deserves to be public, and what belongs to the public, that’s what he’s fighting for.”51 Early works like Study of Perspective (1995–2003), a series of Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 photographs depicting Ai giving the middle finger to world famous landmarks (the Eiffel Tower, the White House, Tiananmen Square), questioned the legitimacy of state power and extolled the freedom of expression. His performance/photo series Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) questioned the moral integrity of audience response and public feeling, asking why people were so distraught about his shattering of a “priceless” Chinese vase — but not so emotionally moved by the everyday destruction of human lives and landscapes in China itself. Ai’s subversive aesthetic transparency, and understanding of public feeling, are informed by Chinese Communism, and in particular his critique of its “anti- democratic institutional calcification.” While enthusiastically embraced today in

212 the West, where lingering Cold War dichotomies claim him as an anti-Communist icon of democratic exceptionalism, Ai’s art is actually distinguished by a personal political imagination that reaffirms Marxist, Maoist, and socially liberal values, often on intentionally affective terms. Ai, writes political scientist Christian Sorace, may be “China’s Last Communist,” and his dissident art aims to revitalize Mao’s originating ideology of self-criticism, egalitarianism over hierarchal authority, and social justice.52 In today’s neoliberal China, where Communist Party strategies of economic development supersede those of class struggle, Ai’s art focuses on the possibilities of radical socialism, or a “liberalized and communalized state of freedom.” As he wrote in 2008, “Return basic rights to the people, endow society with basic dignity, and only then can we have confidence and take responsibility, and thus face our collective difficulties. Only rule of law can make the game equal.”53 Over the past decade, Ai’s political-aesthetic interventions and artist provocateur actions have escalated, from a heightened critique of government censorship and oppression in China to the blunt assessment of human rights violations worldwide. In 2008, he condemned the National Stadium, aka the “Birds Nest,” which he co-designed with a team of Swedish architects for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, calling it a “pretend smile” for a China where “liberty and freedom of expression are lacking.”54 He also organized an investigation implicating the Chinese government in the deaths of 70,000 people, many of them children, who were trapped inside shoddily built schools during the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province. In 2009, he covered the facade¸ of Munich’s Haus der Kunst with 9000 children’s backpacks in five different colors, arranging them to spell out the sentence (in Mandarin Chinese characters), “She lived happily for seven years in this world,” a comment made by the grieving mother of one of the children who died in the earthquake. Famine, political repression, and global migration inspire Ai’s most recent public art projects, including covering columns in front of Berlin’s Konzerthaus in 2016 with thousands of orange life vests left on the Greek island of Lesbos, a main point of European entry for asylum seekers from the Middle East and Africa. He Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 used 1005 similarly abandoned lifejackets to make gigantic “water lilies” in a pond in front of Vienna’s Belvedere Palace, using them to form the letter “F” from “Fluchtling,€ ” the German word for refugee. He also closed “Ruptures,” an exhibit of his work in Copenhagen, to protest Denmark’s passage of a law allowing police to confiscate the assets of asylum seekers, and restrict their travel. As he explained, “I cannot co-exist, I cannot stand in front of these people, and see these policies. It is a personal act, very simple; an artist trying not just to watch events but to act.”55 From 2015 to 2016, Ai visited more than 20 refugee camps in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and on the U.S./Mexico border, documenting what he calls the

213 “human crisis” of unresolved global displacement and the loss of “our very basic values.”56 In one instance, he restaged a well-publicized photo of a drowned Syrian toddler, lying face down on a Greek beach, and released it on his Twitter feed. Critics angrily responded, condemning his reenactment as crude and crass grandstanding.57 Ai unapologetically explained that his art was intentionally provocative and urgent, aimed at inciting immediate public response to humanitarian catastrophe. Grappling with the difficulties of representing human suffering and speaking for “others,” Ai’s political-aesthetic interventions are deliberately troublesome. Framing the refugee crisis in select sites and places — on a beach in Greece, in front of European art museums — he refuted assumptions of their aesthetic or art world neutrality. Further, he employed emotionally charged strategies of “grief-activism” that challenge audiences to critique their “basic values” about intolerable global conditions, and to imagine the possibilities of socially transformative politics.58 With @Large, Ai similarly engaged a highly symbolic site to provoke public feelings about institutional power and social justice. His direct work on @Large on-site was thwarted by Chinese authorities: on April 3, 2011, Ai was arrested, held in solitary confinement for 81 days, and accused of tax evasion — a bogus charge aimed at derailing his political activism. Following his release, Ai was placed under surveillance, stripped of his passport, and banned from leaving China. Despite these conditions, he designed several projects — including scaled-down models depicting his detention and interrogation, which were displayed at the Church of Sant’Antonin during the 2013 Venice Biennale — by collaborating with a global network of gallerists who visited him in Beijing. These included Cheryl Haines, founding executive director of the FOR-SITE Foundation, a San Francisco non-profit group dedicated to place-based public art. In 2013, FOR-SITE announced its partnership with Ai, the NPS, and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy to develop @Large.59 Funding for the $3.5 million project came from private sources. Alcatraz has hosted several temporary art installations in recent years, as the NPS has increasingly assumed a leadership role in managing the nation’s Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 symbolic, and often shameful, sites of history and memory.60 The 1988 exhibit Artists at the Rock prompted critic Rebecca Solnit to write that Alcatraz had become “a display for the liberation of contemporary art, for its newfound power to forge connections and address urgent social and spiritual issues, to break out of the object-making and the gallery establishment, to reach out to audiences and belong to places.”61 In 2013, choreographer Amie Dowling, filmmaker Austin Forbord, and 12 previously incarcerated Bay Area dancers collaborated on Well Contested Sites, a powerful 13-minute film in which Alcatraz was the stage for a kinesthetic discourse about “embodied politics.” Audiences, Dowling observed, were left “feeling moved” about the physical and emotional terms of mass

214 incarceration in America.62 Working with artists in China and the United States, Ai Weiwei designed @Large with similarly affective intentions, layering Alcatraz’s dark tourism spaces with installations addressing the global dimensions of repression, censorship, and the importance of politically engaged art. Writing from Beijing, he expressed hopes “that visitors to @Large will be conscious of artists’ efforts to protect freedom of speech and expression, and that they gain an understanding of the purpose of art, which is the fight for freedom.”63 Almost 900,000 people visited @Large, an increase of 13% attendance overall at Alcatraz. Like The Floating Piers, their experience at @Large included water and walking. Tourists arrive at Alcatraz on private ferries contracted by the NPS, a level of organization that keeps crowds to a manageable level on the small island. Disembarking after the 15-minute ride, many @Large visitors walked to the New Industries Building, where prisoners worked in a laundry (the largest in the Bay Area, as Alcatraz supplied linens for the many military bases located in the region during and after World War II), and in other workshops making clothes, shoes, cargo nets, and furniture for minimal wages (5–17 cents an hour). In the first half of this vast space, Ai designed With Wind: an installation featuring a kite in the form of a dragon — a symbol of imperial authority in China — suspended from the ceiling (Figure 7). Decorating its huge, undulating body with symbols from the flags of 30 totalitarian nations, and with quotes from political activists imprisoned or exiled in these nations, including Nelson Mandela, Vietnamese lawyer L^e Quoc Quan,^ and himself, Ai openly critiqued the symbolic capital of the Chinese state (Figure 8). Writhing and twisting in the prison’s former work spaces, With Wind evoked Alcatraz’s agonizing confinement, the ethical issues of penal labor, and the voices of dissidents demanding rights and release. The eyes of the dragon mimicked the Twitter logo, referencing Ai’s Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017

Figure 7. Ai Wewei. With Wind, detail of @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz. 2014-2015. Mixed media installation. Photograph courtesy Chris Shelton.

215 Figure 8. Ai Wewei, With Wind, detail of @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz. Alcatraz Island, California. 2014–15. Mixed media installation. Photograph courtesy Chris Shelton.

persistent use of social media “to critique the Chinese government and communicate with others despite state restrictions.”64 The second half of the New Industries Building featured two installations: Refraction, an enormous sculpture of a mutant bird made from discarded tea kettles and solar panels, trapped with its wings clipped in the building’s lower gallery (the site of the prison laundry), and Trace (Figure 3), a colorful carpet featuring the faces of political dissidents detained or exiled around the world. A list of 176 people compiled by Amnesty International was turned into large-scale likenesses in Lego: a Warhol-esque design scheme whose sheer familiarity guided audience interaction. Visitors leaned down to see the blurrily pixelated portraits made of 1.2 million Lego bricks, stepping back to more clearly make out their faces, and then looking up their names, the charges made against them, and the countries where they are imprisoned in the interpretive kiosks that were positioned on one side of the room. Visitors could also peer down at Trace’s portraits, and surveil Refraction’s immobilized bird, from an elevated gun galley Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 on one side of the vast room: occupying the space, in other words, where armed guards once monitored Alcatraz’s inmates. Making Lego portraits of political dissidents might seem silly but the popularity of the medium, and how it is normally used by children, lured @Large audiences to rethink casual assumptions about images, craft, confinement, and power. They also troubled norms of entitlement, at the site and in general: @Large volunteers and NPS rangers were kept busy asking visitors to walk around Trace’s portraits, not on them, and asking children not to play with the tiles. Alcatraz itself regularly deals with problems of vandalism, and has posted signs citing the penalties (up to six months imprisonment and a $5000 fine) for

216 “writing graffiti on the wall or inflicting any other damage” to the buildings on the site. These social dynamics played out in Ai’s design for Trace, and the entire installation: gazing down at pictures of prisoners of conscience from around the world, visitors were prompted to think about their own personal freedom and mobility. At the same time, they were reminded of the obligations of behavioral protocol, of the expectations of order and obedience, while inside the site of a former prison. Other parts of @Large occupied other parts of Alcatraz. Twelve cells in the prison’s A Block featured Stay Tuned, a series of spoken words, poems, and songs by people incarcerated for their religious beliefs and political activism. The sound installation included the music of Lolo, sentenced in 2013 to six years in prison for the crime of recording an album calling for Tibetan independence from China; Pussy Riot, a performance group whose female members were sentenced to two years imprisonment for challenging Russian president Vladimir Putin; and the Robben Island Singers, anti-apartheid activists imprisoned for years in South Africa’s most notorious jail. Audiences at Stay Tuned sat on small stools inside each cell and listened to the songs and speeches of these and other political dissidents; lyrics from the recordings were also printed on texts placed on the cell bars. Perhaps the installation’s most beautiful section was Blossom, in the prison’s hospital wing (Figure 9). Continuing his critique of Chinese symbolic capital, like With Wind’s dragon, Ai filled corroded sinks, bathtubs, and toilets used by Alcatraz prisoners with tiny, delicate, and intricately fashioned flowers made out of creamy white porcelain—the ceramic ware collectively called “China” in the West because of its original association with Chinese pottery production. (Figure 10) Accenting beauty amidst the prison’s grungy ruin, Ai intimated the Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017

Figure 9. Ai Weiwei. Blossom, detail of @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz. Alcatraz Island, California. 2014–15. Mixed media installation. Photograph courtesy Chris Shelton.

217 Figure 10. Ai Weiwei. Blossom, detail of @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz. Alcatraz Island, California. 2014–15. Mixed media installation. Photograph courtesy Chris Shelton.

possibilities of resistance and survival under intolerable conditions — not to normalize, universalize, or aestheticize those conditions, among the critiques leveled at @Large, but to engage audiences in the “fight against oppression more visibly.”65 Luring audiences with Blossom’s beautiful flowers, Ai prompted them to reckon with their affective responses, their feelings: like Christo, Ai uses beauty to suggest alternative ways of seeing the world. Ai’s alternative beauty, however, is driven by ideas about socially transformative politics. Blossom was also Ai’s ironic nod to China’s “Hundred Flowers Campaign” (1956), a brief period of liberalization based on Mao’s sentiment “Let a hundred flowers bloom/Let a hundred schools of thought content,” which abruptly ended in the repressive crackdown of the “Great Leap Forward.” Censored and exiled during this crackdown, Ai’s father was forced to clean toilets during his “reeducation” penance, and attempted suicide many times. Audiences at Blossom, installed in a section of Alcatraz that visitors normally never see during NPS tours, were somber, pensive, and absolutely enthralled by Ai’s purposely problematic Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 aesthetic. The audio installation Illumination was set in Alcatraz’s “psychiatric observation cells,” two small tiled chambers where mentally ill prisoners were confined and surveilled. Featuring the voices of Native American singers and Tibetan monks, Illumination addressed repression’s global range, and the global voices of political activists who refuse to be silenced: from the Hopi Indians who were incarcerated at Alcatraz in the 1890s for refusing to follow U.S. government mandates regarding the education of their children and the distribution of their lands, to the Tibetan Buddhists fighting China’s restriction of their religious freedom and cultural sovereignty.

218 Figure 11. Ai Weiwei. Yours Truly, detail of @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz. Alcatraz Island, California. 2014–15. Mixed media installation. Photograph courtesy Chris Shelton.

@Large visitor experiences culminated in Yours Truly, in the prison dining hall. Outfitted with long tables and benches, the installation included large racks of pre-paid postcards, pre-addressed to the 176 prisoners depicted in Lego in Trace (Figure 11). @Large visitors were encouraged to write to them, to let them know they are remembered and admired, on postcards depicting birds and plants from the nations where they are being held (Figure 12). In May 2015, just after @Large closed, NPS rangers related that 90,000 postcards had been mailed to prisoners in more than 20 countries, most of them sent to prisoners in the United States (10.3%), Vietnam (9.1%), and India (9%).66 There was no guarantee that the postcards would be delivered, and no way of knowing how their intended recipients might respond. But by choosing to reach Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017

Figure 12. Ai Weiwei. Yours Truly, detail of @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz. Alcatraz Island, California. 2014–15. Mixed media installation. Photograph courtesy Chris Shelton.

219 out to incarcerated others, beyond the norm of a temporary public art exhibit and prison tour, @Large’s audiences articulated, and acted on, their personal interests in alternative social and political ways of being. They were motivated by feelings of empathy, grief, and anger. Challenging the uncritical terms of “penal spectatorship” by repeatedly contrasting confinement with freedom, censorship with creativity, and conformity with resistance, Ai roused @Large’s audiences to mobilize their public feelings about this site-specific project in terms of personal action.

CONCLUSION

As these case studies relate, factors of site, history, media, patronage, and artistic intentionality play major roles in shaping and developing contemporary public art projects. Both @Large and The Floating Piers engaged specific sites to dramatize concepts of freedom and mobility: Christo transforming a beautiful Italian lake and the private island of an arms dealer into the “gift” of walking on water; Ai transforming the interior of a bleak U.S. prison into an interactive aesthetic meditation on global incarceration, human rights violations, and political possibilities. Both artists challenge the physical and symbolic authority of borders and barriers; as Ai remarks, “What’s important to remember is that while barriers have been used to divide us, as humans we are all the same. Some are more privileged than others, but with that privilege comes a responsibility to do more.”67 Designed as spatial disruptions and artistic interventions in particular sites, both projects centered on making broad connections: between villages and communities, between buildings, between audiences. Likewise, both Christo and Ai evinced a sense of urgency in these temporary projects, albeit on different terms stemming from their different understandings of public art’s affective contexts, and their relationship to public feeling. Driven by libertarian ideas about creative independence and control, and defining his public art practice as gift-giving, Christo is most interested in Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 mobilizing public feelings of awe and gratitude. Orchestrating temporary works of art for “free” and engaging sweeping assumptions about freedom, beauty, and personal choice, Christo’s experiential public art projects are intended to emancipate their audiences from everyday expectations and norms and evoke responses of “love and tenderness.” Their utopian possibilities are complicated, however, by social and political dynamics that work against the public feelings Christo and Jeanne-Claude imagined. Indeed, The Floating Piers was most probably Christo’s last public art project: in 2017, he announced that he would no longer pursue Over the River, a temporary project designed for federally owned lands in Colorado, because of his opposition to the election of U.S. president

220 Donald Trump. “I use my own money and my own work and my own plans because I like to be totally free,” Christo told reporters. “And here now, the federal government is our landlord. They own the land. I can’t do a project that benefits this landlord.”68 Ai’s disaffection with the state is similar, but less for reasons of self- determination than for those of government corruption, indifference, and authoritarianism. @Large and other public art projects are shaped by his “provisional artistic formulation” of a transformative collective politics; his mobilization of public feelings of grief, mourning, sorrow, and anger is focused on raising consciousness, and inciting action, about government censorship and oppression around the world. As Ai noted in his “Artist’s Statement” for the @Large catalogue: “This exhibition could not come at a better time — though, when one is fighting for freedom, any time is the right time. Freedom is meant to be collectively protected and shared; you are protecting not only yourself but also others fighting for the same cause.”69 The Floating Piers and @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz were both determined by their social dynamics, by audience interaction with the site and symbolic specifics of each temporary public art project, and by the somatic and emotional responses — the public feelings — that each prompted and produced. As this essay argues, public response — from feeling overwhelmed to feeling responsible — is a critical component in public art’s social network. Further analysis of the strategies of emotional engagement that public artists employ, and the discursive terms of public feeling they engage, can provide expanded insights about their projects and the nature of public art.

NOTES 1 Charles Green notes that the term “temporary work of art” is Christo’s preferred label for his public art projects; see Charles Green, The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 221, n.1. Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 2 Artsy Editorial, “The Most Influential Living Artists of 2016,” Artsy.net, https://www.artsy.net/ article/artsy-editorial-the-most-influential-living-artists-of-2016 (accessed 3 May 2017). 3 On affect and public culture see, for example, Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 15, 59–60. 4 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 193. 5 On the nature of their artistic collaboration see Green, Third Hand, 125–37. 6 See the discussion of The Mastaba, Project for the United Arab Emirates on the website Christo and Jeanne-Claude. http://christojeanneclaude.net/projects/the-mastaba?viewDinfo (accessed 3 May 2017). 7 See, for example, Cathy Newman, “Christo and Jeanne-Claude Unwrapped,” National Geographic, Nov. 2006, http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0611/voices.html (accessed 13 Apr. 2017).

221 8 Burt Chernow, Christo and Jeanne-Claude: An Authorized Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 112; see also Megan E. Cekander, “Beyond Fabric: The Early Barrel Works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 1958–1962,” (MA thesis, University of Oregon, 2014), 45–47. 9 Tom McDonough, “The Beautiful Language of My Century”: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945–1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 96–97. 10 The website for Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s now abandoned public art project Over the River explained, for example, that it would “enhance Colorado’s growing prominence in the art world and provide a gift that all Coloradans can enjoy.” See “About OTR,” 2016, http://www.overtheriverinfo. com/index.php/about-over-the-river/ (accessed 13 May 2017). 11 Christo quoted in “Wrapping Up Germany: Interview with Sylvere Lotringer (1982),” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, eds. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 556. 12 Green, Third Hand, 134. 13 Christo quoted in Nicholas Baume, “Christo,” Art and Australia 27.1 (Spring 1989): 91, and in Christopher Lord, “Christo: I Will Not Do Any Piece of Art That Has a Purpose,” The National,16 Nov. 2011, http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/art/christo-i-will-not-do-any-piece-of-art-that- has-a-purpose (accessed 12 May 2017). 14 See the “FAQ” (Frequently Asked Questions) section of their website at: http://christojeanne claude.net/faq. In 2015, Christo artworks for sale at the Craig F. Starr Gallery in New York ranged from $7 million for Purple Store Front (1964) to $400,000 for various collages. In May 2016, a Christo collage of The Gates sold for $322,000 at Sotheby’s. 15 Felda Hardymon, Josh Lerner and Ann Leamon, Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Art of the Entrepreneur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School, 2006), 4–5; see also Patricia C. Phillips, “Christo: Independence is the Most Important to Me, The Work of Art is a Scream for Freedom,” Flash Art 151 (1990): 135, and Green, Third Hand, 131. 16 Christo quoted in Emily Nathan, “artnet Asks: Environmental Artist Christo,” artnet.news, 29 Oct. 2015, https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/artnet-asks-christo-350807 (accessed 16 Aug. 2016). 17 Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,” Artforum (Oct. 1966): 20–23. 18 I use the word “seemingly” reservedly, since Tilted Arc was removed and effectively destroyed in Mar. 1989, and the Dia Art Foundation in New York claims that it is the “owner and custodian of Spiral Jetty.” See “Dia: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty” at: http://www.diaart.org/visit/visit/robert- smithson-spiral-jetty (accessed 16 Aug. 2016). 19 Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October 80 (Spring 1997): 92. 20 Christo made this comment in 1994, as noted in Manfred J. Enssle and Bradley J. Macdonald, “The Wrapped Reichstag, 1995: Art, Dialogic Communities and Everyday Life,” Theory & Event 1.4 (1997), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/32480 (accessed 18 Aug. 2016). 21 Sandra Shapshay, “The Problem and Promise of the Sublime: Lessons from Kant and Schopenhauer,” in Suffering Art Gladly: The Paradox of Negative Emotion in Art, ed. Jerold

Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 Levinson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 96, 99. 22 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990). 23 Christo quoted in Nicola Scevola, “Interviews: Christo, The Floating Piers,” Klat, 10 June 2016, http://www.klatmagazine.com/en/art-en/christo/51606 (accessed 18 Aug. 2016). 24 “Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg Announces Agreement with Artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude for ‘The Gates’ in Central Park,” News from the Blue Room, 22 Jan. 2003, http://www.nyc.gov/ portal/site/nycgov/menuitem.b270a4a1d51bb3017bce0ed101c789a0/index.jsp?pageIDDnyc_blue_ room&catIDD1194&doc_nameDhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.nyc.gov%2Fhtml%2Fom%2Fhtml% 2F2003a%2Fpr023-03.html&ccDunused1978&rcD1194&ndiD1 (accessed 16 Aug. 2016). 25 Doss, Memorial Mania, 185. 26 New York Deputy Mayor Patricia E. Harris quoted in Carol Vogel, “Epic Visions, Still Under Construction,” New York Times, 25 Oct. 2015: AR-1.

222 27 Christo and Jeanne-Claude, “Christo and Jeanne-Claude in Their Own Words,” The Gates, Central Park, New York City, 1979–2005 (2005), https://christojeanneclaude.net/__data/thegate s_kit.pdf (accessed 13 May 2017). 28 Patricia C. Phillips, “Temporality and Public Art,” Art Journal 48.4 (Winter 1989): 335. 29 Riccarda Mandrini, “Christo and Jeanne Claude. The Floating Piers, Lake Iseo. Patron, Umberta Beretta, talks about the project with Christo,” ArtMarket-BlogMag, 5 Jun. 2016, http://www. artmarket-blogmag.com/christo-e-jeanne-claude-the-floating-piers-sul-lago-diseo-la-patron-umberta- beretta-ne-parla-con-christo/?langDen (accessed 20 Aug. 2016); Manuela Mesco, “Christo Walks on Water with New Italian Installation,” Wall Street Journal, 18 June 2016, http://www.wsj.com/ articles/christo-walks-on-water-with-new-italian-installation-1466183630 (accessed 20 Aug. 2016). 30 Josh Harkinson, “Fully Loaded: Inside the Shadowy World of America’s 10 Biggest Gunmakers,” Mother Jones, May–Jun. 2016, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/04/fully-loaded-ten- biggest-gun-manufacturers-america (accessed 13 May 2017). 31 Franco Beretta quoted in Karen Alberg Grossman, “Franco Beretta Gives Us a Peek into His 15th- Generation Family Business,” Mr: The Menswear Industry’s Magazine, 17 May 2016, http://www. mr-mag.com/franco-beretta-peek-into-15th-generation-family-business/ (accessed 16 Aug. 2016); Beretta Facebook posting noted in Mike Watson, “Shooting Down the Purely Aesthetic Aspirations of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Piers,” Hyperallergic, 30 June 2016, http://hyperallergic.com/ 308522/shooting-down-the-purely-aesthetic-aspirations-of-christo-and-jeanne-claudes-piers/ (accessed 13 May 2017). 32 For production details see Margaret Rhodes, “How Christo Built His Latest Work: Two Miles of Floating Walkway,” Wired, 22 June 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/06/heres-christo-built- huge-17m-floating-pathway/ (accessed 20 Aug. 2016); and “Walking on Water with Orange-Covered Polyethylene,” ICIS News, 17 Jun. 2016, http://www.icis.com/resources/news/2016/06/17/ 10009059/walking-on-water-with-orange-covered-polyethylene/ (accessed 20 Aug. 2016). 33 Elisabetta Povoledo, “Christo’s Newest Project: Walking on Water,” New York Times, 18 Jun. 2016: C1. 34 Christo quoted in “Artist Christo’s Huge Popular Floating Walkway in Italy Closes After 1.2 m Visit,” ABC News, 3 Jul. 2016, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-04/christo’s-orange-floating- walkway-closes-after-1.2m-visits/7566266 (accessed 16 Aug. 2016). 35 Christo quoted in Jeff MacGregor, “The Inside Story of Christo’s Floating Piers,” Smithsonian. com, June 2016, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/inside-story-christo-floating-piers- 180959072/ (accessed 16 Aug. 2016). 36 Christo quoted in Nathan, “artnet Asks.” 37 Elisabetta Povoledo, “Christo’s ‘Floating Piers’ to Close at Night for Repairs,” New York Times,23 Jun. 2016: C3. 38 “Refugees & Migrants Sea Arrivals in Europe,” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Monthly Data Update, Jun. 2016, http://data.unhcr.org/mediterranean/regional.php (accessed 13 May 2017). 39 Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 Carlo Massimo, “Unwelcome: Why is Cosmopolitan Italy So Anti-Immigrant?” Wilson Quarterly, 22 Sep. 2015, http://wilsonquarterly.com/stories/unwelcome-why-is-cosmopolitan-italy-so-anti- immigrant/ (accessed 17 Aug. 2016). 40 These figures were released by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; see Euan McKirdy, “UNHCR Report: More Displaced Now than After WW II,” CNN World, 20 June 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/20/world/unhcr-displaced-peoples-report/ (accessed 13 May 2017). 41 Tina Loo and Carolyn Strange, “‘Rock Prison of Liberation’: Alcatraz Island and the American Imagination,” Radical History Review 78 (Fall 2000): 27. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered the prison closed on 21 Mar. 1963. 42 Ai Weiwei, “Ai Weiwei: How Censorship Works,” New York Times, 7 May 2017: SR12. 43 Cynthia Duquette Smith and Teresa Bergman, “You Were on Indian Land: Alcatraz Island as Recalcitrant Memory Space,” in Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and

223 Memorials, eds. Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair and Brian L. Ott (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 160–88. 44 See, for example, John J. Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Continuum, 2000), and Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone, The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism (Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2009). 45 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, rev. ed. (New York: The New Press, 2012), 6; Erik Sherman, “How American Prisons Became a Bizarre Tourist Mecca,” Fortune, 17 August 2016, http://fortune.com/2016/08/17/prison-tourism-muse ums/ (accessed 21 Aug. 2016). 46 Doss, Memorial Mania,93–95. 47 Loo and Strange, “‘Rock Prison of Liberation,’” 31; Caille Milner, “Ai Weiwei Exhibit is More than a ‘Big’ Event,” San Francisco Chronicle, 27 Sep. 2014, http://www.sfgate.com/art/article/Ai-Wei wei-exhibition-is-more-than-a-big-event-5781724.php (accessed 22 Aug. 2016). 48 Michelle Brown, The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society, and Spectacle (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 85; see also Michael Welch, Escape to Prison: Penal Tourism and the Pull of Punishment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 259–60. 49 Michelle Brown, “Penal Spectatorship and the Culture of Punishment,” in Why Prison?, ed. David Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 108. 50 Maya Kovskaya, “Ai Weiwei @Large on Alcatraz,” in @Large: Ai Weiwei On Alcatraz, ed. David Spalding (San Francisco: Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, 2014), 23; for discussion of Ai’s career and art, see Deborah E. Horowitz, ed., Ai Weiwei: According to What? (Munich: Prestel, 2012). 51 Evan Osnos quoted in the documentary film Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, dir. Alison Klayman (2012; Orlando Park, IL: MPI Media Group). 52 Christian Sorace, “China’s Last Communist: Ai Weiwei,” Critical Inquiry 40 (Winter 2014): 396–419; see also William A. Callahan, “Citizen Ai: Warrior, Jester, and Middleman,” The Journal of Asian Studies 73.4 (Nov. 2014): 899–920. 53 Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006–2009, ed. and trans. by Lee Ambrozy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 242, 181–182. 54 Ai Weiwei quoted in Flora Zhang, “China’s Olympic Crossroads: Bird’s Nest Designer Ai Weiwei on Beijing’s ‘Pretend Smile’,” New York Times, 4 Aug. 2008, http://beijing2008.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2008/08/04/chinas-olympic-crossroads-birds-nest-designer-ai-weiwei-on-beijings-pretend-smile/ ?_rD0 (accessed 22 Aug. 2016); see also Ai Weiwei, “Why I’ll Stay Away from the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics,” Guardian, 7 August 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/ aug/07/olympics2008.china (accessed 22 Aug. 2016). 55 Ai Weiwei quoted in David Crouch, “Ai Weiwei Shuts Danish Show in Protest at Asylum-seeker Law,” Guardian, 27 Jan. 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jan/27/ai-wei wei-shuts-danish-show-in-protest-at-asylum-seeker-law (accessed 22 Aug. 2016). 56 Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 Ai Weiwei quoted in Robert Mitchell, “Berlinale: Ai Weiwei Teams with Participant Media and AC Films on Refugee Documentary,” Variety, 10 Feb. 2017, http://variety.com/2017/film/news/ berlinale-ai-weiwei-teams-with-participant-media-and-ac-films-for-refugee-documentary-1201984200/ (accessed 13 May 2017). 57 See, for example, Niru Ratnam, “Ai Weiwei’s Aylan Kurdi Image is Crude, Thoughtless and Egotis- tical,” Spectator, 1 Feb. 2016, https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/ai-weiweis-aylan-kurdi-image- is-crude-thoughtless-and-egotistical/# (accessed 12 May 2017). 58 See Maurice Stierl’s discussion of “grief-activism” and the refugee crisis in Europe, “Contestations in Death: The Role of Grief in Migration Struggles,” Citizenship Studies 20.2 (2016): 173–91. 59 See their website http://www.for-site.org/ (accessed 13 May 2017). In addition to @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, FOR-SITE has sponsored projects by Mark Dion, Chris Drury, Andy Goldsworthy, Cornelia Parker, and other contemporary public artists.

224 60 Erika Doss, “Commemorating Disaster and Disobedience: National Park Service Initiatives in the 21st Century,” Social Science Quarterly 97.1 (March 2016): 105–14. 61 Rebecca Solnit, “Connecting with The Rock,” Artweek, 22 Oct. 1988: 23. 62 Amie Dowling quoted in interview with Isabel Ochoa-Gold, “Well Contested Sites: Amie Dowling on Choreographing Ex-Prisoners Inside Alcatraz,” Link TV, 20 Oct. 2015, https://www.linktv.org/ shows/bodies-in-motion/well-contested-sites-amie-dowling-on-choreographing-ex-prisoners-inside (accessed 12 Aug. 2016). 63 Ai Weiwei, “Artist’s Statement,” in @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, 15. 64 Mary Thomas, “Beyond Bars and Broken Wings: A Review of @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz,” American Quarterly 68.1 (March 2016): 139. 65 Ai Weiwei, “Artist’s Statement,” in @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, 13. 66 “@Large: Attendance, Accolades, and Impact,” FOR-SITE Foundation, 12 Jun. 2015, http:// www.for-site.org/projects-notes/large-attendance-accolades-and-impact/ (accessed 17 Aug. 2016). 67 Ai Weiwei quoted in “Ai Weiwei: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” Public Art Fund, Mar. 2017, https://www.publicartfund.org/view/exhibitions/6185_ai_weiwei_good_fences_make_ good_neighbors (accessed 14 May 2017). 68 Randy Kennedy, “Draped in Protest Against Trump,” New York Times, 26 Jan. 2017: C1. 69 Sorace, “China’s Last Communist,” 419; Ai Weiwei, “Artist’s Statement,” 15.

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Erika Doss (PhD, University of Minnesota) is a professor in the Department of American Studies at

Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 07:58 09 November 2017 the University of Notre Dame. Her wide-ranging interests in American art and visual culture are reflected in the breadth of her publications, including Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (1991, which received the Charles C. Eldredge Prize); Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American Communities (1995); Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image (1999); Looking at Life Magazine (editor, 2001); Twentieth-Century American Art (2002); The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials: Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials (2008); Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (2010); and American Art of the 20th–21st Centuries (2017). The recipient of several Fulbright awards, Doss has also held fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

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