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This is the third post in a series of podcasts produced about The Warhol’s exhibition Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei.

These podcasts were produced by The Andy Warhol Museum in collaboration with the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh to coincide with Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei, a major international exhibition featuring two significant artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Interviews with professors, researchers, artists, and museum staff were conducted by high school students at the Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts School (CAPA) to help provide historical and cultural context for the exhibition. CAPA students Will Dowd and Anthony Quesen both edited and produced the final podcasts.

In this podcast Eric Shiner, former director of The Andy Warhol Museum, discusses the inception of the exhibition Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei and focuses on how both artists transformed the understanding of artistic value and studio production.

Audio transcript

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Host: Hello, and welcome to Capitalism/Communism: A Way of Life, the podcast that brings you inside information on the Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei exhibition.

Announcer: These podcasts were produced by The Andy Warhol Museum in collaboration with the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh, to coincide with the Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei, a major international exhibition featuring two significant artists from the 20th and 21st centuries. Interviews with professors, researchers, artists and museum staff were conducted by high school students at the Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts School to help provide historical and cultural context for the exhibition.

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Host: In this podcast Eric Shiner discusses the inception of the exhibition Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei, and focuses on how both artists transform the understanding of artistic value and studio production.

Eric Shiner: I’m Eric Shiner, and I’m the director of The Andy Warhol Museum.

Perhaps more so than any other artists of our lifetimes Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei were first and foremost provocateurs. Warhol of course changed everything in terms of what an artwork could be, what an artwork might be. He had the audacious plan of elevating a simple can of Campbell’s Soup onto the pedestal of fine art, and in so doing sent a shockwave through the art world unlike any that has ever happened before. He thus opened the door, as did Duchamp certainly, Marcel Duchamp beforehand, to say that by the artist simply deeming something to be a work of art that was enough of a concept to make it so.

Of course Warhol continues on in his quest of making the everyday into a higher art form, through not only commercial but certainly celebrities, later his jet set inner circle, things that might not otherwise have been considered art but today stand as some of the prime examples of art. Ai Weiwei of course takes his provocation in a very different direction and it tends to be political in its focus. Social justice is definitely his first and main priority. He in so many ways is the watchdog of the art world, and pays very particular attention to not only what the Chinese government is doing in terms of human rights abuses, et cetera, but more importantly governments, institutions around the world. And in such a way he is in many ways become the moral compass of the contemporary art world in a time when morality does not necessarily play into the art market, art sales, art galleries, et cetera, et cetera.

So when you look at how these two artists changed the very fabric of the worlds in which they lived, you see that through their actions, through their imagery, through their words, through their writing, they really enacted a full frontal assault on their age and their time, and the worlds that have resulted are quite different than where they began.

Ai Weiwei of course is also incredibly provocative and has taken very strong political stances on social justice topics that make him a hero to many but also allow him to be scorned by certain segments of the world that one might not otherwise expect criticism coming from. For example, recently in Germany he was asked to do an artwork for the Berlin Film Festival, and then decided to wrap the columns of the hall in which the festival was being held with life jackets that refugees had worn crossing from Syria on their way to Greece and then on into the mainland of Europe and beyond. He also put a boat on the porch and then wrapped celebrities in foil blankets: gold on one side, silver on the other, very like the refugees are given as they enter Europe, and he had the audacious idea of wrapping the celebrities in them for their step and repeat red carpet photographs.

This of course got the world talking about the refugee crisis, but it also allowed Ai Weiwei to be quite scorned by not only the press in Germany but maybe even more so by the art world. We thought that he had gone too far, also that he had gone too far in posing himself as the three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned while crossing. Ai Weiwei was asked by another photographer to take the position of that little dead boy and had his photograph taken on the beach. And again this created a huge amount of scorn by the art establishment, people saying again that Weiwei had gone too far. But we have to put this into the context of Andy Warhol and realize that in his own lifetime Warhol was scorned again and again and again for going too far, for doing too much, for being too strange, but it certainly worked in the end making us come to terms with the realities of our world, and that is exactly what Ai Weiwei does to us today.

When we think about social media, it is a part of our everyday life. We are constantly Facebooking our friends, sharing every last iota of information about ourselves with our peer group, whether it’s through Instagram, Twitter, et cetera, et cetera. Ai Weiwei is no stranger to this world of social media—in fact he uses it as a vehicle to a curator, an artist, someone that he runs to on the street, self portraits, showing where he is in the world at any given time. He’s putting dozens if not hundreds of images out into the world each and every day, thus creating a visual diary of his life and his practice. Warhol in his own way was a diarist and constantly documented his world, whether through audio tape, through video tape, through photography, he was always thinking about how to record the goings-on of his daily life. It is a compulsion that both artists thus share, and simply is really become a little bit different because of the technologies that were available to each artists in his own lifetime, but the mass dissemination of ideas, of political stances, and of aesthetics is something that both artists utilized on a daily basis.

Not only was Andy Warhol’s famous Silver Factory a site of art production but so too was it an incredibly important social space in New York City in the mid-1960s. It hosted parties and welcomed the likes of every underground celebrity the world ever knew of that time, whether it be Bob Dylan, Baby Jane Holzer, you name it, these people strove to meet Andy Warhol in the Factory. When you think about the site of art production and what that means to an artist’s career and even to their artwork, you have to think about the environments within which artwork is made. Warhol very specifically made his Factory look industrial, and thus promoted the idea of the assembly line production methodology and the idea of making the same object or similar objects again and again and again.

When you look at Ai Weiwei’s studio called FAKE. It is also a site of vast production, but so too is it a site of social engineering in ways in that people would come to the studio from all over the world. Each time I’ve been there there have been artists from Holland, curators from as far as Mexico City, places from all over the world. It’s a convergence place, a site where people travel from near and far to meet Ai Weiwei, to discuss exhibition ideas, to interview him, and it really is a constant in and out flow of the most interesting art people from all corners of the world. So in its own way it too has become a social sphere, just as it’s also a site of vast artistic production.

Host: Join us for scene four of this podcast, where we interview assistant curator of The Andy Warhol Museum Jessica Beck.

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