AI WEIWEI

 WEEK 1 : D. LEFÈVRE

Ai Weiwei is a chinese artist, architect, scupltor and photographer. He works a lot with new technologies : for example, he takes pictures with his Iphone and send it on his blog. 

Through his works, he denounces the chinese government and the contradictions between technical evolutions of his country and the archaism of the social system. 

In a series of photos that I see this year at Jeu De Paume in Paris, he photographs his middle finger raised in front of famous monuments. He calls those photos "Study of Perspective", playing with the idea of a serious experimentation which is counterbalanced by the provocative content of the photos (monuments which are symbols of a nation and representing official art and patrimony).
Recently, he was put in jail (april 2011) for his works. He's also regularly and violently arrested by the chinese police.
I read an article in Le Nouvel Observateur today, which explain that Ai Weiwei had to pay a big fine for fiscal evasion. But the artist contest this decision : Ai Weiwei considers it as a measure of repression against his activism. The authorities also confiscates his passport, compromising Ai Wei Wei's travels to Washington, NY and Berlin to present his works. (204)

Dario ROBLETO Artist or DJ?

WEEK 1:Mia GIRARD-PATROUILLEAU
Dario ROBLETO Artist

Dario Robleto's work uses the connections between the material onto which music has been recorded and the music.  He is his own sort of DJ, making the connections between physicality and music.  He transforms records, cassette tapes into visual histories of music and American history by grinding them down, melting them etc.  In this video, he focuses on the history of dance in the US to folk-medicine tradition from Shaker culture to contemporary club culture. He considers himself a "materialist poet"; the language of poetry is essential to his work and the narrative behind the work.  His works are highly studied and often philosophical in nature.  He "finds a new universe" in objects by manipulating their materiality much like a DJ finds a new nature in music by manipulating sound and mixing different tracks. (134)