La más reciente comisión de Unilever para el Turbine Hall en el museo Tate Modern en Londres es la instalación "Sunflower Seeds" del artista chin Ai Weiwei. La instalación levanta tanto polvo de la cerámica que, por razones de salud y por posiblemente afectar a los pulmones, se ha limitado el acceso al público. Ahora, en vez de poder caminar, tocar y recostarse sobre la instalación, se debe observar a la distancia. La crítica Roberta Smith escribe sobre las consideraciones que un museo debe tomar al presentar este tipo de trabajo y comparte su opinión sobre el dilema actual:
At Tate Modern, seeds of discontent by the ton
LONDON — Last Wednesday I had a close encounter with “Sunflower Seeds,” the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s oceanic new installation piece in the cavernous Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern here. The work consists of roughly 100 million hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds covering a vast expanse of floor to the depth of about four inches, and visitors were invited to wade right in. The black-and-white seeds crunched delightfully underfoot, and the whole thing resembled an indoor pebble beach, with people strolling about and then plunking down to sit or recline. One young man had buried himself.
As it turned out, my timing was lucky. By the next day “Sunflower Seeds” — the ninth in the Tate’s annual series of large-scale installations known as the Unilever commissions — had become the third to run into significant safety problems. In consultation with the artist, the Tate decided that people would no longer be allowed to enter the work, saying that the dust they stir up posed a health hazard. Now it can be viewed only from behind ropes or from the bridge that spans the Turbine Hall one floor up.
I could say I told them so, except I didn’t. I merely commented to my husband, as we looked down from the bridge a few days earlier, that the piece looked like an upper-respiratory disaster waiting to happen. It had not yet opened to the public, and was empty — except for one person off in the distance who was raking the seeds and wearing a surgical mask. That was a big clue.
My inkling was confirmed during my Wednesday visit, as I watched kids dashing through the seeds, followed by little clouds of dust, like Pigpen from “Peanuts.” And as other visitors settled into or sifted through Mr. Ai’s creation, we soon noticed our hands turning gray, as if we’d been reading a newspaper for hours.
What is the dust? The seeds, cast in porcelain, are painted with black slip — essentially liquid clay — and fired. (Some 1,600 residents of a village that once provided porcelain to the imperial court produced them over the course of several years, as documented in a video that accompanies the piece.) This process yields a matte finish that looks exactly like that of real sunflower seeds, but slip lacks glaze’s imperviousness to wear and tear.
The use of slip without glaze is highly unusual on porcelain, although typical on stoneware, with which it bonds more completely. But “stoneware” lacks the cultural resonance of “porcelain,” which refers to a form the Chinese invented, and using glaze would have made the seeds less seedlike and probably very slippery, creating a different problem for the public. All this suggests that Mr. Ai and the Tate must have known that his piece was something of a gamble from the start; so far, it appears that they took it and lost.
Holding the seeds in my hand, I found one already worn white by the friction of all the rubbing together and wondered if the entire expanse of them would have lost their markings by the end of the exhibition. Now we’ll never know, and a lot of lungs are probably the better for it.
As the perils of participatory art go, at least at the Tate, this latest example is probably the most profound. The problems in the other pieces were more easily avoided by visitors: In 2006 Carsten Höller’s enormous spiral slides reportedly caused a few injuries, and a year later three people got too close to Doris Salcedo’s “Shibboleth” — an extended, widening crack in the floor — and fell in.
Perhaps the Tate will finally learn its lesson about due diligence. For now, it is consulting with the artist about widening a pathway that runs along the long side the piece to allow more viewers to get close. It is also having what it calls the “ceramic dust” tested for its level of danger, in hopes that direct access can be restored to some extent.
Meanwhile, experientially, “Sunflower Seeds” has been severely curtailed, stripped, really, of the most appealing qualities of the work: not just the crackle produced by moving through the seeds, but also the way they slow your progress. Their quite un-sunflowery weight in your hand. The slightly overwhelming sense that each one is unique, like a fingerprint or a grain of sand, thanks to the three or four strokes of hand-painted black on both sides. None of this can really be experienced at a remove. All that remains is the vast grayness, stretching into the distance like a congealed sea, and of course the idea: the quantity, the labor, the care.
Before my Wednesday afternoon visit, I had watched a video segment on the Tate’s Web site, tate.org.uk, in which a curator cautioned people not to take the seeds. Until then, I had assumed that pocketing a few would be part of the experience, as with Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s piles of brightly wrapped candy.
And maybe now it should be — perhaps Mr. Ai and the museum should reconsider the prohibition, and hand out (or sell) little packets of the seeds. That way people could have some immediate contact and get a better idea of what moving across their gray terrain might be like, without putting their health at risk.
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