Change you can see: "With Milk, Find Something Everybody Can Use"
Gutierrez + Portefaix,
"Once you have put Ripolin on your walls you will be master of yourself. And you will want
to be precise, to be accurate, to think clearly".
Le Corbusier, A Coat of Whitewash, The Law of Ripolin, 1925, L'Esprit Nouveau Articles,
Architectural Press, Oxford, 1998.
In 1925, architect Le Corbusier published an article in his journal L’Esprit Nouveau, The
law of Ripolin - A Coat of Whitewash1, where he specifically referred to a principle of
applying a white coating, as a “moral act”. Therefore, he proposed to cover every surface
with the new layer of white paint that would bring – according to the architect - sincerity,
equilibrium, truthfulness, harmony and happiness. This strategy of replacement was part of
the modernist approach of the “Tabula Rasa” and included in the logic of the erasure to
start a new project on a new base.
In 1920, artist Marcel Duchamp and photographer Man Ray made another proposition to
embrace modernity. In the photography titled Dust Breeding, Man Ray was focusing on the
dust accumulated on the top of Duchamp’s Large Glass2, changed the perspective of the
art work by imposing another layer while keeping untouched the original one. This new
perspective adopted on the spot by Marcel Duchamp perfectly corresponds to the logic of
détournement3 or substitution as a nature of change.
In 2009, artist/architect Ai Weiwei’s project With Milk, Find Something Everybody Can Use
for the Mies van der Rohe pavilion can be analyzed as in continuity with both Le
Corbusier’s proposal as well as the duo Duchamp and Ray, with a similar intention of
changing the rules. On the first place, Ai Weiwei started to refer clearly to art production as
“a moral act”. This statement could easily find an echo in his ongoing engagement towards
an art implication as part of a social justice. Then, “with milk…” is also in line with a series
1
Le Corbusier, A Coat of Whitewash, The Law of Ripolin, 1925, L'Esprit Nouveau Articles,
Architectural Press, Oxford, 1998.
2
The Large Glass is one of Marcel Duchamp masterpiece elaborate between 1915 to 1923.
3
Détournement is a tactic developed by the International Situationist group (1957-1972).
of artwork the artist has already produced around the idea of détournement – a principle of
changing the meaning of an original media - in order to change the perspective on how we
see and cope with our environment.
Logic of Change and Strategies of Replacement
“My intervention explores the metabolism of a living machine (...). In fact, the building is
not static: the content of the two pools is replaced all the time, unnoticed to visitors […] Up
keeping the condition of milk and coffee is the same as preserving a body, a demanding
effort against light, air, warmth... In total, the two pools will be filled with 65 tons of milk and
15 tons of coffee, which will be kept in the open air.”
The artist statement by Ai Weiwei for his recent intervention at the Barcelona Pavilion is
deliberately not specific. At the contrary, while being asked the reason for filling up the two
existing pools of the Pavilion - he replaced the water of the two pools, one exterior and the
other interior, with milk and coffee, respectively – the artist replied by referring to an
instrument that will reveal changes.
Change, or even the possibility of change, are at the center of Ai Weiwei’s production both
artistic and architectural. In this context one cannot ignore that the artist also work as an
architect, curator, cultural and social commentator and activist. If he never officially studied
architecture - nor art in an academic sense, he has been officially recognized among the
most inspiring architect of the last decade in China. Along various small architectural
project, he has developed his own language that can resemble from some aspects to
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s project for the Court-House Studies (1934-35). The main
concept was to design a settlement of economical houses with individual gardens and
courts on small plots. This strategy was applied in the district of Caochangdi where he built
a compound of houses and artists’ studio and opened his studio FAKE. As uniformly
regular each sites permitted, the small buildings are varying in size, number of rooms and
distance from the street. In both cases, the peculiar way of using the brick for the building
enclosure, is allowing the user to play freely with whatever can happen inside, allowing
change to exist.
To change the perspective of the original architecture has been a constant obsession in
Weiwei’s work. In the Study of Perspective series, the logic is to replace the local
architectural symbol by an even more symbolic figure – the middle finger pointed at the
building or scene. Pointing at Tiananmen Square, Hong Kong‘s skyline, San Marco, the
Eiffel tower or The White House, his middle finger’s gesture becomes a symbolic evidence
of a personal attitude towards the official powers (politics, capitalism, technology, religion).
“By studying a simple decision we can get mixed results. With Whitewash (1993-2000) I
painted a group of Neolithic pieces with industrial paint so that the original texture was
covered up by a meaningless color. To see the change is significant to me. At the same
time even though it becomes suddenly hard to judge, the value of the original pieces
remain but under the white paint.” (Ai Weiwei, Changing Perspective, Ai Weiwei with
Charles Merewether, Ai Weiwei, Beijing, Timezone 8, 2003, p.32)
Then, the most obvious statement is embedded in the sense the artist Ai Weiwei wants to
change the perspective of the iconic monument of the modern movement by replacing the
water with a white and black coating?
While the original characteristic of the pavilion remains in the opposition and dialogue
between Sculpture and Architecture (structure) designed by Mies van der Rohe, Ai Weiwei
begun to turn this opposition by the central opposition between solid and liquid. All, we see
visiting the pavilion is a solid structure that articulates various fluid sequences between the
interior and the exterior entrance and patio. In fact, the visitor pays very little attention to
the presence of the two pools that occupy almost a third of the entire surface of the
pavilion. They serve as a horizontal counterpart to the imposing materiality of the marble
walls, continuing them through the reflection in the water. Both pools can be interpreted as
the mirror image of the architecture. They serve to reflect both the movement of the
visitors and the very static Georg Kolbe’ sculpture titled Morning. Is the coffee a direct
reference to this beautiful gesture of a stretching body? Good morning, wake up, this is the
beginning of a brand new day! If yes, the change could be then understood as a
rectification of the original intention by the modernist architect with his plan to place the
other sculpture of Kolbe - Night into the outdoor pool. Intentionally or not the link of the
Morning with coffee and milk with Night, establish a clear understanding of architecture as
part of the solid and sculpture as for the liquid.
Change, is understood as a logic of reestablishing a possible original.
In this proposal Weiwei goes beyond the Ready Made, by proposing a Ready There,
focusing more on the time and context of the artwork than its own materiality being
displaced.
“With Milk…”, Ai Weiwei infiltrates time, and a certain point restores the temporary
condition of the Mies van der Rohe pavilion. To intervene in the monument questions its
weight as a key reference not only of Mies van der Rohe’s work but also of 20 th century
architecture. Replacement as a strategy of intervention is a recent process used by the
artist. When something is replaced (a surface, a ground), a condition is revealed that was
previously ignored by the viewer. When water is replaced by milk and coffee, the new
liquid reveals another experience – not only visual but also sensorial with its smell and
potential taste. The neutrality of water as the most generic material, and sometimes free
depending of the weather, goes along with certain inertia of the pavilion. The two pools are
now at the center of the plan. The liquid surface lost its reflective power to absorb the
surrounding architecture.
“With Milk…” echoes the “Soft Ground” installed in the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Placing
on top of the cold stone tiles a comfortable rug, imitating the original color tone and pattern
of the stone, he created a disruption in the linear history of the building. The new layer of
surface is also soundproof; therefore history becomes a written element to be read as a
map of traces left by the events and people who have been occupying the floor since
1937.
Visitors are always an active part of an installation. Although they are subjected to a set of
behaviors dictated by the exhibition system, their position is leaving a substantial trace in
this system. This was one of the starting points of Ai Weiwei’s social-conceptual project
“Fairytale” for the Documenta 12, in Kassel, Germany. 1001 participants from various
regions and background were invited to a week in the world’s most prestigious exhibition.
Beyond the complex process of the selection, Fairytale extended the ambition of the
exhibition in remote Chinese regions, in a difficult bureaucratic set of procedures and a
limited time to meet the opening date. The point was: “How to make everybody feel that all
this is made for him or her, for each individual, and to enable the participants have a very
detailed and carefully planned trip that is free? How to make sure that they have the
absolutely correct conditions for traveling and being in this Documenta as viewers and at
the same time as part of the work? I see the whole process as the work itself. I see what
kind of hopes, what kind of worries, what kind of frustrations… and waiting, and
anticipating… then the dream, then imagination, then… maybe surprise.” (Ai Weiwei,
interview by Nataline Colonnello, ArtZine, 2008). The experience of “being part of” was
central to Fairytale. The 1001 visitors as individuals introduced a new form of migration –
not for production (the migrant worker) nor consumption (tourism), but cultural exchange.
Visitors become the contemporary pilgrims of the show.
Individual experience, to see and to be seen within a given structure, is the very principle
of the Barcelona Pavilion, where visitors are reflected in the dark glass, with the sky and
the trees appearing behind them. Blending the interior to the exterior, glass architecture
became the apex of 20th century modern architecture. The vertical plans precisely
dissecting space infinity mirror effect is continued in the horizontal liquid surface of the two
pools.
With Ai Weiwei’s intervention, the plan is back. The new layer of milk absorbs the static
view of the architecture. The logic is absolutely efficient. The milk pool has the virtue to
neutralize the reflective power of the vertical plans while the coffee pool plunges the
visitors into an abyssal plan. The black coffee absorbs the black marble, while the white
milk denies the architecture.
Logic of change and strategy of Détournement
Along his artistic development, Ai Weiwei constantly refers to Marcel Duchamp as a
reference and a source of inspiration – just to mentionned Weiwei’s early work in New
York or the numbers of reference to Duchamp in the Black Cover Book and Grey Cover
Book 4. Most of his artistic production can be traced back in a constructed dialogue with
the master. Among those strategies - the détournement, as defined by the Situationist
Group many years after is one of the most important influence to Ai Weiwei.
The idea of détournement in his production is used not only to recreate another meaning
by the imposition of the new one, but also to reveal what could have been missing from
the beginning. The constant reference to an ideal origin of things is carried in many of Ai
Weiwei’s project and well echo in the name of his office: FAKE. The proposal of origin and
4
Ai Weiwei, Black Cover Book, published in 1994, White Cover Book, published in 1995, Grey
Cover Book, published in 1997 – Everything start and end with Duchamp.
authenticity is all embedded with the position taken by the artist, activated essentially by a
constructed memory. In other words, Ai Weiwei’s works on archeological stone tools, vase,
and wooden furniture are using the logic of the détournement in order to reconstruct an
artificial mythology.
The little moustache added by Duchamp to a postcard of Mona Lisa to become LHOOQ
readymade in 1919 and later in 1965 as LHOOQ shaved is one of the best example of this
strategy. As a coincidence, this piece by is echoed by Weiwei in Mies van der Rohe
pavilion. HOO – H2O, not only that for both pieces water5 is at the center of the artistic
project, but also as he proposed another condition that will forever change the original
proposal.
For whom have seen Mona Lisa with a moustache cannot see the original painting by
Leonardo Da Vinci without having a though for the shaving process. For whom have seen
the pools filled with milk and coffee will never see the Mies van der Rohe masterpiece
without having in mind the missing substance in the pavilion: life.
“With Milk…” makes visible the very nature of the Mies van der Rohe pavilion and the lack
of human dimension behind any modern architecture. The black of the coffee and the
white of the milk reintroduce life into the grey architecture and cannot be detached from
the recent long research project conducted by Ai Weiwei in the Sichuan Province to
identify all the school kids who disappeared after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. With this
investigation, he started to seriously engage his artwork into a social justice category,
creating irritation and animosity among the Chinese Government. The grey in this case is
to be found in the dust that covers both the thousands of missing children as well as the
information not being release by the Chinese government.
“With Milk…” gives a materiality to the water and change the original liquid condition as a
solid substance. Therefore to makes it not only more visible but also more stable and safe
with the ambiguity of making it programmatically instable. This instability of simply: ‘Up
keeping the condition of milk and coffee…’ could also refer to the recent scandal
experienced by the Chinese citizens with the commercialization of contaminated milk in
2009: Melamine.
5
HOO is the chemical sign of water
After a while, with the help of the wind blowing the savor of coffee into the air, dust and
dancing leaves from the surrounding trees accumulating onto the milk, creating strange
patterns and uncertainty, thus giving a new obscure dimension to the pools. Until someone
comes and cleans it again… Change that resonates like déja-vu. A state condition of
history and the effort to make it stable while everything should refers to instability. Weiwei
is constantly searching for ways to make this instability visible and then to control it. With
this last project, his answer is following up the linear process of life until being spoilt.
April, 2010