ON THE TABLE. AI WEIWEI @ VIRREINA PALACE, BARCELONA

 (Blogging from Barcelona this morning)

La Virreina gallery  inaugurates a retrospective of works from the past three decades of dissident artist Ai Weiwei, who has been banned from leaving China since 2011. 

The "On the Table" show at Barcelona's La Virreina gallery spans photos, videos, sculptures, installations and architecture models from Ai's stint in New York in the 1980s to recent works. 

"There are over 40 objects with a selection of items from the beginning of his career as well as works that are now iconic and well known and works made especially for this exhibition," the show's curator Rosa Pera said. 

The goal of the exhibition is to show how China's best known contemporary artist uses images to explore "the tension between truth and lies, evidence and ambiguity, control and freedom," she said. 

A sculptor, designer and documentary-maker, Ai has irked Beijing by using his art and online profile to draw attention to injustices in China and the need for greater transparency and rule of law in the world's most populous country. 

Despite his fame, Ai has been banned from leaving China since being secretly detained for 81 days three years ago by China's authoritarian communist government for reasons that were never specified.  

The artwork "Handcuffs, 2012. " by Chinese dissident and artist Ai Weiwei during the presentation of "On the table. Ai Weiwei" exhibition at La Virreina Image Centre in Barcelona. AFP PHOTO / LLUIS GENE.

After his release in June 2011, Ai's design firm was slapped with a hefty tax bill, which he fought unsuccessfully in Chinese courts. 

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a table and ten chairs normally installed in Ai's studio in Beijing where he meets to discuss his projects. He sent it as a symbol of his inability to attend the show in person. 

The public is invited to sit in the chairs, take pictures and then upload them on social media sites, a preferred medium of the artist. 

"When you put something on the table ... you do not keep any cards up your sleeve and you show everything you are capable of doing," said Pera, explaining the title of the exhibition which will run until February 2015. 

One of the works made specially for the show is an installation consisting of pieces of marble that simulate grass sprouts emerging from the ground. 

The walls of the room where the installation is displayed are decorated with stamped images of an extended middle finger. 

Among the items on display is his "Study in Perspective" photo series, where the artist's middle finger is positioned in front of global  landmarks, such as the White House, the British parliament and the Sydney opera house. 

The show also includes some of his most famous works, including an ancient ceramic jug decorated with a Coca-Cola logo, a map of China made out of wood from ancient Chinese temples and a small sample from the 10 tonnes of porcelain sunflower seeds which covered the floor at London’s Tate Modern as part of his 2010 installation "Sunflower Seeds".  

GRETCHEN BENDER @ TATE, LIVERPOOL

Gretchen Bender was an American artist who worked primarily in film, video, and photography. Her work shares the concerns of the generation of early 1980s Pictures Artists, which included household names such as Cindy Sherman. Although seemingly overlooked in recent years, Bender stars as part of Tate’s Autumn/Winter season Making Things Public, with an exhibition addressing how she experimented with found images to explore ideas surrounding the transmission and distribution of culture.

According to the New York observer, “Gretchen Bender’s art is having a moment” but sadly, this somehow doesn’t translate to the show at the Tate. Having visited the exhibition twice now, the emptiness of the gallery has been apparent – both of people and of art.  The sparseness of the exhibition space hits you as you enter the gallery, and with barely ten works to fill the huge white cube, the stark contrast from the bustling, conversation-inspiring buzz of the Warhol exhibition next door is apparent.

Works on display include Bender’s opening credits for US TV show America’s Most Wanted along with four music videos she produced in collaboration with director Robert Longo. As interesting as these could potentially be, the films are housed in a small room on one screen on constant rotation. I found this a perplexing curatorial decision, given that next door, Warhol’s archive of film and television programmes are each awarded their own screen, suggesting a level of importance granted to the Warhol’s work which is severely lacking in the Bender exhibition.

The real coup of the show is Total Recall (1987), an eight-channel installation with 24 TV monitors and two rear projections combining corporate logos from TV commercials with computer-generated graphics by Amber Denker, doctored clips from Oliver Stone’s Salvador and a post-punk soundtrack by Stuart Argabright. The installation is walled off, taking up half of the  entire exhibition space and is overwhelming to behold: as the darkened room is gradually filled with light, colour and sound from the huge wall of screens, the viewer is immersed in a nightmare of cascading corporate iconography, and snippets of eerily smiling faces from American TV advertising. The booming electronic soundtrack pulses through the floor as your eyes struggle to keep up with the aggressively rapid barrage of flashing images on the screens. Total Recall provides a mesmerising critique of the violence and commoditisation of images in society, as Bender exposes the false nature of corporate messaging and the sinister excesses of television itself. 

Elsewhere, a small handful of Bender’s photographic works, including an unsettling image of recently killed bodies make up the rest of the show. There isn’t enough here to reassure the visitor of Bender’s photographic prowess and the installed works do little to capture the imagination in the same way as her incredible installation piece.

In the 1980s, Bender anticipated our current state of image saturation, using hypnotic repetitions of television footage, and aggressive walls of sound to create immersive viewing experiences. Appropriating images from mass media and using a plethora of cultural references, Bender directly addresses the powerful influence of mass broadcast media. By contrasting the menacing force of corporations and technology with the struggle of individual human beings through pictorial references, Bender’s work is overtly political and subversive in its intent.

With all this fascinating theory behind the work, it would have been great to see more of her famed “electronic theatre” (sic). Where are digital installations Dumping Core and Wild Dead (both 1984)? And what about the infamous People in Pain (1988) which is noticeably missing here? It’s a shame that Tate were unable to acquire more of her works for the show, as without these large-scale immersive pieces, what we are left with hardly uncovers anything new, nor showcases the talent and influence boasted of this artist in the interpretation.

The Guerilla Girls - disrupting the Art world with the F word for 30 years

The Guerrilla Girls are NYC's secret corps of radical female artists, who are still angry and still challenging the patriarchy after three decades. The true identities of the Guerilla Girls is a source of much speculation and has been since their inception. However, the masked group of female artists is still very much at large and incognito 30 years after they first announced their mission to right the wrongs of the gender-skewed art world, flyering the lamp posts of Soho with punchy PSAs signed "The Guerrilla Girls: Conscience of the Art World."

These Artists, 1985. Courtesy the Guerrilla Girls.

The group formed in 1985, its founding members riled up by the 1984 MoMA showInternational Survey of Painting and Sculpture, a retrospective exhibition which included the work of only 13 women artists, out of a total of 169. And it's been hell-bent on disruption ever since. Over the past three decades, Guerrilla Girls have plastered billboards with slogans like "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?"; designed and distributed countless posters slamming everything from the male-female pay gap to gender inequality at the Oscars; staged a "weenie count" in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; written five books; and generally wreaked havoc for the art world patriarchy. All under the cover of  gorilla masks, and code names borrowed from  famous female artists.

As Gloria Steinem wrote in 1995: "The women's movement is too diverse for any one symbol...but if I had to name a group that symbolised the best of feminism in this country, I would say, 'The Guerrilla Girls.' Smart, radical, funny, creative, uncompromising, and (I assume) diverse under those inspired gorilla masks, they force us to rethink everything from art to zaniness."

An interview with the founding party starters of the Guerilla Girls - 'Frida Kahlo' and 'Kathe Kollwitz' , taken from guerrillagirls.com  :

How has your mission evolved over the past 30 years?We began in the art world because we were a group of female artists who saw that things were getting worse for women and artists of colour, after some gains due to feminist protest in the 70s. Almost immediately, we branched out into other areas of culture and politics. We've now done over 100 posters, stickers, actions, huge billboards and several books about art, film, pop culture, politics, abortion, homelessness, rape, war and more.

Naked, 1989. Courtesy the Guerrilla Girls.

Looking back to 1985, how did you channel your anger over the 1984 MoMA show and create a group that could change things?We didn't actually organise that protest in front of MoMA in 1984, but a couple of future Guerrilla Girls joined the picket line and were pissed that it had absolutely no effect. No one going into the museum cared about the lack of women and artists of colour inside. That was the moment we realised there had to be a better way — a more contemporary, creative way — to break through people's belief that museums knew best and that there was no discrimination in art. We got the idea to do posters, and in spring 1985 we called some friends to a meeting, and passed the hat around to pay for printing. When we put the first two posters up in New York in the middle of the night, all hell broke loose. Who knew that would lead to hundreds of others, plus, books and street projects? Who knew that would cause a crisis of conscience about diversity in the art world, something museums, collectors and critics had denied for a long time. Now, it's a no brainer.... you can't tell the story of a culture without all the voices in that culture

What have been some of your most effective campaigns since then?Our poster Do Women Have to be Naked to Get Into the Met. Museum? and some of our film campaigns have been among the most influential. Our goal is to do something unforgettable. After seeing our "Naked" poster, you can never go to a museum without thinking about how many women artists are on the walls.

The Guerrilla Girls have invented a game-changing kind of political art. Humor helps us present issues in unexpected, intrusive ways. We don't do posters and actions that simply point to something and say "This is bad," as a lot of political art does. We try to use information in a surprising, transgressive manner to prove our case. We believe that some discrimination is conscious and some is unconscious and that we can embarrass some of the perpetrators into changing their ways. This has proved true in the art world: things are better now than they ever have been for women and artists of colour, and we have helped effect that change. There is still a long way to go, however, and we are still condemning the art world for its lack of ethics, tokenism, economic discrimination and other bad behaviour.

Dear Collector, 1986. Courtesy the Guerrilla Girls.

Have you had any run-ins with the law...?Not really, but our upcoming sticker campaign against billionaires who control the art world today may get us in some real trouble. We do get angry emails from theatre owners when we put up anti-film industry stickers in their bathrooms.

Are there other practical difficulties with being a masked avenger?It's hot inside the masks! But the good news is you wouldn't believe what comes out of your mouth when wearing one.

Is wearing masks a protective measure? Do you think Guerrilla Girl members would suffer a backlash in the art world if they weren't anonymous?In the beginning, we decided to be anonymous for purely self-serving reasons: the art world is a small place and we were afraid our careers would suffer. But we quickly realised that anonymity was an important ingredient to our success. First, it keeps the focus on the issues, not on our individual work or personalities. Second, the mystery surrounding our identities attracts attention, which is helpful to our cause. We could be anyone...and we are.

A lot of the museums at which you've protested, including MoMA, now own work by the Guerrilla Girls. How do you feel about that?Wary and confused? Happy and excited? It's true that in recent years we've been busier than ever, and we've also been faced with a dilemma: What do you do when the art world you've spent your whole life attacking suddenly embraces you? We think carefully about every request and if the conditions are right, we take our critique right inside the galleries and institutions. When our work appears at venerable venues like the Venice Biennale, the Tate Modern, or The National Gallery in DC, we get hundreds of letters from people saying they were blown away by our analysis of art and culture. It's a thrill to criticise a museum right on its own walls.