Oil spills

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Oil Spills is an installation work of art by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei .

Work description

The work was made in 2006 and represents a collection of several different sized porcelain discs that look like huge drops of oil. The size of the drops varies between 11 × 8x2.5 and 120 × 106x4. The work takes up an entire room and has a very minimalist effect. The fact that the porcelain discs are drops of oil is mainly conveyed by the title of the work. The three main exhibition venues for Oil Spills are the Urs Meile Gallery in Beijing, the Lisson Gallery in Milan and the White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney. The number of drops and their size varies in every exhibition. The lengthy production of the panes in the Chinese region of Jingdezhen is particularly remarkable. If you compare this work with other Ai Weiwei's porcelain factories from the same period, an impressive detail realism is striking in all of the works: Ai Weiwei seems to want to show the limits to what degree a realistic representation of objects through porcelain is possible.

Interpretative approaches

Because of its name, which means something like "oil spill" or "oil pollution", Oil Spills has an environmental meaning. According to Sue van der Zipp, Ai Weiwei would like to criticize the global fight for the raw material oil, China's role as an economic superpower and, in general, mankind's wasteful attitude towards natural resources. It is therefore an extremely political work that aims to draw attention to the way people deal with the raw material oil. The material it is made of is particularly important for the interpretation of the work of art: porcelain. In the past, porcelain was a very popular and important commodity, today it is oil. Based on this observation one can speak of a transformation of white gold (porcelain) to black gold (oil).

Parallels to other works of art

"20:50", Richard Wilson : Oil Spills can be compared with Wilsons 20:50, since both works deal with the subject of oil. For Wilson, however, it seems to be even more about the aesthetic function of the oil, which for him fills a whole room and impresses with its reflective effect.

"Pier Pressure", Banksy : Banksy is much more obviously a political installation than Oil Spills. Banksy not only criticizes the handling of oil in general, but he deliberately criticizes the British oil company, BP (British Petroleum), which was jointly responsible for the disaster on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in Mexico in 2010.

literature

  • Moore, Gregg (Ed.): Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn. Ceramic Works, 5000 BCE - 2010 CE, Pennsylvania 2010.
  • Smith, Karen / Obrist, Hans Ulrich / Fibicher, Bernhard (eds.): Ai Weiwei, London 2009.
  • Van der Zipp, Sue: Unbreakable, in: Ai Weiwei, Groninger Museum 2008, ed. v. Karen Smith / Mark Wilson, Rotterdam 2008, pp. 8-11.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Moore, Gregg (Ed.): Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn. Ceramic Works, 5000 BCE - 2010 CE, Pennsylvania 2010, p. 37.
  2. ^ Smith, Karen / Obrist, Hans Ulrich / Fibicher, Bernhard (eds.): Ai Weiwei, London 2009, p. 85.
  3. ↑ Van der Zipp, Sue: Unbreakable, in: Ai Weiwei, Groninger Museum 2008, ed. Karen Smith, Mark Wilson, Rotterdam 2008, p. 11.
  4. ↑ http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle800.do?categoryId=9048918&contentId=7082603