Modernism as a Philosophy: Sheila Hicks and Ai Weiwei

Although modernism is a dominant cultural force today, the movement’s roots were aesthetically and often politically radical. In the mid-nineteenth century, artists began to break from the European academies’ long-held conformity to classically influenced, idealized depictions, experimenting instead with abstraction and representing individualized, diverse perspectives and experiences. Known for their experimental uses of materials, artists Ai Weiwei and Sheila Hicks share not only an engagement with modernist aesthetics and artistic practices but also a firm belief in the importance of mobilizing these practices to interrogate established hierarchies and, by extension, systems of power. Hicks’s La Mémoire (Memory) (1972/2001) and Ai’s Porcelain Cube (2009), two recent acquisitions currently on view in the exhibition Princeton Collects, offer exciting opportunities to think critically about—and expand—the stories the Museum’s collections tell about modernism and its discontents.

Hicks was at the center of the efflorescence of fiber art in the 1960s and 1970s. She initially learned to weave while studying painting at Yale in the 1950s. Her early interest in the confluence of textiles and color was born in part from studying pre-Inka weavings with anthropologist and cultural theorist George Kubler, as well as from artist Josef Albers’s course on color. In the years that followed, Hicks became renowned for her distinctive wrapped-string artworks—encompassing small objects, wall hangings, and large-scale installations like La Mémoire (originally commissioned by IBM for its Paris headquarters)—which refuse easy categorization according to the putative high art/craft binary. Hicks reflects that institutions and collectors often ask of her work, “‘Is it a tapestry? Is it not a tapestry? What is it? Is it art? Is it a craft?’ . . . I like to play and work and invent things that have crossover meaning.” The defiant approach to materiality and classification adopted by Hicks and other artists working in fiber around that time—including Cecilia Vicuña, Anni Albers, and Faith Ringgold—helped pave the way for the proliferation of textile-based and transmedia practices in recent years.

Looking ahead to future rotations of the Museum’s new galleries for modern and contemporary art, juxtaposing La Mémoire with works by artists like Josef Albers, Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, and Barnett Newman will offer an exciting opportunity to study modern artists’ use of color beyond the paintings that are some of the best known in the Museum’s collections. La Mémoire encourages us to ask: How do we remember and tell the hi/stories of what modernist art looks like and how it developed? What ways of working have been historically left out of these narratives?

Like La Mémoire, Ai Weiwei’s Porcelain Cube offers opportunities to reconsider the legacies of modernism in an expanded context. After moving from Beijing to New York in 1981, Ai encountered work by artists including Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Kosuth, Andy Warhol, and Sol LeWitt and soon began creating conceptual artworks that questioned both classical thought and authoritarian governments’ tactical obliteration of traditions, beliefs, and knowledge. 

Ai’s work as a dissident has long dovetailed with his artistic practice. Porcelain Cube was created the year after Ai began his citizen’s investigation into the casualties of a May 12, 2008, earthquake—an investigation prompted by the government’s lack of transparency regarding the names of students killed when shoddily constructed schools collapsed. The cube’s implicitly fragile materiality and its formal reference to exposed plumbing pipes and fittings suggest the precarity of the structures and systems that have been built to support modern life. 

For Ai’s porcelain artworks, the artist engages a ceramics workshop in Jingdezhen, a town that has for centuries been famed for its development and creation of blue-and-white porcelain. Hand painted with a blue floral motif, Porcelain Cube inhabits a material language associated with the tradition of blue-and-white porcelain objects that have been traded, prized, and imitated internationally since the thirteenth century CE.

Its form—the cube—is an icon of modern abstract and conceptual art. Porcelain Cube encourages us to ask how value is accorded to traditional craft and to art and why museums and markets, especially in Europe and the United States, have historically differentiated between the two. After Princeton Collects closes on March 29, Ai’s cube will make an apt pairing not only for many works in the Museum’s collection of Asian art but also for modern works from the United States and Europe, like Sol LeWitt’s untitled sculpture (1982). 

As they join the Museum’s collection of modern and contemporary art, Hicks’s La Mémoire and Ai’s Porcelain Cube offer lenses through which to reinterpret both the artworks in the collections and the histories we tell through curatorial practice. While always relevant to considerations of modern art, Hicks’s mistrust of cultural authority and Ai’s encouragement to engage in critical reflection of the histories we tell are particularly generative, timely offerings.