Last week, our Gallery Fellow, Frank Fina performed Ai Weiwei’s CCTV Spray as part of our do it! Fridays event. Ai is a contemporary artist, designer, architect, and activist known for his outspoken views against the Chinese government, which has labeled him a political dissident. In fact, on April 3, 2011, Ai was arrested at the Beijing Capital International Airport and his studio facilities were searched. He was released on June 22 after an extensive media and street art campaign to free him. Ai often intertwines his activism and artwork, as in the 2008 work Citizens Investigation in which he published the 5,385 names of children who had perished in a school during an earthquake in the Sichuan earthquake earlier that year. Officials in the Chinese government suppressed these names, allegedly because of the shoddy workmanship that caused the school to collapse.
Given the political subject matter of his artwork and his frequent run-ins with the law, it is no wonder that Ai created CCTV Spray in response to surveillance from police cameras. In this work, he gives instructions on how to create a device that will disable an out-of-reach security camera by covering the lens with spray paint. Check out his original instructions on the left.
For our rendition of the work, Frank assembled the device on a table in the Samek Gallery, using black spray paint, a broom handle, corkscrew, string, and a lever. The idea was to extend the reach of a spray paint can by creating a trigger with the corkscrew, which could be operated by pulling the string below.
As we found, it was much trickier to assemble the device than it appeared in the drawing. Nonetheless, ever-resourceful Frank was able to make a few necessary hacks using duct tape and a saw. Richard Rinehart, our director, commented that witnessing this process was a great reminder of how much time artists spend just getting things to work properly.
For obvious reasons, we decided against spraying an actual security camera in the gallery, but we did use it as a photo op. See this image and more from the event below.
