The Beijing Olympic Games stadium
Dennis Oppenheim is an enormously inventive New York-based artist (and, I should add, a friend) and he is one of a number of well credentialled artists who nowadays operate mostly outside the gallery system, working on public art commissions. He is also one of seven Americans chosen by the China Sculpture Institute to make work for the Sculpture Park which has been created for the Olympic Games.
"I went out in December," Oppenheim says. "Actually I did two commissions. One was in Hongkong at the site of the equestrian event. Zaha Hadid has a piece there. And Mimmo Palladino has a piece involving horses. And in Beijing I did a piece for where the volleyball is going to be. It's called Beach Volleyball."
How long will the pieces in the park be up?
"Permanently," Oppenheim said. "Olympic Park is going to become an open public park in the middle of Beijing." He added that he has been appointed a consultant for the Society of Sculptors.
The other six Americans are Mary Miss, Jonathan Borofsky (who created a pyramid of people), Elyn Zimmerman, Wen-Ying Tsai, Bruce Beasley and Charles Jencks, who has an excellent reputation as an architectural critic, indeed as the critic who made Post-Modernism a talking point in the field.
Then there are the Chinese artists. Some of the Olympic-related art activity is more or less pure promo, such as A Grand Ceremony of Prints: An Art Exhibition to Acclaim the Olympics, which is up in 798 Art District. Then there are the panda soft toys, which are the official mascot, which were created by the Conceptual artist, Zhao Bandi, who is better known for his outré fashion designs, but currently best known of all for mounting an ineffective attempt to get the Chinese public to boycott the Dreamworks movie, Kung Fu Panda, on the grounds of cultural theft.
The pandas, which come with red, blue, green, yellow or black extremities, are on sale both at the gallery ShangArt (where I bought one of his terrific fashion tee-shirts for a fiver) and at the Bandi Panda shop, also in 798, so Bandi may have learned a thing or two from Takashi Murakami.
Cai Guo-Qiang, installation at the Guggenheim, New York
But it is two famous Chinese artists who have drawn the most attention in Beijing. One is Cai Guo-Qiang, who has had a New York studio since 1995, and who has often angered the authorities in his homeland, but who was nonetheless chosen to put together the multi-million dollar firework extravaganzas that will both open and close the games.
Cai, who recently had a show at the New York Guggenheim, has been putting together the firework event for a couple of year. He worked, as he has for years, with Grucci of New York, who were founded in New York and are the acknowledged maestros in the field. The artist was the subject of a recent blistering attack by Jed Perl in The New Republic who writes Cai's fondness for the new Red Guard chic is nothing short of obscene but there have also been rumours that he has yet again aggravated the powers that be in his homeland. Perhaps no more than Chinese whispers.
Ai Wei Wei
The other artist, Ai Weiwei, and the work in question is part of the extraordinary architecture of the new Beijing., a giddying series of spectacles that inevitably began with arrival at Norman Foster's air terminal, which was especially built for the Games. Okay, just assume the superlatives from here on in. After a drive through traffic that makes London seem like a windswept heath you pass Rem Koolhaas's headquarters for the CCTV television authority to reach the National Theatre, which is by the French architect, Paul Andreu. A cosmic armadillo from outside, within it is cluttered with a grotesquerie of the kitsch statuary that the theatre arts so often attract.
Pangu Plaza, the Olympic Village, is unremarkable except for the huge oblong screens which are architectural elements in themselves and which, Bladerunner-like, stream continuous images - including images of the buildings themselves - so that art, architecture and marketing morph indissolubly together.
Then the National Aquatics Centre, four sides of squidgy blue pentagons, where the swimming events take place, and the Olympic Stadium, the "Bird's Nest," which is already one of the most famous buildings in the world, and which is the work of the Swiss team, Jacques Herzog - who has described it as "a work of public sculpture" - and Pierre de Meuron. It was they who enlisted Ai Weiwei as a collaborator. Ai Weiwei is delighted with the building but announced well in advance that he had no intention of attending the opening ceremonies. He talked of the regime's "pretend smile."
Well, the games are beginning. Cai Guo-Qiang spoken to the effect that a smidgen of pollution might add an interesting effect to his fireworks. At times of tension, perhaps of change, what artists do and do not do can become particularly interesting.
Anthony Haden-Guest
Anthony Haden-Guest is a writer, reporter and cartoonist. He writes for leading magazines in Britain and America, most recently in Esquire, GQ (UK) the Financial Times and Britain's Observer Magazine. You can email him directly with your comments at anthonyhaden.guest@yahoo.co.uk and/or post your views on the Saatchi Online public blog, making sure to put the title of this article as your header.
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