In my previous post about the extraordinary show organized by the San Francisco-based FOR-SITE Foundation—@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz—I wrote about the powerful, provocative and (to my mind) somewhat problematic aspects of this sprawling, seven-part installation. Taking the boat to The Rock, as hardcore criminals once did, visitors to Ai’s temporary exhibition (to Apr. 26) can explore some areas—the site’s monumental New Industries Building and its Hospital—that are customarily off-limits to today’s audioguided tourists who throng the site.
Now come with me to see it for yourself, via my CultureGrrl Video, below. The first time I had visited Alcatraz was B.A. (Before Audioguide), when our unforgettable (and harrowing) guide was a former inmate there. He never identified himself as such. But I learned his backstory later, when I came upon him in a 1977 AP article that correctly reported: “Visitors…are not told about his imprisonment here, but his information is unmistakably first-person.” Frank Hatfield had made our small group feel vividly and viscerally what it meant to be locked up in the isolation cells.
Now Alcatraz is an entertaining and engaging spectacle—all the more so because of the pleasures of coming upon Ai’s clever, pointed interventions, four of which you will see in my video. Two of the others are located in the Hospital (cells once used for the observation of mentally ill inmates): Illumination, a sound piece with chants of Hopi tribe members and Tibetan Buddhist monks (evoking their difficult histories in the U.S. and China, respectively), and Blossom, a detail of which I depicted in this tweet.
Also missing from my video is “Refraction”— a monumental wing-like structure composed of reflective panels from Tibetan solar cookers. It looks great on the website for the project, but you’ll never see it that way, because you must view it from above, through jaggedly broken, semi-opaque windows in the former Gun Gallery, where guards would closely monitor prisoners’ activities in the New Industries Building
This is how you’ll see it:
Now join me to experience the rest. Along the way, we’ll meet Tim Hallman, a volunteer who labored to assemble one of Ai’s 175 LEGO portraits of dissidents and tells me what his participation in the project meant to him: