Excessivism.

(Apologies if this is a bit unfinished- I didn't have much time today.)

I only found out about Excessivism yesterday- a post about Ai Weiwei’s Breaking a Han Dynasty Urn showed up on my For You page on Instagram. This artwork contains a set of three photos, showing the artist dropping and breaking a 2000 year old Han Dynasty urn. Our first instinct is to be horrified at something so unethical, but with knowledge of the Excessivism movement, his actions do make sense.

According to Wikipedia (the relevant page of which has been flagged with multiple issues), Excessivism is defined as “a reflection, examination, or investigation of every aspect of life in excessive state with particular consideration of areas that have real and consequential effect on members of society.” so in simple English, Excessivism shows the excessive use of resources (both material and labour) in an exaggerated manner. As far as I can tell, Excessivism is usually intended to be a commentary on capitalism.

A couple of examples:

Ian Davenport pours innumerable lines of paint down a wall using a syringe, such as this one called Everything.

Artists like Andrew Dadson and Michael Villareal make paintings by layering far too much paint than they actually need, emphasizing the role of the material as the carrier of the Excessivist message.

Now to talk about the broken urn and how it came to be:

Ai Weiwei bought a large group of Han Chinese urns for tuppence in the 90’s, back when Chinese history and art wasn’t much in vogue. Eventually he started painting them and converting them in other ways into contemporary artworks.

Since he broke the urn in 1995, you’d think that the urn would still not be very valuable. But even with this context, the photograph generates quite a bit of horror and outrage.

Also considering the fact that this set of photographs sold for nearly 1 million dollars in 2016, and the original urn would have never earned that much money, it raises several questions (at least in my head).

Did breaking the urn add more value to the urn than keeping it pristine ever would?

Would breaking the other urns add more value to them, or was the real value only in the first urn? And why?

Can this concept be translated to other objects? Is it better for something to die in a blaze rather than being perfectly preserved for all time?

Where is the line drawn between breaking things for art and just straight vandalism? (People have tested this! Other artists have broken Ai Weiwei’s painted urns and taken photographs in his style.)

My personal favourite Excessivism artwork is Sunflower Seeds by Ai Weiwei. He hired a bunch of people to hand-sculpt a million porcelain sunflower seeds, and displayed them in a room where the visitors could walk on them and interact with them. (Sadly, this exhibit is not interactive anymore, crushing my dreams of making snow angels in the sunflower seeds.)