Dust to Dust
My husband asked me what I thought of the destroyed Neolithic pots at Ai Weiwei’s exhibition. I was curious about my favourite interests, archaeology and art coming together. Thirty glass jars on a wooden shelf contain powdered Chinese Neolithic pottery that Ai Weiwei had broken and grounded to fine dust. It is suggestive of a memorial site. A series of cremations. Alluvial debris. Stardust. Granules that once had a form and function are now symbolic of a bygone era. In adjacent rooms, Chinese artefacts are displayed as readymades. Neolithic vases are inscribed with the Coca-Cola logo in red and gold paint. Ai Weiwei drops a Han Dynasty Urn, captured in three black and white photographs in the mid-90s. My thoughts concerning his artworks were not about defacing antiquity or desecrating the past. Instead, I considered what values the collective ‘we’ assign to the past. Artefacts that ‘survived’ are considered valuable because they represent information of that period, even if mass-produ