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Art & Design

ART REVIEW

Watch Out: You’re in Ai Weiwei’s Surveillance Zone

Surveillance images from overhead cameras are projected on the floor as part of “Hansel & Gretel,” an installation at the Park Avenue Armory created by Ai Weiwei and the architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.

AGATON STROM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By ROBERTA SMITH

JUNE 8, 2017

With “Hansel & Gretel,” the Park Avenue Armory once again aims ambitiously, and at great expense, for participatory public art but settles instead for public entertainment. In this latest attempt, the subject is surveillance. Your every move is eerily recorded from above by a grid of cameras, which register your ghostly image beneath your feet, while a few tethered drones buzz overhead.

Yet surveillance, so much a part of everyday life, is mostly reduced from threat to mildly educational fun here. The work encourages further variations on the snow-angel selfie, as visitors spread out on the floor and then rise, like Lazarus, leaving behind blurry images of themselves, which they rush to photograph. (It is, in fact, a selfie of a selfie.) At times the scene feels like a large, overactive picnic in a park.

A collaboration several years in the making, this immersive, super-high-tech installation in two parts reunites Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist-activist-dissident, with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the Swiss architects overseeing an inspired restoration of the armory’s historical building. The three worked together on the astounding-looking National Stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a work of starchitecture whose basketlike structure is known as the Bird’s Nest.

Overhead surveillance cameras capture the images of people on the ground and projectors display their images on the floor beside them in “Hansel & Gretel.”

AGATON STROM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The armory project’s curators are Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, a noncollecting exhibition space in London (for whom the artist and architects designed a collaborative pavilion in 2012), andTom Eccles, executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

The work is one of those shows that has “How much did this cost?” written all over it. (The armory would not say.) It teems with fashionable relevance, dovetailing with newish knowledge that the National Security Agency spent yearscollecting emails and texts that Americans exchanged with people overseas, and at a time when the executive wing of the federal government is displaying disturbing authoritarian tendencies.