The latest disaster in the Unilever Series in the Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern is Sunflower Seeds by Ai Weiwei. It is billed as “a 100 million seeds that form a seemingly infinite landscape.” What you actually see is a tedious, bounded stretch of gritty gray gravel that covers the far end of the Turbine Hall. It lacks the careful raking and the strategic placing of carefully chosen boulders that characterize the best of Chinese and Japanese stone gardens—they would break up the monotony and add a variety of shape and texture that is utterly missing from the Tate’s grubby, granulated wall-to-wall.
You cannot even experience the joy of trekking noisily across this mass of porcelain mock–sunflower seeds to decorate it with footprints. Earlier visitors could enjoy the childhood pleasures of walking scrunch, crunch, scrunch across it. But now the tort lawyers are wheeling in the sky. We are sternly informed in stilted legal language: “Although porcelain is very robust, we have been advised that the interaction of visitors with the sculpture can cause dust which could be damaging to health following repeated inhalation over a long period of time.” This spoils the installation utterly because the visitor can no longer feel it or see it from the center but only look at it from the edge or from above. Neither of these views is inspiring.
It is a pity, for Ai Weiwei is a gifted artist and a warm and perceptive human being. These qualities