For my final paper for the class Art in Crisis, have to write a 10 page essay about any of the people we reviewed or choose an artist from another time period and contrast them with someone we studied. I chose the latter and contrasted the Bed-In for peace with Ai Weiwei. Never understood the ins and outs of John and Yoko staying in bed when I came upon it as a kid, I liked the song Give Peace A Chance, but why stay in bed? What did that mean? Now I see the hilarity and inspiration (and guts).
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Beatlemania was still close. Predictably, the paparazzi would follow, spy or interrupt attempts at being private so they decided to exploit their positionality and announced where they would be. In light of successful civil rights sit-ins, like Greensboro, they blended their two major interests love and peace. The paparazzi came assumed this was going to be about sexual exhibitionism. Instead, they found the couple talking in bed about peacemaking. The room was dense with hand made posters that said “peace”. Photographers couldn’t shoot the couple without also advertising their message. Nixon felt threatened by Lennon messaging people to think anti-war and tried to get him deported. This only made Lennon more political. John Sinclair, Give Peace A Chance, Power To The People.
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The Chinese government didn’t want to acknowledge attention to the 80,000 people who died in the Sichuan Earthquake (mostly of University students and school children), they censored and controlled all information about it. This was because schools built by the state are suppose to be very secure they shouldn’t have collapsed. Typical mistake of power that doesn’t know true power. Control the narrative at all costs instead, for instance “I am a very stable genius” . On his blog online Ai Weiwei asked the public, who are the children that died? And people wrote back supplying over 5000 accounts of who their dead children were. The public turned to his blog instead of the government. “The kind of authoritarian state we have in China cannot survive if it answers questions – if the truth is revealed, they are finished. So they started to think of me as the most dangerous person in China. That made me become an artist, but also an activist.”