The Brooklyn Rail

Ai Weiwei’s Camouflage engages the Four Freedoms State Park on Roosevelt Island designed by Louis Kahn and posthumously completed in 2012. The park’s name is a reference to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s State of the Union Address delivered in 1941—on January 6—to a joint session of Congress. Nearly a year before Pearl Harbor and the US involvement in World War II, Roosevelt described “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want (economic stability), and freedom from fear (lasting peace). The speech is a defense of democratic liberties in the face of ascendant fascism, and Roosevelt concluded his remarks with a plea for the urgency of such concerns: “That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create.” A passage from this speech is chiseled into one of the granite monoliths that anchors the space of the monument. Ai Weiwei’s Camouflage—a tentlike structure made of perforated patterned fabric draped over Kahn’s design—destabilizes the solidity of the monument and changes the tenor of the passage that it was originally designed to celebrate.

Camouflage was commissioned to coincide with the eightieth session of the United Nations General Assembly. As one reads the passage from Roosevelt’s speech, one does so with the sound of hovering helicopters and in view of Coast Guard vessels patrolling the East River. On a typical sunny day, Kahn’s space is blindingly bright. The deeply etched words appear in striking contrast against the granite; the monument’s overall experience is an optimistic testament to victory over authoritarianism in WWII. However, under the cover of Weiwei’s protective canopy, the feeling is more subdued and reading the words can feel like uncovering a secret. As the wind makes the fabric canopy breathe and flap against Camouflage’s wooden substructure, the triumphant tone of the monument becomes much more uncertain.

In military use, camouflage (not the artwork but the concept) was developed to protect vulnerable targets or to disguise soldiers, vehicles, weapons when poised to attack. In the living world, some non-human animals use similar techniques to disappear or to remain unseen. Roger Caillois, in his 1984 essay “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” posits that one of the outcomes of trying to blend in with one’s surroundings is a crisis in subjectivity vis-à-vis space: “Alongside the instinct of self-preservation, which in some way orients the creature toward life, there is generally speaking a sort of instinct of renunciation that orients it toward a mode of reduced existence.” That renunciation, in this case, might be read as a kind of incipient collectivity, as one’s own boundaries blur and blend into the milieu, including other people experiencing a similar transformation.

In this sense, Camouflage’s provocation is made visceral through the immersive and shared experience of entering and occupying the newly created space of the altered monument. Camouflage obscures the institution ostensibly put in place to protect the freedoms enshrined in the monument. The distance it creates brings forward the vulnerability of our moment and makes vivid the fragility of the agreements upon which these institutions are built. However, by gathering visitors and ostensibly blending them into each other, the piece builds new audiences through the particular collective experience that it orchestrates.

To camouflage something is not to erase it, though. Camouflage is effective because it blends a legible figure into an indistinguishable ground. In this case, wrapping the white monument in green camouflage does the opposite: it seems to call attention to itself. This camouflage pattern, abstract and non-repetitive, was developed specifically for the installation and is comprised of several different images of cats. The interpretive text at the entrance suggests that this is to call attention to the non-human casualties of war and times of human suffering. Another reading, reinforced by the mastaba-like geometry of the canopy’s supporting armature, might be a funerary one: cats were of course guardians of the afterlife in ancient Egypt. Perhaps another way to understand the role of the cats is to consider the specific felines that comprise the pattern. While most are in silhouette so as to produce shadowy effects, one image is clearly legible, its famous sentiment enshrined in our cultural memory: “I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?” Referred to as Happy Cat, the 2007 image of a smiling British short hair with superimposed text spawned the LOLcats phenomenon and formed a kind of foundation of internet meme culture. While Camouflage stands apart from its physical context because of its color and form, it effectively dissolves the Four Freedoms with the raw material of the attention economy.

The sanctity of the monument prevents any lasting alterations; thus, the temporariness of Camouflage is foregrounded. The wooden support structure, by the Brooklyn-based studio Camber, finds precise ways to engage the monument without any forms of permanent attachment or alterations. This provisionality can be read as improvisationally urgent or as knowingly temporary. If Four Freedoms was designed to be a testament to a future thought to be secure, Ai Weiwei’s Camouflage is a reminder that maintaining these freedoms is a collective practice. Camouflage is a refuge and redoubt but also a recruitment site.