Saxon’s videos include one in which he’s helping topple one of the chimneys. Another shows someone swinging a hammer at a bathroom’s black-and-white marble walls. A third demonstrates how a handsome glass balustrade, the kind you’re almost bound to find in a modern museum, shatters into windshield fragments when you tap its corner with a sledgehammer. In a fourth, Saxon and another man are demolishing the hot tub with two jackhammers. “There was so much rebar in the concrete,” Saxon told me. “It was absolutely brutal.”
Ye, through his agent Saxon, also tore out all the Ando custom wooden cabinetry. Crazy! Parker tries to show that Ye had his own design in mind, that he was pursuing his own particular aesthetic. He says,
Ye revealed to Saxon—although not all at once—that he wanted no kitchen, bathrooms, A.C., windows, light fixtures, or heating. He was intent on cutting off the water and the power (and removing the house’s cable and wiring, which ran through the concrete in plastic tubes). He talked of clarity, simplicity, and a kind of self-reliance. “He wanted everything to be his own doing,” Saxon told me. In one cheerful text from Ye to Saxon, in response to a report of the day’s demolition, he wrote, “Let’s gooooo . . . Simple fresh and cleeeeeean.”
I don’t buy it. It’s like Al Weiwei deliberately dropping his Han dynasty urn. Peter Schjeldahl said of that dubious action,
We’re told in the show’s catalogue that photographs of Ai dropping a millennia-old Han-dynasty urn, which smashes on the floor, “captures the moment when tradition is transformed and challenged by new values.” That likely reads better in Mandarin. The act strikes me as mere vandalism. [“Challenging Work,” The New Yorker, October 22, 2012]
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