This idea opens can take a piece of art from simply being a representation, to an open-ended host of options, meanings and symbols. It allows the art to be more than what it looks like.
Let's take Ai Weiwei's "Sunflower Seeds" for example.
Image from pascalepetit.blogspot.com.
Image from http://www.designboom.com/cms/images/erica/---newsunflower/sunflower01.jpg
Image from http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2010/10/11/1286795618795/ai-weiwei-sunflower-seeds-006.jpg
This piece was installed at the Tate Museum. It consists of 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds, carpeting the floor. Outside of the coolness of these seeds in general (seriously… a hundred million sunflower seeds laying her all handcrafted with amazing detail… open for you to walk through, lay in, or whatever you wish…), there are quite a few interesting things going on here.
First, each of these seeds was handmade by someone in Jingdezhen, China, a town that once made porcelain for the imperial court…. which has been saved from bankruptcy by making small sunflower seeds. The seeds all look exactly identical, but are, in fact, unique.
All of the seeds symbolize the masses of China. Each piece is a part of the whole work, in the same way that each Chinese person is just a piece of the whole of China as a body of people. In a sense, Ai Weiwei is showing the power China has in it's people, even in just the fact that they can get a whole town to just make these seeds. He seems to be saying "Hey, look at us… know what we have that you don't?? We have the power of the masses. Even if we don't have certain resources, or even if we are going bankrupt (Jingdezhen), we have people that can do stuff, and that's pretty awesome." It really brings home the idea of the whole "Made in China" concept, too, where China's people crank out stuff for the Western world to consume. As Ben Valentine writes, "Ai used a factory of workers to talk about factory labor and Chinese ideals concerning individuality; the contradictions are embedded in the piece, which may be why it’s so compelling."
The use of the seeds is important as well. They, as already stated, represented the masses of China, which had been depicted as sunflowers turning to the sun (Mao) in propaganda during the Cultural Revolution. Ai Weiwei himself said,"Chairman Mao is the sun and all the ordinary people loyal to the party are the sunflowers." The fact that Weiwei made his piece into a body of seeds directly references to that, and could indeed too be reminding people of the "Great Leap Forward" campaign of Mao to turn China from an agrarian society to a more "modern" society… a campaign that caused millions of deaths due to starvation. Sunflower seeds were shared in these times of social unrest ("Sunflower seeds were also the frugal diet on which many peasants only just managed to survive during 'The Great Leap Forward'") and were kind of a symbol of friendship and compassion.
In light of all of these meanings, Weiwei's placement of this work in a museum, where it can be interacted with, is really interesting. Putting these seeds here for the public to touch and interact with was a way of sharing his seeds with the world.
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