May 6, 2008
At the Guggenheim, Cai will make you believe, too
Contributor Heesun Wee has been writing for NewYorkology since 2005. By day, she's a video segment producer for Yahoo'sTech Ticker. She’s also writing a screenplay entitled "War Photographer.� Recently she stopped by the Guggenheim, which has just announced it will stay open an extra two hours every day for the final week of Cai Guo Qiang's installation. (That's 10 a.m. to 7:45 p.m. from May 23 through May 28.)
Art in New York lately has been disappointing me. I’ve cruised through the Chelsea gallery ghetto thinking, ‘This is it?’ If I wanted cutesy prints and photographs I’d buy Domino or some other glossy fashion magazine run by cookie-cutter 30-somethings in $300 blue jeans.
But the current car-and-light installation at the Guggenheim in New York is amazing. Part of a larger retrospective, Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe, is beautiful, violent, spatially stunning, postmodern, reflective of 9/11, and East meets West -- all wrapped into one.
Inopportune: Stage One is Cai’s largest installation to date. It showcases nine real cars that are suspended in a cyclone-like progression in the central atrium of the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda. Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, has said the project "may be the best artistic transformation of the Frank Lloyd Wright space we've ever seen."
Cai, born in southern China and now living in New York City, has said constant media images of car explosions after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks inspired the project.
Whether you’re on the ground floor looking up at the swirl of cars or peering down into the tornado-like shape of metal and flashing lights, it’s as if you’re inside a massive bomb about to go off, with Wright’s cylindrical museum as the bomb’s exterior casing.
I’ve always thought of the beige museum on the trash-less Upper East Side of Manhattan as peaceful. That’s no accident. Wright created the seashell-like building with an interior circular design. You take the elevator to the top and wind down a spiral ramp as you enjoy the art seamlessly.
But by installing his art – cars, stuffed wildlife, sculptures -- in the middle of the museum’s atrium and winding ramp – Cai interrupts the spatial peace. Throughout my visit I felt the push-and-pull of the beautiful building against the violence often depicted in the art. Indeed Cai has said his work explores both the beauty and violence human beings are capable of.
BEAUTY AND VIOLENCE
 This beauty-violence juxtaposition is a recurring theme for Cai. In his gunpowder drawings, also on view at the Guggenheim, his images are made with gunpowder, fuses and traditional materials such as ink. The explosions left behind on canvases have a blurry, eerie death quality. It was as if Cai was forcing me to imagine my own gunpowder-y body silhouette, in essence my own humanity, and asking, "What are you capable of? Do you know? Do you want to know?"
Cai created many of the gunpowder drawings on multi-part panels meant to resemble Asian paper scrolls. The long, continuous images stretch and fill the museum’s ramp, another clever move by Cai to meld his art with the space it inhabits.
IT’S THE PROCESS
Cai embraces space, fluidity, movement and group activity. As part of his retrospective at the Guggenheim New York, sculptures of life-size figures working and enduring socialist torture were modeled from originals made in 1965 in China and recreated from scratch by Cai’s team of Chinese artists. He has been accused of plagiarism but he defends the project and his process.
In China, his family was able to avoid privations of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and ‘70s. Cai has said his art resembles that tumultuous period, which essentially was about the process of breaking down and recreating new Chinese traditions and ways of thinking.
Cai’s own ethos began to take shape in Quanzhou in the Fujian Province. His father, an artist, ran a bookstore for the party elite, according to the New York Times, and he slipped his son copies of "Death of a Salesman� and "Waiting for Godot,� along with introductions to Chinese painting and calligraphy. After studying in Japan, he moved to NYC in 1995. He’s now working with a team that’s planning the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympic Games this summer.
THINKING BIG
No doubt the games’ ceremonies will be big if not explosive. Over the years, Cai has staged explosion events all around the world using gunpowder and long, thick fuses that resemble fire hoses. In 1993, 100,000 locals trekked to the Gobi desert, west of the Great Wall of China, to view Cai’s Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 10, 1993. For many rural area residents, it was their first witness of a large-scale art installation. A video of the event is on display at the Guggenheim New York.
As Robert Rauschenberg’s three-dimensional collage "combines� of the 1950s cemented his place in art history, it’s Cai’s riffs on explosions and explosives, beauty and violence that make Cai a fascinating, global artist of our times.
Picture credits: All pictures provided to NewYorkology by the Gggenheim.
Cai Guo-Qiang
Inopportune: Stage One, 2004
Nine cars and sequenced multichannel light tubes
Dimensions variable
Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Robert M. Arnold, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the
Seattle Art Museum, 2006
Exhibition copy installed at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008
© Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation New York. Photo by David Heald.
Cai Guo-Qiang
Self-Portrait: A Subjugated Soul, 1985/89
Gunpowder and oil on canvas
167 x 118 cm
Collection of Leo Shih
Photo courtesy Cai Studio
Cai Guo-Qiang
Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters: Project for
Extraterrestrials No. 10, 1993
Realized at the Gobi desert, west of the Great Wall, Jiayuguan, Gansu Province,
February 27, 1993, 7:35 p.m., 15 minutes
Explosion length 10,000 m
Gunpowder (600 kg) and two fuse lines (10,000 m each)
Commissioned by p3 art and environment, Tokyo
Photo by Masanobu Moriyama, courtesy of Cai Studio
Earlier:
Guggenheim Sex: David Bouley, Dr. Ruth, Cai Guo-Qiang
May 6, 2008 12:24 PM in Architecture, Kids, Museums, Sightsology, Upper East Side
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