 assing under 9 full-sized cars exploding with rays of flashing colored light rods hung in the vast Guggenheim atrium and ascending the ramp along with a gaggle of life-sized tigers, each shot with multi arrows and writhing in agony, is a bit over the top. Yet the space welcomes this spectacular. What a way to start an exhibition! Cai Guoqiang's education in stage design gave him a great start toward presenting this drama to Gotham`s workers,  peasants, and soldiers. Chairman Mao called for art for the masses in his 1942 Talks on Art and Literature. Like Roman rulers who demanded Bread and Circus, Mao sought to win the hearts and minds of ordinary people. Thrills and then,the eternal questions. What does it mean? Is it art?
The director of the Guggeheim Foundation Thomas Krens calls Cai Guoqiang the most powerful artist working today, a magician; co-Curator Alexandra Munroe points to Cai’s confrontation of violence and harmony as a brilliant synthesis of nature’s powers, seen and unseen, that draws on ancient Chinese alchemy, extraterrestrial signs and myths. Cai’s pyrotechnics are internationally famous, as are his installation events.
Are the cars of Importune: Stage One exploding because of car bombs or are they playing out road rage? Or is this the Last Judgment -- our atomic annihilation? With total demolition of our world in mind, why do we read these suspended flashing emanations as a mesmerizing vision that has a kind of beauty?
Why does Cai shoot so many arrows into all those tigers in Importune: Stage Two? In Chinese 20th century painting those, heroic beasts have often been symbols of courage and patriotism. A scroll of 99 tigers that was painted by the artist’s father hangs on a nearby wall.  Cai’s father was an old-time, amateur literati artist. Is the son killing off the father and his art, following Chairman Mao’s exhortations to destroy the old and create a new, revolutionary China? That is the line Mao preached when Cai was growing up during the Cultural Revolution.
Yet another animal installation, Head On, snakes up the ramp like a scroll unrolling. The pack of 99 perfectly synchronized wolves dashes in unison toward a blank wall, hitting it with such force that the wolves drop to the ground broken or dead. Their aerial arc and fall are breathtaking Is Cai reminding us that even wolves are sheep, following the leader regardless of how suicidal the consequences? And adding another layer to his lesson, are the skins he painted to simulate the wolves made from sheepskins? If so, they are really wolves in sheep’s clothing. Is Cai drawing from his own Chinese experience and dissing the exhortations of Mao’s Cultural Revolution call to action? Like the exploding cars, the composition of the running pack has a rhythm and beauty that overtakes its fate.
The exhibition, "Cai Guoqiang: I Want to Believe," has many provocative installations, including Venice’s "Rent Collectors Courtyard," for which Cai won the grand prize at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999. Courtyard, this multi-figured clay sculptural installation, follows Mao’s dictum that art must serve the revolution. It is a potently persuasive political, propaganda piece that features life-sized clay figures of the evil Capitalist landlord and the exploited peasants who worked for him. With whip raised, the landlord and his gang watch the underpaid peasants carry 70 pound bags and drag plows twice their size and is indifferent to the indignities suffered by underfed mothers, children and old folk. This dramatization is the classic Communist portrayal of how the masses were exploited in China’s fedual society .  Class struggle was the crux of Mao’s rule, and this family was its symbol.
Cai recreated the sculpture group that was originally made in on the eve of the Cultural Revolution in 1965, subsequently reproduced and installed in many places in China. Its purpose was to raise the political consciousness of the masses so they would be properly outraged and denounce continuing exploitation in struggle meetings.
Does Cai’s recreation evoke outrage in the Guggenheim visitor? It would take a totally unfeeling person not to be moved by this dramatic scene. Is he demonstrating the power of propaganda art to persuade us of the evils of Feudalism and Capitalism? Or is he making us examine our own lifestyle for any guilty conscience of exploitation? As the clay figures dry and crack, they will disintegrate. Does this a remind us of our future?
Cai’s work is best known for his explosion events. The city of his birth, Quanzhou in Fujian province, is famous for its production of gun powder and fireworks. He builds from his birthright and has created sizeable explosion events all over the world. Documentation of those explosions is displayed on videos, in photographs and on paper that has been burned by the gunpowder.
A famous explosion event concerning Cai’s patrimony is his Project to "Extend The Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters: Project for Extraterrestrials No.10."  Set dramatically in the Gobi desert beyond the Wall’s end at Jiayuguan in Gansu province, his line of fiery towers snakes over and around the dunes beyond the end of the Wall where the illumination burned for 15 minutes. He plays on the fantasy that the Great Wall is visible from the Moon and that this explosion event could put him in touch with unseen, otherworldly beings.
Another fiery event celebrates the "Project for Heiankyo 1,200 Anniversary: Celebration from Changan," also singular in concept and performance. In 794 A.D. the ancient capital of Japan, Kyoto, then called HeianKyo, was established and modeled after the capital of the great Tang dynasty, Changan, currently called Xii`an. Cai dug trenches in front of Kyoto City Hall, shaping them to trace back in ancient seal script; he filled the trenches with Xi`an’s provincial wine, generously donated by Shaanxi province, and it burned with a blue flame for 60 minutes. The installation looked very much like a dragon celebrating the deep Chinese/Japanese cultural bond.
"The Century with Mushroom Clouds: Project for the 20th Century" remembers the horror of the atomic bomb and nuclear proliferation. But at the same time Cai notes that the mushroom cloud is a symbol of progress and victory of science? Cai created his mushroom cloud(s) in many places in America, including in front of the New York City skyline, the Atomic Nevada Test site and Robert Smithson’s "Spiral Jetty." He detonated tubes loaded with gunpowder to create the "Cloud," which lasted 1 second and puffed up to resemble a mushroom cloud. Photographs testify to these events. In Cai’s view, the horror of destruction is linked with its creativity; he is applying the Marxian dialectic of the unity of opposing forces, which creates the dynamic energy he seeks.
Cai’s Gunpowder Drawings sit grandly on the Guggenheim ramp as it spirals up. These compositions were all created through Cai’s anointed technique, gun powder, an explosive, mysterious and unpredictable medium. He uses it as if it were ink or oil, with calculated but not totally controlled results.
Cai had begun experimenting with explosives while still in China, just before he left for Japan in 1985. He laid gun powder on a canvas already painted with oil. "In Self Portrait: A Subjugated Soul, 1985/89," "Self Portrait" is sparse and solemnly expressive, like a Giacometti. His body looks like a cadaver on the canvas, and the explosions give the aura of an other-worldly halo. Cai was in Japan on June 4, 1989 during Beijing’s tragic Tiananmen massacre. He later reworked "Self Portrait" as we currently see it.
 Still in Japan in the 1990s, he began using special hemp fiber paper for his gunpowder drawings, sometimes with stencils or other forms to shape the course of the detonation. Cai relishes the pregnant moment after lighting the fuse and before the explosion, which he analogizes with the penultimate moment of sexual union and the explosion itself is the finale. He finds the chance involved in this process exciting and an important element of his work.
"Extension" was created in 1994, the year after his "Project to Extend the Great Wall" was realized, and is mounted as a 12 panel folding screen, 236 x 1,560cm. The "Wall`s" balletic twists and turns, rise and descend around the mountainous landscape undulating like the Wall itself or a dragon. Its charred course wreathes across the surface, having burnt a powerfully vertiginous and acrobatic path.
"Inverted Pyramid On the Moon: Project for Humankind No. 3, 1991" addresses Cai’s’s interest in the seen and unseen, the living and the dead, our world and the universe. He proposes ethereal communication between the spirits in the pyramids. Michelle Yun explains in the catalogue that Cai proposes: blasting inverted pyramids into the surface of the moon by using explosives ignited by a solar device. These negative impressions would correlate with existing pyramids on the earth and be visible from earth depending on cycles of the moon and sun.?Cai explains his goal as: the endless interplay between humanity and the cosmos ...?
 Cai draws on the folk religion and Chinese mythology that he learned as a child, just as he mines Mao’s ideology and socialist goals. His high level of thinking metastasizes relationships with the seen and unseen. He teases his subjects and materials to perform magic and address universal issues of ideology and mysticism.
How to measure the success of this master showman whose projects are profound but lack easy access to understanding? We must admire his ability to attract a crowd, mobilize a community to help in some of his projects and create something that makes people think --even if the artist’s message is only understood partially and imperfectly.
Cai is brilliant.
 Joan Lebold Cohen, author of “The New Chinese Painting, 1949-1986,” has been writing about contemporary Chinese art for more than 35 years.
|
