Under the Sign of the Crocodile
Cai Guo-Qiang – A
Chinese Art Star in New York
Cai Guo-Qiang prepares a Gunpowder Drawing
on the premises of the Grucci company, 2006, Photo: Maria Morais
This summer, the Chinese art star Cai Guo-Qiang will be having a large one-man
exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. In anticipation of the
show, Deutsche Bank Art organized a press trip to New York. The itinerary
included a visit to Cai's studio and a trip out to Long Island, where Cai
creates his explosive works. Oliver Koerner von Gustorf went along
and met with black clouds, mysterious crocodiles, and "America's First
Family of Fireworks."
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On the roof of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York,
Alessandra di Giusto and Friedhelm Hütte, Photo: Maria Morais
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On this particular spring day, New York looks like a dream
in Technicolor – as though it had merely been waiting for
Cai Guo-Qiang's artwork Clear Sky Black Cloud. The cherry trees are
in bloom in Central Park, and vendors are selling hotdogs and ice cream. A
crystal-clear, cloudless blue sky presides over the city, and when the
light wind subsides, you can already feel the warmth of summer. The clear
light makes every color seem more brilliant, even artificial: the garish
letters on the cheap imitation
Louis Vuitton handbags, the billboards and flags, the yellow of the
taxis speeding by. The roof garden at the
Metropolitan Museum is walled in by bamboo hedges; crowds of people
collect there to stare into the air, armed with sunglasses and cameras, as
though they were awaiting the landing of a UFO.
Clear Sky Black Cloud, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006, Photo:
Maria Morais
Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof:
Transparent Monument is the title of the
open-air exhibition that also includes a highly fleeting work of art.
Through October, a black cloud appears here every day at exactly twelve
noon above the skyline of Manhattan.
When it's time today, it all
happens so quickly that we hardly have a chance to blink: a load of
gunpowder explodes above our heads in a loud, brief bang, leaving a dark
trail of smoke in the sky that spreads like a spot of spilled ink. It
dissipates within seconds, as though it had never even been there.
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Transparent Monument, Metropolitan
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2006, Photo: Maria Morais
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At first, this work of the Chinese artist seems rather
unspectacular, but then an initial perplexity gives way to the realization
that this temporary sculpture has just burned a hole in the sky for a
moment, as though the alleged reality of the beautiful day were nothing
more than a projection. And then there's Cai Guo-Qiang's Transparent
Monument, a glass plate several meters in height that enhances this
impression. Like a transparent canvas, it frames the images of the city in
spring, the parks and skyscrapers. Imitation birds are installed on both
sides of the gigantic plate, fake pigeons that have presumably broken
their necks after flying into the invisible barrier, for which there is
neither an inside nor an outside.
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Transparent Monument, Metropolitan
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2006, Photo: Maria Morais
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One recalls, perhaps, that
September 11, 2001 was also a clear, beautiful day and that the black
clouds rising that morning from the World Trade Center were reproduced in
the millions by the mass media and branded into the collective
consciousness – initially as an unreal image impossible to comprehend, and
then as a symbol for a new calculation of time. In this regard, Cai's
exhibition on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum also addresses life in
the post-9/11 world.
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Nontransparent Monument, Detail,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006
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On the other hand, his Nontransparent Monument of
green limestone seems like an antithesis to the glass plate. Nine panels
form a wall approximately ten meters wide into which tragic, comical, or
even banal mass media images have been chiseled: news images from Iraq,
public appearances by the American president
George Bush , homosexual marriage ceremonies, scenes from TV news, parades
and demonstrations. While the stone slab comes across as an archaeological
finding from a long lost culture, archaic monsters preside on the roof
garden's balustrade: two crocodiles, each of them impaled on a wooden
stake. In his installation Move Along, Nothing to See Here, Cai
lets the animals, symbols for insidiousness, danger, and evil, appear as
protective spirits. The artificial reptiles are drilled through with
knives, screwdrivers, and other sharp objects confiscated at airport
security controls.
Nontransparent Monument, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006
In various different ways, all the works shown here convey an uneasy,
ambivalent feeling; in an apparently effortless manner, they combine art,
architecture, and the gentle green hues of Central Park. Already in 1994,
at a symposium on Asian art, Cai asserted: "Art's existence… is dependent
on a large number of natural, social, and cultural factors. These factors
frequently contradict one another, and it is one of the fundamental
religious tenets of Far Eastern culture to accept these contradictions and
to look for the harmony and peaceful coexistence within them. It is quite
clear that this eastern way of thinking calls for a new methodology in
art."
Move Along, Nothing to See Here, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006,
Photo: Maria Morais
Since that time, the
Chinese artist, who was born in 1957, has attracted international
attention with his unique, multi-faceted methodology. Since the early
nineties, he has realized a large number of projects around the globe that
combine traditional Chinese art and culture with post-conceptual thought.
To achieve this purpose, Cai Guo-Qiang takes recourse to an arsenal of
highly disparate symbols, narratives, practices, and materials:
Fengshui , Chinese medicinal herbs, dragons, roller-coasters, computers,
automats, objects washed up on shore, and especially black gunpowder.
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