In early July, a cute little one-family house was suddenly standing on the empty lot at Anhalter Bahnhof, built by the Babelsberg Film Studios; on July 11, 2006, it became apparent that the house was indeed meant to serve as a prop for a film – the day Cai Guo-Qiang blew it up with a spectacular array of colorful fireworks for his action Illusion II. Now, in his recently opened one-person show Head On at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, the explosion can be seen in a wall-sized dual projection.
While the Chinese artist, who has been living and working in New York since 1995, spoke of the conflict the spectacle evokes as his audience experiences "both the beauty and destruction of the fireworks," these same viewers appeared quite relaxed as they enjoyed their Prosecco and hors d’oeuvres. And they weren’t entirely wrong in their amused curiosity. As Europeans, fireworks still symbolize the Baroque spirit to them, the purest way of celebrating the art of squandering. Each bang and spark-spewing, colorful constellation costs money that everyone and everything depends on and that’s being simply pulverized here. And we still – today very democratically – love the showy expenditure of fireworks, which, to the point of absurdity, nullify any questions concerning cost, purpose, and utility.
The beauty of fireworks derives from a pleasure in the thing itself, the magnificent rain of fire whose artful choreography transcends the profane appearance of violence and destruction. It is an attitude that springs from European thought. When gunpowder made its way from China to Europe in the late 13th century, it was only used for decorative fireworks after being implemented in warfare. It was above all during the Baroque period that firework displays were put on as regular theatrical events. Craftsmen built complete architectural replicas and artists skillfully painted props as fire workers brought countless serpents, rockets, and cherry bombs into position. Dragons represented the attackers and, led by a string, slithered to the fortress to unleash a carefully planned chain reaction. Then, ear-splitting cherry bombs were detonated, pinwheels spun their tracks of light across the sky, and serpents flew out to confound the enemy. In the end, the enemy’s stronghold was blown up to the deafening sound of thunder – just like at Anhalter Bahnhof, because Illusion II, which premiered in Berlin, is an inescapable part of this tradition.
When the artist, who was born in 1957 in Quanzhou, decided in 1981 to study at the theater academy in Shanghai, he came into contact with European theater tradition, which also draws on the Baroque love of spectacle. In contrast with that of the art academies, the program at the theater academy was capable of carrying on an international dialogue. The discussions were conceptual in nature, as Cai Guo-Qiang recalls. Along with practical instruction ranging from the initial proposal to budget planning, production, and finally the performance itself, the discussions over the set, the use of light, and above all the treatment of space and time were crucial to Cai’s artistic development.
When he finished his studies, Cai Guo-Qiang initially immersed himself in oil painting. He had already, however, begun working with the material that was to continue to determine his artistic work for some time and that would bind him to his Chinese heritage: gunpowder. Cai implemented it as a kind of random factor in order to influence the form and color in his oil paintings. At this point in time, in 1986, he received a travel grant for Japan, which took him to a country that had over the course of centuries developed its own great tradition of fireworks. While in China gunpowder was a waste product of alchemical experiments in search of new cures, and hence called "fire medicine," the Japanese term hana-bi, "Flowers of Fire," clearly underlines the aesthetic aspect, which seems more related to the Western view.
In their site-specific nature, the Gunpowder Drawings and firework performances that Cai developed in Japan had far more in common with the notion of "fire medicine." But they also kindled a spark in their Japanese audience, with their great reverence for the tradition of hana-bi. The interest Cai’s work met with here might have proved puzzling, because Cai’s fire art had nothing whatsoever to do with the ordinary image of fire flowers. But Cai Guo-Qiang attained a measure of success in Japan with one fundamental idea of his artistic work: using the strength of his opponent in accordance with the teachings of Asian martial arts. Cai, who played in martial arts films as a young man, returned to this again and again; he often mentions that he borrows the energy for his works from nature.
If Cai Guo-Qiang worked with fire, which would rapidly bring to mind archaic notions concerning the power of nature, this statement would be easy to understand. But he works with its probably most refined and, in terms of its historical significance, singular form, the explosion. If fire stands for nature’s energy, the explosion stands for the energy of civilization. After all, as the saying goes, nature did not invent gunpowder – human experimentation, however, did. For this reason, one might feel tempted to correct Cai. He doesn’t revert to nature, but to natural laws that are universally valid and understandable. He banks on these universal natural laws, whose widely divergent cultural use he further distorts in his artistic work, mixing it to create new images. Under closer examination, his work subscribes to rationalism and to the Enlightenment, chiefly in the form of natural science and technology – but there is also a political dimension, as earlier works testify.
Thus, he made the image symbolizing the end of civilization for the entire planet the theme of his 1996 photographic project Century with Mushroom Clouds: Project for the 20th Century. For the piece, he ignited a firecracker in his outstretched hand in various different locations, producing a ridiculous miniature of the infamous mushroom cloud. If the atom bomb is the feared ultima ratio of the explosion, its most popular form is probably the combustion engine, a motif that can also be found in Cai’s work. In the installation Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf: The Ark of Genghis Khan, which was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize in 1996, three Toyota motors power a formation made of 108 inflated sheepskins. Clearly situated in the field of contemporary artistic practice as a site-specific interactive installation, Cai Guo-Qiang’s projects prove to be urban art through and through.
Yet precisely at the point where one regards Cai Guo-Qiang’s artistic work as being rooted in urban culture and rational thought, one begins to suspect that one has been mistaking a marginal aspect of his work as being central, and that Cai himself is seeking to deflect attention from his work’s basic core. Because suddenly he invokes the spirits his grandmother once spoke to; when he dispels them, he is also dispelling the artist who was still involved with political symbols.
And one doesn’t quite know how to interpret Head On , the pack of 99 wolves currently charging at a glass wall in the Deutsche Guggenheim, which clearly recalls the now-vanished Anti-Fascist Protection Wall, as the Berlin Wall was called in the Communist East. Formally, the pack’s room-sized formation is reminiscent of a stage set, which only really unfolds to its full effect at a distance. For an installation in an art space, the animals are too close; besides, they’re disappointing in their not very wolf-like appearance. This is not least due to the soft, dyed, and brushed sheepskin they’re made of. Added to this is the fact that the wolf does not symbolize the collective heroism for us that Cai Guo-Qiang spoke of in his talk with Harald Fricke and Oliver Körner von Gustorf; instead, we associate the wolf with a dangerous slyness, an image that’s difficult to reconcile with the history of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Furthermore, we traditionally see wolves as coming from the East, that endless space of yore that is no longer a part of civilization. In this sense, they belong to the symbolic order of archaic fire, although they too have an carefully planned explosion to thank for their existence. At least in the huge gunpowder drawing Vortex, which corresponds to The Making of Vortex, the video film of the magnificent fireworks. Shortly before the show’s opening, a few people were permitted to watch a drawing being made. In the framework of a small, cultivated event for the friends of the Guggenheim and the press, the artist appeared as a technician providing concise information on the making of the drawing and the process of the explosion.
Yet he prefers to mask this pose with a Far-Eastern esoteric mystique that seems strange, added on after the fact. In all probability, where his compositions no longer obey self-imposed rules of art, but the laws of Feng Shui, Cai Guo-Qiang is once again using the strength of his opponent – and the fabled beings, tigers, and dragons that populate the China of a mythical past quite possibly derive from nothing more than our own Western expectations and clichés. In this case, we’re merely irritated by an approach that we otherwise know as marketing, that signifies art in the age of its wellness function. This is the moment when we should insist that the seductive, tense aesthetic of Cai Guo-Qiang’s explosive work is due to chemistry: that it lends an artistic expression to universally valid natural laws: physics, far more than any metaphysics.
Translation: Andrea Scrima
28. August 2006
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