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CAI GUO-QIANG: I Want to Believe
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
By Thomas Hollingworth
This is the most comprehensive survey to date of the innovative body of work by Cai Guo-Qiang (last name pronounced tsai; given name gwo chang). The exhibition, I Want to Believe, is Cai’s first solo exhibition at the Guggenheim, and it also represents the museum’s first solo show devoted to a Chinese-born artist.
Conceived as a spectacular site-specific installation within the museum’s galleries, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Rotunda, I Want to Believe charts the artist’s creation and development of a distinctive visual and conceptual language across four mediums: gunpowder drawings; sitespecific explosion events; large-scale installations; and social projects
Presenting more than eighty works from the 1980s to the present, the exhibition, organized by Thomas Krens, former director of the Guggenheim Foundation, and Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian art, occupies most of the museums 46,797sq.ft., and is nothing if not action packed. Explosions resonate throughout the galleries, and startling cinematic sights of suspended objects and wildlife speak to a flare for theatrics that rivals a Hollywood action movie; in this regard it is perhaps relevant that the artist studied set design.
Installations feature heavily in I Want to Believe. Some, such as Reflection — A Gift From Iwaki, rise from the depths, where as others, Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf — The Ark of Genghis Khan, hang suspended. The most impressive (and simultaneously tragic) of these air borne aesthetics are Head On and Inopportune: Stage 1.
Head On, in which a sleigh run consisting of ninetynine wolves barrel in a continuous stream the length of the gallery and crash head on into a glass wall, was conceived in Germany in 2006. Like much of Cai’s work it engages vividly with politics. The plate glass that the hapless wolves gallop into is, the artist explains, “not an exact replica of the Berlin Wall. I wanted a transparent boundary, harder to see and harder to escape from.” Similarly, the wolves themselves aren’t taxidermy, but instead are made from the hides of Fujian farm goats, rebuilt around straw and papier mâché frames; the teeth are resin. They were fabricated at Quanzhou Xinwen, a craft factory run by the artist’s brother. The visual impact is so impressive that it almost distracts from the work. Like Hollywood, however, this epic scale can seem pompous and disappointingly apparent. The sin of indulging in such razzle-dazzle image making in the movies is that the special effects often have little bearing on the story; and here too, there is a sense of drama for the sake of drama. Likewise, in Inopportune: Stage two, nine arrow-studded tigers writhe somewhat coarsely in suspended agony.
Inopportune: Stage One, 2004, consists of white American cars — this time they’re real — cascading in a freeze-frame back-flip down through the central atrium of the museum’s famed rotunda. As they fall, colored lights pulse along transparent rods that protrude from them like sparks, or jets of fiber-optically illuminated blood.
Aside from his obvious flare for installation, Cai seems fascinated with gunpowder, which he uses to make scorch patterns and for his staged “explosion events” that have been performed in some twenty cities around the world and photographed.
His best-known explosion on a massive scale was Transient Rainbow, 2002. Commissioned by MoMA, it celebrated the opening of the museum’s temporary exhibition space in Queens. The event consisted of exploding fireworks that formed a colorful arch at dusk over the East River from Manhattan to Queens. Referencing the events of 9/11 in New York, Cai said he wanted to show that “something used for destruction and terror can also be constructive, beautiful, and healing.”
In another of his site specific explosion events, Fetus Movement II: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 9, 1992, the artist sat in meditation at the center of an explosion event at Bundeswehr-Wasserubungsplatz, a German military base. Cai juxtaposed a site that has violent connotations with the healing practice of feng shui by filling the outermost circle and innermost circle with water from a nearby river, illustrating the feng shui principle that "water does not rot". Each of the other concentric circles were lined with gunpowder fuses, as were the transverse lines segmenting the circles. The artist positioned himself in the center of the concentric circles, connected to an electrocardiograph and an electroencephalograph to monitor his heart and brainwaves during the explosion. Nine sensors were buried around the outside perimeter of the outermost circle and attached to a seismograph to chart the movement of the earth. The resulting data from each instrument are printed as a composite and depicts the inextricable relationship between man, the earth, and the universe.
This project in particular, combined with the success of Transient Rainbow, 2002 has meant that Cai’s explosions have come to been seen, if not marketed, as therapeutic. For example, the Guggenheim now describes Cai’s practice among other things as “drawing freely from ancient mythology, Taoist cosmology, Buddhist philosophy, and Chinese medicine”. Although such shamanistic practices are not new, the presentation now of a “world healer” by a globalizing art institution is curious.
There are also art historical and critical questions surrounding his work, questions that might emerge from what some call the Guggenheim phenomena and the confluence of entertainment and therapy that persistently governs Cai Guo-Ciang's practice.
The feat and feel of this retrospective arguably owes much to the ambitions of the Guggenhiem under Thomas Krens. With I Want to Believe Krens has once again produced a spectacle of immense proportions conceived more as monument to art than an appreciation of specific work. Rosalind Krauss describes Krens's Guggenheim as an enterprise based upon “fun fair exploitation”... “The modern museum was resolutely historical, endlessly rehearsing the unfolding of modernism’s discoveries in the field of formal research, of social analysis, of psychological rebellion. In order to mount this narrative, such a museum had to be encyclopedic. The new museum, Krens argued, would need to forego this array, replacing it with just a few artists shown in great quantity over vast amounts of space. History would thus be jettisoned in favor of a kind of intensity of experience, an aesthetic charge that is not so much temporal (historical) as it is now radically spatial.”[1]
Krauss’ comments speak of an empire that bases the institutional conditions of exhibiting art upon the model of Disneyland. I Want to Believe, a title itself burdened by the stuff of the entertainment industry, hints at the strain of an international art star with plenty of resources and little time to think things through — revealing perhaps that contemporary art practices can mirror the exhausted ambitions of the institutions that support them. These arguable flaws notwithstanding, the work of Cai Guo-Qiang is at times breathtaking.
Notes:
[1] Rosalind Krauss, in Art Since 1900: Modernism, Postmodernism, Antimodernism, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yves Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Volume Two, Thames and Hudson, c. 2004, p. 578.
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From Art Basel to ShContemporary
A Conversation with Lorenzo Rudolf
By M. Brendon MacInnis
While much of the press coverage of the second edition of ShContemporary will likely focus on the event and its related promotional activities, we take a moment to revisit a conversation this magazine had with Lorenzo Rudolf, the show’s founding director. Mr. Rudolf discusses the history behind the launch of The Asia Pacific Art Fair, or simply, ShContemporary, organized by BolognaFiere SpA, which takes place this month, September 10-13, at the palatial Shanghai Exposition Center. Tapping into a fascinating history that began in Basel, Switzerland, a portrait emerges of one of the international art world’s true innovators as Mr. Rudolf recalls how it all began.
Can you tell me something about your background?
I was born in Switzerland, grew up in Switzerland, in Bern. Studied law, to become a lawyer. Afterwards, international PR, in an international banking environment.
You did public relations for an international bank?
Yeah.
How long did you do that?
For two years; that was two and half years. Then in Basel, I was director of the art fair [Art Basel].
How did that come about?
They had a situation that the first director, who stayed there for twenty-five years, he retired. And they looked for a new director, and I was interested. I was already in the art scene since a long time, much more on the private side.
So you were a private dealer and Basel?
No, no, I was not a private dealer, I was, so, an artist. Oh? I had a lot of contacts in the Swiss art scene, and then I came in contact with them [Art Basel] and after a lot of discussions, they wanted me as their new director, and I became the second director.
When was that?
That was early 1991, when I started. Then for ten years, I was director of Art Basel. When I started in Basel, Art Basel was an art fair in the classical sense; back then art fairs were like trade shows. That means you sold someone a space, a booth, and if somebody comes, beautiful, if somebody doesn’t come, you have to find someone else to pay for the space. It was a trade show. And then, when I started, that was at the peak of the crisis in the art market…
Okay, I knew that from the perspective of New York, but I guess it was worldwide.
Absolutely it was a worldwide crisis in the art market. The art market was really down. And so, I had there the chance —because, first of all, I was not coming out of the fair environment — so I had the chance to really change things in a totally different way, with a totally different perspective. I wanted to do things different from the way that other fairs were functioning. So, I made an entirely new concept of Art Basel —it became a brand; it became a quality label; it became an event. I started to bring in the first sponsors for an art event, there was UBS…
So, up until that time the fair was supported only by exhibition fees?
Yes, a classical trade show, like I told you; you sell space to an exhibitor, and instead of a company who brings in some chairs, or whatever, it was galleries.
That’s interesting, because today it seems that all art fairs have sponsors, in fact now you don’t do an art fair without a sponsor.
Yes, that was the first time, and then there were huge discussions; how is a possible, art and sponsoring? Blah blah blah. Then I invented also new formats, like this “Art Statements” for the young galleries. “Art Unlimited” for those projects that are not presentable in a classical booth.
You know, I remember when that was introduced, because I happened to be doing an internship with one of the participating galleries back then; Galerie Sollertis, a French gallery from Toulouse.
So what I did was to really change the form of an “art fair”. And the concept of this new art fair is still now functioning. I invented the VIP treatment, that says that the first, the most important guest, is not the gallery but the collector. So we really changed it step by step. And the last project that I did as director was the strategy and the launch of Art Basel Miami Beach. Then in late autumn of 1999 I got a phone call from Frankfurt, where they asked me if I would be interested to come to Frankfurt, to become the director of the Frankfurt Book Fair.
I see.
And after quite a long time of reflection, I accepted
About Basel… I was wondering, who actually owns Art Basel?
Art Basel belongs to the Basel Fair, the fair enterprise [Messe Basel] which has its own fair grounds, that all belongs to the company, Messe Basel.
I ask that question because, when you bring all of this innovation to the table — you know, these are really your ideas, in effect, your intellectual property — to basically make a new fair, how does that work out? Do you have some feeling about the fact that other people benefit from your intellectual property, so to say, I mean your ideas, after you leave…
Well, I think whenever you work for a company, wherever you are in this world working, when you do something new, that’s not confidential, everybody can see it, and copy it. The question is something else; you always have to be one or two steps ahead of everybody else. And that’s happened.
Why did you decide it was time to leave Art Basel? I didn’t decide that it was time to leave Art Basel, I was not even thinking to leave Art Basel, but if you receive such an offer, to head what is probably the biggest cultural event, worldwide, as is the Frankfurt Book Fair, then you reflect about the situation. The Frankfurt Book Fair is really the meeting point for the global publishing industry. You have publishing industries wherever you have languages —the written word, books and everything. Nowadays the publishing industry is not only that, it’s multi-media, it’s really everything. Just so you see, a bit, the dimension; the Frankfurt Book Fair has around 6,700 exhibitors from all over the world. The press conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair draws around 14,000 journalists. It’s a dimension, on such a scale, that you really have to consider an offer like that, to be the director.
But I thought that Leipzig was the center for book publishing in Germany? Perhaps I’m thinking of the former “East Germany”…
No, no. Frankfurt; what Basel is, what the Olympics are for sports, Frankfurt is for the publishing industry — that begins with the books, on through to multi-media. That’s including Time-Warner, Bertelsmann, everything.
So it’s not restricted by the language?
No. It’s really global; it’s really global.
So, how long did you do that?
I did it for a bit more than three years.
Three years? I thought that when you left Art Basel, it sort of segued into Art Basel Mimi Beach…
No, I invented Art Basel Miami Beach; I launched the project, the strategy, everything was done, and then I consulted with them [Frankfurt Book Fair], and then I handed it [Art Basel Miami Beach] over to my assistant at that time, who became then my successor, that was Sam Keller.
Sam Keller — I remember, that was the PR guy in Basel.
Yes, yes. Then I went back to Frankfurt.
Okay… And I stayed in Frankfurt for more than three years.
Why did you leave?
I left Frankfurt for two reasons. First of all, they wanted me to really develop the Frankfurt Book Fair even more into a globalized… let’s say, into an event that reflects the globalization of the publishing world. The problem was, however, there were two things: One thing is that the owner of the Frankfurt Book Fair is the German Association of Publishers. That means 90 percent of the members of this Association are small, national publishers. They have, in the end, no interest to become even more globally affected. And the other thing is, not only publishers are in the Association, but also booksellers; and there is no bookseller in the world who is interested in globalization. So you had daily conflicts there, between the direction that, for example, the advisory board wanted to go in, and the owners of the fair, their interests.
And at the same time, the publishing industry had gone through huge changes in the last ten years. Before, you had a situation where you had intellectual publishers. Nowadays all of these publishing groups, they have disappeared, or they were bought by huge companies, huge holdings; nowadays the publishing market worldwide is dominated by a couple of huge holdings; and your publishers, there are not really the intellectual publishers any more, it’s all just managers.
So at the end of the day, you decided that you had done as much as you could there…
At the end of the day I decided that; no, it was no longer the field that I like, because I don’t have any more the intellectual discussion, discourse and exchange. It’s much more a management job, only looking at numbers. So I decided to go back to where my real passion is, to the contemporary — to the arts. And then after that, I went to America. I did some projects. Among others, I did this Fine Art and Antique Show in Palm Beach.
I know that fair. You worked also with Natalia Hnatiuk…
Yes, and I engaged Natalia as the director of the contemporary art fair in Palm Beach. But I think even more important and interesting than the contemporary art fair was this Fine Art and Antiques Show, which became, in just two years’ time, I would say one of the most exclusive ones in the States. At this time I lived also in the States, in Miami. And then began all the thinking and reflection, together with Pierre Huber and I, about what is going on in the art market, what is going on in the international scene, and what globalization means, and so on; and out of that came, then, the concept for the show here [ShContemporary].
Whose idea was it do a show in China?
Everybody came to the same conclusion… The market in the future will shift more and more to Asia.
Already, when I left Basel, I told my successor, Sam — I said: “Sam, I prepared for you Miami, and now the next step you have to do will be Asia, will be China.” And nothing happened.
And so, when I met again with Pierre, and we discussed, and then we decided; yes, we have to think about doing this. And then we looked for a partner because we needed also an operational partner... So we took a year, and did a very intense investigation of the global market — where are the trends for the future? In which direction will the market probably develop? And on the basis of this analysis we developed the concept that would become this fair [ShContemporary]. Together, with our partner, Bolognafiere, we decided; now let’s realize it.
So then, this time, you’re not just the director; I guess you’re an owner. Right?
Okay, what we decided; that’s now a practical question… To do something in China, it’s not exactly, from a legal point of view, the same as doing something in America. That’s the reason we said, okay, the first event we will do on the basis that Bolognafiere, [Mauro Malfatti] our partner, is the organizer, the official organizer, legally. And we work with and are related to them on a contractual basis. The next step, after having done the first show, is to form a common company where you have shareholders.
I understand that, in order to do business in China, you need a license from the Chinese authorities. What happens if, once your company gets off the ground, and is successful, someone there in the bureaucracy decides to take your license and give it to some else? I mean, they could say, “Okay, thank you very much; we appreciate your help, and now we’ll just take things over from here”. How do you protect your investment?
You, as a journalist, you work a lot with a computer….
Yes, okay.
Let’s say, a laptop or a PC. .
Sure.
And, like every laptop or a PC, you know, there is the hardware and there is the software. Without the hardware; it is only an empty box with a lot of smoke…
I think I know we’re going with that.
They cannot do it without…
They could not do it without your connections, your know how.
Yes. Or even if they wanted to do it, then we say; okay — then we just go to another place. Now we have a position of strength; where everyone goes here in Asia, people look to their pocket, and they would follow us. So, it’s not that easy. But, of course, this is a theme that for sure we have thought about.
In the run up to the fair, there was a lot of talk, among some dealers, about the issue of censorship. Now that the fair has taken place, how has all of that played out?
Well, I’ll tell you frankly, we are dealing here in a country where there are certain delicate things, where there is censorship. It’s strange. Because on the one side you have this ideology, a certain communist ideology, and on the other side you have a kind of unbridled capitalism here that offers even more freedom than in America. That is, so long as you don’t touch certain delicate themes.
So, in other words, for this reason, there is a certain censorship. But I tell you, the censorship thing here is really peanuts. There are very, very few works of art where they, where we could not show; and on the other side, don’t forget, this is the first time that something like this [ShContemporary] has come along. Censorship people are functionaries, they’re not art historians. So, at first, they were a bit afraid of what could happen. Now they see that we are not going to cause a problem for them. I think that in the future it will go very, very smooth. Also this year, it was not a big problem.
Can you tell me something about the price structure for exhibitors? Isn’t it something like 10,000 Euros for a booth? Is that a lot for the market here?
The price is based on the square feet, and we break that down into blocks of space. You can have two blocks or three blocks, and so on. The price is within the average for international art fairs.
In the Art Basel fair, doesn’t the “Art Statements” offer reduced prices, to bring in fresh, young galleries? Is there something like that in this fair?
Yes. When I started the “Art Statements” the idea was that we wanted to support the young galleries, especially young galleries with younger artists,
Sure, to make it a more interesting fair…
What we are doing here is, we say, we don’t only want to support the young galleries; we want to position unknown artists in a way that they really have the possibility to make a statement in the international market. That, for example, is why we made the “Best of Discovery” section. But the big difference is that this is the first show where the show, itself, takes the responsibility for the content. It was us that curated the work... And in the end, the costs for such a place in “Best of Discovery” turned out to be even less, much less expensive than for a space in “Art Statements”.
Can you give me figure?
Yes, it’s a bit more than 2000 Euros for the entire space, with infrastructure and everything. So, the idea is to give real support for the artist, for them to be able to position themselves in the market.
Who is the artist, Zhou Tiehai?
He’s one of the most important artists in China; he’s one of the stars. And, for us, it’s very important, when you go to a place like this, that you don’t come and say: “We know everything, we do now a show for your country.” What’s important for us is, first of all, to know exactly this art scene, to have relationships, to be a part of this art scene, of this art market.
And for that we needed somebody who opens all of the doors for us, who makes the bridge for us, everywhere. And Zhou Tiehai was exactly this guy. He, on the one side, is a very respected artist — as I said, worldwide, not only the top here in China. He knows everybody, here; he knows everybody in the art scene; he knows everybody in the art market scene; he knows even everybody in the local scene because he’s based in Shanghai. He has an incredible network. And for us it was important to have somebody like him, as a colleague and even a friend, who opens all of the doors for us and who builds all of the bridges. He became part of this team.
So, what are you plans now that the show is over?
It’s now the first step, and I think it was a very successful first step. This fair will be developed in such a way that... First of all, every year, it will happen at the same time. It will be a yearly event. Next year, I think you’re going to have the big boom here, because, this year all that we could say [to promote the fair] was, we have a beautiful venue, please come and have confidence.
Now, however, we have a product that everyone can speak about. Next year [2008] we are going to have a constellation, because we are operating and doing it in parallel with the Biennale; and the Biennale in Shanghai is one of the most important in Asia. We are going to have the opening of the Biennale and the opening of the fair [ShContemporary] happening within two days. So that will be a beautiful attraction in the market, for everyone.
The fair will take place the same time next year?
Yes — already, in its first edition, it is, from the quality, the most important art fair in Asia. It’s the only art fair in Asia that really gives you an overview of the contemporary market — the activity here in Asia — and it’s not only China, it’s Asia. So, we want to go even more in this direction; but, on the other side, the goal and the plan is that it [ShContemporary] will become one of the two, three or four most important art fairs in the world.
You know, from what I see, I believe that’s how things will play out.
Me too, because we have something at our back that will happen, without that anyone can change it — that’s the shifting of a certain economic power to Asia.
Is there an agreement to have this venue next year? [2008] The building is incredible; it’s a palace, really.
Yes, yes we have long-term contracts and options, yes.
Okay. Well, I’m really glad that I caught up with you for this chat — fascinating history. Thanks for your time.
It was a pleasure. |
