7th Hiroshima Art Prize: Cai Guo-Qiang
From Bonny Cassidy...
In his series of photographed process works, The Century with Mushroom Clouds (1996), New-York based Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang summons the horror of the nuclear cloud, but to what effect? Photographed in various “test sites”, Cai’s cloud (produced by gunpowder rather than atomic fission) is no longer sublimely fearsome but reduced and therefore impotent. In the image from Nevada, for instance – a location that invokes Land Art works of the sixties and seventies – the cloud appears from the hand of a human figure, toy-like by comparison to his scale. In process, though, the affect of Cai’s public fireworks, which continue to emulate the human sublime of the mushroom cloud, is uncontained and threatening.
Watching the staging of his Black Fireworks at the A-Bomb Dome in Hiroshima on November 25, I could see the work’s technical strictures of design, engineering and communication. Cai stood on the riverbank with a walkie-talkie and watched the site like a hawk; to appearances, the work was contained, even mechanical. But at the first, snaking lines of the fireworks, followed by the opening explosions, my hand shot to my chest. From the sky above the Dome, rolling charcoal clouds flowered, releasing a flock of black birds. The birds began travelling outwards in all directions, more like a synchronised squad of jets, then burst into a second tier of cloud. After ninety seconds, all that remained was a filthy blanket hanging in the air; but still I wasn’t ready to turn my back until it had dispersed without a trace.
The sublime aesthetic of Black Fireworks was intensified by the emotional shock of its historical reference. And my response had answered to both qualities, for as the terrible beauty of Cai’s conceptual design blossomed in front of me, the nature of its material substance took on more-than-human potential. It was impossible not to keep wondering, would the pyrotechnics go wrong? Was it the planned artwork we were seeing, or an unexpected catastrophe? What were those flying creatures; and what did the cloud foretell?
Cai Guo-Qiang has toyed with the awesome dynamics of explosion from urban to remote regions all over the world, including the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games Opening Ceremony. But perhaps only in his 2006 Clear Sky Black Cloud, installed for daily performances on the roof of the Met in New York, had he used that power to evoke the real fear of a non-aesthetic event as he did in Hiroshima. A menacing black wisp sailed over the blunted Manhattan skyline at scheduled hours: small enough to be a natural freak; freakish enough to be a portent of the unknown. What are the ethics of Cai’s choice to generate mortal fear and to recreate tragic realities? In an interview for the PBS series, Art in the Twenty-First Century, he explained the challenge “to depict things that are not seen but have a profound effect on us”. In a sense, he achieves this by creating a fear of human capability in his audiences. It’s the unseen potential of his process that plays with the boundary of the aesthetic. Rather than complicated technological design, his use of inventive resourcefulness – that most primate trait – harnesses, as he says, “the chaos of time and space”. As well as the planned artwork, there is the shadow work – in which “you can allow uncertainties to exist within the same space and situation”. Perhaps the sublime fear experienced by his audiences is so real because the artist feels it himself: by using the elements as his materials, “you want to set this on fire, to explode it, but yet you are afraid”.
The night of Black Fireworks, he was to be presented with the 7th Hiroshima Art Prize, awarded every seven years to acknowledge outstanding careers of international artists. But just a few days before, eyes had already been drawn to the skies of Hiroshima. A Tokyo-based collective, Chim↑Pom, hired a jet and used its vapour trail to write the hiragana characters of pika, the Japanese term for the atomic flash, above the city. Unsurprisingly, their act kicked up media attention and public controversy, as well as excitement among young artists. But it’s only in retrospect of Black Fireworks that the act by Chim↑Pom, whose studio exhibition opens at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in a few days, can be publically appreciated as more than a slacker joke or publicity stunt.
Set in dialogue, the two works generate a discussion about the influence of context and medium on types of affect, specifically, shock. Chim↑Pom knew that Black Fireworks would receive a reverent and congratulatory reception by the convening art world. Why then, their work asks, is a local group of young artists denounced as irreverent and ethically irresponsible for making a linguistic reference to the bombing of Hiroshima; and a senior international artist applauded for making the same reference with colour, light and sound? At first, Chim↑Pom’s use of a word – conscious, specific – would seem to be the more arresting act; and certainly this was confirmed by public response. I asked Italian artist Ingrid Hora, present to witness “Black Fireworks”, about the distinction between the artworks. For her, Chim↑Pom’s was the more potent because of its complex conceptualisation. Whereas Cai’s work made a literal representation, theirs was twofold: it looked back to the historical moment of the A-Bomb as well as forward in anticipation of Cai’s planned explosion.
And yet Black Fireworks is the more direct, and the more literally shocking event. Like its white, almost immediately diffused form, Chim↑Pom’s word had a delayed, abstracted realisation. It referred to itself as a concept of pika. Cai’s explosion, on the other hand, refers to pika itself. Taking roughly the same time to complete as Chim↑Pom’s action, it was, unlike theirs, thick and black and persistent. It gave to the ephemeral substance of cloud a lingering afterlife. Perhaps, then, it was the works’ different modes of execution that impacted on their reception. Chim↑Pom acted by stealth, mysteriously appearing on an unremarkable weekday. This way, their work enacted the original pika in a physical way that, otherwise, the word itself could not. In contrast, like the writ-large tableaux in much of his work, Cai’s staging – consistent with his experience in theatre design – was a widely advertised public date on the weekend of a major art event. Even if its image and sensation were hidden until the moment of its realisation, the concept of “Black Fireworks” had been suggested by its location and his medium. As such, Cai had effectively paved the way to his work with an apologia. Chim↑Pom’s self-defence came in the form of an explanation and apology to the press.
Although it was conceptually mild, “Black Fireworks” was possibly the more successful work as a process. Arguably, this is true of many of Cai’s works, which hit the body hard and yet can be crudely symbolic or discursively shallow. For Cai, the experiential or processual aspect of his art – its material thingness and the source of human error – remains its most effective and important. “Of course”, he says, “there’s a concept behind it, but never mind the concept—just the very fact is a difficult thing to overcome”. It’s almost regrettable that Black Fireworks was presented in a polite and prepared context, and not in the guerilla style adopted by Chim↑Pom. For it’s clear that Cai is not after the beautiful or picturesque – or if he is, it’s of a kind that’s “unfashionable or inappropriate, or inopportune”. His works’ lack of irony places it in a category of the austere in contemporary art that includes Bill Viola, Bill Henson and Richard Serra – a category identified by its use of shadows. This distances it from a good deal of current Chinese art that urgently draws its form from political statement, often ironic. Indeed, whilst Ai Wei Wei and other Chinese artists withdrew from involvement in the Beijing Olympics, Cai was the one who noticeably remained. Why? Perhaps, and this is presuming much, he felt that something could be said, without words, between the screaming lines of his fireworks. “There’s a lot of talk about the content of my work, about the subject matter or the historical background”, Cai notes. “But there’s not a real in-depth investigation into the visual impact. It’s through visual impact that you can transmit these ideas. And it’s through visual impact that this pain is felt”.
As the party for the Hiroshima Art Prize mingled on the terrace of the Museum of Contemporary Art, I could still smell cordite in the night air, and the city below was sparked with a thousand neon flashes.
Bonny Cassidy is undertaking an Asialink literature fellowship in Japan, supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation, and currently in residence at Akiyoshidai International Art Village. This piece, part of the resulting work, is drawn from an unpublished essay on “The human sublime”.
In his series of photographed process works, The Century with Mushroom Clouds (1996), New-York based Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang summons the horror of the nuclear cloud, but to what effect? Photographed in various “test sites”, Cai’s cloud (produced by gunpowder rather than atomic fission) is no longer sublimely fearsome but reduced and therefore impotent. In the image from Nevada, for instance – a location that invokes Land Art works of the sixties and seventies – the cloud appears from the hand of a human figure, toy-like by comparison to his scale. In process, though, the affect of Cai’s public fireworks, which continue to emulate the human sublime of the mushroom cloud, is uncontained and threatening.
Watching the staging of his Black Fireworks at the A-Bomb Dome in Hiroshima on November 25, I could see the work’s technical strictures of design, engineering and communication. Cai stood on the riverbank with a walkie-talkie and watched the site like a hawk; to appearances, the work was contained, even mechanical. But at the first, snaking lines of the fireworks, followed by the opening explosions, my hand shot to my chest. From the sky above the Dome, rolling charcoal clouds flowered, releasing a flock of black birds. The birds began travelling outwards in all directions, more like a synchronised squad of jets, then burst into a second tier of cloud. After ninety seconds, all that remained was a filthy blanket hanging in the air; but still I wasn’t ready to turn my back until it had dispersed without a trace.
The sublime aesthetic of Black Fireworks was intensified by the emotional shock of its historical reference. And my response had answered to both qualities, for as the terrible beauty of Cai’s conceptual design blossomed in front of me, the nature of its material substance took on more-than-human potential. It was impossible not to keep wondering, would the pyrotechnics go wrong? Was it the planned artwork we were seeing, or an unexpected catastrophe? What were those flying creatures; and what did the cloud foretell?
Cai Guo-Qiang has toyed with the awesome dynamics of explosion from urban to remote regions all over the world, including the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games Opening Ceremony. But perhaps only in his 2006 Clear Sky Black Cloud, installed for daily performances on the roof of the Met in New York, had he used that power to evoke the real fear of a non-aesthetic event as he did in Hiroshima. A menacing black wisp sailed over the blunted Manhattan skyline at scheduled hours: small enough to be a natural freak; freakish enough to be a portent of the unknown. What are the ethics of Cai’s choice to generate mortal fear and to recreate tragic realities? In an interview for the PBS series, Art in the Twenty-First Century, he explained the challenge “to depict things that are not seen but have a profound effect on us”. In a sense, he achieves this by creating a fear of human capability in his audiences. It’s the unseen potential of his process that plays with the boundary of the aesthetic. Rather than complicated technological design, his use of inventive resourcefulness – that most primate trait – harnesses, as he says, “the chaos of time and space”. As well as the planned artwork, there is the shadow work – in which “you can allow uncertainties to exist within the same space and situation”. Perhaps the sublime fear experienced by his audiences is so real because the artist feels it himself: by using the elements as his materials, “you want to set this on fire, to explode it, but yet you are afraid”.
The night of Black Fireworks, he was to be presented with the 7th Hiroshima Art Prize, awarded every seven years to acknowledge outstanding careers of international artists. But just a few days before, eyes had already been drawn to the skies of Hiroshima. A Tokyo-based collective, Chim↑Pom, hired a jet and used its vapour trail to write the hiragana characters of pika, the Japanese term for the atomic flash, above the city. Unsurprisingly, their act kicked up media attention and public controversy, as well as excitement among young artists. But it’s only in retrospect of Black Fireworks that the act by Chim↑Pom, whose studio exhibition opens at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in a few days, can be publically appreciated as more than a slacker joke or publicity stunt.
Set in dialogue, the two works generate a discussion about the influence of context and medium on types of affect, specifically, shock. Chim↑Pom knew that Black Fireworks would receive a reverent and congratulatory reception by the convening art world. Why then, their work asks, is a local group of young artists denounced as irreverent and ethically irresponsible for making a linguistic reference to the bombing of Hiroshima; and a senior international artist applauded for making the same reference with colour, light and sound? At first, Chim↑Pom’s use of a word – conscious, specific – would seem to be the more arresting act; and certainly this was confirmed by public response. I asked Italian artist Ingrid Hora, present to witness “Black Fireworks”, about the distinction between the artworks. For her, Chim↑Pom’s was the more potent because of its complex conceptualisation. Whereas Cai’s work made a literal representation, theirs was twofold: it looked back to the historical moment of the A-Bomb as well as forward in anticipation of Cai’s planned explosion.
And yet Black Fireworks is the more direct, and the more literally shocking event. Like its white, almost immediately diffused form, Chim↑Pom’s word had a delayed, abstracted realisation. It referred to itself as a concept of pika. Cai’s explosion, on the other hand, refers to pika itself. Taking roughly the same time to complete as Chim↑Pom’s action, it was, unlike theirs, thick and black and persistent. It gave to the ephemeral substance of cloud a lingering afterlife. Perhaps, then, it was the works’ different modes of execution that impacted on their reception. Chim↑Pom acted by stealth, mysteriously appearing on an unremarkable weekday. This way, their work enacted the original pika in a physical way that, otherwise, the word itself could not. In contrast, like the writ-large tableaux in much of his work, Cai’s staging – consistent with his experience in theatre design – was a widely advertised public date on the weekend of a major art event. Even if its image and sensation were hidden until the moment of its realisation, the concept of “Black Fireworks” had been suggested by its location and his medium. As such, Cai had effectively paved the way to his work with an apologia. Chim↑Pom’s self-defence came in the form of an explanation and apology to the press.
Although it was conceptually mild, “Black Fireworks” was possibly the more successful work as a process. Arguably, this is true of many of Cai’s works, which hit the body hard and yet can be crudely symbolic or discursively shallow. For Cai, the experiential or processual aspect of his art – its material thingness and the source of human error – remains its most effective and important. “Of course”, he says, “there’s a concept behind it, but never mind the concept—just the very fact is a difficult thing to overcome”. It’s almost regrettable that Black Fireworks was presented in a polite and prepared context, and not in the guerilla style adopted by Chim↑Pom. For it’s clear that Cai is not after the beautiful or picturesque – or if he is, it’s of a kind that’s “unfashionable or inappropriate, or inopportune”. His works’ lack of irony places it in a category of the austere in contemporary art that includes Bill Viola, Bill Henson and Richard Serra – a category identified by its use of shadows. This distances it from a good deal of current Chinese art that urgently draws its form from political statement, often ironic. Indeed, whilst Ai Wei Wei and other Chinese artists withdrew from involvement in the Beijing Olympics, Cai was the one who noticeably remained. Why? Perhaps, and this is presuming much, he felt that something could be said, without words, between the screaming lines of his fireworks. “There’s a lot of talk about the content of my work, about the subject matter or the historical background”, Cai notes. “But there’s not a real in-depth investigation into the visual impact. It’s through visual impact that you can transmit these ideas. And it’s through visual impact that this pain is felt”.
As the party for the Hiroshima Art Prize mingled on the terrace of the Museum of Contemporary Art, I could still smell cordite in the night air, and the city below was sparked with a thousand neon flashes.
Bonny Cassidy is undertaking an Asialink literature fellowship in Japan, supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation, and currently in residence at Akiyoshidai International Art Village. This piece, part of the resulting work, is drawn from an unpublished essay on “The human sublime”.
Labels: Bonny Dot Cassidy, Japan
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, October 29, 2008 at 3:17 PM.
|
