My first morning in the parched Southlands finds me in Pasadena at the delightful USC Pacific Asia Museum for the exhibition of one of my favorite living artists, Cai Guo-Qiang. The show surveys chronologically Cai’s trajectory of using gunpowder in drawings, from his first thorough-going works when he lived and studied in Japan in 1986, through his large works made (or intended to be made) outdoors in the late 1980s, then continuing to the present with recent uses of integrating AI and robots into their conceptualization and making. The exhibition lacks the very large pieces for which he is best known (of course along with his stupefying fireworks), and so has perhaps more the feel of a well-curated documentation of his career than of a major artistic event. And even a large museum retrospective of Cai’s work would seem not fully representative, as his works include drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations, the quasi-performative events of the making of his gunpowder works, fireworks displays, and other hard-to-categorize hybrid constructions. Still, any exhibition of a few dozen works by this great artist is of keen interest to us art lovers, and I seize the opportunity to begin to reconstruct and consider the artistic ontology motivating and/or embodied in his art.
Over the past 35 years Cai has released quite a number of writings and interviews wherein he has stated and re-stated his basic conception of art. Although I note the philosopher of art Richard Wollheim’s wise observation that with artists one ought to use their works to interpret their writings, rather than using their writings to interpret their work, Cai is a visual artist-thinker in the manner of William Kentridge, one who is outstandingly reflective, clairvoyant, and articulate, to permit starting with his words. At its most general, Cai’s philosophical orientation is Daoist; as he puts it with a characteristic indifference to the alleged distinction between facts and norms: “Human beings should echo the rhythm of the Universe. If you fail, you should accept it. If you are tired, you should rest. Its basic principles are the laws we must follow in doing anything. Human beings must understand nature and go by its rules. You cannot change nature, and everything must follow it. Life must respond to its rhythm.” (Cai, quoted in Cai (2016)) With suitable substitutions, his doctrine here seems close to Stoic ethics, as stated for example by Diogenes Laertius: “Therefore, living in agreement with nature comes to be the end, which is in accordance with the nature of oneself and that of the whole, engaging in no activity wont to be forbidden by the universal law, which is the right reason pervading everything and identical to Zeus, who is this director of the administration of existing things.”
Cai ties the making of gunpowder drawings in a statement from the mid-1990s: “In the past few years, I have mainly worked from two concepts: the first is from the perspective of the universe and the second is the interaction and dialogue between humanity and the universe. I mainly use gunpowder to convey my concepts because I hope to allow the explosion of my work to be assimilated into the movement of the universe” (p. 73). This statement of the two perspectives Cai attempts to construct is extraordinarily illuminating, as we shall see, in helping to explicate the distinctiveness, and the distinctive artistic power, of the gunpowder drawings.
Cai gives his basic artistic aim, and one that is realized in his oeuvre with especial vividness, as realizing within an instant a fusion of time and space (this is some evidence for Wollheim’s dictum; plainly the nature of this attempted fusion needs explication from Cai’s actual works). In an interview Cai has said that starting with his gunpowder works in the late 1980s “the idea was to transcend time and space. And starting then, art became a time-space tunnel for me. I was able to travel freely between East and West, the past and the present, in and out of government systems, and the visible and invisible worlds . . . My works are like time-space continuums that link imagination and the inner child among people from different cultures.” (Cai (2012), p. 77)
In his remarks on his gunpowder drawings Cai repeatedly states that his proximal aim is to make invisible forces visible. How this works in relation to Cai’s invocation of a two-fold perspective in the drawings is suggested in his remark that “For me, the allure of gunpowder lies in its uncontrollability and spontaneity; as with destiny itself, much of the creation is pure luck. Therefore, behind the artwork, another artist or force seems to be at work. Even more significant is the sensation I feel when I come in contact with the gunpowder; the moment of explosion feels like a direct dialogue with a source of invisible energy.” (Cai (2012), p. 77). The first point places the work in the cosmological perspective itself, the second the relation between human and cosmos. A final important mark of his drawings arises from Cai’s distinction between his paintings and his drawings: “Simply put, the distinction between my “paintings” and “drawings” lies in their purpose. If I made something for the sake of my installations, especially for the outdoor explosions projects, then it is a drawing; otherwise, it is a painting.” (Cai (2016), p. 134)
Let’s turn to the drawings themselves. Again, the works at this exhibition are perhaps not most representative of Cai’s gunpowder drawings, which with their large size and multiple foci carry on their face more of an environmental and collaborative character. Consider the recent small piece ‘Study for Cosmos No. 1’ (2018).
This study displays his only recent use of colored gunpowder; for much of career he had limited himself to black gunpowder with the thought that black contains all other colors. Prominent here and throughout the gunpowder drawings is the basic feature of gunpowder’s explosiveness, whose visual after-effect is invariably of some smallish center from which radiates clouds and strands with decreasing saturation. Here and elsewhere an especially concentrated deposit of gunpowder tears a hole in the support, usually paper or canvas, but also rarely of silk. Whatever range of resonances arise from the explosive marks, the effect is first of all invariably floral, and so the hole maintains a pictorial function as the sepal or ovary. The invisible becomes visible as the flower gives expression to the nutritive and reproductive forces in plants, and orients itself to the spectator as the flower does to the pollinator.
One way to bring out the specificity of Cai’s ontology is through contrast with its spiritual and artistic contemporary, the prints that the composer John Cage made towards the end of his life. For both Cai and Cage part of their secondary motivations were the elimination, defusion, and/or transformation of the thought of violence within artistic creation. By 1950 Cage had come to conceive of his artwork as setting up a circumscribed spatio-temporal ‘space’ or ‘place’ wherein things could show up as they are, undistorted by the tastes or prejudices of the artist. When he starting regularly making prints in the 1980s this conception collapsed, as Cage began to notice that there was no way of evading his own tastes and preferences. Either his life’s work had been based upon a misconception, or the role of violence within artistic creation had to be reconceptualized. Cage then began with ‘distressing’ the support—burying, staining, and/or burning the paper. The paper was then ‘branded’ with simple shapes or forms chosen by Cage, but whose placement and intensity were determined by chance. Here is Cage’s ‘EninKa #28’ of 1986:
The effect was to create a kind of ontological equivalence between support and non-support, mark and hole, forces as it were arising from the interior of the paper and forces exerted upon the paper. Equivalence reigns. Cai’s way, seemingly so similar and similarly motivated, differs absolutely. For Cai the ineliminable floral character of the marks carries the botanical structure of root, stem, and flower with its own internal structure. The blossoming is instantaneous, and only so can it evoke the concentrated fusion of spatial and temporal dimensions. In one way, Cai’s work is vastly more capacious than Cage’s, in that it contains an indefinitely large social dimension of collaborators and viewers via the second of its two-fold character. Cage restricts himself to the first of Cai’s dimensions, the point of view of the universe, and it is this that gives it its profundity, but also something of its impersonality. Cage’s is a world indifferent to us, the result of a personality aiming to extinguish itself, and one for each person as no one and everyone. Cai’s ontology is processual and ineliminably heterogenous.
I’ll try to make something more of this cryptic analysis in my next post, where I encounter Cézanne at the Norton Simon and begin with reflections on Cai’s own stated engagement with the great French painter of nature.
References:
Cai Guo-Qiang, Cai Guo-Qiang: Ladder to the Sky (2012)
--Cai Guo-Qiang: My Stories of Painting (2016)