The first time I saw Cai Guo-Qiang's work it was only in a magazine, but I nearly tore apart the binding and pages trying to claw my way through the printing ink and into the actual presence of
Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf: The Ark of Genghis Khan
. It was the Chinese-born artist's first US museum exhibition, in 1996, at the Solomon R Guggenheim museum in SoHo and, arcing through a huge exhibition space, suspended from the ceiling and never touching the ground, was a raft of sorts-a 65-foot-long expanse of tree branches tied over the dark, inflated skins of more than 50 sheep, with elegant oars hanging off the side and, for real power, three menacing Toyota motors complete with transmissions and exhaust pipes hanging off the back of the entire mad and mythical contraption.
There was a kindred, but not derivative, echo of the 1969 work by Joseph Beuys,
Das Rudel (The Pack)
, in which 24 sleds, loaded with specific, elemental provisions, are in procession out the back of a Volkswagen bus, but Cai's piece was altogether wilder, more organic and primal, not to mention airborne. In practice,
Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf
was a thoughtful, incisive representation of kneejerk Western fears regarding increasing economic might in Asia, achieved by melding artifacts from Genghis Khan's original blitzkrieg invasion technique with Japanese auto manufacturing into the form of an alarmist flying dragon, but I couldn't figure all that out from a magazine photo. I just wanted to see it, to touch it when the guard or docent wasn't looking, to sniff it, taste it and, most of all, ride that crazy ride.
Twice since then Cai has shown his work in Santa Fe, both times at SITE Santa Fe (1606 Paseo de Peralta, 989-1199). One showing was as part of the traveling group exhibition,
Performance Anxiety
, curated by Amada Cruz. A second time came in the form of an awkward and somewhat haphazard signal tower constructed of branches and detritus atop SITE's building during its third Biennial curated by Rosa Martinez, but neither example has given Santa Fe real entrée into Cai's world-or, more interestingly, our world seen through Cai's eyes-in the way that
Inopportune
, opening this week (reception 5-7 pm Friday, Jan. 20; through March 26) will do. Meditating on the title of the exhibition (originally conceived and executed at MASS MoCA when current SITE director Laura Heon was curator there) will offer the initial clue as to what awaits. First, accept an internalized discomfort with a Chinese man who, though he lives in New York, doesn't speak English and whose previous work is filled with references to herbal medicines, the whole skins of dead animals and a great deal of explosives (Cai uses gunpowder for drawing and loves it like Rovert Duvall's character in
Apocalypse Now
loves "the smell of napalm in the morning"). Accept it because you don't know how to pronounce his name and because, if a man from any number of countries recognizable as a Muslim is the Western/Christian world's overt fear, the quiet terror induced by the stereotypical "inscrutable" Chinese man is our most secret concern. Thus a simple word, like "Inopportune" takes on the vexing dualism (like "auspicious") of a fortune cookie soundbite and the scintillating potential of a secret and foreign profundity beyond our immediate grasp but capable, we suspect, of offering spiritual fulfillment. Something that is inopportune may prove to be unfortunate or a windfall, it presents opportunities for growth or death, for joy or despair. It is frustrating in its vagary and enchanting in its wide open possibility.
The physical exhibition is much the same, straddling the murky but stimulating boundary between fear and desire. Although this version is abridged from the original,
Inopportune
consists of a video projection of an illusory and stylized car bomb igniting in Times Square and the physical, charred remains of the car in question. Then comes a room full of tigers attacked with long bows and several combusted drawings. Inventory the items involved and it clearly makes no sense; nine tigers, a fake rock, hundreds of archery arrows, enough gunpowder to defend the Alamo and the carcass of one, plain family sedan full of charred rubble. But in the thick, real presence of it, there is precision-it is a chaos in which remarkable order becomes rapidly apparent. For each layer of meaning a viewer chooses to descend, the signposts become more perfectly arranged (a process capably described by Heon in MASS MoCA's original catalog) with references to Chinese folk tales blending with contemporary American politics and the histories of Chinese painting and Western imagery intersecting at an ouroboros of entwined philosophies.
The most ready topics addressed are the near-and-dear-to-the-US concepts of terror, terrorism and heroism, but the real message is in how Cai addresses these ideas. Cai is a global citizen, very much involved in the modern, Western world, living as a celebrated contemporary artist in New York, but is ingrained less with the cultural vapidity of our young country and more with the perpetual memory and long tradition of his native China. He lives in both worlds and makes his art from fast, loose and instinctive constructs pulled out of the vast otherworld in between. Gunpowder is neither necessarily weapon or medicine, but quite obviously both. A tiger pierced by arrows is a terrifying thing conquered, a poor creature hounded by arrogant humanity and a hybrid beast given the inopportune but splendid gift of ascension by virtue of tufted flights guiding each arrow. None of these things is less true than the other.
"To make art you have to be stupid and extravagant," Cai tells his studio director and translator Jennifer Ma in the MASS MoCA catalog and it is indeed his willingness to combine cross-cultural explosive theatricality with very serious notions of history, politics and personal well-being that allows Cai to, as Stanford literature professor Robert Pogue Harrison described it "disworld the world." Permanence and malleability, Cai's ridiculous carnival remarkably shows us, are the same thing.
