Cai Guo-Qiang media explosion
Art21 artist (Season 3) Cai Guo-Qiang’s exhibition I Want to Believe at the Guggenheim Museum may go down as the most-documented show on video of 2008 in New York. However, Cai faces some serious competition: we’ll have to wait and see if the ongoing Olafur Eliasson exhibition at MoMA, Takashi Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum, or the upcoming Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) retrospective at the Guggenheim will out-spectacle the current Manhattan media blitz.
With only 7 days left until Cai’s Guggenheim exhibition closes, who knows how many more videos are in the works, but in the meantime enjoy the following sampling. And for those planning a visit this final weekend, get your tickets early (and hide those camera phones)!
New York aside…if you include Cai Guo-Qiang’s role as director of visual and special effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympic Games in August, he will undoubtedly hold the record as the contemporary artist whose work has been seen by the most people on television, ever. (Who previously held the record? Mel Chin and the GALA Committee’s little-known subversive project with Melrose Place?)
Do you have a video of Cai’s Guggenheim show? Leave a link in the comments below!
VIDEO | Channel Thirteen (PBS) SundayArts
Spacey! Guggenheim curator Alexandra Munroe is “literally” beamed onto Frank Lloyd Wright’s ramp. (Fun fact: the Guggenheim is 2 years younger than Sputnik & Cai, and 7 years older than Star Trek)
VIDEO | Guggenheim Museum
Working at the Guggenheim must induce some serious déjà vu—here riggers install Inopportune: Stage One in a way reminiscent of Matthew Barney’s climbing escapades in CREMASTER 3 (2002).
VIDEO | VernissageTV
A non-narrated, comprehensive tour of the exhibition’s major works.
VIDEO | NewArtTV
Some comments from Cai Guo-Qiang on the day of the press preview.
VIDEO | Museum TV
Hello! Enthusiastic host Mel Merio does a “profoundly postmodern” interview with Guggenheim curator Alexandra Munroe.
And…last but not least……..
VIDEO | Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century
Watch an excerpt of the Art:21 episode Power featuring Cai Guo-Qiang, with the artist reflecting on Inopportune: Stage Two (2004) when it was first installed at MASS MoCA.
Up to the Minute: Cai Guo-Qiang
Exhibition: I Want to Believe, the acclaimed retrospective exhibition of works by Cai Guo-Qiang (Season 3) closes at the Guggenheim Museum, New York next Wednesday, May 28. Also closing is the special exhibition Everything Is Museum curated by Cai as part of the retrospective. Located in the Guggenheim’s Sackler Center for Arts Education, this installment of the artist’s ongoing series features works by Art21 artist Kiki Smith (Season 2), architect Norman Foster, retrospective co-curator Thomas Krens, artist Jennifer Wen Ma, and composer Tan Dun, as well as submissions by the public.
Book: Available in the Aye Simon Reading Room at the Guggenheim is Cai’s recent collaboration with Ivory Press, London–the limited edition publication Danger Book: Suicide Fireworks. The concept according to Cai: “Be careful of books. Be careful with books. Be careful or one can become a weapon-wielder. Be careful or one can become the victim.” The book, which can be “exploded,” is also on view through June 29 in the exhibition Blood on Paper: Art of the Book at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Installation: In Cordoipo, Italy, the artist’s installation “Dream” (pictured above) is included in God & Goods: Spirituality and Mass Confusion at Villa Manin Centre for Contemporary Art. Curated by Francesco Bonami and Sarah Cosulich Canarutto, the show aims to present the idea of the sacred and the spiritual through the interpretations of 28 artists. God & Goods closes September 28, 2008.
Fashion: Cai was one of twelve artists to design a t-shirt for a special project with the Whitney Museum, Art Production Fund, and the Gap. See his design at Gap.com.
(Artist) Frays Book
The Victoria and Albert Museum’s latest exhibition, Blood on Paper: The Art of The Book, showcases book-based work by a wealth of modern and contemporary artists, including Cai Guo-Qiang and Richard Tuttle (Season 3) and Louise Bourgeois (Season 1).
Since the book form implies a beginning, middle and end, it’s always been a popular form for artists looking to meddle with heads, from Max Ernst’s superlative The Hundred Headless Woman onwards. The exhibition traces a significant transformation in the definition of the artist’s book: from a kind of freeform improvisation on textual illustration (Matisse’s Jazz, Sol LeWitt’s take on Borges’ Ficciones) to an artwork taking the form of a book as its conceptual jumping-off point (Dieter Roth and Richard Hamilton’s Inter Faces and Richard Tuttle’s NotThePoint). The connotations of books as cornerstones of religious doctrine are underscored by Damien Hirst’s New Religion, a huge, plinth-mounted mixed-media sculpture in the form of a shelved Bible, set off by a display of Francis Bacon’s much-pored-over ephemera, battered Muybridge photos and snaggly Polaroids, displayed in glass like the fingerbones of a saint.
The most fun is to be had in the illumination artists’ work can cast on a canonical text; Balthus replays Wuthering Heights as a pas de deux of feral adolesence; Paula Rego turns Jane Eyre into a mad psychodrama of Gothic puppetry. Serialism found an easy home in the book form, with Ed Ruscha’s deadpan series of swimming pools and gas stations repeated on every page of a pocketsize book, insouciance itself. Meanwhile, the pages of Cai Guo-Qiang’s Danger Books, charred with the spidery remainders of fireworks, indicate the book as a site of explosive excitement, and anyone who’s ever been 7 will probably agree.
U.S. Embassy Makes Olympic Rings
These big metallic tulips aren’t just going to be on view in Spain, where they are permanently installed along the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s riverside façade, above. An edition of Tulips by Jeff Koons, as well as new work by Art:21 artists Louise Bourgeois, Cai Guo-Qiang, Martin Puryear, and Maya Lin are included on the checklist of 18 contemporary Chinese and American artists that will on view when the massive SOM-designed American embassy opens in Beijing, just before the start of the 2008 summer Olympics. Many of the pieces are either new commissions or site-specific works purchased by the State Department. According to The Art Newspaper, the State Department calculates the budget it will spend on art based on a new building’s square footage, and therefore $800,000 will be spent on art for the Beijing project — the largest sum ever splurged on a new US embassy.
Martian Museum show at Barbican features real Art21 artists
Examining contemporary art from the perspective of an extraterrestrial, the group show Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, which opens this week at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, features the work of Art21 artists Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Eleanor Antin (Season 2), Mike Kelley, Cai Guo-Qiang (both Season 3), Jenny Holzer, and Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla (both Season 4). This unusual exhibition’s starting point is the fantasy of an alien anthropologist attempting to understand and explain human culture solely from contemporary art, and it builds from there to offer a quirky look at recent art practices. The curators invent a humorously imprecise classification system designed to raise questions about the practice of anthropology, as well as the role misunderstanding plays in the understanding of contemporary art. Interested patrons will also want to download mp3’s of the the exhibition’s audio guide, narrated by the director of the Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, the “esteemed” Dr. Klaatu.
The show is open until May 18. Find more information, images, and the audio guide here.
Prospect.1 New Orleans Coming in November
Slated as the largest biennial of international contemporary art ever organized in the United States, Prospect.1 New Orleans will open November 1, 2008 and run through January 18, 2009. Founding director and chief curator of this new biennial, Dan Cameron (former Senior Curator of the New Museum and recently appointed Director of Visual Arts of the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in New Orleans) was inspired to organize an exhibition in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The recently announced list of 75+ artists from around the globe includes Art21 artists Allora & Calzadilla, Mark Bradford (both Season 4), Cai Guo-Qiang, Arturo Herrera (both Season 3), Janine Antoni, and Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2).
Calling for a total of 100,000 square feet of exhibition space, Prospect.1 New Orleans will be divided among several buildings in various historic New Orleans neighborhoods, including the Warehouse District, the Bywater, French Quarter, the Marigny, and the Treme. A number of existing institutions and halls - CAC, New Orleans Museum of Art, and Ogden Museum of Southern Art - will be used, along with converted warehouses, commercial structures and other public spaces and found sites throughout the city.
How will Prospect.1 New Orleans help the damaged city? “[It] will contribute to the cultural rebuilding of New Orleans by creating an entirely new narrative about the city, its architecture, and its history. By re-branding the city as a place where the visual arts can thrive, the long-term aim of Prospect.1 New Orleans is to create an entirely new category of cultural tourism for the city, and to broaden its image overall.”
While the Prospect.1 website is good for answers to logistical questions, and briefly addresses the terms “global art” and “biennial,” what is perhaps most important here (as demonstrated in the above excerpt) is attention to the city’s predicament and progress-Prospect.1 tells us the state of things in New Orleans.
For further information and updates, please go to the Prospect.1 New Orleans website.
Whitney Biennial Model Tees
The Whitney Museum has collaborated with the Gap on a series of t-shirts designed by past Whitney Biennial artists, including Art21 artists Cai Guo-Qiang, Barbara Kruger (her design is pictured above), Kerry James Marshall, and Kiki Smith. There are thirteen in all, and the prominent remainder includes Ashley Bickerton, Chuck Close, Jeff Koons, Hanna Liden, Glenn Ligon, Marilyn Minter, Kenny Scharf, Sarah Sze, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.
The t-shirts will be available at select Gap stores and online beginning May 15. In the meantime, with the opening of the 2008 Whitney Biennial last week, they can also be found in advance at the museum gift store.
Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe at the Guggenheim in NYC
On view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City from Friday, February 22 until May 28, Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe surveys the innovative body of work of this Season 3 featured artist. The exhibition charts his distinctive visual and conceptual language across four mediums: gunpowder drawings, explosion events, installations, and social projects. With more than 80 works from the 1980s to the present, this show establishes Cai’s influence as a creator of socially-provocative projects for large audiences. Designed as a site-specific presentation, this comprehensive retrospective is the museum‚Äôs first solo show devoted to a Chinese-born artist.
Following its New York opening, the exhibition is expected to travel to the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, as a part of the cultural Olympiad during the Olympic Games in August 2008. It will also be presented at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in spring 2009.
Cai Guo-Qiang was first exhibited by the Guggenheim in 1996, when he was selected as a finalist for the inaugural Hugo Boss Prize. The installation work he presented, Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf: The Ark of Genghis Khan, currently installed as part of the retrospective, is a highlight of the Guggenheim’s contemporary art collection.
“Cai Guo-Qiang has literally exploded the accepted parameters of art making in our time,” says co-curator and Guggenheim Foundation director Thomas Krens. “He draws freely from ancient mythology, military history, Taoist cosmology, Maoist revolutionary tactics, Buddhist philosophy, pyrotechnic technology, Chinese medicine, and methods of terrorist violence.” Co-curator Alexandra Monroe adds, “His expanded notion of cultural experience subverts tropes like East versus West, traditional versus contemporary, center versus periphery, suggesting a new cultural paradigm for the art of a global age.”
A number of public programs complement the exhibition. The first takes place Friday night at 7pm and will be a conversation between Cai and the show’s curators. A book signing by the artist follows the program. Read more info here.
See installation images and a video on the exhibition’s website.
2007: a brief recap
2007 was a landmark year for many Art21 artists. Apart from the accolades and prizes bestowed upon such artists as Kara Walker, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jessica Stockholder, Kerry James Marshall, and Cai Guo-Qiang, the multitude of exhibitions featuring Art21 artists reflect the pinnacle stages in many of their careers. While this is an achievement in its own right, we wanted to mention some of the other critical kudos recently published in print and online.
For Robert Ayers of ArtInfo.com, the two sculpture retrospectives organized by MoMA last year, Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years and Martin Puryear (on view through January 14), are the fourth and fifth best shows of 2007. “Having already visited [Serra’s] show several times, I actually cancelled all of my plans for its final day so that I could see it one last time,” writes Ayers. About Puryear he notes that the artist, “proves himself here a magician of forms that sit happily at the intersection of abstraction and representation and a poet of implied and suggested appearances and meanings.”
As previously cited in December, the top ten exhibitions of 2007 for Time’s Richard Lacayo include those of artists Richard Serra (#1), Vija Celmins (#3), Martin Puryear (#5), and Kara Walker (#6). For Howard Halle of Time Out New York, Serra’s show at MoMA is one of 2007’s best. “Serra put the me in heavy-metal postminimalism, but in this retro of curving labyrinthine slabs, he put you and I and just about everyone else in there, too.” remarks Halle.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the writers from 24 Hour Museum (to be renamed Culture24 this Spring) have their own opinions. Jon Pratty, 24 Hour Museum’s Editor and Head of Content, selected the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at Tate Modern as his top pick. For Pratty, this show (on display through January 20) “was the first in a long time I have seen bringing to life the peculiar talent, skill and craft of a true artist. Everything in her show had been chosen by her, crafted by her, formed by her. It was really inspiring.”
On a more somber note, 2007 sadly marked the death of Season 2 artist Elizabeth Murray, who passed away on August 12. But as Verlyn Klinkenborg writes in the New York Times, “her paintings will be with us for years and years to come.”
Cai Guo-Qiang wins the Hiroshima Art Prize
The New York-based Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, featured in Season 3 of Art in the Twenty-First Century, has been honored with the 7th Hiroshima Art Prize. The prize, awarded by the city of Hiroshima, celebrates contemporary artists whose works express ways to promote world peace. As part of the prize, apart from the $41,500 award (¥5 million), Cai Guo-Qiang will have a solo exhibition at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in Fall 2008. Also in 2008, Cai Guo-Qiang will premiere two of his major projects to date: a mid-career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York opening in early Spring, and his contribution to the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, that will reach an estimated 4 billion viewers worldwide.
In addition to Cai, two other Art21-featured artists have previously won the Hiroshima Art Prize: Krzysztof Wodiczko (1999), also from Season 3, as well as Nancy Spero (1996; in collaboration with her husband, Leon Golub), who is profiled in the upcoming fourth season of the series.
