This weekend on a visit to the Guggenheim I had the pleasure of seeing the multimedia installation exhibit of Cai Guo Qiang titled I Want to Believe.  Before I even attempt to describe these immense works, it might be best to give some background on the artist and the museum itself as a way of envisioning them. The artist  was born in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China. As the son of a historian and painter he studied at the Shanghai Drama Institute and began his career working in gunpowder as a means of exploring the idea of recorded explosion. Though Guo-Qiang works in a variety of mediums including gunpowder, yak skin, steel, found object sculpture, plexi-glass and clay, his works frequently attempt to capture the crest of the wave of motion of any given event. That being said his works are not so much about destruction as they are about the moment of destruction as a way of seeing recreation and being. I know this all sounds a little vague, but hopefully you’ll soon know what I mean.

The Guggenheim Museum, in case you’ve never been (and this was, I hate to admit it, my first time here) was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Any general architecture text you might read on the subject will tell you about how the curved lives of the museums facade combat the regimented order of the architecture within New York’s grid system, they’ll probably also mention that though Wright was a modern architect he referenced the classical past (jn this case the Pantheon) in the interior circular skylight. The interior is composed of spiraling layers around the perimiter and an open atrium that stretches the expanse of the the building’s height. Frankly, I found the place to be nauseating. The low banisters and constant spiraling had me pretty woozy by the exhibits end,  not to mention it looks pretty terrible on the outside since equipment used for renovation obscures the building.

Image from Allposters.com                                                                    Image from flickr.com

The building is so well respected in fact, that most would consider what Cai Guo Qiang has done to it’s interior to be a defacement. He has, in fact, taken the museum over completely. As I said before much of Guo-Qiang’s work is a mix of sculpture– in this case the sculptures are made of cars, faux taxidermied animals, yak skin and wood. Each project deals with the artist’s interest in history, chinese mythology, animals and generally, his hope to see “conflict and transformation [as] interdependent conditions of life.” The first thing a visitor sees upon entering the museum is Inopportune: Stage One, a work comprised of 9 full sized- real cars suspended from the buildings ceiling spiraling down, with LED lights exploding from within them.  If you don’t happen to look up when you initially walk in you may actually miss the fact that a full sized car is hovering over your head. It looks something like this

Now, I’m not sure if this particular work is pure spectacle; I think in a way, it does operate in the hopes that people will be wowed by the sheer mechanics of the installation as well as the size and use of electronic light, but i don’t think that it is any reason to discount it in this case. It seems much of the artist’s work is in fact a matter of events of distraction. His performance art pieces often involve what appear to be fireworks exploding in artful patterns, which he captures in his gunpoweder paintings in which the paper remembers the explosion that happened above it as the gunpowder leaves traces of being lit.

Here and in his other pieces, he succeeds in materializing that moment of explosion (in this case a car descending from the buildings ceiling and exploding on the way down) as a way of capturing dynamism and sustaining the the viewer’s attention in a timeless moment.

The remainder of the exhibition was comprised mostly of faux taxidermied animals that were incredibly life-like arranged in groupings.Besides tigers pierced with hundreds of arrows, hurled in mid- air, he arranged approximatley 150 wolves around the perimeter of one level of the museum, a work titled Head On. As the viewer walks up perhaps only one or two wolves walk beside him, soon the pack grows larger as they begin to claw at the air and rise up above the ground. What seems like a stampede finally crashes into a glass pane and contorts falling violently back to the ground. That sounds pretty unbelievable, and it was. The life like quality of the sculptures and the sucessful illusion of motion (the wolves don’t in fact move, we do– further and further up the museum’s levels) made the work border on creepy– but entirely effective. The work seemed to me to be about the idea of a crash and of mindless and seemingly subtle volition that in fact is quite dangerous. Though the this piece has been installed in several other museums, I can’t imagine that it worked as well in a space other than the Guggenheim in which the floors gently spiral up as you approach the buildings highest level.

                                                                                             Image from http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2143/1525219172_e549889e5c.jpg

Beyond that most of what I remember of the museum had to do with the construction  of a canal out of fiberglass in which visitors could ride in a yak skin boat down while looking up at Guo- Qiang’s suspended works above. This part was the most actually interactive though I thought the idea that the works featured in this gallery space acted as a retrospective and that the viewer was riding down the metaphorical canal of the artist’s work was pretty kitschy, however fun it may have been. Though it did confirm my idea that Guo Qiang’s pieces work best when they posit the viewer as the locomotive force behind their success. In both Inopportune: Stage One and Head On the relationship of the piece to the viewer’s body dictates it’s success and motion entirely. Beyond the fact that the Guggenheim might never look like this again, I can genuinely say that Guo-Qiang’s work is unlike anything I’ve ever seen and I recommend it highly to anyone if you happen to be in New York between now and May 28th which is when the show closes. I’ll warn you though– the combination of the museum’s spiraling levels and the work of Guo Qiang that appears as though it could collapse or come to life at any moment is not for the weak of heart.