-
-
Ad Space
(728 x 90)
“Row, row, row your boat” isn’t a refrain typically heard in a fine arts museum, but when your kids step onto New York–based artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s Tibetan raft and paddle down a river of real flowing water whose serpentine course was crafted from fiberglass and bamboo, they’ll likely bellow it at the top of their lungs. Titled Arbitrary History: River at the Guggenheim, the piece provides a scenic introduction to Cai’s famous suspended sculptures, several of which rafters pass under on their short journey. The ride, says Alexandra Munroe, senior curator and co-organizer of a new retrospective of the artist’s work, is a way “for kids to understand that a museum can be as active as a playground.”
Indeed, the exhibition, titled “I Want to Believe,” aims to explode any child-held notions that art museums are “boooring.” After all, gunpowder features prominently in Cai’s work. Video monitors installed along the ramp in the Guggenheim’s rotunda show the artist laying sheets of Japanese hemp paper on the floor and arranging gunpowder fuses, cardboard stencils and weights on top. He then ignites the fuses, producing patterns on the paper.
In a separate room, a large-scale installation called Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard (a replica of a piece Cai unveiled at the Venice Biennale in 1999) also offers insight into the artist’s process. It requires ten artisans from Cai’s native China to work on-site during the first two weeks of the exhibit, modeling 50 life-size clay figures based on a Socialist-Realist tableau dating from the Chinese Cultural Revolution (the original was commissioned in 1965 to portray the pre-Revolution exploitation of peasants). The sculptures are intentionally left unfired, and the fun lies not just in seeing the figures take shape but also in witnessing their slow decay over the course of the exhibit’s run. Their deterioration hints at Cai’s well-known wish to expand the definition of modern museums from “tombs” for perfect masterpieces to living studios where art is created and allowed to fade. Another piece, Everything Is a Museum, continues the deconstruction of art-world solemnity through its depiction of galleries in unexpected places—such as along a beach, in a living room and atop a mountain. In related workshops, kids can follow suit and learn to transform their own favorite places into artistic showcases.
Then again, some works cry out for display in grand, awe-inspiring art institutions. Looking up from the Guggenheim’s architectural spiral to Inopportune: Stage One is akin to viewing a series of cinematic freeze frames; nine real cars, studded with long, blinking light sticks, are suspended in the void as though hurtling through the air. Somehow, we don’t think your child will be re-creating that in your third floor walk-up.
“Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe” runs Fri 22 through May 28 at the Guggenheim Museum.
