Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling back to earth

74 75 III. How are we to understand this strange spectacle? One of the extraordinary things about Cai Guo-Qiang’s work is that it suggests so many different layers of possible meaning and brings into play a very wide range of references from different cultures and disciplines. Natural history dioramas are only one starting point for reading this work. Another might be Cai’s complex relationship with certain key figures in recent Western conceptual art. By constructing a landscape within the gallery, Cai suggests a connection with an earlier generation of American and European artists who worked with ideas about land and nature and explored the relationship of inside and outside, specifically Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer and Walter De Maria, the principal exponents of Land art in the United States. In a seminal project executed shortly after his arrival in the United States from Japan in 1995, Cai ‘activated’ a series of historically and culturally charged landscapes — including Heizer’s Double negative 1969–70 and Smithson’s Spiral jetty 1970 — by detonating small hand-held explosive devices to form miniature mushroom clouds. The photographs that document these actions, exhibited as The Century with Mushroom Clouds: Project for the 20th Century 1996, suggest perhaps that such works are more caught up in the turbulence of late twentieth-century post-nuclear global history than their conceptual frameworks might suggest. Heizer, for example, has always discussed Double negative in purely formal rather than symbolic terms. However, Cai’s gesture relocates Heizer’s monumental earthwork within a discourse of historical and political engagement. Much of Robert Smithson’s work explores a dialectic between inside and outside — between a specific place in the landscape and its equivalent or signifier in the gallery — a concept he articulated as ‘site’ and ‘nonsite’. To develop this relationship, he would typically bring material from the site into the gallery to be displayed in minimalist containers or piled directly on the gallery floor alongside documentation — maps, photographs, texts — that identified and located the source, the site itself. Thus, the physical structure of his most famous earthwork, Spiral jetty , is just one aspect of a matrix of works in which the remote desert sculpture is brought to the audience via film, photograph and text — the sum of the parts greater than any of the individual elements. Left Robert Smithson United States b.1938 d.1973 Spiral jetty (stills) 1970 16mm transferred to Digital Betacam (PAL): 35 minutes, colour, sound, ed. unlimited Purchased 2007 Collection: Queensland Art Gallery © Robert Smithson, 1970/VAGA. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2013 Right The Century with Mushroom Clouds: Project for the 20th Century , realised at the site of Robert Smithson’s Spiral jetty , 15 February 1996 Courtesy: Cai Studio Heritage is what we might call an open nonsite, for there is no specific referent in the landscape. The pool does not refer to a geographical location, as the pool of tequila in Sunshine and Solitude referred to the ancient lake of Texcoco, upon which Mexico City stands, by echoing its shape. It suggests only a kind of ur-landscape. It is an allegorical version of a universal landscape, an empty space of sand and water. While Heizer and Smithson were important reference points for Cai when he first began to discover recent Western art in the mid 1990s, such connections do not really help unlock Heritage . They do provide, however, a context. And within such a context it is apparent that the emphasis of Cai’s work is elsewhere. He is fascinated by life, symbolism and myth, in a way that artists such as Heizer and De Maria were not. Just a few years after the mushroom cloud project, Cai created the New York Earthworm Room 1998 as a direct response to De Maria’s New York earth room 1977. 5 Instead of De Maria’s deliberately inert installation, comprising a room filled to a perfectly even depth of 56 centimetres, with 196 cubic metres of sterilised soil, Cai’s version teemed with organic matter and life. He deliberately ‘contaminated’ De Maria’s purist vision, so that worms burrowed into the installation and seeds sprouted from its surface and the work came to embody the life force and a sense of potential. Such ‘contamination’ reminds us that we must be wary of positioning Cai’s work — and in particular a piece like Heritage — as somehow riffing on the legacy of Land art. Cai has always stressed that ‘my work is based on my own cultural foundation’. Nonetheless, a mythic strand does run through American Land art and chimes with Cai’s concerns. Smithson never quite managed to completely purge his art of the mystical obsessions that animated his early paintings. And Nancy Holt, the important artist who was married to Smithson, used local myths to anchor her works to specific places. For example, Holt pointed to the inspiration for her major work, Hydra’s Head 1974 — six large and deep concrete pools in the configuration of the constellation of Hydra, located on the bank of the Niagara River, Lewiston, New York — writing: ‘The Seneca Indians of New York have a saying: “Pools of water are the eyes of the earth”.’ 6 The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard extended this idea: The lake is a large tranquil eye. The lake takes all of light and makes a world out of it. Through it, the world is already contemplated, already represented. It too might say, ‘the world is my representation of it’. 7 In such notions, we might see something of Cai’s panoptic pool. Heritage might also be positioned in relation to work by two younger artists who have consistently used animal figures within their work. The British artist Damien Hirst has used animal carcasses preserved in formaldehyde to explore notions of life and death. Unlike Cai’s, his work is dependent upon the knowledge that what we see is an actual animal, something that was once alive. The frisson of death is key to the effect Hirst strives to achieve. Nancy Holt United States b.1938 Hydra’s Head 1974 Niagara River, Lewiston, NY Concrete, water, earth 853.4 x 1889.8cm Pools: diameters 60.9, 91.4, 121.9cm; depth: 91.4cm Photograph: Nancy Holt © Nancy Holt. VAGA/Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2013