Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling back to earth

82 83 The Chinese calligraphic mark for ‘gunpowder’ is translatable as ‘fire-medicine’. With the application of good medicine, a skilled physician can alter dullness and lassitude till they become, in time, lustre and energy. When a healthy balance prevails, each opposite state — illness and wellness — dwells in the other, much as Yin and Yang cosset each other. Viewed in a snapshot of simple, linear time, one state (such as illness) may occlude the other (such as wellness). But considered in the volumetric, active spirals of time that Cai envisages and investigates, all states of history are equally immanent and apprehensible. Which means the two opposite states — the dull and the bright — must dwell in a good medicine. And because, over the duration of an effective treatment, a good medicine draws the radiance out from the ailment, so a tincture or pulverised potion (often not much different in appearance from gunpowder) can be regarded as the fuel that serves a time traveller seeking better health. Gunpowder can be such a potion for the body politic. This is no innocent statement. Across world history, self-serving megalomaniacs have convinced themselves they were doing good with detonation. But Cai’s use of the explosion is communal and creative rather than totalitarian and destructive. Lasting more than a decade in their repeated detonations, and enduring for ever after in documentation, his ‘Projects for Extraterrestrials’ have cajoled and jolted viewers to imagine that ‘then’, ‘now’ and ‘the future’ might all be living in each other, despite how different these tenses can seem when each is understood as a separate moment along one simple, straight timeline. Cai uses his gunpowder as a means of moving around in the past, present and future or, more precisely, as a means of moving these tenses through each other and entangling them inseparably in each observer’s consciousness. He helps us see how his fire- medicine, which appears so dull and inert when first brought to the scene, actually has brilliant, burning potentiality in it. This magical substance contains a state that was prepared previously, a state from another time that is actually already present and ready to emblazon your mind’s eye when a coexistent time, poised and parallel with the present — namely, the time of its intended detonation — will be charged in your imagination even before it will be ignited in physical space. Thus, Cai helps the viewer know ubiquity in time, sensing all at once the wisdom of the ancients and the options of questers yet to come. Nine Dragon Wall (Drawing for Dragon or Rainbow Serpent: A Myth Glorified or Feared: Project for Extraterrestrials No.28) (detail) 1996 Spent gunpowder and Indian ink on Japanese paper Nine sheets: 300 x 1800cm (overall) Purchased 1996 Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Opposite Dragon Sight Sees Vienna: Project for Extraterrestrials No.32 , realised at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 6 November 1999 Commissioned by Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna Photograph: Fritz Simak Courtesy: Cai Studio Mystery Circle: Explosion Event for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles , explosion event, realised at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, 7 April 2012 for ‘Cai Guo-Qiang: Sky Ladder’ Commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles Photograph: Zen Sekizawa/JWPictures.com Courtesy: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles