Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling back to earth

84 Time Scroll 2009 Installation view, ‘Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms’, The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, 2009 Stainless steel panels, water, pumps, plastic hose, silk charmeuse, gunpowder, audio narration by Marion Boulton Stroud, and video of gunpowder drawing process Collection: The artist Photograph: I-Hua Lee. Courtesy: Cai Studio magic tricks, some other place is always simultaneously and invisibly present, demanding acknowledgment, ready to press forward. You need to imagine yourself otherwise, literally as other to yourself, in order to sense the full cohesion of Cai’s energetic signals. At the start of Patrick White’s 1966 magical-realist novel The Solid Mandala (attributing the quote to the surrealist poet Paul Éluard), the author declares: ‘There is another world, but it is in this one’. 5 With this epigram, White insists that the most vital realms are most likely intra terrestrial. Inside each of us, a world of good possibility waits to be ignited in the imagination; but, equally important, most of our best options wait in the earth itself, which has in it everything that has happened and might happen. As the ancient management regimes of Aboriginal culture have always insisted, and as modern ecology is proposing now with different languages and rituals, the earth is a live thing that is also a record, and it is a warning and an invitation. To reprise the philosopher William James, there is an unseen order and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. There is not so much good in adjusting the world. Nor in blasting it into shape, as if the world were an inert, memory-free chunk of dull matter. Rather, the vitality that we need is within. Delicate and desirous, as well as vast and rambunctious, this vitality is ourselves and it is within us even as it is within the earth. Fallen Blossoms: Explosion Project , realised at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 11 December 2009 Commissioned by Philadelphia Museum of Art Photograph: Lonnie Graham Courtesy: The Fabric Workshop and Museum So how can we learn to live well with this knowledge that all times — the past, present and future — are always in each other? Here’s one answer that’s implied in most of Cai’s work: via the imaginative ventures of culture, the dead can give us what we need for making our living if we refuse to allow our ancestors to fade into oblivion. In other words, we have to heed the energy of the invisible. We have to absorb the legacy of the past while enacting our most noble rituals, so we can make sure that all those people and actions that have composed history can be activated again and again in the eternally unfolding now. In doing so, they can ‘serve the interests of the unborn’, as Robert Pogue Harrison has written in his great meditation on cultural memory, The Dominion of the Dead (2003). 4 For example, consider how love works its magic in your family, or how the history of your tribe or community or nation might oblige you to keep the world healthy for the growing future: these are other ways to understand and access Cai’s proliferative, all-at-once time. Cai’s artworks contend that invisibility can be made explicit in your imagination, just as a timeline can be revealed to be otherwise — to be nothing like a line in the way time presses in folds and interpenetrating meshes of causation and repercussion. Furthermore, even as multiple times overlay and interlace in Cai’s work, his projects also cast us imaginatively and simultaneously into several distinct places . Consider, for example, the many vast craters of flame and outbursting energy that make up the full suite of ‘Projects for Extraterrestrials’. As the title indicates, there are qualities in these explosions that are not visible to us groundlings; rather, there are aspects of Cai’s full, unfolding heat events that can be seen and understood only from elsewhere. In Cai’s massive