Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling back to earth

88 89 The physical world is just a portal to the moral world, and we are obliged to go deep, Rilke asserts, so we can know the debts, obligations and opportunities that are bequeathed to us by the world of time and matter that we have inherited. Rilke continues: . . . it is our task to imprint this provisional, perishable earth so deeply, so patiently and passionately in ourselves that its reality shall arise in us again ‘invisibly’. We are the bees of the invisible. 7 With the hushed poise of Heritage , Cai wafts a wonderment to the ground, a wonderment to match Rilke’s yearning. This is an exciting new aspect of Cai’s great career. For inside this, his latest innovation, there is also continuity. With Heritage we see again the quarry that has been ever-present in Cai’s work: invisibility. It’s there in the sand. In Heritage we sense again, but with a new quietude and an earthed intensity this time, how it is actually the unseen — everything just outside the obvious frames of visible space and immediately present time — that informs and sustains us most subtly, most profoundly. We see how Cai has turned away from the extraterrestrials, seeking instead to divine the wellsprings of the sustaining earth that bears up underneath him and that still hosts us all despite the myriad vulnerabilities in today’s troubled ecologies and political systems. We see how Cai has built a time-and-vision system for intraterrestrials , for questers devoted to the invisible urgencies that still run vivacity through the earth. And finally, as we gather near Cai’s quiet congress of animals, as we ponder the vital elements in the lake in the gallery, we feel within us the need to tread carefully and knowingly on the brittle ground, to approach the beautiful, vulnerable reservoir of time as if each one of us can sense and see how we have the chance either to consecrate or detonate this magically poised and primed earth that still offers us all its time. Now, examine the great parliament of beasts that are girding the water. The Babel of beasts. They are magically present — ubiquitous in time — in the unperturbed sand. See what a welter of different roles, past and future, these animals have in their assembled community. See how they are starvelings but also predators, companions and collaborators. They are ambassadors of tolerance. And they are prey and dumb fodder. They are at home with each other even as they are estranged by inherited history and geography. See how they could en masse explode: if you behaved ineptly or provocatively while approaching them, they might scatter, they might panic and shed all their different species of blood in a gory calligraphic display that would festoon the clean waiting sand. See how they might tear the silence apart too, how they might obliterate the peaceable shoreline that sustains them. Imagine them eviscerating each other, or pulling you apart. Next, imagine the several times that press all around this possible centrifugal instant; see how many tensions could be sprung here that might obliterate the stillness. Imagine the jostling past that brought all these animal emissaries together to this hushed point in time and space; and imagine the next moment, when the paradoxically serene and mongrel gestalt of their assembly might disintegrate hugger-mugger. With its suspension in mysterious timeliness, with its magically re-made spatial setting and the political commentary of its allegorical confederacy of heretofore alienated participants, Heritage continues Cai’s great explosive project insofar as we sense how primed the scene is to scatter into mayhem. But this explosion is whisper-quiet and in slow motion. Or no-motion. And it’s made with fire’s opposite. With this minimally undulating, aqueous installation Cai has become defter and more grounded. He deploys a newly calibrated attentiveness to the subtlest shifts in surfaces and timescales, and with it comes a fresh delicacy that brings him close to a sensibility so well evoked by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who proclaimed: We of the here and now are not for a moment hedged in the time- world, nor confined within it; we are incessantly flowing over and over to those who preceded us, to our origins and to those who seemingly come after us. Cai Guo-Qiang and his daughter Wenhao Cai during site visit to the Low Isles, Great Barrier Reef, north Queensland, July 2011 Photograph: Russell Storer Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Research Library Endnotes 1 William James, ‘Lecture III: The reality of the unseen’, in his The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature , Longmans, Green and Co, New York, 1902, p.53. 2 Arthur Lubow, ‘The pyrotechnic imagination’, New York Times Magazine , 17 February 2008, quoted in David Elliott, ‘Between heaven and earth: Space and time in the art of Cai Guo-Qiang’, in Cai Guo Qiang: Fallen Blossoms , Philadelphia Art Museum and The Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, 2010, p.39. 3 Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms , p.39. 4 Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead , The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2003, p.ix. 5 Patrick White, The Solid Mandala , Eyre and Spottiswoode, London, 1966, frontispiece. 6 See the ABC Radio report on the work of Dr Cameron Barr from the University of Adelaide, June 2013, <http://www.abc.net.au/ news/2013-06-04/adelaide-researchers-find-remarkable-little- changed-lake-in-que/4732122>. See also <http://www.adelaide.edu . au/news/news61741.html>. 7 Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke (Volume Two, 1910–1926) , trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M D Herter Norton, W W Norton and Co, New York, 1948, pp.373–4.