BLOG - Archivo JUNIO de 2009

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Cai Guo-Quiang: I Want to Believe. Do We Believe Him?

Along with an Asian degree of exploitation of the commercial aspects of pop art by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, praised ad infinitum by the posse of characters populating the gossip magazines, the Guggenheim is presenting its first exhibition of an artist born in China. One feels like Bill Murray’s character in the film Lost in translation, on a gloomy Tuesday, in the tidal wave of lively OAPs and schoolchildren.

Cai Guo-Quiang (Quanzhou, 1957) presents forty pieces produced in the last twenty-five years: drawings, explosion projects, installations and social projects. Of these, the best known were his gunpowder drawings on fibrous paper, his open-air explosions, and, in his role as spectacle producer, the cauldron and opening and closing ceremonies for the last Olympic Games. The combination of traditional Chinese culture, Maoist revolutionary tactics in Japan –where he lived between 1986 and 1995–, Taoism, Buddhism, international art and terrorist violence, with Beuys’ social sculptures, UFO sightings, and a concern for “the community” which materialises in the artist’s request for extra hands for his work, are the raw materials with which he creates his play of creation and destruction.

The Venice Biennial, Swedish Style.

It is a well-known fact that biennials have become media circuses and a mere excuse for so-called cultural tourism, but, in our naivety, we always expect each new curator to take advantage of the stage, particularly the one offered by Venice, to present some kind of idea. This has not been the case here. The Swedish curator Daniel Birnbaum has deliberately adopted a position of extraordinary ideological lukewarmness, “Swedish style”. Given the global meltdown we are currently experiencing, it would have been desirable for him to have made some kind of conceptual effort, to have conducted some kind of analysis of the situation, and to have selected a series of artists whose production gives rise to some kind of debate. But this has not happened. In his brief text he mentions three central elements which we cannot help but find surprising; firstly, the idea of “DIY”; secondly, the notion of painting as an expanded language, and, lastly, his defence of the value of poetry as a manifestation of a symbolic plurality in the face of a single globalising way of thinking. All of which is summarised in the sentence Making Worlds, a deliberately deceiving title, as it makes promises but does not deliver, given that there is little that can be built out of these raw materials.