Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim

Using a car bomb as his point of departure, Cai has created Inopportune: Stage One, 2004, a monumental installation at his retrospective in the Guggenheim Museum. The piece, which is composed of a number of cars suspended in mid-air with colored rods of light protruding out from the car bodies, rises from the first floor up through the open atrium to the 6th floor. The first car is positioned normally at entrance lobby and each successive car rises up the atrium, tumbling in what look like individual frames from a movie clip. The final car is upright and placed on the ramp of the top floor as if nothing had ever happened. The piece is striking, beautiful and somewhat intimidating. Like much of Cai's other work this piece presents itself as spectacle ready to be consumed by the viewer. Cai's choice to make such a colorful and beautiful work about a car bomb is rather compelling. He appears to be challenging our understanding of beauty and violence, perhaps even equating the two in some way. However, despite the fact that the piece is based on a car bomb I do not see much tension in the work. Actually, for me the work is more of a piece of fantastic spectacle and beauty than a commentary on or reinterpretation of our values of beauty and violence. Inopportune: Stage One is so precisely stylized, executed and presented that any potent reference to violence is gone. I find it more entertaining than thought provoking. Although the artist may claim that the use of violence as entertainment is precisely the point, I feel that amongst the carnival like atmosphere of the retrospective there is little opportunity for the piece to be seen as a commentary on our love of beauty and violence. It simply becomes part of that world rather than standing out from it.