Cai Guo Qiang: I Want to Believe

ART New York

Cai Guo Qiang: I Want to Believe

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10128

By Melissa Passman

Thomas Krens, the polarizing director of the Guggenheim Foundation for twenty years, plays a central role in the story of Cai Guo-Qiang’s massive spectacle of an exhibition currently at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. With last week’s surprising news that he would be stepping down as director, journalists began to eulogize his tenure, once again reminding us of the motorcycles and the Armani suits that will certainly remain as symbols of the excess that characterized his brash leadership style.

The current retrospective (co-curated by Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian art) is no different. As a vocal proponent of Cai Guo-Qiang’s theatrical art, my first impression on walking though the revolving doors was one of amazement. Confronted first by the cars hanging from the ceiling with fluorescent bulbs piercing them, and then by tigers with arrows that fill the second ramp. On the third ramp, an installation originally commissioned for the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin invites us to weave in and out of the line of wolves that will eventually crash into a glass wall. According to the wall text, this piece is an allegory for the Berlin Wall, synthesizing local and global histories.

Also drawing on recent history, Cai recreates “New York’s Rent Collection Courtyard,” a Communist propaganda sculpture from the late 1960’s. Occupying almost an entire ramp, a team of Chinese sculptors will fabricate this piece throughout the duration of the exhibition, exposing the process to the multitudes of visitors who will inevitably pass through the museum. He continuously insists on this process of audience engagement, whether incorporating paddleboats steered by four year olds and live snakes into his installations or forcing us to navigate past tigers pierced by arrows.

Best known for his work with gunpowder and fireworks drawings, I can’t help but think of the politically charged link to Cai’s prominent participation in the Beijing Olympics. As a prelude to the coming months, this is one spectacle that shouldn’t be missed.

Gustave Courbet at The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art

ART: New York

Gustave Courbet
February 27, 2008–May 18, 2008
Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art
1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY

by Melissa Passman


Inescapably plastered across the cover of the exhibition catalogue, posters, and signs leading me to the exhibition, Gustave Courbet’s visibly tortured and fraught visage stares out, confronting me at all angles, capturing the public’s attention. With a well-documented affinity for self-promotion, it is no surprise that Courbet represents himself as the public face of the exhibition. Having already seen the previous incarnation of this exhibition in Paris’ Grand Palais, I entered the Met’s galleries with great curiosity to discover what alterations had been made to the intricate arrangement of the paintings, and with greater anticipation, what pieces had been allowed to travel across the Atlantic. It was a pleasant surprise then to find that greeting me once again was a room of Courbet’s provocatively indulgent self-portraits, one of the greatest rewards of this retrospective, the first in over 30 years. The curator’s inclination to declare Courbet’s modernity is immediate – these self-portraits beg to be compared to Cindy Sherman’s gallery of personalities.

Following this dramatic entrance, the thematically divided rooms cover a broad range of subjects, from his equally sensational nudes to thriving landscapes, Courbet’s meandering oeuvre leaves no category untried.

Baudelaire’s essay “The Painter of Modern Life” aptly characterizes Courbet’s agenda, namely to substitute the grand themes of history painting for the more immediate realities of France. Walking from room to room, the intensity of paint viscerally confronts the viewer with a force that had not been present before this moment. Most compellingly, the numerous connections to the burgeoning history of photography, an active presence in France since its invention in 1839, draws the lineage for multimedia influence and the enormous effect that this new form of capturing reality had on the once-dominant form of preserving historical moments.

Despite all of these compelling intersections of forms, unsurprisingly the crowds swelled as I entered the room containing art history’s best known work of pornography, "L’Origine du Monde." A blunt portrayal of gender, this small painting signifies both the potential of life and inevitable death in terse terms. Owned by Jacques Lacan prior to entering the collection of the Musée d’Orsay, this commissioned work is ensconced on a small wall facing the photographs that served as his sources, along with a peep show apparatus set up to replicate the furtive actions of the audience for them.

It is perhaps these paintings, most prominently “Sleep” which features two women, one still in stockings, more than even the self-portraits that present the strongest argument for Courbet’s grip on contemporary painting most notably, with John Currin’s most recent work. The ongoing fascination with paint, flesh, and above all, fresh engagements with the physical immediacy of paint as a tool for representation, confirm Courbet’s status as the progenitor of a highly adaptable form of painting whose repercussions continue to fascinate today.