Art Fag City at the L Magazine: MuseumTime: Uptown/Downtown

Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim

Given the number of museum shows I’ve taken an interest in recently, I decided to write a series of mini reviews for the L Magazine. The entirety of the Guggenheim’s Cai Guo-Qiang retrospective appears below both for your convenience and my gratification, but you’ll have to click through to read about Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer at the New Museum. Readers interested in the Turner prize winner Tomma Abts also at the New Museum, may be disappointed to learn I didn’t also write about the show, but if I were, the gist of it would read something to the effect of, “A painters painter with an absolute mastery of abstract forms in medium sized format.” And now on to Cai Guo-Qiang.

Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim

It's hard to argue with the visual appeal of fireworks, countless taxidermied wolves mindlessly flying into a suspended circular piece of Plexiglas or tigers and boats impaled with thousands of arrows, but that’s not going to stop me. Not much time remains to see Cai Guo-Qiang's retrospective at the Guggenheim, an awe-inspiring symphony-of-fire-meets-Times-Square-style exhibition made from the oldest contemporary art-making formulas in the book. The general aesthetic philosophy behind much of his work falls under the “multiples look good, particularly in larger scale” means of problem solving. In addition to the pieces mentioned above, a series of cars dangling from the ceiling with multicolored rope-lights exploding through the windows also meets such criteria. Making obvious and spectacular reference to terrorism, the installation encourages the viewer to reflect on the activity in the same way we might contemplate a billboard news crawler: fleetingly at best. The gunpowder drawings seem to have more behind them, even if the earth vibrations to body rhythms are a little too contrived. Even larger works like Fetus Movement II, an earth-like shape drawing with notations detailing the artist's heart rate, brainwaves and the earth's vibrations at the time of the explosion, can be too-easily reduced to an aesthetic reliant on the inevitable beauty found within destructive forces. With the exception of a breathtaking shipwreck sunk in broken dishes on the top floor, the exhibition never escapes the predictability of its own formulaic processes.

Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer

Nothing brings to mind the term “boy art” quicker than the words “extended adolescence,” “rock culture,” “death” and “self-portraiture,” all of which appear in the New Museum's press release for Double Album, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer.

To read the full review click here.