"Fireworks are apparition [...]: They appear empirically yet are liberated from the burden of the empirical, which is the obligation of duration; they are a sign from heaven yet artifactual, an ominous warning, a script that flashes up, vanishes, and indeed cannot be read for its meaning."

      There is a fiery explosion of colors, shapes and patterns, fleetingly iterated against the darkened sky. An effusion of smoke lingering in the night air, the atmosphere thick with the smell of gunpowder. It is the unfolding of a project, an event, an artwork articulated through the language of fireworks. These orchestrations trigger aural, visual and olfactory sensations, eliciting a dynamic response from the entire corporeal entity. There are immediate and lingering traces, at once ephemeral and subtly material: bodily shock, optical afterimages, perhaps a ringing in the ears, degrees of cognitive and spatial overload and confusion. Dynamically present only for a few moments, then dispersing into the air, creating a rich, smoky absence: this is, in a sense, the intrinsic aesthetic of temporal transience that underlies Cai Guo-Qiang's gunpowder and firework projects. There is the dramatic buildup of anticipation, the unfolding of a display with images and forms pulsating in the nocturnal sky, a climax of resounding effects, and then everything is extinguished. The event resonates, imprinted in memory, as a constellation of phantom cognitive signs. Representation becomes anti-representation, the legible illegible, in a matter of seconds.

      Fireworks are a paradoxical ritual: at once violent and beautiful, populist and mysterious, mundane yet magical, they can be considered, historically, one of the first truly public, spectacle-oriented forms of cultural expression and social symbolism. Traditional yet continuously reinvented, fireworks have been employed for purposes ranging from militaristic symbolism to nationalistic celebration, to just plain consumerism; or, in their most basic form, a kid firing a bottle rocket in his or her backyard. In these days of anxieties (real and imagined), the transient imaginary reality of fireworks has undoubtedly taken on more profound implications, particularly in their seductive power to invoke the sound, fury, and visuality of armed conflict.

"... In my hometown every significant social occasion of any kind, good or bad—weddings, funerals, the birth of a baby, a new home—is marked by the explosion of fireworks. They even use fireworks when they elect Communist party officials, or after someone delivers a speech. Fireworks are like the town crier, announcing whatever's going on in town."

      Cai has traversed many miles to establish himself as one of the most innovative and risk-taking artists of the past decade. Born in 1957 in Quanzhou City (located within the Fujian Province of China, where firecracker manufacture is pervasive), he moved to Japan in 1986, then re-located to New York in 1995, where he currently lives. He developed a fascination with, and critical understanding of, historical manifestations of process-oriented and event-based art, and has internalized the conceptual implications of de-materialization and site-specificity (in terms of exploring cultural and geographic topographies and territorial parameters). These concerns have been fused with Cai's relationship to notions of spirituality, as well as an interest in spectacle and entertainment, to engender an art method and language that is as premeditated as it is unpredictable.

"Both past and future are placed into an objective present."

      In the rapidly changing global present, in which social, cultural, economic and political boundaries are increasingly interconnected (for better and worse), Cai has endeavored to utilize art as a way of re-imagining these relationships. He believes in the potential of art to generate new rituals of social participation that are catalyzed by a blend of utopian and spiritual impulses, contextual analysis, and pop culture entertainment values. A consummate experimentalist, Cai has dovetailed traditional materials and methods from the East (specifically derived from the historical and living cultural traditions of both China and Japan) with vanguard strategies culled from the canonical narrative of Western art history (e.g., Earthworks/Land Art, site-specificity, Performance Art, Conceptualism, etc.). Cai's practice reflects an intersection of these diverse aesthetic and philosophical influences, and it functions as an allegory of his home country's complex negotiation of received inheritance and acquired influences. Cai positions himself as a global artist embedded within local tradition and, conversely, as a local artist injected into a globalized network of art languages, strategies and cultural-social differences.

      This practice amplifies the paradoxical aspects of the language of time-based, performative work, in which conditions of materiality and de-materialization unfold within an ephemeral zone that suggests a transient presence. Cai has a sense of the theatrical, and his ambitious projects invariably require consummate negotiation and organizational skills, openness to tactical collaboration, and a fine-tuned understanding of situational requirements. There is, of course, a fine line between success and failure in these projects, a line that Cai has continued to challenge as the complexity and scope of the gunpowder and fireworks events have demanded a commensurate sophistication in technological acumen and strategic logistical decisions. On conceptual and symbolic terms, Cai's work invokes important questions: What is the duration of a process-based work of art? Can art transcend officially determined cultural, social and political boundaries to produce a new "map" of human relations? How might art function to mobilize new moments of social communication and interaction, beyond the precincts of gallery and museum space?

"Ernst Schoen once praised the unsurpassable noblesse of fireworks as the only art that aspires not to duration but only to glow for an instant and fade away. ... If art were to free itself from the once perceived illusion of duration, were to internalize its own transience in sympathy with the ephemeral life, it would approximate an idea of truth conceived not as something abstractly enduring but in consciousness of its temporal essence."

      Cai had been utilizing gunpowder to produce drawings and explosion events beginning in the 1980s, and this would logically and organically evolve into experimentation with larger gunpowder and firework displays later in the 1990s. In 1992, he embarked upon a grand cartographic and socially-collaborative endeavor in China's Gobi desert, Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 10. Here, the physical trajectory of the Great Wall was temporarily extended in a nighttime event by the lighting of a series of gunpowder fuses in the desert landscape, a symbolic re-mapping of geographic, cultural, social and political territories. In 1994, the night sky was transformed into a horizontal line of red fire in the project entitled, The Horizon from the Pan-Pacific: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 14. In this event, an area just off the coast of Japan was momentarily amplified by an illumination created by 5,000 meters of ignited gunpowder fuses, and other elements. The works from the Extraterrestrials series are conceptualized and designed to be seen from outer space, i.e., by entities not of this Earth. Perhaps this suggests a playful rethinking of the issue of audience in relation to the remote locations of Earthworks/Land Art, in which viewership is less accessible and therefore more exclusionary, a logic that Cai endeavors to reverse by offering his projects to the world-and beyond. Such projects indicate a kind of new utopianism, in which dreaming and pragmatism are synthesized.

      In 1996, Cai embarked upon a project entitled The Century with Mushroom Clouds: Project for the 20th Century. He was photographed firing a gunpowder-and-tube contraption into the air at a number of seminal locations for Earthworks/Land Art and urban life (e.g., Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, the Manhattan skyline, a nuclear test site in Nevada, Michael Heizer's Double Negative, etc.). This action produced an effusion of smoke that resembled the form—albeit momentarily—of a mushroom cloud. Not without a sense of irony in reference to the tragic consequences of nuclear proliferation, Cai here reconceived the iconic weapon of mass destruction as a personal sign of aesthetic production, a gesture at once melancholic, hopeful, and humorous. He indexed himself as a kind of tourist figure (a tourist in art history, in political history, and in American culture), reclaiming these over-determined, canonical geographic locations. Against the odds, Cai re-coded an apocalyptic image into a harmless puff of smoke.

      In the later 1990s, invitations from museums, as well as municipalities, to produce context-specific works increased, and Cai began to move, to a certain extent, his focus away from the natural landscape, and towards the cultural landscape of urban and institutional zones. In 1998, he produced No Destruction, No Construction: Bombing the Taiwan Museum of Art, a gunpowder event that was staged for the purposes of initiating the renovation of this museum. A spectacular array of gunpowder and fuses was detonated in the sky above the museum, which then traveled sequentially downwards, entering the museum through the building's skylights and windows. From an outside perspective, the building thus appeared to be exploding: a virtual incursion into the site that anticipated, and set into motion, on symbolic terms, the actual remodeling of the museum. In this project, and others that followed, Cai's manipulation of the visual and aural effects of the explosions became increasingly sophisticated on technical and creative terms, and cultural institutions became aware of just how effective such displays could be in expanding the audience for art.

"A million years is contained in a second, yet we tend to forget the second as soon as it happens."

      This brings us to the evening of June 29, 2002, wherein a spectacular firework display, choreographed to unfold in a swift, staccato sequence, crossed the East River in New York City. Transient Rainbow, true to its title, instantaneously appeared and disappeared in less than 15 seconds. The project comprised 1,000 firework shells launched sequentially from Roosevelt Island. Starting from the Manhattan side, the fireworks progressively cascaded towards the opposite side in Queens. The dazzling visual effect resembled a rapidly moving rainbow momentarily spanning—and symbolically linking—the East River's two banks.

      No trace remained, other than a smoke-infused night sky, and a lasting sense of wonderment for those who gathered at various locations to witness the display: a unique constellation of viewers for an unprecedented nocturnal art event in New York. Compressed into those few seconds, however, was about one-year's worth of false starts, sketches, negotiations, compromises, budgets—and a great deal of anticipation.

      Not unlike many artworks that engage a broad public scale, there is a complex history to the development of this project, a narrative account that reveals the extent to which Cai's art is contingent upon responsive collaboration and continuous design recalibrations. In 2001, The Museum of Modern Art in New York approached Cai with the idea of a commission to develop a fireworks program that would be part of the opening celebrations during 2002 of its new temporary facility in Queens. Cai responded with an ambitious proposal for a fireworks program in three phases that would symbolically bring together the three distinct institutional sites constituting MoMA, while simultaneously evoking the trajectory of the museum from Manhattan to Queens.

      The first phase was to be centered around "light pillars" in which tiger-tail fireworks about 600 feet high would be ignited consecutively, five seconds apart, from four sites: the MoMA building on 53rd Street, the Southernmost tip of Roosevelt Island, P.S.1 and, finally the new MoMA QNS. Fireworks forming the letters M-O-M-A would be shot over the East River, followed by fireworks in the form of a monumental blossoming kamuro with multiplying flowers, and the letters M-A-M-A above. The second phase would literally trace the movement from Manhattan to Queens, taking place on especially designated subway cars traveling on the 7 subway train tracks, from P.S.1 to MoMA QNS (a section where the train is elevated above ground). Cai proposed to affix a line of fuses to a structure attached to the top of the trains. The fuses would then be ignited by the movement of the trains, progressing from front to back in "a waterfall of rainbow colors," evoking a dragon traveling through space.

      The grand finale would take place at MoMA QNS, on the roof of its blue converted warehouse, focusing on the celebration of MoMA's collections. The sequence called for monumental sets, placed on the roof of the building, that outlined iconic works: Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel, Henri Matisse's Dance, Jackson Pollock's One (Number 31, 1950), among others. Children's fireworks would sequentially inhabit these sets, rendering the images visible. Photographs and film excerpts would then be projected on the smoky clouds generated by the fireworks—a screen that would slowly dissipate, eroding the representational legibility of these artistic reproductions.

      The development of Cai's proposal involved-and was to a certain extent shaped by-consultations with city officials and neighborhood representatives. From these discussions it became clear that, given the general anxiety in a post-September 11 New York City, there was a sense that it might be alarming and confusing for citizens to experience loud explosions emanating from tall buildings and moving trains. Responding to these concerns, Cai revised his proposal, removing the initial phase and adding a rainbow going across the East River. This new proposal was comprised of a two-part program entitled Transient Rainbow. Transient Rainbow I was to consist of seven lines of aquatic fireworks that would be laid out on the surface of the East River between Manhattan and Queens by motor boats, each line corresponding to a color of the rainbow. Fireworks would be ignited electronically at the same time from the Manhattan side, and an undulating rainbow would connect the two banks, traveling at a speed of 100 feet per second. Transient Rainbow II was directly developed from the first proposal that was to utilize subway cars. After much consideration, however, New York City's Metropolitan Transit Authority indicated that, due to safety concerns, the project could not be feasibly located in the subway system.

      In order to realize Transient Rainbow, an unprecedented network of communications was required, involving the artist, the Museum, the Grucci fireworks company (with whom Cai discussed the production in every detail and developed the technical elements for the three-inch multi-color peony shells fitted with computer chips), the New York City Fire Department (to acquire permits), the FAA (to control air navigation safety above the fireworks site), and the Coast Guard (to coordinate maritime schedules on the East River in concert with Cai's event). During this process, in response to the Coast Guard's imposed restrictions due to concerns with terrorist threats, Cai ingeniously developed—in a kind of jujitsu maneuver—a plan in which all the fireworks would be ignited not from the water but from the Southernmost tip of Roosevelt Island at various angles.

      Utilizing seven colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, pale blue and purple), Cai decided to visually maintain the rainbow trail until the end, with the shells continually detonating until the entire rainbow was illuminated. Each shell would contain a computer chip that instructed it to break in the air three seconds after being launched, thus making possible the precise choreographing of its explosion at a specific height, and thus making possible the image-construction of the rainbow shape. This modified design created better viewing possibilities, allowing for the formation of an arch-like emblematic shape, which suggested a more direct morphological resemblance to a rainbow, and lessened the possibility of fireworks not igniting due to water damage. The rainbow would now span 300 feet in length, rising to 300 feet at its apex. At the end of 12 seconds, by accumulation, the full arch would form. After its initial dissipation, a few moments later, the arched image would return for a full instantaneous bang. Then, instantaneously, the rainbow would be revealed one final time, with shimmers added, in its entire splendor.

      Documentation, an imperfect surrogate of memory, constitutes the only residue left by Transient Rainbow. Beyond the fact that all sensual experience gets lost in photographic and video documentation, capturing a fireworks piece is notoriously difficult. This is mainly due to the challenging light (or lack thereof) conditions, unpredictable wind directions that influence smoke patterns and may affect clarity of "image" (itself, a rather transient condition), as well as the limited duration—and unrepeatable nature—of the event. Based upon the experience of previous gunpowder and fireworks projects, Cai had developed an elaborate corollary system of documentation nearly as sophisticated as the fireworks technology itself. Cai's main photographer, Hiro Ihara, with whom he has been collaborating since 1996, was responsible for hiring a team of 17 photographers that he would painstakingly coordinate with the utmost precision to document Transient Rainbow, carefully assigning a location (distributed on either side of the river, building roofs, bridges, helicopter, and other improbable sites) to each photographer. In addition to these, three photographers who specialized in fireworks were flown from Japan specifically for the event. The photographic and video-based documents become a de facto part of the life of the work; these documents memorialize the artwork-as-event and the event-as-artwork, providing the image-traces of the performance's ephemeral condition.

      For the artist, the rainbow is a sign of hope and promise, something that comes after a storm, and therefore the choice of this iconography was meant as a symbolically appropriate way to address a post-September 11 New York City and a propitious way to mark the museum's opening of a new, albeit temporary, home. It was in those fleeting moments of explosions and high-velocity cascading of colors, of a spectacularly ephemeral display iterated across the sky, that the temporal dimension of art was redefined as a virtually instantaneous beginning and end. An explosion of temporality that was also a compression of time: both literally and symbolically, one year in 15 seconds.

Audience, Reception, and Transformation

      In his projects, Cai triggers a contemporary quasi-ritualistic event, in which viewers are invited to witness a unique mode of aesthetic language grounded in a notion and practice of collective reception. Yet he does not desire or expect a passive reception from the audience; rather, viewers are participants engaged in a social event that is catalyzed by the fireworks display. This is, I believe, an essential aspect of Cai's aesthetic methodology: the creation of situations in which there is social interaction that frames—and is framed by—the language of fireworks. The audience for Cai's gunpowder and fireworks-based pieces is not in a simultaneous state of collective distraction; to the contrary, they are activated by a luminously beautiful display that momentarily, yet powerfully, alters their normative relationship to context, place, and site. In other words, Cai is not interested in simply orchestrating a dramatic spectacle for its own sake, but rather utilizing the fundamentally public language of fireworks as an imaginary vehicle for individual and collective transformation.

      These works are conceptualized and designed to appeal to a wider audience, to engender vibrant interconnections between rituals of viewership and a broader zone of social space in which events and reactions are less prescribed, less predictable. Cai has produced a new hybrid form of cultural expression that fuses general accessibility with conceptual integrity (and entertainment with provocation), while simultaneously invoking a quality of timelessness in relation to the fugitive reality of modern technology.

Essay originally published in
Cai Guo-Qiang: On Black Fireworks.
Valencia: IVAM, 2005, pp. 86-103.

Notes:

1. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 81.
2. Cai Guo-Qiang in an interview published in Cai Guo-Qiang (London: Phaidon, 2002), p. 14.
3. Excerpt from Robert Smithson's "Entropy and the New Monuments" (1966) in Jack Flam, ed. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
4. Adorno, op. cit., p. 29.
5. Smithson, op. cit.