I want to believe

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum dragged me in for yet another time. Still half-way scaffolded, today was the second day of it's new exhibition "I Want To Believe" by Chinese-born-and-now-New Yorker artist Cai Guo-Qiang. No doubt, the fact that he used cars in one of his recent works Inopportune: Stage One. The installation is the eye catcher of the exhibition showing some nine identical white cars exploding and flipping in sequence, the bursts suggested by illuminated tubes radiating from the cars' center in varying colors. The Guggenheim exhibit is the 2008 copy of original Inopportune: Stage One that supposedly was shown 2004 in the Seattle Art Museum, as a gift of Robert M. Arnold, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum and also had its appearance in a 2004/05 exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (see here or here). Interestingly enough, Cai changed the brand of cars used in his art from Ford to Chevrolet. Whatever that will tell us...

Cai has been known for his gunpowder art, but this retrospective exhibition (including an artist self-designed retrospective in the retrospective including a life river allowing visitors to "row" through his work of art) goes way beyond that (including New York's Rent Collection courtyard (2008), a new version of Cai's historic Venice's Rent Collection Courtyard (1999) that reenacts a 1965 socialist-realist sculptural ensemble that is an icon of China's Cultural Revolution. The work comprises dozens of life-size clay figures modeled on side and intended to decompose over the course of the show.

After a stroll in wintery, snowy Central Park we enjoyed the final showing of "The Maddening Truth" (see here or here), a piece about the life story of Ernest Hemingway's third wife Martha Gellhorn that seemed a constant struggle between journalism and writing, with an amazing Lisa Emery (as Martha Gellhorn) and Peter Benson.