Very uneasy…. When you enter the room in the Kröller-Müller Museum with 9 Tigers
revolving in extreme agony, you feel at least uneasy. And I still feel very uneasy when
I look at these pictures.
The excess of arrows, the rolling, the theatrical scenery makes you identify with these tigers. They are not dead yet and you are part of the process, part of the suffering as the artist says somewhere; “part of an ongoing tragedy”. Where the rabbit in “Watership Down” (Richard Adams) defines being as “Life is here and now”, I would say this installation makes you feel like “Death is here and now”.The installation “Inopportune: Stage Two (2004) of the Chinese born New York artist Cai Guo-Qiang depicts his reaction to terrorism, cultural and religious conflicts, violence of war and extinction in relation to heroism (The Tigers – man made - refer to a Chinese story about Wu Song a brave man in the 12th century who killed a man-eating tiger with his bare hands to save his fellow villagers.)
Trying to understand this / his work I quote his words from
an interview:
“My
idea of making this work is not to do any criticism or replication but to focus
on what it means for sculptors to create realist sculptures in the time the
work was created. ...The end goal is not to make perfect sculptures and have
them exhibited elsewhere and then have them collected somewhere. The key is to
focus on the process of fabrication of these artworks, to pay attention to the
process of the artists making these sculptures, rather than where these
sculptures will end up and how they will look in the end.”
His large drawing Myth: Shooting the Suns: Project for
Extraterrestials No. 21 (1994) Produced by detonating gunpowder (suns) on
paper. The continuing search for balance between mankind and the shifting
universe.
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