Pop Goes the Easel

But disaster isn't always expressed with a bang. "Inopportune: Stage Two" is a work of painful beauty, depicting nine life-size, fabricated tigers, pierced with more arrows than Saint Sebastian, jumping and writhing in agony. In the powerful installation "Head On," originally created in Berlin in 2006, a pack of 99 soaring wolves race toward their annihilation into a transparent wall, like birds smashing a picture window. Wolves and tigers and arrows, oh my—these are mesmerizing as art objects alone, but they're metaphorically rich, too. Those wolves could be the embodiment of evil in German fairy tales. Or they could be us, stampeding toward oblivion. They're also pretty darn cute—"teddy bears," as Guggenheim director Tom Krens puts it—made in China and as softly furry as toys under a Christmas tree. The ideas keep crackling like exploding firecrackers—or they hang serenely in the air. The yin of volatility, after all, is the yang of peace. According to Chinese legend, the alchemists who discovered gunpowder were searching for medicine—gunpowder actually means "fire medicine" in Chinese—not potential weaponry. When Cai speaks of his art as "comforting" or "healing," that's what he means. The dualities of celebration or warfare, exhilaration or destruction, the sublime or the savage keep unrolling as you move up the Guggenheim's curving ramps through this dreamscape for the 21st century.

© 2008