Ring of Fire (detail)ink on painters calk on silk and canvas, ©ITIN ’05
Here’s another odd piece of post 911 public terrorism art by an Asian in New York, Cai Guo Qiang. This ring of fire, burned burned burned over Central Park in 2004. It was raining and the umbrellas seems to allude to Rosenquist’s F-111… like maybe an F-111 dropped some circular cluster bomb and New York is Vietnam at the turn of the century.
That explosion looked pretty amazing and I use it for omEGG when Pat blows up M. Tristan’s palace at Egg in Grindewald. It looks and sound particularly great with Wagner’s Ride of the Valkaries, like Apox. Now. I just did a greenfaced improv of Clark and the narrator. Sadly my makeup is all dried out, so I was limited in effects. But looking like a dead man in the mirror reminded me of the charming editor of Paris Review, George Plimpton. He wrote a delicious little book for all you pyros out there called, Fireworks and in it he predicted that the way technology and certain inovators like the Grucci’s (and the Grucci’s produced Light Cycle for Cai) were heading, one day fine artists would work in the medium of fireworks. He said, “Can’t you imagine Ruachenberg working in fire?” and I say leave it to a Chinaman to make Plimpton right. Bravo Cai and the website has some really amazing video (this from a guy who used to build model airplanes with the firecrackers already situated for future explosion fun… art shmart fart, let’s be boys and blow shit up…he is a man after my own heart for sure)
