Inopportune: Stage One, 2004, Seattle Art Museum, Sept. 2008
On my most recent trip to Washington State, I visited the Seattle Art Museum purposely to see
Inspiring Impressionism. Now, SAM isn't the MOMA, but it has character and surprises uniquely its own.
And surprised is exactly what I felt when I first laid eyes on it. I vividly recall how my attention was immediately drawn to this symphony of cars and lights as I walked in. In the lobby, I looked up on it, mesmerized ; on the second floor atrium, I gazed down on it, magnetized. Only after I had lengthily deliberated the artistic merits and tectonic risks of cars suspended from the ceiling did I walk away, quietly.
A project by Chinese artist Cai Gou-Qiang, Inopportune: Stage One, 2004 consists of nine identical white cars and multi-channel tubes with lights emanating from them in perfect choreography. The work is awe-inspiring, with its scale encompassing the entire lobby - a whole city block - of the newly renovated SAM in downtown Seattle. It is politically charged, too, as the seven cars suspended in mid-air and in various stages of rolling over seem to portray a car in various stages of explosion.
In an interview, the artist said: Ever since September 11th, the idea of terrorism is always on our minds. It’s ever so present. And while car explosions have been around for a long time, they have a heightened sense of reality in our minds. "Inopportune" obviously has a direct reference to these conditions that we live in now. But making an installation that is so beautiful and mesmerizing that also borrows the image of the car bomb already has inappropriateness in it..."*
Reading - and watching - the headlines, I can't help but be reminded of the Inopportune. Though created in reference to the events of Sept. 11, the work is noteworthy for its relevance to the issues of the day. It is noteworthy, again, how the artist had utilized American cars on this particular work, a tiny detail that wasn't lost to this observer.
Looking back, could Cai Gou-Qiang have predicted the downfall of the Big Three? It is interesting what the artist might come up with this time. Inopportune: Stage One, 2008, Cadillac Hearse?