Monday, March 31, 2008

I Too Want to Believe


















i know this is pretty lame, like wearing a concert t-shirt to prove i was at the show, but i couldn't resist. pictures were not allowed and meri managed to snap this surrpetitiously. just as she did so, a guard reprimanded us.

but to the point: I Want to Believe is an amazing show. projections of explosions over time's square, tigers shot obscenely full of arrows, wolves flying together in an arc that ends with them smashing into a glass wall, gunpowder portraits, huge domes of sheet set to explode in sequences that make them look like a ufo taking off...this is an amazing display of art as procees, product, event, politcial and spiritual statement.

All encompassing in a way that i have not experienced in recent memory, the show aims to (and succeeds at) showing that--indeed, (re)affirming the belief that--the creation and experience of great art is an absolutely necessary part of life as a thinking, feeling human being.

that said, the show also kind of had the effect of making me feel like a total failure. if only i could get a fraction of what Cai Guo-Qiang gets into his art into my poems. i left with the disctinct feeling that poetry may simply not cut it any more. in fact, for art to have power, i felt, it had to be multi-media. some of this, i think, had to do with the fact that i'd just seen an amazing reading/performance of a multi-vocalic by Rodrigo Toscano at the bowery poetry club that left me feeling that if a poetry is to be relevant or new or have any real future, it must be, if not multi-media to some degree, then at least poly-generic.

but then again, what is belief but pressing on despite your own worst fears and doubts?

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