Today I was working with some image data in a spreadsheet, and for a while I was working specifically on cleaning up the “materials” field, and came across a work that was made with gunpowder… While many of you think my job is to look at art all day (and I kind of thought it would be, too), it actually isn’t, and this is an example — I wanted to look into this more and see what this piece was all about, but if I stopped every time something caught my interest, I would never get anything done, ever. So I skipped over it, went on to the next problematic materials field in the data, and kind of forgot about it.
But then tonight I ran across a NYT article on Cai Guo-Qiang, and noticed that he worked with gunpowder.
I remember his name being among those I worked with when I was cleaning up the artist field earlier this week, and I think this is probably a match… Anyway, there’s this cool video on the Times site you should watch if you have a few minutes — he basically draws with gunpowder and then ignites it, but in such a way that the whole piece isn’t burned. Pretty neat. I love the deliberateness of his work, juxtaposed with the uncontrollable nature of something like gunpowder and fire…
PS — work was actually very good today — after working with data and my favorite programmer for a really, really long time, we finally got 843 new images up, and the groundwork has been laid for future purchased images to go into the system relatively smoothly (after some fairly significant data massaging) (data massage sounds more fun than it is).
3 Comments
February 22, 2008 at 8:43 am
(data massage sounds more fun than it is)
No doubt. That is a phrase to be feared and avoided in my SQL database world.
February 22, 2008 at 11:39 am
There is an article on him in Newsweek as well. Interesting work!
November 11, 2008 at 8:18 pm
[...] the young artist is looking more at Cai Guo-Qiang (who I’ve actually written about very [...]