Sky Ladder has one of the better opening lines I’ve heard in a movie all year. We are told (through subtitles) that many centuries ago, while searching for a substance that would give them immortality, the Chinese discovered dynamite. What a great exposition to a meditation on the themes of artistic legacy, creativity, mortality, and destruction. And the documentary that follows takes these topics up with aplomb.
The movie, whose full title is Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang, is directed by Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland). It charts the family, youth, and artistic growth of Cai Guo-Qiang as he rose from a Chinese art student to New York art-world celebrity. Known for his firework displays and canvases that are ‘painted’ by the ignition of gunpowder, he has had many artistic phases -- including astonishing taxidermied installations tumbling through the air. He is truly an artist who lends himself well to a cinematic treatment.
The movie takes its name from a piece he had been trying to execute for decades where a ladder-like assemblage of fireworks is carried up into the air by a hot-air balloon. Lit up, it looks like a ladder ascending into the sky. It is a great anchor for the film to provide bookends and redemption for a career that has strayed from a coherent artistic vision in the intervening years.
For example, Cai was the director of the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, which is a political display in all cases, but maybe especially for China. It did not quite mesh with his notion of art as a form of destruction, opposing itself to structures of power. Cai’s work is interesting because his frequent return to explosions (either in themselves, or their aftermaths). They either suggest impermanence or are themselves ephemeral art pieces. So he seems especially unsuited to become the creative voice behind a propaganda display that did nothing but shore up the illusion of permanent, inevitable, worldly power.
But then again, there is a decidedly unchallenging side to his work. Compared to most modern art, his elaborate, beautifully choreographed firework displays are pretty easy to swallow. Dare we say, commercial? Then on top of that, their execution takes so much planning and cooperation from regulatory domains, that he can hardly pose as a rogue, anti-establishment artist. So, like all artists who aim to achieve something transcendental, his work is always somehow compromised.
The movie is by no means a smear job, but a very interesting and thought-provoking examination of the interplay of these factors. The final segment shows Cai’s most recent attempt to execute the Sky Ladder, which he is eager to do it before the death of his extremely elderly grandmother. The resonance between her mortality and the ladder into the heavens is hardly subtle, but, like so much of Cai’s oeuvre, this movie shows that it is not necessary to be subtle to be great. Sometimes, an overwhelming, visual display isn’t flashy. It’s just dazzling.
