Written by David Bartal, and published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE Volume #8
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Eliasson is probably best known for ‘The Weather Project’ at the Tate Modern, a blockbuster 2003 event that set a new standard for contemporary installation art. One can’t fault Eliasson for a lack of ambition. He dominated the entire London gallery with his evocations of the sun and sky. The main part of the exhibit, described by some as an almost religious experience, was created in the 155-meter long Turbine Hall. The entire ceiling of the room was covered by mirrors which effectively doubled the size of the chamber. The room was dominated by a synthetic sun – a gigantic half circle made of 200 yellow sodium lamps, which were doubled into a full circle by the mirrors. Cloud-like formations of mist or haze floated in the cavernous room, emerging and disappearing. 

As is often the case with Eliasson, the concept of time is central: “Weather gives a very distinct sense of time. You see clouds today that you will never see again. I wanted to capture that,” he was quoted as saying in a 2003 Copenhagen Post article. He repeatedly explores in his works the way in which time, motion and the physical location of the viewer affects the way things are perceived. The ‘Weather Project’ was an unprecedented public success. Roughly two million visitors made a pilgrimage to the Tate over a six-month period.

Many lay on their backs on the floor of the Turbine Hall below the artificial sun, in effect becoming part of the installation. In a videotape of the exhibit viewable on Youtube, it looks as if visitors are ants crawling in the desert, or worshipers taking part in an obscure sun-cult ritual.

I witnessed a less spectacular side of the artist that same year in Italy when Eliasson represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale. Using prisms and mirrors, strobe lights and cylinders, Eliasson took spectators on a magical tour. At one point, I looked through a large cylinder tube expecting to see a mirrored image of my face. Instead, I was startled to find myself staring at another visitor who was peering into another opening at the same instant, equally alarmed to see my face. As critic Dana Lixenberg remarked in her Tate Magazine article,* the Venice exhibit demonstrated a “witty, inventive eagerness to provoke spectators into 'seeing themselves seeing.” Olafur has few if any peers when it comes to that particular trick.

Born in Copenhagen of Icelandic parents in 1967, this artist with a penchant for ‘minimalist spectacles’ had his first solo show of pen drawings at age fifteen, in a non-profit gallery in his hometown in Denmark. “After that I took a break from art and spent most of my time break dancing. But then I went back to art again”, the artist explained in a question/answer session with Red Studio in conjunction with his recent 2008 retrospective exhibit at MoMA: ‘Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson’.

Eliasson connection to Iceland cannot be dismissed. His father and mother met while studying in Denmark, his artistic dad to be a cook and his mom to be a seamstress. After his parents separated when Olafur was still young, his father moved back to live in the Icelandic countryside. Visiting Iceland in the summers and on holidays, Eliasson would frequently stay with his grandfather and go traveling with his dad across the striking lunar landscape.

“Icelanders have a very strong sense of temporality and scale, of distance and height. It’s not esoteric or spiritual or particularly existential. It’s pretty physical, actually,” Eliasson told The Times of London. Because the sun is only ten degrees above the horizon for a large part of the year, objects are cast in dramatic relief. Even a casual visitor to this island nation, half-way between Europe and America, becomes quickly aware of the ‘other-ness’ of the geography – endless sculptural fields of frozen black lava, some of which are covered in soft green moss, geothermal ponds shrouded in mist, geysers violently erupting from beds of granite, cliffs dividing massive continental shelves, and winds rolling in off the Atlantic chilly enough to burn your eyes. No, Iceland is not like most other places.

And Olafur Eliasson is not like most other artists. Several of his contemporaries also work on a monumental scale with events in public places and museums, but Eliasson is more – more prolific, more original. His meticulously organized and executed events and installations are often imbued with an unpretentious poetry and beauty, which is hugely appealing even when difficult to define.

Since leaving Copenhagen’s Royal Academy of Arts in 1995, Eliasson’s work has been displayed at the world’s top art spaces, including MoMA, New York’s Guggenheim Museum, and the Tate. But he has also conducted vigilante-like actions with the flavor of street art. In 1997, for example, when showing photos of Iceland at the Johannesburg Biennale, Eliasson got his hands on a diesel pump used for draining water from basements.

He used it to pump water from a reservoir into the street, creating a sort of flood: “I wanted people to see the way the water would make a drawing as it carved its way through a not-so-clean street,” the artist told the New York Times. Similarly, in his ‘Green River’ project during the period 1998-2001, Eliasson made use of a non-toxic powder used to trace leaks in plumbing systems to temporarily turn rivers in Sweden, Japan, the USA and other countries a sickly fluorescent green.

Some of his works have an underlying political or social dimension – one could expect no less, of course, from a Scandinavian. He used his commission for BMW’s Art Car program, for example, to make a wry comment on global warming. Eliasson removed the body of the hydrogen-powered car and replaced it with a cocoon of icicles, transforming the futuristic vehicle into a sort of spikecovered frozen dinosaur.

Eliasson, 41, allows us to sense an urban space and the temporality of nature in a new way. Typical is his ‘Yellow Fog,’ which was permanently installed on the facade of the Verbund-Zentrale at the Am Hof square in Vienna’s old city centre. Through grates in the sidewalk in front of the building, the lights from 32 lamps shine upward, illuminating a yellow fog which, after sundown, rises up toward the façade every three minutes. Eliasson shrouds the stationary building in fog, creating an air of mystery, constantly shifting because of wind or other weather conditions.

The virtuosity, range and sheer volume of Eliasson’s creations prompted a mid-career retrospective called ‘Take Your Time’, which was staged from April-June 2008 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and at its affiliate, P.S. 1. In one display, according to a museum description, colored bulbs bathe a room in yellow light, turning everything inside monochrome; strobes illuminate a thin curtain of falling water, causing the eye to ‘freeze’ the droplets in mid-air; kaleidoscopes produce colorful prismatic effects; mirrors reflect spotlight beams, revealing an artificial dimension. Other components of the Eliasson tour de force are a wall of reindeer moss, an indoor rainbow, and an upward-flowing waterfall.

The artist maintains that the illusion itself is not his main aim, although he extensively uses mirrors, kaleidoscopic shapes, and camera obscurae. “I always try to show the way these devices are constructed as well,” he explains. For example, his reversed waterfall clearly reveals its pump and mechanical inner workings. Although his purpose is not magical illusion, the effect of Eliasson’s works on viewers can be nearly hallucinogenic. Art critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl described the extraordinary effect of one Eliasson installation at MoMA’s P.S. 1 featuring “a vast, overhead, tilted disk of mirrored plastic that rotated slowly, gradually giving lovely, subtly disorienting effects which register best when you lie flat on the floor.” Relaxing on his back, the critic had the sensation that the disk was stationary and that the building, as well as the planet were turning on a new axis.

Needless to say, artworks without a clear narrative which induce sophisticated viewers into imagining that the earth is rotating on a new axis cannot be found on every street corner. But the New Yorker critic stubbornly resisted falling under the artist’s powerful spell. “What are these works, besides fun?” Schjeldahl asks acidly. “Perhaps not much in themselves. They are choice instances of institutionally parasitic art that exists only because space-rich, audience-hungry museums and Kunsthallen must fill their schedules with something, and preferably not the inefficiently small and expensively insured objects that are traditional paintings and sculptures. I have been unhappy with the reign of such circusy manifestations,” the critic sniffed.

While this view is legitimate, it also smacks of elitism. In a videotape during the installation of his exhibit ‘Take Your Time’ at MoMA, Eliasson explains his own point of view: “I don’t think we should be afraid of doing something very beautiful and very engaging and very seducing, emotionally very challenging. I think it is worthwhile taking up the blurred area between something seducing and something more serious.”

Eliasson pulled off one of his most extravagant and complicated feats this year, between June 26 and Oct. 13, when he created ‘New York City Waterfalls’, four gigantic artificial waterfalls in New York City. The concept grew out of Eliasson’s observation that although the city is surrounded by water, most New Yorkers are not as strongly connected to their waterfronts as urban Europeans. The project was the city’s biggest public art project since artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude created ‘The Gates’ in 2005 – the construction of 7,500 of gates swathed in saffron-colored fabric along 37 kilometers of pathways in New York’s Central Park.

The Falls are up to 37 meters high and cascade into the East River and the NYC waterfront from scaffolding constructed off the coast of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Governor’s Island. These installations, including one eerily placed at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, caused observers to reflect upon a non-urban past the city never had. Writers were forced to reach deep into their literary backpacks for suitable metaphors. Eliasson’s waterfalls could “almost fool King Kong into imagining he was back home,” mused Roberta Smith of the New York Times. The Falls on Governor’s Island were pinpointed as especially beautiful, “like a tropical vision, they seem to be waiting for the jungle to grow up around them.”

Beautiful. That is a word which is infrequently applied to modern conceptual artworks, which often have a more purely intellectual appeal. But Eliasson considers his work to be in the spirit and tradition of earlier masters, who also combined experimentation with an inviting aesthetic. In his question and answer session with Red Studio, in response to the question “What do you hope visitors will gain from the physical and sensory experience of installations?” Eliasson replied: “I don’t think your experience of my installations is different from that of paintings or sculptures. The Impressionists and the Pointillists also worked a lot with the gaze of the viewer and her movement in front of the work. They made clear that our perspective matters; it makes us co-produce what we see.”

*Dana Lixenberg, ‘Captain Spectacular: Olafur Eliasson’, Tate Magazine, Issue 7, 2003.

This article was published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE Volume #8. It was written by David Bartal a writer based in Sweden who writes primarily on popular culture.