ISSN: 1705-6411
Volume 6, Number 2 (July, 2009)
Review Essay: Olafur Eliasson’s Subtle Subversions
Olafur Eliasson, Anna Engberg-Pederson, Philip Ursprung. Studio Olafur Eliasson: An Encyclopedia. Köln: Taschen, 2008.
Dr. Gerry Coulter
(Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, Canada).
1. Eliasson. A Description of a Reflection (1995)
I. Introduction
In the age of computer guided machines and prefabricated environments Olafur Eliasson situates his apparatuses in constructed environments to increase awareness of our own human perception. Perception is for him a product of the cultural conditions in which it takes place. Similarly, he understands his studio as an instrument with which he, and many others, collectively produce the art which appears under his name. Against the anti-retinal Marcel Duchamp (possibly the most influential artist of the twentieth-century), Eliasson produces an art for the eye.
2. Eliasson. Frost Activity (2004)
This book provides a sustained and thoughtful look at both Eliasson’s studio and the organizing thoughts which guide him as an artist. As an “encyclopedia” the book is framed by 26 alphabetic entries: architecture, beauty, colour, democracy, experiment, friction, gravitation, house, institution, journey, kaleidoscope, landscape, movement, now, orientation, perspective, quasi, reality, studio, temporality, utopia, vibration, weather, xenophilia, you, and zero. This is of course an inconclusive list but it serves to organize Eliasson’s work and his thinking for the purposes of an ongoing dialogue. In each of these “chapters” Eliasson responds to interview questions from curator and professor Philip Ursprung (Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, University of Zurich), and Taschen Editor Anna Engberg-Pederson. All text (including names and descriptions of works), appears in English, German, and French).
Ursprung and Pederson succeed in having Eliasson go into some philosophical and analytic detail but they resist challenging him as they might have. This lends to the book a promotional quality that one has come to expect from Taschen publications which tend to be visually robust but analytically feeble. We should not let this deter us in this case as Eliasson’s responses, alongside of his works, make this a very useful and interesting book. 206 of Eliasson’s works (since 1994) appear in hundreds of colour photographs in this large and richly illustrated volume.
II. Work and Thought
It is difficult to ignore Eliasson’s work and it has been present in over 200 venues over the past fifteen years. Contemporary art museums certainly have great difficulty looking away. Eliasson is now considered by the art world to be among the very best of contemporary artists and he has at his disposal many of the exhibition spaces he prefers. Eliasson goes against a strong “object” orientated current in the contemporary art world as his works are better suited, in the main, to museums and public spaces than to private collections. He does however point out that “experimentation isn’t for all museums, the ones which emphasize market friendly certainty rather than unpredictable uncertainty” are not as comfortable with his work (131). He has also found a tendency among many American museums not to understand his work. He says: “art is not for museums that are then for the audience; art is for the audience and museums should support the artistic content by making it accessible to the audience” (195). Eliasson prefers a museal model where the museum too is the co-producer of “reality” more than a contributor to the values of the art market (Ibid.) This is his first effort to subvert trends in the contemporary art world.
Eliasson has a good deal of the inquisitive scientist in him as he constantly experiments with light, movement, and human presence. His art is mostly about conscious human existence and how our experience of sensation is fundamental to how we live and act in the world. He tends to focus our attention, in interacting with his works, on things like the weight of our own bodies in space which we tend to forget. He says: “I’m interested in movement … you actually feel the weight of your body” and he wants to show how gravity is deeply integrated into our conception of space (161). He is intensely concerned with bodily presence in space – how our bodies sense and move in the world and how our eye guides how we feel. Eliasson constantly seeks to stimulate us to remember that our eyes are fundamental not only to what we see but how we feel. He says “movement is crucial to what we actually see” (220). This insight is supported by both particle and wave physics which also inform his philosophical approach. Contemporary physics has, for a century, contained ideas which can operate on a subversive level against the smug functionality of our socio-economic and political-cultural systems – one of Eliasson’s goals is clearly to smuggle these ideas into the museum and our experience of art – his second subversive effort.
Within a supposed democratic socio-political environment Eliasson believes that art and artists exist to differ (6). He seems to understand that humans, despite our sophisticated neurological system remain quite primitive creatures who need to think more about what it means to “be” (to see, to move up and down, to feel our self in space, to feel colour not just see it). Despite the often technologically complex appearance of his art, it is rather uncomplicated and people tend to not find it threatening. One often feels good in the presence of his works which do not confront us as much as they encourage our thinking about the effect they are having on us. His works tend to be invitations to engagement and thought and this lends them a reassuring presence even if they surround us or we encounter them in dark spaces. All of his work involves the experience of space and how our personal engagement with it changes not only the social space but our understanding of what a social space is.
Eliasson then sees his work as a series of experiments revolving around terms such as temporality, movement, tangibility and friction (49). He says his work aims to “generate an awareness of presence by making temporality tangible” (196). His movement away from “object-hood” reflects his concern for art to stimulate a heightened awareness that we are perceivers moving through the world who’s very movement affects our perception (50). “Art is more about the principle than the product” (349). He understands himself to be a seducer (as in his The Weather Project at the Tate Modern in 2000)
3. Eliasson. The Weather Project (2000)
Eliasson says he is not afraid of his work being called beautiful and differentiates between manipulative forms of beauty (such as we see in advertisements – which attempt to standardize experience), and the kind which focuses on individual experience which he says is relative and negotiable (75). While colour is very important to his art Eliasson keeps his distance from lavish aestheticization.
Eliasson is part of an fascinating change involving the representation of work in colour photography. Photographs can only hint at what it is about. To experience his work you must be present to interact with it in order to physically complete it. Think for example about how this is quite different from the experience of say Andy Goldsworthy’s work which depend much more on photography for our enjoyment of the work than participation. It is interesting to note how the art of Joseph Beuys was often presented in black and white photographs despite the fact that colour images were common by his time. Eliasson’s work does not communicate in black and white and this is something that distances it from artists like Duchamp or Beuys whose work worked less on a retinal than an emotional level (as much as the two can be thought of as distinct). Colour is profoundly important to his investigations of how the eye functions in generating feelings (93).
Eliasson wisely speaks to political matters only in the most general sense. He feels that the welfare state has too often been based on a supposition that sameness is the ideal. He feels that we engage in a “truly democratic situation when we constitute and entity based on our differences and disagreements” (113). For Eliasson it is the presence of differences which are most constitutive of a community. If art and culture have a political role Eliasson feels that it is in the continual examination which is necessary to the welfare system and parliaments.
Orientation is very important to Eliasson as it is very much about understanding the threats posed by a space. He refuses to see the individual as an agent in a neutral surrounding and says that one of his interests is to expose “power structures embedded in everything political, social and cultural” (299). The friction which his art creates is necessary says Eliasson to open up differing points of view and his interest in subversion focuses at the level of the individual first.
Eliasson has done some interesting work which points to the fundamental way in which our conception of the real changes as the light changes. Changing light reminds us constantly that we do not know the real but the appearances which mask it. A series of twenty-five photographs of the same landscape taken at 45 minutes intervals from before sunrise to after sunset beg the questions: “which landscape to I know to be real? – the partially lit one I see faintly illuminated at 6am or the one of strong baroque light and shadow of 4pm?” The real is multiple.
4. Eliasson. The Domadalur Daylight Series (North) (2006)
5. Eliasson. The Domadalur Daylight Series (North) (2006)
What applies to the outdoors also applies inside art galleries. In his Lichtdecke Kandinsky (2006), Eliasson focused on the way changing light [modulated through a light control system in the ceiling] changes our perception of Kandinsky’s paintings (199). In other works (The Light Setup, 2005) he attempted to make us aware of the powerful role played by light in our awareness of colour. Eliasson is routinely considered to be (among other things), an expert practitioner of Light Art (his lamps are another example). He says that his main interest is to show “that our perceptual apparatus is a cultural construction. The way the eye functions is partly a construction, since it processes light from our surroundings, and the brain compresses and digests information around us, but we mistakenly tend to understand these complicated systems as a natural, given, thing” (239). Eliasson’s third subversion is aimed at this sense of “given-ness”. This has led him to work with kaleidoscopes which emphasize multiple ways of viewing the world: “A kaleidoscope makes us understand through experience that what we see through its mechanism is to a large extend negotiable, relative, open for engagement” (239).
6. Eliasson. Kaleidoscope (2001)
7. Eliasson. Kaleidoscope (2001)
In his own particular way Eliasson reminds us what it means to have eyes, that we perceive but not merely as recorders, but as builders. He believes that the more we are aware of how we construct the world, of how things are not simply given as they appear, that we can change our way of seeing, thinking, and perhaps even our way of living. As for instructions on how to live Eliasson (thankfully) offers none. I think he feels that we settle too easily because we take things as givens which are in fact social constructions of varying complexity.
The following passage on landscape provides an excellent example of how Eliasson’s mind operates in approaching art making in the context of life:
I think it’s important always to think about landscape in relation to the person experiencing it. I mostly move around in urban settings, and therefore base my sense of scale, space, time, depth, and speed on that particular landscape. The nice thing about going into a landscape is the fact that you can focus your eyes on something that is very far away. You can actually use your focus to estimate distance, whereas in an urban setting you tend to make estimates based on stored knowledge and memory. How time and space are experienced in a landscape very much depends on how you evaluate distances and temporal issues as you involve yourself in the landscape. This is important when, going into urban life, you suddenly realize that what you take for granted as temporal and spatial parameters are in fact cultivated and not natural at all. I don’t think nature as nature exists. When we think about nature we instantly develop a relationship to it and then it ceases to be nature and becomes landscape instead (253-54).
Eliasson’s core belief is that it is only as bodies extant in space we can grasp time (132). This has given him an interest in movement (understood in its most basic form as creating a sense of presence), which has led him to create his tunnel installations such as Your Spiral View (2002).
8. Eliasson Your Spiral View (2002)
Eliasson’s tunnels are among his works which emphasize movement over viewing the image and he points out that “images tend to arrest movement” (270). “Presence” for Eliasson is considered to be an extension of memory. In his art he seeks to generate a heightened state of self-reflexivity. He says that he “does not believe in unmediated now’s, all now’s are cultural products” (287). Eliasson is eager to focus on social construction as he is to avoid being categorized as a romantic. In the contemporary context where so much is being sold as an experience he acknowledges that it is difficult to avoid the experience industry and that his work sometimes suffers from trends in it (288). Despite this Eliasson persists in trying to show us how our surroundings are very important to how we feel about them and ourselves in them (300). As for memory “it isn’t only about the past but the now – a recounting that is forever changing … your memory of yesterday is constitutive of today”(490).
Among Eliasson’s influences he credits the experimental attitude of science and research in optics and colour. He is very interested in Bergson’s notion that space is multifaceted and steeped in time. From Varela he has taken the notion that the body is crucial to our way of thinking and perceiving things. Eliasson is an artist who wants to emphasize the importance of engagement to the perception of a space and the work of art in that space (391). He is also influenced to some extent by contemporary concerns for the environment but he is no pushover for ecology movements. On several occasions he has created a stir by increasing people’s awareness of pollution in rivers. In these works (such as Green River, 1998) he surreptitiously pours a harmless dye into a river radically changing the appearance of the river. In some places people express deep alarm – in Los Angeles almost no one noticed.
9. Eliasson Green River (2002)
Eliasson feels that the weather and nature have enormous potential as a social organizers and he describes efforts to forecast it as a metaphor for the desire to control the future. He claims to prefer Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of the “singular-plural” for describing the individual within a collective and seems to believe that he can influence the collective by focusing on changing the individual’s sense of his / her own abilities as perceiver / constructor of reality. As such, Eliasson finds sustainable energy as highly relevant to his thinking because it enhances our sense of “responsibility”. Works such as The Body As Brain (2005) attempt to increase our awareness of nature, in this case by connecting the art museum directly to nature (the local river).
10. Eliasson The Body As Brain (2005)
Eliasson says he holds onto something of the idea of utopia in terms of his belief “in the value of doing something that has a positive impact on our surroundings (my utopia cannot be applied to everyone else around me) …the modern version was based on sameness, that we work toward a common goal …it was normative …the generalization is unhealthy, because it means striving for collectivity through unification …we need to believe in the value of making things better on an individual basis” (413). Eliasson’s politics, whatever it is, and he may not be fully certain of it himself, is very open ended and post collective. In so many ways he is a product of the contemporary moment and one who resists manipulation and group think of any kind. This is his fourth act of subversion in the contemporary.
Eliasson’s liquid conception of politics suits well his overall scientific and experimental outlook on the world. He says he is interested in vibrations because he can use them to question the world. Science has shown that everything can be considered from the perspective of waves or vibrations and “physics has found no straight lines – only waves – physics has found no solids – only high frequency event fields. The universe is not conforming to a three-dimensional perpendicular-parallel frame of reference. The universe of physical energy is always divergently expanding (radiantly) or convergently contracting (gravitationally)” (435). So what about sound in space? Eliasson says his interest lies in stressing the polyphonic nature of space. To engage in space means to create vibrations. We are a wave section, the colonization of a space in sound-scape. He is wary of involving his work with sound very much at present and says that acoustics is too formal for his practice.
Eliasson describes himself as xenophilic – as someone accepting of the foreign and prefers negotiation. He does not like to operate dogmatically and claims to value the uncertain and unpredictable. He deploys the word “Your” in many titles [e.g.: Your Rainbow Panorama (2006)] of his works to emphasize that the person who encounters the work is responsible for the performativity that completes it (477). This is very important to Eliasson as he feels that the mutual responsibility invested in the work lessens its object status. Mutual responsibility for completing the work in part dematerializes it (Ibid.)
III. Delicate Subversions
Given Eliasson’s well considered philosophy concerning his art and its role in stimulating awareness of our human abilities as perceivers and builders, it is difficult to fault him for how ingeniously he has met this goal. The question I would like to pose to Eliasson, who turns 42 in 2009, concerns whether or not he might expand his goals? At mid-life there is no question that Eliasson is a brilliant thinker and highly refined craftsman who works with a well considered artistic philosophy and knowledge of science and contemporary thought. He is wary of specific causes and keeps his political concerns at a macro level and he is not one to preach. As artists go, in an era teetering on the posthuman, he is a friend of the human.
What we need to appreciate better in Eliasson is how his concern for the human, for perception and movement, and for terms like responsibility, involve a very subtle exercise of radicality. While I would like to criticize Eliasson for failing to use his art to point to the monstrosity of the social, when I look at it in a more subtle manner, I find it actually does just that. Olafur Eliasson is a subversive thinker in a most understated way.
11. Eliasson Quasi Brick Wall (2002)
Eliasson’s art challenges our system by attempting to stimulate what it dulls out – our level of awareness of presence, perception, movement, temporality, and the power invested in spaces. He is hopeful that we will come to see our world more clearly through physics and art and that each of us as individuals will make good choices – responsible choices concerning sustainability etc. Pressure for change will work upward – democratically, not downward in his view. So in this he is a necessary corrective to group think and groups forcing agendas on us via politics the way corporations have done. He leaves it to others (Leon Golub, Odd Nerdrum etc.) to point to the more obvious levels of the monstrosity of the social, and himself chooses to work at the prior level of consciousness raising about our awareness of consciousness.
Eliasson works then at a level prior to politics and possesses a positive definition of both the individual and democracy. He is aware of the end of dialectics – as he puts it: “the two yeses that a hundred years ago would have excluded each other can now live side by side” (254). He is also aware of the unpredictability of the contemporary moment and often uses the word “quasi” to point to it in titles of his works (333). He feels that his best efforts to subvert the current order are to conduct experiments which are unpredictable and thereby make a frictional space (his studio) in reality. He sees his studio as laboratory as a critique of the “smooth standard mechanisms of a society that excludes unpredictability (Ibid.)
The point of art for Eliasson is to challenge us to be more aware of our active role as perceivers. Many of his works mirror the functional and smooth look of high technology systems but their effect runs counter to passive or homogenizing efforts. People will decide for themselves, from the ground up, what changes are necessary when they are better and more aware perceivers. This position is laudable in its lack of specific politics. Eliasson is a subversive against techno-functionality who does not preach but encourages.
On the downside I think Eliasson is a little too fond of models and places too much faith in their liberating potential. He plays a very dangerous game in making his subversive art look so “normal” in our advanced techo-scientific context and possesses a great deal of faith in it to stimulate perceivers to a new kind of awareness of perception. He believes that its way of affecting different people in different ways will lead to an increased recognition of difference between individuals in a globalizing culture that otherwise encourages sameness. He is careful to avoid making the world appear more enigmatic and this is where his work differs radically from Baudrillard’s understanding of thought and writing (to take a world that is given to us enigmatic and unintelligible and to make it more enigmatic, more unintelligible). What is interesting is that Eliasson and Baudrillard are deeply concerned by the same processes of homogenization and sameness and respond to it in diametrically opposite ways with their art.
For Baudrillard the best way to increase awareness of our system is to push it to topple before it can reach some kind of perfection – its perfect crime against the individual and human thought. For Eliasson we need to also take a step back and work on people’s awareness of how their consciousness of themselves as perceivers is being dulled out by the current technocratic order. Eliasson takes a different approach, one more rooted in the fundamentals of the science of perception, but it is, given the state of our system, subversive on many levels.
Baudrillard’s strategy was to go to extremes to get people to think about what they were building without preaching a specific solution – indeed, he felt that was not the business of the intellectual. Eliasson is on a similar subversive course at an earlier stage in the human processing of information – the very formation of our awareness of perception. His is an art dedicated to an increased awareness of social constructionism. Where he differs from Baudrillard and Nietzsche is in possessing a greater faith in humanity to remedy its course. This leads him to depend on less robust thinkers such as Varella and Nancy. Eliasson’s is a different kind of radicality and subversion than many of us in Baudrillard Studies might prefer, but it too is valuable in the present moment.
If Eliasson needs to work on one aspect of his craft it is in bettering his ability to touch those who interact with his work at an emotional level. Some of his recent geometric works (e.g.: Golden Ratio Pavilion (2001) look for all the world like physical manifestations of computer models and have a tendency to leave me cold. What I suggest is not easy. Many artists who seek a more emotive road to consciousness raising (Beuys especially comes to mind), do so in very enigmatic ways more often than not. Enigmas hold little appeal to Eliasson but as he reaches mid life he might reconsider the intellectual coldness of many of his works despite his intentions. Still, Eliasson does often succeed in subverting the normal experience of technology where we are subject to it – especially when in public and private environments (under surveillance from even our work stations which count our keystrokes and spy on our communications), and under the watchful eye of the camera in the hallway, the ceiling, and now increasingly the bathroom.
12. Eliasson Golden Ratio Pavilion (2001)
Eliasson’s efforts to subvert the presentation of art in the art world and our passivity as perceivers has may interesting paths which it could yet take. Perhaps he will also discover ways of pointing more to the system and its fragility. He is very much a believer in the real, despite his mastery of appearances – he seems to be failing to learn one of the great lessons of his own art – that we do not know the real, merely the appearances behind which it hides. This is another aspect of his approach he may come to reconsider as his outlook continues to expand. Personally, I have a good deal of optimism in Eliasson given his understanding that we constantly negotiate what is real. As he says: “the real is always returning, but its never quite there” (413) and “we have to give up on universal reality” (413). There is great promise in the artist who understands this insight and he may produce works in the future which also point to the irony of community more than he has in the past.
One thing I sincerely hope is that Eliasson does not become overly focused on “responsibility” but I suspect he understands that for an artist it can very much be a synonym for “liability” and “burden”. Perhaps as he ages over the next several decades Eliasson will even come to view indifference as a positive thing but at present this appears to be a long way off in his thinking.
Eliasson might also do well to abandon his tendency to see his generation (he tends to generalize a good deal about “my generation”), as the positive force which he does. In time he will no doubt be as disappointed by its failures as exciting thinkers in every age have been. Yet, given the context of the system in which he works, Eliasson himself is a marker of hope that we may somehow come to avoid the nightmarish scenario which will follow if the current system succeeds. Baudrillard placed his stake in hoping for system failure and this led him to adopt extreme position and seek a poetic resolution of the world. Eliasson’s work is hopeful in another way and in its own subtle radicality it too is a subversive art. In the mostly dismal spaces of the contemporary art world Eliasson is a flash of bright light. This artist still has many of his best experiments ahead of him.
13. Eliasson. Olafur Eliasson in Iceland (2006) |
