Olafur Eliasson: Take Your Time
SFMoMA
San Francisco, CA
8 September – 13 January

by Tonya Warner

The work of Olafur Eliasson is characteristically about interactivity and the presence of the viewer. He is conscious of the relationship between art, the museum, and the visitor, inviting everyone at his current show at the SFMoMA to “take your time.” What he creates is “a situation” in which you become aware of “seeing yourself seeing.” This self-reflexivity takes many forms over the course of the exhibition. First, one encounters “Your Mobile Expectations,” a project Eliasson developed for BMW’s art car programme, where he encased their hydrogen powered racecar in a spiked metal shell that is covered with ice. To observe this sculpture, one must walk into the giant freezer that houses the car; although we are provided with blankets by the invigilators, it is a very physical experience that seems almost more important than the car itself. Supporting materials state that this is a reflection on automobiles’ role in global weather changes – this to me smacks of something that sounds good in a grant application. One cannot escape the sense that there is something more to this – the hedgehog-like structure that becomes an armature for the ice takes over the work, rendering the car unusable, irrelevant.

This use of crystalline structures is repeated upstairs, where Eliasson has transformed the top story bridge into a multi-coloured and multi-faceted portal, activated by the skylights. It creates a surreal experience, one that is complimented later by a space where one can stand, surrounded by mirrors with one wall exposed to an outside window; this induces a feeling both of floating above the city and of vertigo. Eliasson seems to revel in disorientation as a mode of examining one’s relationship to art and place. The exhibition also becomes literally interactive with “Notion Motion,” consisting of a room with a screen and loose floorboards. When one steps down on the fake floor, it creates ripples in a pool of water behind the screen. These disruptions are made visible simply through the reflections of light bouncing off of the moving water. The works on show draw from simple elements, mainly light and the modulation of forms in space, as well as the presence of a viewer, however, each is the product of elaborate planning and modeling – both on computers and as maquettes. Process is an important element and is very transparent in the work of Eliasson, who prefers to show cryptic preliminary sketches rather than texts explaining the theories in play. The drawings and scribbles on photographs are beautiful (and works of art in themselves), but are not at all informative – what they illuminate instead is the amount of work contributed by many assistants, as well as a hip Nordic/German feel for design.

Eliasson as an artist is clearly a fan of the charrette and creative collaboration, questioning the notion of authorship and inverting the now much disputed model of the solitary artist by openly exhibiting his studio bustling with assistants. It is in their efforts, in a space that seems more like an engineering design laboratory, where the element of process comes through – an integral part that perhaps rivals the idea itself. Truly, Elisson’s works seem to draw the majority of their strength from their interactivity, from creating an experience more than delivering some form of “truth”. This is where we have come to in our post-post-modern world, where artists acknowledge that meaning in art comes from the individual and his/her reactions to it. These, of course, are based upon one’s pool of past experiences, and intellectual and cultural knowledge. Eliasson seems to leave space for this by creating works that require involvement, that require one to experience the piece in a three-dimensional space. Documenting these modifications of space can lead to some quite beautiful photographs, but in the creative decisions that enter into the cropping and composition of these images, the photograph becomes something else entirely. One must actually walk into a giant freezer, or across a psychadelic coloured bridge, or stare at themselves infinitely repeated on a dizzying overhang for these works to truly exist.

Quotes taken from SFMoMA’s website

http://www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/exhib_detail.asp?id=316

http://www.sfmoma.org/eliasson/data/index.html

http://www.olafureliasson.net/

http://www.olafureliasson.net/publ_text/TYT_vol_1.pdf

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