Olafur Eliasson, The island series, 1997. Private collection; photo: Oren Slor; © 2009 Olafur Eliasson


Take your time: Olafur Eliasson
01 May - 13 Sept 2009
Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art
220 E Chicago Ave
Chicago, IL 60611-2644
www.mcachicago.org


Take your time: Olafur Eliasson is the first comprehensive survey in the United States of works by Olafur Eliasson, whose immersive environments, sculptures, and photographs elegantly recreate the extremes of landscape and atmosphere in his native Scandinavia. 

Drawn from collections worldwide, the presentation spans over fifteen years of Eliasson's career. His constructions, at once eccentric and highly geometric, use multicolored washes, focused projections of light, mirrors, and natural elements such as water, stone, and moss to shift the viewer's perception of place and self, foregrounding the sensory experience of each work. By transforming the gallery into a hybrid space of nature and culture, Eliasson prompts an intense engagement with the world and offers a fresh consideration of everyday life.


A very interesting conversation between Olafur Eliasson and Robert Irwin in 2007 on the subject of museum. The following is an extract from the conversation, reprinted in the catalogue Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, published by SFMOMA in association with Thames & Hudson.

RI - Robert Irwin
OE- Olafur Eliasson


RI: The museum is an old, old model that was set up essentially to deal with objects. You and I are not object makers; we’re dealing with experiential processes. The museum structure is geared toward a particular kind of art making, which represents a particular set of values. What we’re proposing is another set of values. Museums have to respond to that in kind. Right now there is no methodology to deal with the phenomenal in art.

OE: I first became interested in phenomenology when I was an art student, as it seemed to offer a means for understanding subjectivity and the ways in which one could engage with one’s surroundings. But I have sensed a danger in phenomenology’s being presented as a kind of truth; there’s a tendency to detach experience from social context by justifying it as a phenomenological situation. And it is a more dynamic conception of phenomenology, of course, that has been a source of inspiration in my work. To me the greatest potential of phenomenology lies in the idea that subjectivity is always susceptible to change. I like to think that my work can return criticality to the viewer as a tool for negotiating and reevaluating the environment—and that this can pave the way for a more causal relationship with our surroundings. Whereas earlier decades looked to phenomenology as a sort of formula that constitutes our surroundings, I think the 1990s showed that it can instead be a tool for negotiating these surroundings. It offers an inquisitive, explorative approach to the world that allows for multiple perspectives on artworks, subjectivity, and experience.

…

RI: I’m also wrestling with the history of modern art. The big move is when we eliminate abstract references to art history, and the person walking through the work doesn’t have to know anything about you or art. That puts it on the most immediate social level, because the observer’s referencing the same cues you are. It’s no longer an abstract referencing, it’s an experiential one. Which is what I mean by phenomenological: it’s made in real time. We’re in this funny spot right now—we’ve got one foot in museums, but philosophically we also have one foot over here. The game we’re playing is riddled with contradictions—the world isn’t going to change just because you and I feel this way. Basically, we’re making things that may have implications for change. But we have to deal with the idea of the museum as a forum. The museum is a representation of a moment in time, and it eventually becomes a historical model. That’s the natural evolution of museums. When a collection grows, the museum may end up showing incredible art—there’s nothing wrong with that—but it doesn’t maintain its position as an open forum. What we’re asking the museum to be is a forum for dialogue in which we can exercise just what we’re doing right now. A museum can do that, generally, for only a very short period of time. We participate anyway, because that’s how we interface as artists and work out the issues of being
artists. But at the same time, in doing so, we actually compromise the critical point.

OE: This is also where feelings come into it. We’ve always been told that feelings are
introverted states. It’s curious that so little work has been done on the nature of feelings until recently; cognitive scientists, for example, have begun to focus on them. Our culture promotes a split between the mind and the body, which doesn’t allow for an understanding of feeling as an extroverted activity.

RI: Right. A feeling is not just a response, it’s an action.

OE: A feeling is a relationship between a mental and a physical state—it implicates both mind and body.

RI: That’s what I mean by co-arising.

OE: And the idea that you as perceiver become a producer is the key issue here. You project your feelings onto your surroundings—this is how you relate to them.

RI: That’s because values are essentially invested by your feelings. I see something, and by seeing it—attending to it, spending time with it, acting on it—I give it value. And so value is not neutral; once negotiated, it ultimately becomes a piece of you. It can reconstruct how you practice, or how you move in the world. In time, that has the implication of changing the structures around you. But it’s a long-term project. The real change that comes from feelings and values has to be seeded, in a sense, and then it begins to act on things—on you, and then on how you make decisions and judgments, and therefore on how you construct the world.

OE: That is really a crucial concept. I have been doing some research on the relativity of white light used in museum spaces, the point being to emphasize the fact that the white cube is a construction. In my Berlin laboratory we have a white room for experiments with different kinds of light based on real-life observations in Reykjavík, Venice, and other cities. You can work in a really detailed way with the color spectrum of white light. Even though I still find the white cube a fairly attractive model to engage with, I think we owe it to the spectators to tell them that this kind of space is embedded in a long history, that it is culturally coded. There are so many things involved in viewing art—that’s what makes it such a rich and complex field. How can we consider representation in a productive light? How may we deal with our memories of previous artworks when looking at a new one? All along there has been a hierarchy of the senses that influences the way we experience.

Olafur Eliasson, Beauty, 1993. Installation view at AROS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, 2004; Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles with funds provided by Paul Frankel; photo: Poul Pedersen; © 2009 Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson, Colour space embracer, 2005. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase through a gift of Chara Schreyer and the Accessions Committee Fund; photo: Jens Ziehe; © 2009 Olafur Eliasson


Olafur Eliasson, 360° room for all colours, 2002. Installation view at Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris; Private collection, courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; © 2009 Olafur Eliasson