Northern lights: in installations that variously involve light, color, geometry movement and more, Olafur Eliasson nudges the participant-viewer into an ambient perceptual awareness

Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Carol Diehl

I'm not talking about the water canning in the river. I'm not standing on the side of the river and watching the river passing by. I'm sitting in a boat in the river and watching the water and the bank always being now but constantly changing.--Olafur Eliasson

Walking into the Tate Modern last winter was like entering a misty cathedral illumined by a dim winter sun. The immense Turbine Hall, which serves as the entrance to the London museum, now appeared doubly vast, a shadowy infinity through which visitors gravitated toward the yellow aureole of light at the far end. Titled The weather project, the installation by Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, fourth in a series of commissions for the hall, immediately became the destination point of the London winter season, drawing a million visitors. And while certainly the most prominent, it was only one of several museum showings on Eliasson's 2004 schedule, which included solo exhibitions of recent major works in Reykjavik, Oslo and Zug, Switzerland; a retrospective of light pieces from the last 12 years in Wolfsburg, Germany; photographs at the Menil Collection in Houston; and installations at the Aspen Art Museum (through Oct. 3) and Arcadia (University in suburban Philadelphia (through Jan. 9, 2005).

A few years earlier I'd seen a piece at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York, where Eliasson removed the glass from the gallery skylight, installing beneath it rows of triangular mirrors that kaleidoscopically replicated and repeated the pattern of the skylight's steel frames. Intrigued by that memory, as well as by reports of his success at the 2003 Venice Biennale and now at the Tate, this year I set out to see as much of Eliasson's work as possible. After visiting his Berlin studio and all of the European exhibitions except the one at Zug, I found Eliasson's interests so wide-ranging, and his perspective and working methods so variable and dissimilar to those of most other artists, that I felt as if I'd only scratched the surface. Unlike, most artists who attempt to "thematize" (his word, and a good one) their work in order to make it more understandable and ultimately salable, Eliasson purposefully resists any gratuitous consistency that would hamper either his freedom in making it or the public's fresh experience of what he does.

Having been greatly influenced by the work of Robert Irwin, Eliasson considers his overriding concern to be an awareness of the act of perception ("seeing yourself seeing"). However, by introducing elements such as temperature and humidity, as well as a more overt disruption of physical orientation, he goes even further to show how not only the eye, but also the rest of the body, responds to various stimuli--in addition to the emotional and intellectual reactions one might have when anticipating, discovering and experiencing a new or altered situation. Eliasson's work often involves an intervention which either takes its cue from its surroundings or imposes upon them constructions that affect them in some way. His installations may incorporate some or all of the properties of reflected or projected light, color, geometry, movement, water, wind, sound and temperature. He uses natural and industrial materials, as well as the environments of nature and architecture, to create situations that, while not esthetically displeasing and often very compelling, are less about their look than about the experience they create for the viewers, who, by their very presence, become integral elements in the work.

Encompassing a hall that is 115 feet high, 75 feet wide and 500 feet long, The weather project may well be the largest interior work to date by a contemporary artist. Of the three previous winners of the Tate commission, Anish Kapoor and Louise Bourgeois dealt with the immenseness of the space by introducing objects that, to varying degrees, occupied it, while Juan Munoz worked entirely below the main floor plane.

Eliasson, by contrast, sought to expand the space perceptually by covering the lofty ceiling with mirrored panels that appeared to double its height. The only light source, the artificial "sun" on the wall at the far end, was made up of a half-disk of translucent plastic placed in front of 200 yellow monofilament bulbs similar to those used in streetlamps. Reflected in the mirrored ceiling above, the half-disk was seen as a full circle. A light fog contributed to the illusion of a bigger space by making the walls appear insubstantial, more like dark, indefinite recesses than delimiting planes. Rather than the architecture containing the work, Eliasson configured an installation that actively incorporated the architecture and, like James Turrell's sky-roofed room titled "Meeting" (1986) at New York's P.S. 1., it blurred the distinction between inside and outside.

Created at the time of year when the sun is at its lowest declination, The weather project provided an environment in which visitors were impelled to linger. They parked themselves in groups on the floor to chat, or lay down on their backs and made motions so they could find themselves, specks as small as insects, reflected in the ceiling. It was a mesmerizing, highly romantic image, but at the same time there was something creepy about it. The yellow light, far from being flattering, seemed to drain the color from everything it touched. A low hum, either from the lights or the fog machines, contributed to the sense of artificiality. It reminded me of a famous study, done in the 1950s, where baby monkeys, deprived of their mothers, accepted man-made surrogates, snuggling up to them in lieu of the real thing. In the same way, Eliasson replaced the sun, source of all life, with a mechanical device that caused people to behave as if they were in Central Park's Sheep Meadow on a sunny day. Sitting or sprawled on the museum's cold concrete floor, they appeared not to care that the disk emitted no warmth, just light. This brave new world aspect of the project, however, was mitigated by the way it lent itself to a moment of social activism when, on the eve of the U.S. president's visit to Britain, 80 or so protesters lay down so that their bodies spelled out "BUSH GO HOME" on the mirrored ceiling, while several onlookers spontaneously scrambled to add "NOW."