Entertainment | Visual Arts
The other point of view
Olafur Eliasson doesn't see things like you or I see things.
- By Ravi Somayai, The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2008
- Published: 00:07 July 4, 2008
Olafur Eliasson doesn't see things like you or I see things. He can tell you the precise distance at which two people on a street will recognise each other, or how our bodies are composed differently when we walk down a hill as opposed to along a pavement.
His art — mainly installations featuring lights, smoke, mirrors and water — takes such insights, mixes them with elements of architecture, theatre and conjuring, and uses them against us.
He is best known in Britain for putting a giant yellow sun, fog and a mirrored ceiling in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2003. More than two million visitors saw the installation, called The Weather Project.
Now he is engaged in installing four giant waterfalls in the middle of New York's East River — the somewhat ignored body of water between Manhattan and Brooklyn.
The $15 million waterfalls are actually on the river and range in height between 90 feet and 120 feet. They will pump 35,000 gallons of water per minute up to the top and back over their illuminated lips from 7am to 10pm every day for the summer.
Which means a total of 3.465 billion gallons. They are made of reusable scaffolding — albeit 64,000 square feet and 270 tonnes of it — “that helped build the city'', Eliasson explains.
Eliasson likes the bones of his work — the ugly cables and industrial lights — to be on display, like a magician exposing the trick he is playing.
He was responsible, along with the Norwegian architect Kjetil Thorsen, for last year's adventure-playground of a summer pavilion at the Serpentine. One commenter described it as a “zero-gravity bouncy castle activity centre''.
Walk through the Eliasson retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art and you notice that everyone is talking about the installations instead of observing them in silence.
“My eyes hurt,'' laughs a woman as she enters Room For One Colour, a corridor fitted with monochrome sodium lamps that render everything either yellow or black. “It's art,'' her friend says, “it's supposed to.''
So why did he decide to bring waterfalls to New York? “The city for me always had this issue of scale,'' he says. “You look at this iconic skyline, clearly the most postcarded in the world.
And you stand there and you think ‘how big is it?''' His plan is to use the waterfalls and their scale to help define the cityscape.
It goes beyond the visual, too — he is very excited, on a visit to see the waterfalls being built, when he realises that the noise of the torrent will blend with the ambient noise of the city and blur the lines between the two.
Eliasson looks like an architect, down to the frameless glasses and the black chronograph.
He is so measured, you feel he has designed, blueprinted and built all his thoughts before he vocalises them.
He was born in Copenhagen, to Icelandic parents, in 1967.
He spent his childhood between the Danish capital and Iceland: Some of his earliest works are grids of pictures taken while walking, climbing, flying or sailing through the rugged Icelandic landscape.
But, he says, “one should not romanticise the impact of being out in nature. By the time I got to be a teenager the only thing I was interested in was breakdance and hip hop and graffiti, and that definitely did not come out of nature in Iceland.''
He went on to attend The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen between 1989 and 1995.
Eliasson has a studio in Berlin with a team of 30 specialists — people within spatial practices such as architecture and engineering, people trained in mathematics and in theatre stage sets, art historians, theorists, people in publishing, a bookkeeper and financial people.
Running such an operation can't be cheap, which raises the question: who has the funds — and space — to display his installations?
“The type of work I do is not market-friendly,'' he admits. “I do sell things occasionally but a high percentage of those go to institutions.''
For Eliasson, art must be part of society — in his case literally, as people walk through, into, over or under his works, or see them as part of the everyday cityscape.
“I went to art school in Denmark,'' he explains, “where art is considered to be something outside. That's why I keep insisting that art is society, art is mainstream. Art must be accessible.''
Art has its commercial uses too, as shown by his recent work with Louis Vuitton and BMW. For Vuitton he designed a window display entitled Eye See You, used in all its stores.
For BMW he shrouded a hydrogen-powered racing car in a cocoon of steel mesh, mirrors and ice to highlight the relationship between cars and global warming.
Eliasson accepted the Vuitton commission to fund his charity: He and his wife, who have adopted two Ethiopian children, started 121ethiopia.org to build orphanages in Addis Ababa.
Meanwhile, back in his laboratory, he continues to mess with our senses. “We're experimenting with how fast people walk,'' he says, “and whether one could just walk and claim that this is a dance.
t's like taking a waterfall from a place with natural waterfalls and locating it in the middle of New York. It is all just a playful way of addressing different ideas.''
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