The Olafur Eliasson exhibition at Tate Modern has been getting some top reviews. "Has to be seen to be believed" - the Times. "A glorious mind-altering display" - Secret London. And, from the Tate website, it's clearly not shy on the self-promotion:
In Eliasson’s captivating installations you become aware of your senses, people around you and the world beyond.
Some artworks introduce natural phenomena such as rainbows to the gallery space. Others use reflections and shadows to play with the way we perceive and interact with the world. Many works result from the artist’s research into complex geometry, motion patterns, and his interest in colour theory. All but one of the works have never been seen in the UK before.
Within the exhibition will be an area which explores Eliasson’s deep engagement with society and the environment. Discover what an artist’s perspective can bring to issues of climate change, energy, migration as well as architecture. And once every other week you’ll be able to communicate with people from Eliasson’s 100-strong team in his Berlin studio via a live link.
The kitchen team at Studio Olafur Eliasson will also create a special menu and programme of related events for Tate Modern’s Terrace Bar, based on the organic, vegetarian and locally sourced food served in his Berlin studio.
The artist certainly takes himself seriously.
There is more to Eliasson’s work than cheap thrills and damp air. He is an inventor, architect, splitter of light if not of actual atoms, universalist, artist – an all-round Renaissance man. In the catalogue to this large and impressively varied exhibition Eliasson communes with scientists, philosophers, professors of economics, neuroscience and anthropology. He talks with Denmark’s most provocative chef, René Redzepi; with ex-president of Ireland and author of Climate Justice Mary Robinson; and with hip-hop pioneer Fab Five Freddy. All this is fascinating and, in its way, rather brilliant. Eliasson is full of curiosity. He has spoken at Davos and sat down with the Dalai Lama. As curator Mark Godfrey puts it, Eliasson is a new model of artist. Godfrey precedes his discussion of the work with a lengthy list of Eliasson’s recent and current projects. You wonder there’s time to make any art.
In one of the notes, articles and other material covering a long wall in one of the final rooms of the show, Eliasson writes that “We need to move beyond the failure-success dichotomy to embrace new, non-quantifiable criteria for what is a good work of art.” For him, I think, “good” means generative, and moving beyond the production of objects into a discourse with the world itself. He encourages us to read his work as entering the frame of geopolitics, climate emergency, and all the issues – from food production to fossil fuel – that flow from that. Where his art is at its most entertaining, he also wants to effect a change in consciousness, and the ways in which we perceive the world and our place in it. Hence, the optical and other perceptual phenomena we encounter in his work are intended to alert and sensitise us to our place on the planet, as agents as much as spectators.
For further proof, check out the BBC's Imagine, which screened on Sunday. I couldn't last the whole hour, getting tired of Alan Yentob following the great man around like a devoted puppy. But yes, with his studio in Berlin employing over a hundred people, and his determination to "effect a change in consciousness, and the ways in which we perceive the world and our place in it", Eliasson does indeed come across as a new model of artist. Did Picasso ever contemplate "a discourse with the world itself"? Or indeed create a special menu at his shows based on the organic, vegetarian and locally sourced food served in his Paris studio?
He made his name in 2003 with his Tate Modern Turbine Hall installation The Weather Project. It was, and remains, the one Turbine Hall installation which could be described as a success. With a huge space like that you need something dramatic and easy to install. No chance of a new Michelangelo doing a Sistine Chapel job nowadays. It's only for a few months anyway. And with his huge orange sun and mirror and smoke, it was effective. Compared to subsequent dismal efforts - the crack in the floor, the plant boxes - it was indeed brilliant.
But, for all its talk of "exploring ideas about experience, mediation and representation", it nevertheless seemed to me to be just a glorified kind of funfair experience. Indeed it possibly laid the foundation for the idea of Funfairism in later Turbine Hall presentations - swings, and slides and the like.
This latest Eliasson show just confirms that impression. Take, for instance, Your uncertain shadow, where different coloured lights project shadows onto a wall:
Um...isn't this the kind of thing that kids get up to? When they've just been given a couple of torches with colour lenses for Christmas, and they turn off the bedroom light and create pretty shadows on the wall?
Yes, we know.....he's a new model of an artist. What next, though? A hall of mirrors? A ghost train? Isn't this just an upmarket funfair for nice middle class people.
Elsewhere there's a room with a mirror ceiling - oh wow!
And, at the start, a wall covered with moss that you're allowed to touch. So people, of course, do touch it - with that beatific expression that nice gallery-going people assume when allowed to do something that's normally forbidden. They may have touched moss before, but not this special artist-approved magic gallery moss.
And at the end there's a kind of mock-up of his studio, with lots of stuff stuck up on an ideas wall - vague, but hinting at a profundity which somehow always escapes:
Now - an addition to the original exhibition - they've added what they call The Cubic Structural Evolution Project in the Turbine Hall, where you're invited to "build a vision of a future city" with the white lego bricks provided.
Which is fine. Good to see all those youngsters - and middle-age-sters - having fun and doing stuff together. They certainly don't have anything better to do with all that space. It's just that....well, I think I preferred the old model of artist.
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