olafur eliasson

Ok, here he is. I'm showing a couple of images from the works using water, as a contrast to the sculptor mentioned in the last post. Eliasson does many other things with light - and water - which can be seen at his website, link below.
















The images here are two of my favorite of Eliasson's works. Totally simple but at the same time enlarging spectacularly on a phenomenon that we utterly understand. That he has brought it directly into a gallery/museum setting on such an impactful scale is quite an achievement.

We've had renderings, or versions of the effects of light, in all paintings and photographs since we moved beyond the middle ages, most inventively perhaps, with the impressionists. But a photograph, or a painting of an event is not the event itself, its paint or metal oxides creating the illusion of a real thing.

Here, if we go to the museum we have the event without mediation - we experience it for ourselves. Even looking at these images now, we understand the scale of the real event and that it would be experienced first-hand. (The scale of the installation below is the same as the above with the people - the reflection covers a wall-sized area.)

































I saw a You Tube video of him discussing his work which was fascinating. In it he says that he is after engagement. He doesn't want the look of the work to be too "perfumed" and pretty. For him, the beautiful visuals are secondary - he believes that beauty and pleasure catch people's attention and suggest that it is worth getting more involved with, more engaged with the artwork.

The brochure for the NY waterfalls says "... at the root of his artworks... is his keen interest in the way we perceive the world around us. Eliasson's work encourages us to consider what we see, and more importantly how we see and experience our surroundings. With the New York City Waterfalls our attention is called to the riverfront and the addition of something seemingly natural - waterfalls - that have been artificially constructed".

Well, the NY river interface has been there our whole lives so we feel that IT IS natural, when lots of it really isn't. The waterfalls draw attention to the whole idea of man-made, and what it is for, what it does, what it might be for.

Not everyone has liked the waterfalls, perhaps because of the distance most people see the installation from but the photographs are interesting. It is quite a scale, even compared to the urban landscape that dwarfs it. The images (I couldn't download them) can be seen via this link to the brochure.

http://www.nycwaterfalls.org/#/about_the_waterfalls/Waterfall_Images

here you can read someone else's blog that discusses the waterfalls and some of its detractors
http://www.greatwhatsit.com/archives/2826

So William, though it may be very lovely to sit next to your fountains and beautiful ripples, Olafur appears to be infinitely more interesting.

Images shown above are from Notion Motion, 2005, at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands. See it at Eliasson's website here www.olafureliasson.net