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Olafur Elliasson: In Real Life @ Tate Modern

Olafur Eliasson was born in 1967 in Copenhagen, Denmark. He specialises in dramatic art ‘experiences’ – and they really are dramatic and wonderful.

I got to Tate Modern as it opened at ten am and there was already a long queue outside the exhibition, mostly of parents with small children, toddlers and even babies, because of all the art displays on anywhere this is probably the most ooh and aah.

Curators categorise and sort and order and structure exhibitions. It’s open to any of us visitors to do the same. In which case, at the top level, Eliasson produces roughly three kinds of work, the traditional look-at-the-wall-label-then-look-at-the-exhibit sort; the clever circus attraction mirrors and kaleidoscopes — and then the totally immersive ‘experiences’ which require no explanation.

Wall label art

Into the wall label category fall:

Room one which contains a huge glass display case, inside which is a jungle – in fact some 450! – complex, fancy, inventive geometric shapes and designs and prototypes which Eliasson and architects and engineers he’s worked with for decades, notably the Icelandic artist, mathematician and architect Einar Thorsteinn, have produced: models of buildings, booths, shops, street plans, spaceships, all kinds of clever shapes generated from copper wire, cardboard, paper photocopies, Lego, wood, foam and rubber balls.

Model Room (2003) in collaboration with Einar Thorsteinn. Photo by Anders Sune Berg © Olafur Elliason

There’s a room of pin-prick clear digital photos. On one wall a grid of 42 photos of a river which Eliasson white-water rafted down (river raft, 2000). Opposite it an exactly matching grid of 42 photos of glaciers in Iceland.

Installation view of Olafur Eliasson: In real life at Tate Modern, showing the grid of photos of the river to the left, of the glacier to the right. Photo by Anders Sune Berg

As you might expect, Eliasson is very aware of global warming (aren’t we all, darling) and so has spent considerable time and effort flying to and from Iceland, driving chunky Land Rovers and gas-guzzling four-by-fours up to the glaciers and recording the way they’re melting away as a result of human beings… er… flying all over the place and driving billions of petrol and diesel-fuelled vehicles everywhere. Thus:

Ice Watch which was staged in front of Tate Modern in 2018, is an installation of ice blocks fished from the water off the coast of Greenland. It offered a direct and tangible experience of the reality of melting Arctic ice. Other works, like those in this room, are a more abstract reference to the changing environment. In Glacial currents 2018, chunks of glacial ice were placed on top of washes of coloured pigment. This created swells and fades of colour as they melted onto the paper beneath. In The presence of absence pavilion 2019, a bronze cast makes visible the empty space left by a block of glacial ice that melted away. Glacial spherical flare 2019 is constructed with glass made from small rock particles created by glacial erosion.

So this is the kind of art you have to a) read about and then b) respond to with the appropriate sentiments – ‘Global warming, isn’t it terrible, somebody ought to do something, that wonderful Greta Thunberg’ etc.

Optical illusion art

Eliasson likes kaleidoscopes, and prisms, and distorting lenses and mirror balls. Thus as you stand in the queue to enter the gallery space, outside in the foyer is hanging a huge geometric ball with light projected through it to cast a complex shadow on the wall.

Stardust particle by Olafur Eliasson (2014). Photo by the author

There is a room with one vast jagged mirror ball casting rainbow-prism colours all over the walls. Another with a big white silk screen onto which is projected a continually changing swirling white shape. There’s a sort of catwalk which lets you walk through a ‘tunnel’ made of thousands of jagged fragments of reflecting metal, which reflect your moving image into thousands of fragments. There’s a concave lens embedded in the wall of one of the galleries so you can see the visitors in the next room amusingly distorted.

Installation view of Olafur Eliasson: In real life at Tate Modern. Photo by the author

There’s a wall of moss – ‘a vast plane 20 metres wide entirely covered with Scandinavian reindeer moss’. Why? Why not? This reminded me of Richard Long’s environmental art. But 1. the friend I went with was upset that this much sphagnum moss had been torn up and removed from its natural habitat i.e. she saw it as an act of destruction 2. as always with unusual sculptures, I wanted to touch it, to get up close and touch and stroke and smell it. But none of that is allowed and there’s now a security tape (not in this picture) preventing visitors from touching it, and a burly security guard strolling up and down to make sure nobody gets too close.

Moss wall by Olafur Eliasson (1994) Photo by Anders Sune Berg

Immersive art

But Eliasson’s really distinctive trademark is the immersive experiences. There are three or four real crackers here. In one you go into a pitch black room and then there is a sudden flicker of intense white light by which you just about make out a weird white blog in the centre of the room. Only as you carefully blunder your way in the pitch black towards it (trying not to trip over the numerous toddlers underfoot) do you realise the periodic flash of intense light is illuminating a continual small-scale fountain of water, whose shape – caught in mid-snap – is always different, always changing.

Big Bang Fountain by Olafur Eliasson

Along the same lines – well, involving water – is another darkened room in which a sheet of sine misty spray is continually falling. Not a pour or drench of water, a fine mist so that it’s comfortable to stand under and feel only a little damp – as indeed hundreds of visitors do in order to be snapchatted and instagrammed by their giggling friends. When there are no people under it, you can enjoy the rainbow prism effect of the hidden wall lights refracted through the mist.

Beauty by Olafur Eliasson (1993)

Last and most spectacular of all is Din blinde passager (Your blind passenger) from 2010. You have to queue and are let in a few at a time into a airlock between the gallery and then the experience. And then you open the inner door and enter a 39-metre-long corridor full of dense fog, really dense fog, fog where you can’t see anything more than a couple of yards away, and which is lit by Eliasson’s trademark orange light. At first it’s wonderful and disorientating but the real power comes from it being so long. It really lasts. It takes an appreciable time to walk that distance and this is long enough for your entire system to begin to acknowledge and acclimatise to the new circumstances. 

Din blinde passager/Your blind passenger by Olafur Eliasson (2010)

Oh and I forgot the coloured shadow room. A bank of coloured lights are at the back at floor level projecting upwards onto the entire facing wall and anyone who walks in front of them projects multiple, multi-coloured shadows. So a number of people walking through create a complex interaction of shadows. It’s titled Your uncertain shadow (2010). This is a really interactive creation, with loads of people throwing shapes and silly poses and my favourite was a baby which has just reached the crawling stage and its parents let it crawl around the floor casting huge multi-coloured baby shapes on the wall behind it.

Your uncertain shadow (colour) 2010 by Olafur Eliasson. Photo by Maria del Pilar Garcia Ayensa

There’s much more. There are long narrow trays full of sleepy liquid in which one wave is travelling up and down. There’s a room with a mirror for a ceiling where you can look up and see yourself looking down. There are more prisms and mirror balls.

The lifts are illuminated by the trademark Eliasson orange glow, as is the lobby outside the exhibition.

Downstairs the Tate Modern café has been given an Eliasson makeover by Studio Olafur Eliasson’s ‘kitchen team’, SOE Kitchen, so that you can munch on the same kind of tuck Eliasson enjoys at his Berlin studio.

The Expanded Studio

The show culminates with a space called The Expanded Studio, which ‘explores Eliasson’s deep engagement with social and environmental issues.’

You exit the main gallery rooms into a school-type space: down one side is a long wall covered with magazine and newspaper pages, and photos and articles. These are full of positive uplifting messages about how we can change the world and change ourselves and be more mindful and live in the present and co-operate and engage and energise our communities and save the planet, arranged into a casual A to Z order.

All this is alongside a big round table surrounded by kids making objects and shapes out of some kind of meccano-like set.

Installation view of Olafur Eliasson: In real life at Tate Modern. Photo by the author

It reminded me of school. It was just like school, like the woodwork or design classes back at school, with the corridors lined with examples of uplifting art and inspiring slogans about diversity and equality and opportunity, and big posters across the dining hall saying SAVE OUR PLANET. Just like my children’s junior and secondary schools, with lots of concerned parents milling round on an open day or Parents’ Evening.

And made me reflect on the maybe, possibly, essentially juvenile nature of all art, at some level. Insofar as it is play and men and women’s lives are, for the most part, not spent in play, but in work, and if not in work, then in childcare and childrearing and childworrying, and worrying about their rent or their careers or their sick parents or their various ailments.

Because the drawback about school, and about art galleries generally, is that sooner or later you have to bid farewell to the high-minded sentiments about gender and diversity and the environment, and walk back out into the actual adult world, where no-one gives a toss about your fancy ideas or your idealistic slogans.

The video

Related links

Reviews of other Tate exhibitions

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by Simon on October 28, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 28, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/10/28/olafur-elliasson-in-real-life-tate-modern/

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