Weather you like it or not The powerful simplicity of Olafur Eliasson’s art
A retrospective at Tate Modern in London showcases his blockbuster installations and environmental concerns
“ENJOY YOURSELF,” the gallery attendant says, smiling, “and be careful.” She opens a white door and lets a few people into a narrow passageway thick with fog. It smells unpleasantly artificial. No one can see more than a metre or so ahead, and a strange kind of intimacy ensues. People search for someone close in front to lead the way; friends place a guiding hand on each other’s shoulders; strangers offer advice (“look up at the roof, it makes it easier to navigate”). Many visitors take selfies, and the wan faces that stare back at them from their screens float adrift in nothing. Yellow and white lights play tricks on the brain—some people think the tunnel glows magenta, while others are adamant that everything is blue.
“Your Blind Passenger” (2010, pictured below) is the centrepiece of a new retrospective of Olafur Eliasson’s work at Tate Modern in London. In 2003 “The Weather Project”, another of his installations, recreated the golden, glowing light of the sun in the museum’s cavernous and gloomy Turbine Hall. That artwork was a hit, attracting more than 2m visitors; this new show will undoubtedly, and justifiably, be just as popular.
“In Real Life”, as it is called, is filled with works which explore the unsteady link between perception and reality (all but one piece have never been exhibited in Britain before). Each visitor’s experience is highly subjective, shaped particularly by how they move through the gallery. Mr Eliasson says that some found “Your Blind Passenger” to be threatening, claustrophobic and disorientating, while others found it uplifting and thought-provoking. “I’m very happy to see that I’ve had very different reactions to the fog tunnel,” he says. “It is increasingly rare to find spaces where we can be together and share an experience, without having to be the same, or think the same, or see the same.”
A similar trick is at work in “Beauty” (1993, pictured top), where a punctured hose sprays out a fine mist of water. The room is dark and the drizzle lit by a spotlight: depending on where a visitor stands, a rainbow dances and disappears. Elsewhere the Danish-Icelandic artist builds on his theme with deception, as in “Regenfester” (“Rainproof”, 1999). A window looking out of the museum indicates miserable weather, as the glass spatters with raindrops. But on the other side of the wall is a pipe perforated with hundreds of tiny holes: water flows through it and drips steadily onto the window pane. Such features require expertise, and Mr Eliasson relies on a 100-strong team of craftspeople, architects, archivists, film-makers and designers based in a studio in Berlin to help him create his spectacles.
The weather, the environment, climate change and energy have long been Mr Eliasson’s primary concerns; he is as much an activist as he is an artist. In collaboration with Frederik Ottesen, an engineer, he launched the Little Sun project at Tate Modern in 2012, selling portable solar lamps and phone chargers in the shape of Ethiopian meskel flowers (which bloom after monsoons). Art fans and gadget-lovers in the West buy the items at a premium, helping to supply them to those living off the grid; to date, more than 500,000 lamps have been distributed to people without electricity, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa.
For a piece of protest art called “Ice Watch”, Mr Eliasson harvested 12 blocks of ice from a fjord in Greenland. Arranged to resemble a clock face, they are intended (hewrites on his website) to provide a “direct and tangible experience of the reality of melting arctic ice”. The first installation, in Copenhagen in 2014, recognised the publication of a UN report on climate change; the second, in Paris in 2015, coincided with a UN Climate Conference. Last year Mr Eliasson arranged the chunks of ice outside Tate Modern as well as the Bloomberg headquarters in London. He has often said that he is drawn to the idea of a “museum without walls”, and seeks to encourage people to learn and pay attention to what is going on around them.
Some critics scoff at this work, considering the installations expensive but shallow curiosities, or opportunities for visitors’ facile virtue signalling on social media. Yet Mr Eliasson’s work successfully invites engagement and foments a sense of community: “the viewer contributes to the work’s meaning,” as one curator of the show put it. His blockbuster pieces are popular because they are accessible, exciting and immersive. It is easy to marvel at the water rushing from scaffolding 11 metres high (“Waterfall”, 2019), or to be transported by the smell and feel of the lichen that adorns 60 metres of mesh (“Moss Wall”, 1994). That everyone responds to light, is drawn to colour and is awed by nature is no bad thing. Simple messages are often the most effective.
“Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life” is showing at Tate Modern until January 5th