OLAFUR ELIASSON
26 April – 14 June
www.tanyabonakdargallery.com
Olafur Eliasson has two aims: focusing viewers’ attention on natural
phenomena – such as fog, rainbows, waterfalls, and reflections – and on how
we perceive them. In a project a few years ago at MoMA in New York, this
concern was quite literal. He coated the wall separating the museum’s
interior from its garden with reflective glass so that the viewers, peering
out, viewed their own act of looking. In his most recent installation,
Eliasson made tangible the Euclidean rules of the game – the mathematical
formulas to which, in Western thought, the natural forms around us can be
reduced. He constructed a model room out of plywood shelving within the
gallery. Cabinets overflowed with mirrored geodesic domes, steel spirals,
wooden spheres, aluminium foil kaleidoscopes, and cardboard helixes. Made in
expendable, studio-quality materials, the maquettes appeared less like
scientific truths arranged in a neat geometric order than fantastically
shaped figures from an obsessed, and somewhat dated, imagination. The room
suggested a cluttered warehouse full of discarded, antiquated ways of
understanding space.
Like a courageous husband, Eliasson takes on his subjects’ art-historical
and theoretical baggage – here, Euclidean geometry, Cartesian philosophy and
Buckminster Fuller’s utopian theories. In earlier projects it was sunsets,
waterfalls and romantic depictions of the sublime; light, mediation and
James Turrell’s experiments; illusion, camera obscura and perspective in
Renaissance painting. This consideration of earlier approaches to nature is
not a postmodern nod to precedent, it is the very point of the works. Above
all, Eliasson is interested in the perception and representation of our
surroundings, highlighting how our understanding of so-called pure, natural
phenomena is culturally specific. The twisting helixes in his storeroom are
not simply beautiful shapes, but products of Western scientific rationalism.
Balancing this investigative, theoretical slant is Eliasson’s reverential,
awe-inspired wonder about nature, which inevitably leads viewers to note
that he spent a portion of his childhood in Iceland – a land of steam
springs, moss-covered rocks and barren, craggy landscapes. It is now a
hackneyed point to make but one that seems, in the end, not at all
incidental to the strange, beautiful and superb expressions he creates.
Melissa Gronlund