Engaging personalities

SAN FRANCISCO —  OLAFUR ELIASSON wants you. And not as a passive spectator. He wants you to be a “co-producer” of his light-filled environments, walk-in kaleidoscopes and fleeting rainbows.

The Icelandic artist calls his works “devices for the experience of reality” and invites active participation. At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the site of his first big American survey, he offers plenty of opportunities.

In one darkened gallery, you can make wave-like lines on a big screen by stepping on loose floorboards. In a couple of other locations, you can poke your head into a mirrored window box that seems to bring the city into the museum. As you make your way through the exhibition of 22 works made from 1993 to 2007, you can also inhale the aroma of a wall carpeted with arctic moss, think about perspective in a room divided by shifting light, and blink through purple afterimages created by a gallery drenched in yellow.

“I want to introduce a way that the body as well as the mind can, by engaging, create language,” Eliasson says in a conversation at the museum. Working with what he calls “dematerialized phenomena,” such as light, space and color, he intends to free his audience from old-fashioned ideas about art as objects. “Stressing the phenomenon emphasizes the quality of the spectator’s engagement,” he says.

Like Southern California’s Light and Space artists, Eliasson uses ephemeral effects and intangible materials to generate emotional responses, but he doesn’t hide the hardware used to produce them. What he’s after is a condition of awareness that he calls “seeing yourself seeing.”

In “Beauty,” a seminal piece made in 1993, viewers who stand in the right place and peer through mist see a rainbow. They also see a hose and nozzles, pump and lamp.

Half this, half that

Curator Madeleine Grynsztejn, who spent several years organizing Eliasson’s exhibition, describes his work as “50% wow and 50% aha! -- 50% wonder and 50% showing you how it’s done.”

One of her favorite examples is “One-way colour tunnel,” a kaleidoscope-like tunnel that encapsulates a catwalk high above the museum lobby. People who walk through it in one direction see a black structure; observed from the opposite direction, it’s multicolored. A mixture of high- and low-tech, the tunnel is made of triangular reflective acrylic panels, tied -- by hand -- to a stainless steel framework. “To my mind, this piece represents the absolute moment we live in, a kind of parallel existence of the virtual and physical realms,” Grynsztejn says. “This could not have been done without a computer. It looks like it popped straight out of an iPod, and yet there’s the human touch. We shop online in the morning and at Whole Foods in the afternoon. Olafur has found a visual language that represents that.”

The point of getting people involved in his work, Eliasson says, is to help them reach a heightened state of consciousness and self-awareness -- and gain a sense of belonging.

“If I give spectators the responsibility of what is real in a show like this, I would think they would feel respected,” he says. “They are allowed to decide what they see. They can feel that they are taken seriously and make more out of the experience. This is what I mean by spectators being co-producers; we share responsibility. By respecting individuality you can generate a language of community. When every individual makes their own exhibition, we can create a kind of collective experience.”

Whatever that experience may be, he says, it is deeply affected by the amount of time spent with the artworks. Hence the exhibition title, “Take your time: Olafur Eliasson.”

“Museums are invested in stopping time,” he says. “They are invested in their endowments and collections, and they are not supposed to undermine them by introducing a new phenomenological social agenda where everything is proportionate to the way you engage with it. I would argue that the quality of the ‘Mona Lisa’ is proportionate to the way you engage with it, but that is completely not in the interest of the Louvre. But here we have a museum and a show called ‘Take your time,’ to give back time to the spectator. It’s as profound as that. Or it’s as simple as that. The idea is that you should introduce the type of slowness that you please -- take back individual time, not for egocentric reasons but to sustain collectivity and community. You cannot define a sense of individuality if you don’t belong to a community. What’s the point of being an individual alone?”

Outside the lines

An artist who has worked outside institutional boundaries -- pouring environmentally safe green dye into rivers, projecting a red horizon-like line on an outdoor brick wall, and photographing caves, islands and waterfalls in Iceland -- Eliasson has thought long and hard about the pros and cons of working with museums. He worries that their leaders are so obsessed with success that they forget the institutions’ core values. But he professes strong faith in museums as public places that can nourish a sense of community.

“Museums are there for the art,” he says, “but a museum without an audience is not interesting.”

He made that point in 2003 at London’s Tate Modern with “The weather project,” a spectacular environment featuring a sun-like orb, a mirrored ceiling and mist. Visitors turned the experience into a sort of day at the beach as they walked through the mist, sprawled on the floor and basked in the “sun” while searching for their tiny reflections on the high ceiling.

The cerebral 40-year-old artist, who loves taking rugged hikes in Iceland as much as probing convoluted aesthetic theories, has developed his ideas over a couple of decades. He was born in Denmark to Icelandic parents in 1967 and raised in both countries, and he studied art at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.

Since 1993, he has maintained a studio in Berlin -- the closest art capital to Copenhagen, Eliasson says, and a place “where you can really make it with no money. In L.A., if you don’t have a bit of money, it’s pretty hard to get in. In New York, you have to have a lot of money; people have to work seven days a week and make art in the evenings. In Berlin, people might have to work one day a week to have enough money to make art the rest of the time.”

With a huge warehouse-like studio and 30 employees, he has definitely made it. A regular on the international exhibition circuit, Eliasson also has strong ties to the Light and Space movement of the 1960s and ‘70s. Although he had few opportunities to see examples of the work while he was in school, he learned about artists such as Robert Irwin and James Turrell. When he saw an Irwin show and one of Turrell’s “Skyspace” installations on a post-college trip to New York, he was thunderstruck.

“It was a revelation,” says Eliasson, who still calls Irwin “my hero.”

Despite the ethereal look of much of their work, it can be extremely difficult to install in museum galleries. Planning the design of Eliasson’s exhibition was an enormous challenge for the artist and the curator. An additional installation -- a comment on global warming and the auto industry, featuring an ice-encrusted race car in a walk-in freezer -- has a separate space. But the works in “Take your time” had to be carefully selected to represent Eliasson’s career and fit into the museum’s architecture. It took 20 tries to arrive at the layout.

The show will remain on view at SFMoMA through Feb. 24. When it moves to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, April 13 to June 30, it will be divided between the Manhattan facility and P.S.1 in Queens. “Take your time” will conclude at the Dallas Museum of Art, Nov. 9, 2008, to March 15, 2009, in yet another arrangement.

“This is not your normal situation where you create rooms to contain art,” Grynsztejn says. “The rooms are the art. We built the art in building the sequence of galleries.” What evolved in San Francisco, she says, was “almost an accordion effect, from empty to full to empty, light to dark to light.”

The challenge, Eliasson says, “is to do less. I have to make sure I don’t prescribe. I have tried to stay honest to my values in allowing this show to be open, to co-produce a situation where I am not present.”

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