In 2003, the same year that he unveiled The Weather Project, his now legendary giant artificial sun that lit up the Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern, Olafur Eliasson also created a much more intimately dramatic work of art. In a makeshift gallery at the Venice Biennale, he installed a white plastic drum that protruded from a wall with a red button on it that said “PRESS.” Anyone who was brave or curious enough to press the button was startled seconds later by an intense flash of light from within the drum. For several minutes afterwards, each time the viewer blinked, the word “UTOPIA” was imprinted on their retina. It was a work of art that literally made you see the world differently, and as such was both an illustration of and a metaphor for the Icelandic-born artist’s methodology. Perhaps more than any other artist working today, Eliasson involves the viewer directly in the artworks he creates. “My work is not about me,” he once said, “it’s about you.”
The Weather Project was the most successful single work of contemporary art exhibited in Britain in recent years, attracting an astonishing 2 million viewers to Tate Modern. More interesting still was the way in which the audience interacted with the piece. Many visitors wandered slowly through the Turbine Hall as if determined to take it all in, while others lounged on the floor for hours like sunbathers. Some days the atmosphere turned celebratory as crowds of strangers interacted by arranging their bodies to spell out giant words that were reflected on the mirrored ceiling. When Tim Neuger, Eliasson’s gallerist in Berlin, visited Tate Modern, a group of young people had spelt out the words “Fuck Bush” on the ceiling. He rang Eliasson in Berlin and let him listen to the cheers of the crowd echoing though the Turbine Hall.
You could say that Eliasson has reinvented the way in which conceptual art is received by the public, replacing the usual hushed reverence — or sighs of exasperation — with a mood of playful and anarchic mischief. “I do not see my work as any kind of statement or a manifesto,” he says. “It’s a dialogue. Always.”
Right now, that dialogue is continuing apace in New York, and with equally dramatic results, where Eliasson has created a series of giant self-propelling waterfalls on the East River. Situated at four different points between Manhattan and Brooklyn, the New York City Waterfalls range in height from 27m to 36m, each pumping up to more than one million liters of water a minute up and over their giant frames. At night, they are illuminated, adding another level of surrealism to an otherwise drab stretch of the river. Eliasson’s art attempts to make us see the everyday in a different light. “In a way,” says Eliasson, “I like to think that I have given New Yorkers back their river.”
And they, in their turn, have responded in kind. On the online photograph site, Flickr, visitors have posted more than 5,000 snapshots of the waterfalls, a mass response that pleases Eliasson much more than the chorus of excited approval that greeted the project’s unveiling in the US media. “On Flickr, the photographs have been taken mainly on mobile phones, and often there are people in the photographs with the waterfalls,” he says. “It’s a highly subjective way of documenting the work. I see the waterfalls as a co-producer of the time and place in which they take place. I suppose, in that way, the work filters into questions about society and democracy.”
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