Exhibitions
Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life Tate Modern to 5th January
Please forgive me in advance. It is likely that I may gush in an un-critic-like manner during this month’s preview.
For me, Olafur Eliasson is one of the superstars of contemporary art, particularly of installation art. His work is popular, and inevitably that has attracted the disdain of some art critics – notably the American Hal Fisher, who said that Eliasson’s Weather Project ‘overawes us with sensory overload, fostering emotional rather than critical responses’; it is ‘too easily apprehended as otherworldly, even spiritual’, as if these are bad things, and critics the only worthy audience for art. ‘Eliasson is exactly the kind of artist that museums can call on to fill their newly inflated spaces and generate huge crowds too.’
Very true. In its six-month run in 2003, Weather Project, popularly referred to as ‘the Sun’, attracted two million visitors to the newly inflated Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.
Many of the greatest artists
throughout history have used and manipulated the reactions of their audience as a medium, in combination with paint, marble, light or whatever. In Weather Project, Eliasson took this further; the reactions of the public to their moving reflections high above became part of the work. Brian O’doherty, generally a more perceptive critic, seems to have slightly misread this, describing visitors as ‘intoxicated with their own narcissism as they ponder themselves elevated into the sky’.
Over the years, Eliasson’s concerns have focused more precisely on environmental problems, but there is a clear progression from his interest in space, light, motion and natural phenomena in his Icelandic homeland, such as Moss Wall of 1994, to this year’s Waterfall, by way of the Ice Watch project shown at Tate Modern last year, which consisted of blocks of Greenland glacial ice melting to nothing.
This show, In Real Life, consists of 40 works – from installations to photographs and watercolours – covering Eliasson’s whole career, including architectural work, culminating in the practical ways in which he engages with the environmental crisis.
His Little Sun project, for instance (launched at Tate Modern in 2012), provides solar-powered, hand-held lamps and chargers to communities without electricity, while the Green Light scheme is an artistic workshop hosted by institutions around the world where refugees and members of the public can construct lamps.
Since 1994, the Danish-icelandic artist’s studio has been in Berlin, currently in a repurposed brewery, and there his teams of workers and collaborators eat family-style meals together.
For the run of the show, Studio Olafur Eliasson and Tate Eats will be offering a special organic, vegetarian and localproduce menu in the Terrace Bar. It will be interesting to see what they forage in Southwark. There will also be opportunities ‘to engage in collaborative, making activities’.
Not only is this an important exhibition, but it should be fun – except for art critics.