Book Review: Olafur Eliasson: Experience
Olafur Eliasson: Experience is a special artbook, a retrospective of Eliasson’s art career. The environmental message is faithfully threaded through, and the work is celebrated as it should be. Eliasson is a mad scientist in the art world, and this book shows how fun, powerful and heart-wrenching his inventions can be.
Olafur Eliasson is a titan of modern art. Devoted to the natural world and geometric experiments, he’s exhibited everywhere from the Irish Museum of Modern Art to the Palace of Versailles. As well as prestigious art institutions, he is famous for radical installations out in the world for citizens to see. He illuminated the streets of Utrecht with an artificial sun, brought waterfalls to Manhattan, and dyed green the rivers in cities like Tokyo and Stockholm. His art brings people into a gentle world of ambient naturalism.
In Olafur Eliasson: Experience, a retrospective updated and luxuriously clothbound in canary yellow, his body of work from the 1990s to present day is assiduously explored and documented. For newcomers, it offers a great introduction to the bizarre and beautiful world of Eliasson’s art. Even for diehard enthusiasts, the sheer abundance of installations and artworks catalogued means that you’re bound to find new works and perspectives.
Eliasson utilizes nature in extraordinary ways. In his more traditional work, photography of Icelandic landscapes and receding glaciers draws attention to the impermanence and changing forms of our planet. In Experience, these are reprinted in neat formations and high definition. He gets far more experimental when inviting nature into human spaces. Materials such as ice, fog, moss and even hardened lava are transformed into art-objects, exhibiting the frailty of our Earth. In the unsettling series Ice Watch, his team transported blocks of ice from Greenland and displayed them in prominent cities. Watching these monuments melt in real time gives visceral urgency to the issues of climate change. It’s clear to see in the faces of viewers. Like other works in this book, you can feel the cold, smells and textures emanating from these photographs.
This is key to understanding Eliasson’s work, the experiencial interactivity of it. The book does this by showing artworks not in isolation, but in the process of being viewed and observed. People relax on the floor of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, in the orange glow of a massive indoor sun. They rest under a towering sculpture on a cold Swedish coast. They regard his creations in a quiet museum in Kanazawa, Japan. Seeing these audiences together in this book really delivers a sense of global connection, as if we’re all part of the same audience. From botanical gardens to the Palace of Versailles, even in this book that Eliasson was involved in, these experimental artworks have truly had an impact across many different times and countries. The world is filled with his shapes, geometry and neat formulations, his mark made on every continent.
As well as the wonderful photographs, Experience also features a wealth of additional material. A sharp introduction by Michelle Kuo presents the various themes Eliasson incorporates, from nature to mathematics. She argues that he carries on the spirit of sculptural Expressionism: “Against the anomie and depersonalization of modern life – the coldness of the city, the stultifying work of the factory and bureaucracy alike – Expressionist art and architecture attempted to explore the flat, inanimate picture into an engagement of the senses.” It’s easy to see how he uses this 20th century approach, tackling conventions in uplifting fashion, while always using ecofriendly overtones. Alongside the introduction, there is a lengthy interview with the man himself, plus a dedicated section at the back for the Olafur Eliasson Studio, which handles the architectural projects. You get the sense that he has a very dedicated team helping him fulfil this vision.
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