Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson in MoMA@Exhibitions

"360 Room for All Colours" (2002)

Holland Cotter writes:
"What a relief. Near the end of a decade crammed with junk-art collectibles and a museum season of ragbag sculptures and wallpapered words, we get bare walls and open space in the Olafur Eliasson survey at the Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1. Light and color, with a few odd-duck objects of a kind you might wrap up and take home."

Photo: Michael Nagle for The New York Times

"1 M3 Light" (1999)

"Mr. Eliasson, who was born in Denmark in 1967, spent part of his life in Iceland and now lives in Berlin, is well known for creating immaterialist magic through bare-bones means: literally, in some cases, mist and mirrors. In style, his art is utterly un-Murakami; not slick; not plastic, not cash-and-carry."

Photo: Michael Nagle for The New York Times

"For his New York debut at Tanya Bonakdar in 1996, he ran a perforated hose along a gallery ceiling, then turned on a flickering strobe to transform a sheet of falling droplets into a field of stop-action stars. Four years later, he removed the gallery`s skylight and added a frieze of mirrors to bring the sights, sounds and frosty air of the outdoors inside."

Photo: Michael Nagle for The New York Times

The Weather Project at Tate Modern

And this tour-de-force fusion of nature and culture was nothing compared to the grand setting sun he created from lights and haze at the Tate Modern in 2003. It was a one-piece blockbuster. Tens of thousands of people came to soak in its glow, as if they were at the beach. Or Woodstock. Or Lourdes.

Photo: Tate Modern

"Like abstract painting, Mr. Eliasson's art can be slow to reveal itself. In an installation called 'Beauty,' a rainbow emerges from a curtain of mist and vanishes. Maybe you see it; maybe you don't. The illumination in an empty 'white' room at P.S. 1 changes color all but imperceptibly as you watch: from white, to faint gray, to pale pollen-beige, to lavender, one dissolving into the next like shifts in weather or the readings of a mood ring."

Photo: Michael Nagle for The New York Times

"Room for One Colour" (1997)

"And like certain kinds of jazz, or ragas, or New Age ambient sound, this is an art of variation rather than destination. It lays out a visual theme, then asks you to wait, watch, wait some more, and discover things happening. A stationary object turns out to be moving; a window view of the street through a prismatic sculpture turns reality upside down, but not entirely."

Photo: Michael Nagle for The New York Times

" 'Take Your Time' a new piece at P.S. 1, made for the show, consists of a huge, tilted, disc-shaped mirror suspended horizontally from a gallery ceiling. What strikes you at first is the omniscient, bird`s-eye reflection of the room below, with you standing in the middle of it. Then you notice that the mirror is rotating very slowly, and with a subtly undulating motion that causes the room itself feel warped and unstable. You experience this as much with your sense of balance as with your eyes."

Photo: Michael Nagle for The New York Times

"The name of the piece is also the name of the exhibition. It is an aptly utopian title. 'Take' implies an invitation, a sharing. 'Your' suggests inclusion, community. 'Time,' we all know about that. Everyone has some of it; nobody has much, or enough. Museums are built to freeze time but end up freezing other things too, such as ethics and history, which are, or should be, fluid. Art, by contrast, can expand or dissolve time, which is something Mr. Eliasson seems to want to do."

Photo: Michael Nagle for The New York Times

"Wall Eclipse" (2004)

"A fair amount of his work, in a witty way, is about disruption and disorientation. At P.S. 1 a waterfall flows upward; a rotating metal fan, propelled by its own wind power, swings from a cable, just above head height, in MoMA's atrium. This is art that teases and even, a little, humiliates, as we hesitate before the false doors, or are blinded by flashing lights, or duck the buzzing fan. It keeps the art from being sappy or flashy, all light shows and special effects. And Mr. Eliasson obviously wants the work to feel tough, which is why he leaves the mechanics transparent. This directness is a reminder that Mr. Eliasson, like his Chinese contemporary Cai Guo-Qiang, is at his best as a producer of public gestures; impermanent, immersive theatrical situations."

Photo: Michael Nagle for The New York Times

"360° Room for All Colours" (2002)

"And how radical is Mr. Eliasson's art? How market-challenging or convention-shifting? Not terribly. 'Take Your Time' looks anomalous enough in an object-riddled moment, and in MoMA's galleries. At the same time, the work feels too easy in its repeated appeals to our appetite for passive sensation and luxe, as do Mr. Eliasson's architectural and commercial design projects (for BMW among others)."

Photo: Michael Nagle for The New York Times

"360° Room for All Colours" (2002)

"Mr. Eliasson's art deals, some would say, in a politics of enchantment. Enchanting the work certainly is, and open, evanescent, intellectually stimulating, and beautiful. In all these ways it offers a model for a future beyond the present rummage-sale glut. In others ways, though, it reminds us how far art has not come."

Photo: Michael Nagle for The New York Times

@Source: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/04/17/arts/2008418elia2_index.html