Marshall Berg | Contemporary Art History | 5.8.11 OLAFUR ELIASSON: YOUR CONTEMORARY ARTIST I find contemporary artist Olafur Eliasson the most intriguing individual producing work today. He is constantly expanding how we look at, and act in space and time. His work engulfs the viewer, allowing them to become a participant. Eliasson uses perceptual phenomenon as an entry point that leads to much larger conceptual ideas. His work discusses physics, perception, natural and man-made phenomenon, social and cultural realms, and personal and collective experience of space and time. Eliasson incorporates elements from all the curiosities of life, and
I find Olafur Eliasson the most intriguing individual producing work today.
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Marshall Berg | Contemporary Art History | 5.8.11
OLAFUR ELIASSON: YOUR CONTEMORARY ARTIST
I find contemporary artist Olafur Eliasson the most intriguing individual
producing work today. He is constantly expanding how we look at, and act in space and
time. His work engulfs the viewer, allowing them to become a participant. Eliasson uses
perceptual phenomenon as an entry point that leads to much larger conceptual ideas. His
work discusses physics, perception, natural and man-made phenomenon, social and
cultural realms, and personal and collective experience of space and time. Eliasson
incorporates elements from all the curiosities of life, and translates them into
environments, objects, and information. While creating certain situations that have never
been conceived of, he is not avant-garde. His pieces, while appearing aesthetically new,
embrace and evolve questions humanity has been asking since (and almost positively
before) ancient Greece,
“What’s actually going on between the subject and the space – and how much of
that is happening in his space, his perception? The question of the position of the subject
within his space has become the theme of my artistic work.” 1
Eliasson creates installations that prompt participants to ask these same questions
within his mediated spaces. These experiences may stain the memories of the individuals,
because they are uniquely uncanny yet, subtly informative, activating a dichotomous
process in the mind of the individual, of experience and reflection. This cerebral reflex
constantly compares the fully sensuous now, with the curious memory of then. The
perception of the individual dictates how they will read the work. The relative experience
of the work encodes referential memories, changing how they perceive the world
following it. Experience shapes perception, and exists as the only limitation of human
development and consciousness. Eliasson searches to artistically investigate this
boundary. “I am interested in enhancing the role of art as a participant in society and find
that it can contribute with reflections of a spatial nature; it can have political, social and
aesthetic impact in non-artistic practices as well.”2
Olafur Eliasson was born in 1967 in Copenhagen, Denmark. He studied at the
Royal Danish Acadamy for Fine Arts between 1989 and 1995. In an interview with 032c
Magazine he describes his first artistic endeavors, and how he started thinking about his
own creative potential. “In 1984 I was completely convinced that (my break dancing) was
art. It was pretty hardcore… My father was an artist... It doesn’t get any more banal than
that.” Upon entering art school, Eliasson started experimenting with post-modern artistic
practices surrounding phenomenology, and delved into researching Gestalt psychology.3
“When I started art school, one thing that seemed interesting to me
about Gestaltpsychologie was that it worked with a specific idea of the
subject—the subject as a very productive entity. This was unlike
phenomenology, which had a much more formal or objective idea of
the subject. I think Gestaltpsychologie works specifically because it
also has more to do with cognitive science and neurology. This is what
triggered my interest—the idea that you could reinterpret the meaning
of the individual based on the experience of the artwork… When I read
about Gestaltpsychologie, I focused on the general, basic experiments
—about how expectations could influence the way you see very
elementary ideas.”4
With these conceptual tools Eliasson set off to smartly and
elegantly show people their perception, expanding it in the process.
Connecting ideas of relativity to social systems and reinstalling a sense
of temporality in objects and experience.
In an early project; Green River, Eliasson poured non-toxic green
dye into four international city rivers and documented them, between
1 Blessing, Joachim “Experiencing Space: Olafur Eliasson” 032c Magazine Issue #8: Space Begins Because We Look Away From Where We Are (Winter 2004/2005) 1002 Eliasson, Olafur. “Your Engagement has Consequences.” Experiment Marathon: Serpentine Gallery. Edited by Emma Ridgway. (Reykjavik: Reykjavik Art Museum, 2009) pg20.3 “Gestalt psychology attempts to understand psychological phenomena by viewing them as organized and structured wholes rather than the sum of their constituent parts. More specifically, they tried to explain human perception of groups of objects and how we perceive parts of objects and form whole objects on the basis of these.”Soegaard, Mads “Gestalt principles of form perception.” Interaction-Design.org http://www.interactiondesign.org/encyclopedia/gestalt_principles_of_form_perception.htmls (2010)4 Obrist, Hans Ulrich. “VIII — The vessel interview, part II: NetJets flight from Dubrovnik to Berlin, 2007.” Olafur Eliasson & Hans Ulrich Obrist: The Conversation Series; Vol. 13.(Edited by Matthew Gaskins. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, Köln, 2008) 163-64