Nowadays, artists of all kinds emphasize the role viewers play in interacting with artworks. Most of the ideas have to do with treating viewers as participants in the artistic process. A work of art, it has been said, is not complete until a viewer sorts through the visual or conceptual data and settles on an interpretation. The end of the process is not acceptance of the artist’s point of view but a selection that “empowers” the viewer.
Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-born artist who has created two temporary installations at the Art Institute of Chicago, goes further. His environments, which use such elements as fire, water, earth and light, seek to shift the focus entirely to viewers. They are, in effect, triggers of perception and provide a framework in which the subject becomes the viewer’s experience.
Chicagoans already have seen perceptual work by two pioneers. The Museum of Contemporary Art gave a show to California Light-and-Space artist Robert Irwin; the Art Institute purchased a piece by Irwin’s one-time assistant, James Turrell. Both have had impact on Eliasson, though having been trained in perception psychology, he responds more to Irwin’s pragmatism, resisting the spiritual subtext of Turrell.
Eliasson’s own emphasis, however, involves an added degree of self-consciousness about how the places that exhibit more orthodox art have conditioned our viewing.
“The traditional art object has had a hierarchy of seeing imposed on it,” Eliasson says. “History has a way of imposing a tradition of seeing, as well. So when you go into a museum, there are lots of contracts, lots of rules about how you are even supposed to move around to look at things. The rules are about how things are exposed to us. And in that exposure, there’s a whole codex of how to see. This is the kind of seeing that I’m trying to question. To do it, I need a [viewer]. The work, the art object, then becomes more of a machine which creates a problem or a solution or whatever.”
The first of Eliasson’s two pieces at the Institute is a hanging bank of fluorescent tubes in an otherwise empty gallery. The tubes are covered by a scrim that the artist has affixed to a wooden space frame. Nothing is hidden from sight. Eliasson intended the structure to be simple and, he says, as “unsuspicious” as possible.
Many of the galleries in the museum’s original building have skylights; spaces in the newer Rice Building, where Eliasson worked, do not. However, the tubes he installed are on two sine waves that cause random brightening and dimming. The illumination filtered through the scrim approximates daylight out on Lake Michigan.
“I came to Chicago twice, approximately a year ago,” says Eliasson. “The first time I saw this enormous, heavy structure–the museum. It was a little bit dark, a lot of spaces having no windows. But then there were the skylights. Due to what I have called the contract of the spaces, you don’t look at the skylights; you see only the artworks, which obviously is what you’re here for. But sometimes in one of those galleries, the light will suddenly change, and people wonder where the change came from because they’re inside–not only inside architecture but history.”
On his second visit, he noticed the daylight more.
“And I thought: This will be the end [of the piece]: the quality of being near the lake, with the wind and the clouds going by the sun,” he says. “That is what the work alludes to. The light fades in from a 60 percent intensity to 100 percent. Sometimes the fading is very slow. Sometimes it’s very fast. Sometimes you don’t know if your eyes are playing a trick on you and you are changing the light internally, so to speak. Sometimes you’re sure everything takes place outside you. To perceive all that is to break the contract I was talking about.”
When Eliasson moved from Scandinavia to Germany in 1993, some critics seized on how his work was created from natural elements and thus related to the Scandinavian Romantic tradition in painting. This was a mistake, he says, for while he carries within him a cultural history, he has been formed equally by popular culture. So his approach to nature has been as something banal and democratic, in the sense that everyone, regardless of background or education, has experienced it.
But to assume that the apparent directness of the work makes it simple is another mistake, for like many artists born in the 1960s, Eliasson has been attentive to aesthetic and social theory. The museum “contract” he speaks of comes from French philosopher Michel Foucault, and Eliasson’s speech is peppered with references to other writings that any good art student in the’80s might be expected to know. Even his title for the light piece–“Your intuitive surroundings versus your surrounded intuition”–shows a regard for language that is common among “cutting-edge” contemporary artists, and to some minds such regard has deepened Eliasson’s art by withholding it from the sin of speaking too plainly.
“I am interested in how we as spectators respond to our surroundings, to other people socially or to culture or architecture,” Eliasson says. “To investigate the issues around that, I need a method. Maybe I could have done this research with music as my language, but I’m not skillful within music. The only chance I have is to look upon myself and determine what my tools are. . . .
“I have this training from school that if something is different, it’s worth less or is not good; we should try to change everything so it becomes the same. There is a tendency, even within the structure of a museum, to objectify the way we sense our surroundings so that we become more and more alike. What I am maybe trying–to make a very large jump–is to support a different realization: subjectivity or difference. I think of individuality as a concept that works with acceptance of difference.”
Eliasson’s second piece is outside the museum, on the east side of a canyon that runs between the buildings to accommodate Illinois Central train tracks. Next to the loggia in the Rice Building, visible from a window that faces the Michigan Avenue skyline, the artist has created a scaffold supporting a 21-foot square of grass. The effect is like a tiny lawn surrounded by a quasi-industrial void.
Across the tracks is another large window, from which viewers see mainly Eliasson’s scaffold. But more important is what happens whenever afternoon light brightens the grass and glazed loggia. Viewers standing inside, to the east, may catch a glimpse of their sunlit reflection in the windows to the west. They see not only an urban landscape touched by the green that will grow into Millennium Park but also fugitive impressions of themselves in the act of seeing.
“There’s a new book, a wonderful book,” Eliasson says, “called `The American Lawn.’ Starting off with David Lynch movies, it’s about the history of lawns in the United States. Everybody knows something about this. Everybody has something to say about it. And seeing a lawn exposed here on train tracks through windows, this is where nature comes in. In this case, a lawn is nature more than so-called wilderness, which I think would look strange and artificial because [city dwellers seldom] see it. The lawn here looks quite like people’s own lawns. They can recognize something in themselves out there hovering in front of the window.”
That accessibility is important to Eliasson.
“I know it doesn’t look like it’s very accessible, but if you don’t think about it, it actually is,” he says. “I think it’s much more accessible than a Picasso painting, which is complex and sort of rigid. I’m sometimes a little afraid when we talk about it because I have a tendency to become convoluted, and people step back a bit. But only the relationship between the components of a piece and the viewers is important. That’s why I said each piece is just a machine which maybe creates a phenomenon. At 6 o’clock, you turn off the light piece, let’s say, and it’s just metal and wood and plastic. I didn’t do anything.”
———-
“FOCUS: Olafur Eliasson” continues through Aug. 13 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave.
