The thermometer on the door outside Olafur Eliasson’s Your Mobile Expectations reads five degrees Fahrenheit. I’m wrapped in a grey fleecy blanket, waiting to go inside. As I read the wall texts, I try to figure out whether SFMOMA could actually be buying geothermal electricity for the project, or if they’ve done some kind of economic voodoo to make it look greener. Then it’s time to go in.
Your Mobile Expectations (pictured above in an image from SFMOMA's website) is like no art installation you’ve been in. It is like a giant beer distributor’s fridge…or maybe an operating room in which some alien autopsy is about to begin. More specious than any apartment I ever had, the giant refrigerated room accommodates about two-dozen visitors at a time. Our frozen breath swirls around us in misty curlicues. Most of the audience passes through the room fast, hardly pausing to look at the sculpture at its center. A few of us linger in the chilly space, getting down on our knees to peer under the rapidly forming icicles.
The sculpture at the center of all this – a very swanky BMW race car wrapped in some sort of CG carapace that makes it look like it was captured at a raid on a Klingon outpost – is interesting enough in itself, but what can compete with all the ideas Eliasson throws around? The car, a factor in global warming, enshrouded in funereal ice. The power, coming from a geothermal source that could power the entire city indefinately (were it not for corporate inertia), is just one extravagance in a small world of extra-extravagances.
For all this, I think the ideal vantage point for the installation is outside it. One can observe through little windows, like a scientist waiting for the hibernating creature to awaken. In my estimation, Eliasson is at his best when he is most economical, creating enchantments that defy the apparent simplicity of their apparatus. Upstairs in SFMOMA’s larger show, aptly named “Take Your Time”, there are several examples of Elisson’s best work (and, thank heaven, a few clunkers lest we get too exicted). Elegant works like his 2003 Yellow versus Purple and the spectacular 2005 work Notion Motion provide magical spatial transformations at the same time they reveal all their secrets. Hiding the machinery of illusions diminishes their magic.
Now I sound chilly. But Eliasson’s generousity makes me suspicious. Not of him (or his studio) but of how the spectacles he (they) might trickle down into popular culture. Some works – like 360 degree room for all colors begin looking like trendy nightclubs awaiting furniture. Anxiety about Eliassoin's popularity is picking up. Writing about the artist and his work in the September 2 New York Times, Dorothy Spears fretted openly about his accessiblilty.
From rainbows glistening in curtains of tumbling water droplets, to echoing rooms steeped in a single saturated color, to reverse waterfalls and walk-through kaleidoscopes, these are marvels of optics, sound, smell and touch. Mr. Eliasson’s admirers have kept the museum turnstiles spinning, although he is sometimes skeptical of the attention surrounding his work.
His “Weather Project,” a giant fake sun made of 200 yellow sodium lamps and a bit of trickery involving mirrors and mist, attracted more than two million visitors to the Tate Modern in the winter of 2003-4. Asked to extend the show, Mr. Eliasson declined.
“The media attention was very flattering,” he recalled, sitting at a communal table on a loading dock outside his Berlin studio’s backyard of scrubby trees, grass and abandoned train tracks. “But it was also becoming very brutal. There was a danger that the project might slip from an artistic experience to mindless entertainment.” But on a dark winter day in London, who wouldn’t long to see a sun glowing in atmospheric fog while lying on a concrete floor, watching one’s own reflection make the indoor equivalent of snow angels?
It's not worth getting into whether the choice of the word 'fake' over a more neutral word, like 'simulated', is indicative of Ms. Spears’ feelings towards Eliasson's work. What Eliasson's show offers is a moment to consider how having the resources to do what you want might actually diminish the quality of one’s work and detract from its meaning. Later in the same article, Eliasson talks about the political subtext of his work:
For some reason [...] our history has produced the misconception that experiencing individuality has to do with being alone. But being together is greater than being alone, because we can do more. We are more responsible.
What more beautiful, subversive idea could an artist have in today's economic and political environment? And it's brilliantly reflected in works that achieve spectacular effects using hardware store technologies. When it takes the backing of BMW or begins to look like something we might soon see in a Banana Republic's window behind the latest khakis, art that aspires to build community runs aground in the shallow waters of corporate aesthetics.
Too often, when I talk to young artists, they are confused about the nature of public space. Eliasson has reinvigorated our awareness of space, making him a subject of great interest to those who stand to benefit from having 'interesting spaces' (not just public institutions like museums, but commercial ones interested in spectacle for its ability to pack in the customers). A work like Your Mobile Expectations fails because it cannot wiggle out from under the marketing imperative that made it possible - it can, at best, comment obliquely on the concerns it raises. Small successes, we learn, can be greater than thundering ovations. That may explain why Eliasson's latest work leaves me a little cold.
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