Olafur Elaisson: Take Your Time

Olafur Eliasson, 360° room for all colours, 2002; installation view at the

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany, 2004; Private collection, courtesy
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; photo: Jens Ziehe; © 2009 Olafur
Eliasson. Permission to reproduce from MOCA, Chicago.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
May 1, 2009

Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson's solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago is certainly an exhibition that will awaken senses and sensations that may have lay dormant. Eliasson says that his art works are "devices for the experience of reality." Each formal work embodies elements which create independently immersive environments; collectively, they form an experience of intense individual perception.

360 room for all colours, 2002, is situated further within the gallery spaces - reachable via two paths of entry - glowing like a pulsating beacon. The controlled unit environment is contained within a white rotunda - the structure sound and tactile from the exterior and bewilderingly ethereal on the interior - immersing the viewer in a extremely reductive landscape via the color spectrum. Immediately, the intensity of light and color forces the viewer to make cognitive adjustments and even the muscles of the eyes and face react uncontrollably to the abrupt change in environment creating self-awareness. Then suddenly, as if a spectacularly zenith moment takes over, the body settles into the new space and light. Interestingly, the mind does not. As the physical body adjusts, the mind flows serenely through the space attempting to explore these newly introduced perceptions of space and color, both tangible and intangible. I found myself suddenly relaxed and moving my eyes and hands very slowly through the space in an effort to wrap my mind around the mechanics of the work and at the same time experiencing the sensations that flowed in as the fluorescent lights engulfed the space. My mind and body truly began to slow down.

The wonderful thing about this show is that each work and each new space that one moves through in the gallery evokes a new new combination of sensations and a new dichotomy between tangible and intangible senses of perception. Passing over to the the South gallery space of the museum a brilliant yellow light from Room for one colour, 1997, beckons the viewer into a long narrow hall. Intense monochromatic bulbs move along the ceiling of the hall in striation, emitting light at a very narrow frequency, which affect our normal perception of color (Exhibition pamphlet, MOCA, Chicago). The artist hopes that our various states of self-awareness and reflection on larger conditions of creative involvement will spring forth in our own personal and civic lives (Madeleine Grynsztejn, MCA Pritzker Director, MOCA, Chicago). I think that as we begin to realize how we work through each of these pieces it brings about a greater overall awareness to sensations that we may not call upon often and also entices us to engage on new levels of perception.

After exiting the light drenched avenue that seems to vibrate with the extreme sensation of light, the exhibition turns into a space filled with the swaying motion and sound of air breezing by on a single fan hanging down from the ceiling titled Ventilator, 1997. Propelled back and forth across the room from its own momentum the fan engages with the walls of the gallery space and shifts and changes its direction dependent upon the number and location of individuals within the gallery. Swinging above the heads of the viewers the fan seems to have no direction until it meets another surface. In the context of how Eliasson envisions a goal for the work in a larger social arena to cultivate awareness, by putting ourselves in the position of the fan, it helps us to conceive of how we move in the world. As the fans energy is reflected off of and absorbed by the viewers and by the space around it, so to are we - as the fan - affected by the individual(s) and spaces that we come in contact with. It is our self-reflection and awareness of these interactions that allows us to control our movements unlike the fan. Ventilator becomes a very poetic aspect of this idea, not only within the context of the exhibition, but in the way in which Eliasson suggests that we take our time and truly be present to experience this reality.