Olafur Eliasson: Art in real life
I thought it would be a real chore moving old blog posts over from my blogger site to this new one. It turns out that I was particularly prolific during my PhD years and there were nearly 300 posts to move in total! But it turned out to be a really enjoyable lockdown activity, re-discovering places that I visited and things I heard, read or thought over the last nine years. It also made me realise how many more recent visits I haven’t had time to write about, so I thought I’d pick a few recent ones to revisit here.
It was hard to miss Olafur Eliasson’s show In Real Life at Tate Modern, as it was probably the most visible exhibition on social media of the last few years. I saw endless images of friends and colleagues in the coloured shadow room, which also provided the exhibition poster, and heard of the long queues to witness the various experiences. I am often wary of works like this that attract such instragram fame as invariably the real-life experience is significantly less beautiful or thought-provoking than it looks in the images. Likewise, I don’t enjoy an exhibition that is mostly queue management as, for me, part of the joy of a show is finding my own path through it.
However, Eliasson’s work is extraordinary art that also looks good on instagram. I was lucky to go first thing on a weekday when there was no queue and experience many of the rooms entirely on my own. The coloured shadows really made me think about how I could move and pose my own body, the kaleidoscope pieces raised questions about space and vision, and Eliasson’s glacier melt series really rams home the current momentum of climate change. He is an artist who embraces, uses and questions science, and I think his work is in many ways sadly reduced by its instragamability.
In fact, the room that most fascinated me was also one of which I didn’t see a single photo on social media, the first room that you entered in the exhibition: The Model Room. This brought together around 450 models, prototypes and geometric studies produced by Eliasson and his studio team over 18 years of collaboration with Icelandic artist, mathematician and architect Einar Thorsteinn. They were displayed together in a central case and evoked architectural models as well as collector’s cabinets, fossil collections or precious ceramics. I loved how they showed you the material reality of collaborative work and the structural, mathematical considerations behind what sometimes seem simple large works by Eliasson.
In fact, this room made me realise the aptness of the exhibitions title - In Real Life – bringing together works by an artist who engages with life through big questions and big experiences, and whose work has to be experienced in real life to be fully appreciated.