Finally, here’s a picture of the Color Tunnel from the side. We couldn’t take pictures inside the galleries, so I took one while leaving.
Olafur Eliasson’s art is about “seeing yourself seeing” - what’s so special about that? All artists ought to be conscious of the experience the viewer will have upon seeing his or her work. But Eliasson’s art not only takes that seemingly obvious core and makes it the centerpiece of his pieces; he takes a concept and expands it into a total experience to create a room lit in yellow monochrome (Room for One Colour), or a dark room with illuminated mist falling through the middle (Beauty). For the viewer, the immediate initial reaction is not a mental one - “Oh, I’m now conscious of myself seeing” - but one of attraction and curiosity to seeing things that are at once technical and natural.
After staring, wide-eyed, at whatever spectacle he places before you, Olafur Eliasson’s bare modernist aesthetic shows us that his understanding of “seeing” is something more singular, deconstructed, and patterned than a typical moment of vision. The way his pieces react to our placement and motion impel us to be aware of what we are sensing. He seems to want us to see not only his self-declared message that we should take responsibility for our actions in the world, but also that the similar, pared down elements of our sensory experience - the elements of our seeing - form the actual sources for curious beauty. Eliasson’s brilliance is not that he deconstructs light and forms to emphasize their basic, bare parts- it’s that in his carefully devised ways of doing so, he also deconstructs our awe.
Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson
is on display at the SFMOMA until February 24th. Go see it if you can!
