Olafur Eliasson is an artist with a wide range of interests like vision, colour, light, but mainly reality and how it is formed. He works with many complex materials and designs experiences that are intended to challenge the audience to make their own deductions and craft their own reality.
Your Blind Passenger is a tunnel filled with fog and light designed to disorient the viewer from normal ways of perceiving reality. In this way the audience is invited to alter their perception, using sound and other senses to navigate independently. Some areas are dark or light, some warm or cool; this is to further the disconnection from constructed reality as we normally perceive it.
His other works are varied but most focus on audience experience within the work not only visual aesthetic or beauty, even though this is a clear consideration. Works like Riverbed in particular play with the notion of the individual’s place on the planet and in the universe. These are very complex topics that are tackled using universal materials, bringing a riverbed into a gallery again subverts the norm and blurs the boundaries between things.
In this way we are called to reassess how we think about nature, galleries, ourselves and the environment; all by navigating the indoor space filled with outdoor materials and themes. The juxtaposition can be understood across languages and is accessible to all (wheelchair access does not look possible however) since the experience is communicated through the body and through movement not through a prior knowledge of contemporary art or scientific theory.
There have been some critiques of his work, namely the Ice Watch piece, in the sense that raising awareness often doesn’t lead to lasting change. The argument is that the energy and fuel wasted transporting the ice from Greenland, the counter argument is that Greenland loses 10,000 of these every second so taking 30 is relatively benign.
Honestly I am not sure how I feel about this piece specifically, but in terms of his wider work I feel Eliasson has good intentions and brings a lot of interesting questions and insights to the fore. His understanding of space colour light and how this relates to the human experience is astounding, he like many others seems to be able to speak to a universality inside each of us.
Some Quotes from his interviews that stuck with me were:
‘combine singularity and collectivity’
‘an artwork hosts whatever subjective material you bring to it’
‘you don’t have to be a professional to have an opinion about a rainbow’
Was Olafur Eliasson Bringing 30 Icebergs to London a Sustainability Own Goal? | Frieze
Olafur Eliasson – ‘Collective Experience’ | TateShots
Olafur Eliasson: Become Your Own Navigator | Art21 “Extended Play”