Sensational

"Beauty," 1993

Take your time: Olafur Eliasson
MoMA and P.S.1
April 20–June 30

Ever since reading about his "Weather project," a huge artificial sun at the Tate Modern, I've been intrigued by the work of Olafur Eliasson, and eagerly anticipated the double-whammy show at the P.S.1 and MoMA.

"Take your time" is the kind of show that you can enthusiastically recommend to friends who only set inside a museum once or twice a year. It's fun, you'd say. There's this circular room where the walls light up and change colors, bathing everyone inside with intense color. People sit on the floor taking photos of each other. It's wild. Maybe my favorite piece, you continue, is this regular electric fan that hangs on this really long cord from the ceiling in the MoMA's atrium space. It swings around powered by it's own wind. Kids love it and chase it around. There's something sweet and surreal about it...

Olafur Eliasson is likable because his works are straight-forward and easy to understand without any back story or art history degree necessary. In fact, none of the works in "Take your time" are labeled. If you want to know the names of the pieces, you can consult a glossy hand-out, but it's clear that the artist and curators feel it's unnecessary. We don't need to know that he's 41 years old, Icelandic, has a residence in Berlin and that he's influenced by "Light and Space" artist Robert Irwin, or that he is comfortable discussing his work in terms of Continental philosophy, specifically phenomenology and the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

In fact, his works are so stripped-down and baggage-free -- a huge rotating mirror on a ceiling, a wall covered in living moss -- that it's easy to blow through the show. It's something Eliasson is cognizant of. Witness the show's injunctive title -- "Take your time."

His more immersive environments encourage languor on their own. His blockbuster 2003 "Weather project," had visitors sitting or lying on the floor of huge turbine room at the Tate Modern, basking in an artificial sun. In the current show, visitors lie beneath a rotating ceiling mirror in a piece with same name as the show (this is a new work specially made for P.S.1).

Lying under the mirror, you're taken by how fun and calming it is to commune with a bunch of art-loving strangers, staring at yourself and others. Then, after a few minutes, you notice that the mirror is tilted, causing your image to recede, get closer, and so on. It's meditative. You feel pleasantly disembodied. It's the same deal in the "360° room for all colours"; you feel a sense of spontaneous community, bathed together in the shifting spectrum, as your subjective perceptions are tweaked and your sense of objectivity is loosened. It's a bit paradoxical: a group experience of heightened subjectivity.

In a clever but lighthearted way, Eliasson aims at upending our critical faculties and tweaks our preconceived notions, such as about the separation between nature and culture. In the brilliant "Wall eclipse" (2004), a spotlight shines on a slowly spinning mirror, filling the room with shifting shapes of light and shadow, arranged so that it perfectly to illuminate and "eclipse" opposite walls. In "Beauty" (1993), a light shines through a spray of mist creating a spectral like rainbow that changes shape depending on your viewing angle.

His best works are both lyrical and reveal themselves over time. All his works reveal how they work, with simple materials and nothing hidden. There is no trickery in his spectacles. This simplicity at it's best is charming and honest. For his lesser works it can be stupefying. (As Leslie Camhi writes in the Village Voice, formalism is his Achilles’ heel.)

Such is the case of "1 m³ light" (1999), an arrangement of spotlights defines the shape of a cube in a dark, foggy room; and "Reversed waterfall" (1998), a contraption of basins and hoses that ferries water up.

"Take your time" is the first joint exhibition between MoMA and P.S.1 since their merger in 2000. It's a bit sad in the context of the ouster of P.S.1's founder Alanna Heiss and inevitable corporate encroachment (see recent reporting by New York Magazine). While surely it's a sign of institutional changes, perhaps the split exhibit makes sense for Eliasson, who likes to mess with the museum space and its normalizing and essentializing devices like the frame, the wall label and the white cube. (One unexpected and annoying difference between the shows is that photography is allowed at MoMA and banned at by P.S.1, as enforced by their disgruntled guards -- why?)

While not all of it is completely successful, there are a handful of brilliant and beautiful works and happy-making participatory spectacles that engage every viewer and make this show one of the year's best.