Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Introduction

Seu corpo da obra (Your body of work), the first solo exhibition in South America of work by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, spans three different exhibition venues in São Paulo, as part of the 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil. Eliasson conceived many of the show’s installations in direct response to the city and the architectural and functional situations of the host institutions: SESC Pompeia (Social Service of Commerce), the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, and SESC Belenzinho.

With Seu corpo da obra, Eliasson deliberately inserts his sculptures and installations into spatial situations that are marked by ambiguity between inside and outside. At SESC Pompeia—a former drum factory occupying interior and exterior spaces, open warehouses and roads, which was converted into a cultural center by the architect Lina Bo Bardi from 1977 to 1982—
Eliasson’s works dialogue with the public aspects of learning and leisure in this Cidadela, a small city within the city. Seu caminho sentido (Your felt path), Hemisfério compartilhado 1–6 (Shared hemispheres 1–6), and Seu corpo da obra (Your body of work), all from 2011, as well as Waterfall (1998) and The structural evolution project (2001), speak subtly to the different modes, speeds, and objectives with which the institution’s users peacefully share the collective spaces of SESC Pompeia: the Área de Convivência, a versatile warehouse offering seating and reading facilities, a library, exhibition areas, and space for leisure and contemplation; and the Solário Índio, a wooden deck for sunbathing. At the Pinacoteca, Eliasson uses the mirror as an optical tool and deploys geometry to address modes of perceiving and conversing with the building’s classical but uncompleted architecture, which was famously reworked by the architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha. Microscópio para São Paulo (Microscope for São Paulo, 2011), transforms the Pinacoteca’s first courtyard into a giant kaleidoscope, accessible via two of Rocha’s bridges, which were originally introduced to allow an alternative circulation through the building. For the Octógono, the building’s central space, Eliasson installs Take your time (2008), which was first shown at the exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art and P.S.I Contemporary Art Center in New York. Esfera de luz lenta (Slow light sphere) in the museum’s former entry hall and Seu planeta compartilhado (Your shared planet) on the Belvedere terrace, both from 2011, are new works developed for the exhibition at the Pinacoteca. And for the recently inaugurated SESC Belenzinho, Eliasson presents Sua fogueira cósmica (Your cosmic campfire, 2011), a constantly changing light projection in a gallery that appears markedly distant from the lively, multipurpose entrance area in front.

The exhibition gives a wide-ranging introduction to Eliasson’s artmaking and research, including earlier works as well as many new projects createdespecially for São Paulo. Among these is Sua cidade empática (Your empathic city, 2011), made in collaboration with the Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz and screened at the SESC Pompeia. A development of Eliasson’s earlier afterimage experiments, the film consists of sequenced color projections that provoke afterimages in the complementary hue within the viewers’ eyes. Sua cidade empática features black-and-white moving images superimposed on the red, green, and white changing shapes. The black-and-white sequences, which Aïnouz fi lmed at different locations on and under the Minhocão, an elevated highway in São Paulo, suggest alternative paths through the city.

At the center of Eliasson’s artistic research are processes of perception and the construction of reality. Works incorporating familiar laws of physics, neuroscience, or optics invite spectators to experience phenomena such as fog, light, color, and reflection. Although Eliasson’s installations often begin as setups for experiments, he is less interested in the scientific aspect of these experiments than in the spectator’s active engagement in interpretation by using his or her body, senses, and knowledge. Eliasson’s work makes clear that much of what we perceive is not physically out there, but, rather, within our sensory systems and brains. The blue and yellow color filters of Seu corpo da obra, for example, merge into green only on our retinas, not in space. Similarly, in Sua cidade empática, awareness of our actual viewing activity is paired with the recognition of places in São Paulo, and thus we see that our feeling of self is tied to our surroundings. Eliasson’s installations function as tools that modify our vision of the world, and the pleasure of the playfulness in his work is ultimately nothing other than the joy of perceiving, learning, and understanding ourselves.

The entire exhibition is conceived as a single experience, where impressions accumulate and converge in the body of the spectator, who sets out to see its three distinct chapters at SESC Pompeia, Pinacoteca, and SESC Belenzinho. On the journey from one venue to the next, though, in following the temporary geography for São Paulo that the exhibition sketches out, one is continually thrown into reality and into one ’s own life, which is full of responsibilities and decision-making—essential factors in experiencing art.

Along the route, one may by chance encounter a series of subtle interventions within the city. Your new bike (2009), for example, is a series of modified bicycles whose wheels have been substituted with mirrors; the bikes have been parked and locked to lampposts and other urban structures. This is an ongoing project, first realized in Berlin in 2009. Other interventions might appear over the course of the exhibition, or may have been temporarily there, some only for moments during Eliasson’s preparatory visits to São Paulo.

This publication is part of the exhibition rather than merely a record of it. It is a portrait of Eliasson’s approach to São Paulo, and includes several photographs of heavy rainfalls, lamp shops on Rua da Consolação, and public buildings in São Paulo that captured Eliasson’s interest with their radical concrete spaces housing schools, museums, and community centers. There are also photographs of Eliasson’s mirror experiments in the street. These series are not documentary in character, but, rather, result from the artist’s investigation of the city and the way it is perceived and contextualized, which he uses as a matrix for the development of his work.

Internationally, there are few artists who in the last decade have so explicitly dwelled on the role of the spectator as a coproducer of artworks, a concept that has been prevalent in Brazilian art since the 1960s. Even fewer artists have managed so eloquently to merge phenomenological ideas and the notion of individual and collective awareness with ethical and political consciousness within society. The São Paulo–based scholars and critics Guilherme Wisnik and Lisette Lagnado each contribute an individual take on Eliasson’s artistic production and research. Although more than fifty catalogs and books on Eliasson have been published worldwide over the past fifteen years, this is the first to be published in South America. I hope it will provide the initial stimulus for an enriching reflection on his work in conversation with—although, perhaps, from opposite geographical and conceptual poles—the context of Brazilian and Latin American contemporary art.

VOLZ, Jochen (org). Olafur Eliasson: Seu corpo da obra. São Paulo: Associação Cultural Videobrasil/Edições Sesc SP, 2011, p. 35 - 39.

What is it that makes a space productive?

"The telephone was not yet at that date as commonly in use as it is today and yet habit requires so short a time to divest of their mystery the sacred forces with which we are in contact, that, not having had my call at once, the only thought in my mind was that it was very slow, and badly managed, and I almost decided to lodge a complaint. Like all of us nowadays I found not rapid enough for my liking in its abrupt changes the admirable sorcery for which a few minutes are enough to bring before us, invisible but present, the person to whom we have been wishing to speak, and who, while still sitting at his table, in the town in which he lives (in my grandmother’s case, Paris), under another sky than ours, in weather that is not necessarily the same, in the midst of circumstances and worries of which we know nothing, but of which he is going to inform us, finds himself suddenly transported hundreds of miles (he and all the surroundings in which he remains immured) within reach of our ear, at the precise moment which our fancy has ordained."¹

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past 

I

Let's say that the reader has not even read the biographical line: “Olafur Eliasson, artist, born 1967 in Copenhagen.”

For anyone seeking information, the artist’s official Internet site offers some images, beneath a white band indicating his ongoing projects.² And they all reveal an urban landscape with names of cities that evoke a collection of places distant from the tropics: Aarhus, Kiev, Harpa,³ Berlin, Kanazawa. Only the last photo diverges from the series and depicts an animal—if there is time, I shall comment on this in my closing thoughts (just one remark: the animal has mottled black-and-white fur and looks like Dolly, the genetically manipulated sheep).⁴

There is also an eighty-minute documentary by JJ Film that opens with the artist asking the following question: “What is it that makes a space productive?”⁵ Before I continued watching the film, I took a pause to unlock the opening statement and explore an initial thought: What is being considered, and what does this question show?

For sure, the question, besides being an infallible rhetorical figure for grasping the listener’s attention, transmits a high phenomenological voltage. What class of “goods” is a space capable of producing? A typical investigation in the field of philosophy. The place of matter has been a philosophical concern since the time of the ancient Greeks and has echoed in the physical sciences, extending as far as the edges of the solar system.

Two problems should be anticipated at once: First, at the starting point of the speculation (What is it that makes a space productive?), we still do not know its final purpose—is it about knowledge? And second, stricto sensu (here I speak to the purists who pay rigorous attention to the specifi city of the disciplines), Eliasson is not a scientist or a philosopher. So let us begin: How can a space be questioned in the context of an artistic experience?

II

The first lesson in aesthetics generally comes to us in an unexpected way, before we have trodden the paths of literature and philosophy. Youth normally conjugates the two forms of languages as though they were heads and tails of the same coin. The name Maurice Merleau-Ponty helps to tip the balance. For many, initiation into the fi eld of aesthetics takes place with this author and can last for an entire lifetime: the perception of a sensorial experience beyond the cogito of words, in which the subject gains densities that are indefi nite, yet attractive to different degrees. Merleau-Ponty’s writing articulates the sensory and objective dimensions in a way that provides a multiplicity of textures where one could only previously perceive a unidimensional body. The discovery of a powerful and moving language in nonverbal patterns (poems by Fernando Pessoa come to mind) expands the porosity of perception. 

Following the same logic, there is not a single topic to be considered, but rather many simultaneous and non-exclusive ones: visible and sensible, material and immaterial reality, contemplating the mutual influences (and separations) of nature and technology. In Merleau-Ponty, the idea of an environment having a transparent membrane around it is hardly a metaphor, so thin is the skin between the real world and the subject. Listening to Eliasson, I ask myself whether we are going to be rewarded with an indication of the presence of intuition in his method. My finger remains on the pause button, suspending the artist’s discursive flow a bit longer. While I do not let him speak, my thoughts fly toward “abstract labor” (Karl Marx). What makes a space a value-creating substance?

An obsessive tendency to introduce terms from political economy, yell the formalists who believe it is possible to isolate the aesthetic dimension in Eliasson’s question. 

Creative intelligence is traded in the market just like a product, however. The capitalist system would eliminate, if it could, the degree of uncertainty that still remains about this and would even dominate the instinctive energy of productivity. This process is under way, ignoring Herbert Marcuse ’s diagnosis in Eros and Civilization and the intangible effects of the subjugation of human consciousness. Nothing but small struggles against the destructive action of the total space can restore losses in sensibility.

III

One may discover, along other suggested itineraries on the home page, that Eliasson chooses to insert his works at concentrated points of tension between architecture and urbanism, at the intersection between the human scale and that of multitudes. For the last twenty years, the procedures he has adopted have turned inner space into an outer one—the classic observation of an illuminated window (Window projection, 1990)—and have gone from a domestic setting to areas that require more complex apparatuses. 

If the device of the artwork’s setup determines the experience of art, where (in whom) is the creation? I had imagined that the studio must be equipped with apparatuses that can reach the material of the stars, before verifying that the current team consists of about fifty staff members, ranging from scientists to art-world professionals.

The inclusion of a link to the Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments), directed by Eliasson, conjures a recent recollection. The last time I came across a personal résumé mentioning a laboratory was in the case of Sergio Bernardes and his Laboratório de Investigações Conceituais (LIC—Lab oratory for Conceptual Investigations), whose mission it was to integrate the solar system, the human system, and the earth system into a single system.⁶ Eccentricities apart, experimentalists bear the defect of a lack of objectivity and precision. Supposing this to be true (which it isn’t), what sort of (beneficial) dysfunction can be extracted from heteroclite combinations?

The initiative was so unusual that the proprietor of the laboratory ended up inventing a para-governmental agency that spent fortunes on a scientific work without immediate applications. Dissatisfied with a profession restricted to providing service to the haute bourgeoisie, the architect invested in projects aimed at the quality of an ineluctable urbanization of daily life. In those times, the context was propitious for utopias, when Brasília was dawning on the horizon. Having designed the Brazilian pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair, Bernardes spared no effort in outlining what he called the “first tropical civilization.”⁷ He claimed that only by undoing man’s intervention into the course of the waters would it be possible to “restore the historical role of the rivers—the pathways of civilization.” To transform a vast, arid wilderness into river basins, install a network of aqueducts, and imagine a future metropolis, an environmental program was necessary. This was designed by a hybrid architectural fi rm: part laboratory for scientifi c, political, and philosophical investigations; part artist’s studio; and part institution for research into the social-geographic realm.

Even if it promised to distribute national wealth with a degree of participation and offer solutions for lowering cargo and passenger transport costs, the “developmentalist” discourse of the laboratory, fully immersed in unbridled capitalism at the height of the Cold War, was a tense topic. I rather like this mixture of science and delirium, however, which is entangled in the search for a “particular and original” alternative on a nonhegemonic continent; the predisposition to collective discussion that brings together collaborators from distinct areas; the intervention by a small group into the affairs of a nation, without fear of overstepping lines of expertise. In short, ideas without a certificate of origin or guarantee, fueling the waking dream of a force that does not need authorization to manifest the time that is to come.

IV

The space age empowered the image of cosmic travelers floating in a gravityless environment. Clearly, there were repercussions in the artistic imagination, regardless of the degree to which it mastered the laws of the universe. But no artist needs to master the general theory of relativity to make the meaning of the space-time continuum an integral part of his or her life. This is also true for the critics, placed in the position of the “subject supposed to know.”⁸ To give an example, Lucio Fontana’s “Manifiesto Blanco” (written in Buenos Aires in 1946) played a decisive role in the formative process of various generations and, in my case, once freed from the burden imposed by (incomprehensible) symbols, I was able to move less precariously among notions such as the inclined field and kinetic, potential, or elastic energy.

In the language of art, the “four-dimensional” (or “integral art”) does not lose its immeasurable character, but explains itself through the slit in Fontana’s canvas: “Matter, color and sound in motion are the phenomena whose simultaneous development makes up the new art.”⁹ The same can be said of the aesthetic delight that strikes the visitor as he or she enters the penetrable sonic works by Jésus Rafael Soto, an artist who resorted to optical effects (movement and light) to bring about the integration of time in the work.¹⁰ In pedagogical terms, his “square that vibrates” strips away the dryness of a geometry class without losing the magic of a certain enigma suspended in the air.

And we can thus play for hours at proposing the best works for shedding light on formulas that make physics ungraspable.

Obviously, two areas harmful to art are out of the question: scientific illustration, in which the object merely serves a didactic purpose, and works whose message is exhausted in the manipulation of technological devices. If the installation superimposes the complexity of the media on the work’s poeticpolitical meaning, we are faced with a trick. This is a common misunderstanding in cases where the technology has existed for only a short while— which brings to mind an early show of holographs I saw in São Paulo in the early 1980s.

Images that I find now on Eliasson’s website alternate between the natural world and artificiality, light, brightness and shadow, fog and mirrors, rainbows, polyhedrons, crystals … Everything that lives—plant, animal,¹¹ man, woman—is able not only to reproduce, to produce a symmetric other, but also to produce itself. The true meaning of this production, the question of identity, was jeopardized by the figure of the clone, but this character is not important here. Within the initial question there was therefore an implicit degree of reflexive consciousness: whatever it is that makes a space productive also requires interiority.

The recognition of this hitherto unknown value obliges me to consider an unexpected subjective nature. I deduce that the comprehension of the space, in the perspective of Eliasson—an influential name in contemporary art that the Brazilian public can know better thanks to the show Seu corpo da obra (Your body of work), which will consist of various simultaneous exhibitions in São Paulo¹²—depends on an exchange. Without reciprocity between exterior and interior, objective and subjective, the space doesn’t breathe; it doesn’t have form, nor does it perform. This information allows me to release the pause button to listen to a little more of a discourse that I have already managed to isolate.

V

The question about the productive space sought to highlight a quality, to extract a surplus value for it. This implicit value is that of collective experience— an interrogation that goes outside the sphere of banalities and puts its finger on the inflamed wound of current times: the integrity of the social body. “What is it that makes a space challenging, exciting, embracing, including, hospitable, tolerant and so on?”¹³ This series of adjectives could not be more revealing: while the first terms indicate a participative subject (challenging, exciting, embracing), the last three imply larger groupings, people, or nations (including, hospitable, and tolerant). In what hemisphere does he intend to have relevance? “When I make something, … I want it to be in the world … sincerely and honestly and responsibly in the world.”¹⁴ There is no longer any doubt about the wish to gain political resonance. What can be said of his ideological reach, however?

Thinking in terms of a group indicates a need and a talent for the game — and this takes time.¹⁵

Eliasson reexamines the hypotheses about the body in movement set forth by the physician and physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey.¹⁶ Following the master’s example, he repeats Marey’s teachings by making his own laboratory-studio available to groups of students. This attitude truly requires an instinct for communication. In terms of effectiveness, it surpasses the vulgarization of science. It is not easy to dismantle misunderstandings that are repeated through the force of habits anchored in beliefs. The Newtonian view of space perpetuates the conviction that the environment that surrounds things in the world is a receptacle or an inert substance—thus the commonsense notion that insists on treating space and atmosphere as synonymous. From an artist’s point of view, however, the atmosphere is a result obtained from experiences of the body in contact with a very concrete space: temperature, smell, color, density, vibration …

We know that Marey relentlessly studied how to film a perception invisible to the naked eye. The decomposition of movement allowed him to increase the eye ’s sensorial capacity; that is, to enlarge the visibility of the outer world. It is as though the organ of vision were able to perceive a particle previously hidden. But this was done without sliding into the field of metaphysics. On the contrary: the investigation did not leave reality for a second while Marey questioned the wretched limits of our transmitter-receptor organs. This endeavor depended on the dissection of the instant: dissecting with the aim of magnifying the evanescent element. It was imperative that what goes by unnoticed, without leaving traces, could be captured in its ephemerality and lack of direction.

This is confirmed by other declarations made by Eliasson, in search of a phenomenology of landscape:¹⁷ in the field of culture, the windows of the museum behave like a frame, “and you look through the frame to see a picture of the picture of the picture …”¹⁸

But what can be “prior” and “exterior” to refl ection? Does what our senses tell us pertain to a pre-refl exive ontology that precedes verbal language and institutions (art and science)?

VI

Just as a memorable monument is pictured on a postcard, the image of art in the second millennium has an exact date and place for museum visitors: October 16, 2003, London, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, The weather project. Ever since, the Internet records of this installation have grown to the hundreds of thousands. They show it from different angles, views, and perspectives, none the same and yet all equally extraordinary and striking. The mass media did not hesitate to associate the temple-museum with the Temple of the Sun, the sacred golden room of the Incan Empire.

The society of the spectacle gave rise to the society of distraction, which is omnipresent in educational curricula. How do we preserve inscriptions of knowledge in the Twitter era and ensure an increase in experience if our attention has been programmed to self-destruct after 140 characters? To what extent is the distraction that marks the current time analogous to Walter Benjamin’s notion of “distraction” (Zerstreuung)?

Just as the Brillo boxes displayed in a showcase in a New York gallery signaled to the critic Arthur Danto that 1964 had ushered in a new paradigm, The weather project also came to sanction new forms of thought. To each his own revolution. A half-century ago, Andy Warhol’s products were necessary to embrace the ultimate mode of non-distinction between art and non-art, an art object and a cleaning product; between the place where it is possible to appreciate art and the space destined for the consumption of basic needs, the gallery and the supermarket separated by a moral line. In a masterstroke, The weather project unfastened the rigidity of the era of museological exhibitions and reinvented notions that had either been lost or were in decline: enchantment with art, beauty, contemplation, duration, art as a plane of immanence. “How does light define space? How does it influence the way we experience the world?”¹⁹

I am not writing here about this project in particular, nor do I aim to introduce the abundant bibliography it has generated; rather, I am specifically interested in considering the scale of joy that I have not been able to find in any other contemporary artwork.

Every discourse is an artificial plot to escape from hubbub and, necessarily, a ruse to disguise conflicts. Whatever field we consider, disagreements prevail. They are irreconcilable parts of a single struggle: the impossibility of freeing the art form from its condition as commodity. 

While it is certainly true that ideas stemming from early 1920s European capitalism continue to mobilize fantasies, it is nevertheless necessary, before evoking “conceptual characters” such as the flâneur, to verify what similarity to the “palaces of distraction” remains in the present time. To what degree does the flow of visitors at Tate Modern resemble the masses that flowed into the majestic movie theaters in Siegfried Kracauer’s Berlin?

VII

I would like to discuss play, distraction in technological society, and the artificiality of the aura. In another interview (Berlin, July 6, 2009), Eliasson stated that since the beginning of his career, there is one thing of which he has been very certain, even when he was still young and insecure: his interest in the dematerialization of the art object.²⁰ It is known that immateriality inhibits art from being a commodity, art as a fetish, art for collectors: even the fabrication of objects. But is it possible to conceive of an “aura” despite the object’s dematerialization?

The experience of the “aura” was never the same after Benjamin’s analysis; nor should one compare altarpieces depicting the Madonna and child with posters of the Russian Revolution. One impact follows another in the theory of aesthetics, and each of its unfoldings translates an instant of restricted truth. This is the definition of the rhythm inherent to modernity. And there is no better scapegoat than mass culture when it comes to vilifying art that yields to spectacularization. The weather project did not construct its reputation on the basis of irreality or alienation, since the mechanism allowing for its setup was apparent, thus giving the public a behind-the-scenes look that demystified the magical effects of the large mise en scène.

Every time an artist adopts a language that is not yet embodied in a catalog, the analysis returns to the same place. This means that we persist in the error of weighing cultural products fabricated today with the same scale used to evaluate the “here” and “now” of a small work in oil on wood, painted between 1503 and 1506, measuring 77 by 53 centimeters, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and hanging in the Musée du Louvre.

This is not about invoking the innocence of art. On the contrary, I propose to reread two phrases by Paul Valéry dating from 1934 (“The Conquest of Ubiquity,” Pieces on Art): “For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.”²¹ It is interesting to observe the context of the fore-going citation: Benjamin uses it to precede the preamble to his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Nor should we ignore the advent of new formats, applications for smart phones, tablets, and so on— an inventive and sustainable system of pirating.

As it turns out, not only is Valéry’s advice far from being effectively revisited every twenty years, but “capitalism continues to drive the game” and the culture industry has not provided any service to the Revolution. What is left to be done to avoid being relegated to the trash can? The problematics opened by Benjamin need to be reviewed, at the risk of serving a new totalitarianism; the records of the aesthetic process in the digital era require another reversal, but who will risk doing a pirouette? And what good is it to weave another theory of reception, if its star oscillates between the mourning of old times and juvenile enthusiasm for the future?

Eliasson shifts the focus from the work’s reception to an invitation to experience the exhibition. His demand for a “third-person point of view” expresses the (ethical?) inadequacy of the artists who construct a world of artificiality as compensation—measures of precaution for theoreticians of culture in the face of technological innovations.²²

That said, the intellectual tools used to evaluate the art being made today do not completely take into account the temporality introduced by the civilization of the virtual world and the digital image. They leave open the question of reception, a shadowy zone of contemporary culture, where judicious arguments raged for a good part of the 20^th century.

To mention two of Benjamin’s dearest media—newspaper and cinema—the first has entered a state of entropy and the second has exploded to the point of the virtual world taking the place of the real. Even without the hic et nunc of the profane temples, there is a matter that continues being validated using the (magnifying) lens of a completely different historic situation. Following this logic, theorizing an aesthetic perception exclusively committed to the present moment has been put on hold. Indefinitely.

What is the line that defines and separates leisure from entertainment? Just as “distraction” is not divertissement, leisure is not fun. I wrote about this when I decided to bring Hélio Oiticica’s Creleisure concept into the present, tracing analogies with two works by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Park—a Plan for Escape (2002) and Cosmodrome (with Jay-Jay Johansson, 2001–07), which relate to architecture, the environment, and cinema.²³ Playing, wrote Oiticica, is the raison d’être of the Cosmococas.²⁴ I remember mentioning that distraction was necessary for creativity to take place. But could it be that there is distraction without waiting? To withdraw from the time of contemplation is to withdraw from attention. It is to renounce duration. And I need it, duration, because there is no distraction that is not a forgetting of time.

Just two years separate Benjamin’s text (1934) from the writing of Homo Ludens (1936) by Johan Huizinga. While the latter needs to explain how and why, after Homo faber and Homo sapiens, “our time” deserves to have the question of playfulness placed into circulation again, the former raises an alert in regard to the decline of experience. There is no game that is not a yielding to the void and to freedom.

VIII

Roland Barthes expects the delivery of a letter; Sophie Calle learns of the breakup of a love affair by e-mail or SMS—who cares? The contemporary model of instantaneity and the opening up of private life within the public arena has led to other structures of perception and sensibility, expectations, promises, and the sabotage of hope. Distraction, a noncontemplative attitude, is the home of the dream, the indispensable margins of creation. The problem is when the processes are inverted and creation begins to be an appendix to distraction. What is lost in the theory of distraction is the component of duration.

Technology shook and is irreversibly shaking forms of expression. In this sense, art must incorporate the reduction of communicative distance. Diminishing speed, decelerating rhythm, is one of the pedagogical framings that is still valid for elevating impressions to the level of consciousness. It is useless to continue embracing a theory whose foundational paradigms no longer describe reality. Each era has its share of technical inventions. Greatly simplified: production means work, and for some time now the verb “to create” has belonged to the same lexicon as “industry,” “remix,” and “cut and paste.” Narrating history, any history, condemns its subject to being out of step. Time passes while we write. For the historian Eric Hobsbawm, the century that began with the First World War, in 1914, ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991. He was perhaps hasty in determining an end to the totalitarian systems and defining the “age of the extremes”: humanity ignores what lies ahead.

Without the possibility of extending the instant (from the Latin instans, “imminent, near, neighboring, threatening, urgent”), there would be no corporeal inscription. And without corporeal inscription, what sort of record (perception) can be thought of (imagined)? Without waiting, there is no happening, however. Only catastrophes. The days are numbered for the notion of productive waiting. In Proust, “arriving earlier” or “ahead of time” determined the development of the desire to narrate. So much hope and apprehensiveness concentrated into a half hour. The main character may be ready, but the telephone still needs to ring; perhaps the device will never ring, and it would be better to leave and stop waiting; perhaps it will ring and no one will mention the name Albertine.

Finally, what is so surprising in Eliasson’s body of work? This is not to claim that his greatest works allow a “recovery” of an aesthetic experience considered lost: what once was is no more, and, even if a likeness returns, the spectator must have other attributes, unimaginable antennae to guide him or her. It is necessary to take seriously changes in sensibility, such as the loss of the memory of physical contact. Exploring the depths of the terrain will reveal mines that are as precious as they are explosive. What would The weather project have been in the subtropical and desert city of Lima, as opposed to in London, where the humidity also reaches extremely high levels?

Anachronistic

But Olafur, could it have been any different? Would you postulate a perception apart from a context? I imagine that you have the desire to understand the origin of creation, which allows for the blessing of the fruit, of abundance and the extraordinary. I imagine that you are interested in biology, with so many metaphors associated with living organisms, feminine, and fertile. This is a lot for artistic research. However, it is not enough.

It would be fundamental to guarantee the continuation of this interior monologue that has already lasted two months. And if the path does not lead anywhere? And if it is nothing like what I thought, it will be a scientific proposition without proof. Will it be a fiasco? Therefore, curiosity—yours and ours—is the method and the training, engineering that benefits the uncommon, an attentive gaze on the sparks of nothing, until a minimum becomes a phenomenon.

¹ Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Volume I (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, Limited, 2005), 964–65.

² http://www.olafureliasson.net(accessedMay–July 2011).

³ Harpa is not a city, but in this essay it makes sense to treat it as one. See http://en.harpa.is/ about-harpa/in-house-operations/. I hope that the following text manages to justify the argu- ment, when we come to the point of the flâneur and the reader is prompted to ask about Moscow, Paris, Marseilles, Berlin, or Naples ...

⁴ I have pushed back the deadline for delivering this article three times. I did not want to resort to inserting e-mail conversations, a resource used so commonly nowadays, but for lack of time, I am copying the response I received: “Grey sheep is an ongoing project linked to the studio that expands the studio’s activities by initiating a dialogue between artists associated with the studio and a local audience. The name refers to a type of rare Icelandic sheep.”

⁵ Olafur Eliasson: Space Is Process, directed by Henrik Lundø and Jacob Jørgensen (Copenhagen: JJ Film, 2010), http://www.jjfilm.dk/en/productions/art/olafur_eliasson/.

⁶ See Lauro Cavalcanti, “Sergio Bernardes: A Modernist Adrift,” in: Drifts and Derivations: Ex-periences, Journeys and Morphologies, ed. Lisette Lagnado (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2010), 235–45.

⁷ Cf.Paul Meurs, in http://vitruvius.com.br/revistas/read/arquitextos/01.2007/947.

⁸ The “subject supposed to know” is a Lacanian concept that denotes the place of transference between the analysand and the analyst (Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho- analysis, 1964/1979). This is not the first time I have referred to the coincidence between the task of the critic/curator and analytic praxis, insofar as they both configure experiences of con- structing (as a joint effort) an interpretation (of the artwork, the context, the exhibition/institution circuit).

⁹ Lucio Fontana, “White Manifesto,” in Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era; 1820– 1980 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and South Bank Centre, 1989), 334.

¹⁰ Cf. Lisette Lagnado, “A invenção do Penetrável,” Trópico (São Paulo, February 23, 2005), http://pphp.uol.com.br/tropico/html/textos/2535,I.shl.

¹¹ A humble attitude in the face of the historical limitations of science (always provisory impossibilities) demands caution in light of the supposed incapacity for self-reflection imputed to animals.

¹² Five years before the show at Tate Modern, Eliasson’s work was at the 24^th Bienal de São Paulo (1998), where it received few enthusiastic comments.

¹³ Olafur Eliasson: Space Is Process(see note 5).

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Cf.D.W.Winnicot, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications Ltd.,1971).

¹⁶ http://www.raumexperimente.net/marey-experimente.html.

¹⁷ http://www.projetsdepaysage.fr/fr/phenomenologie_du_paysage.

¹⁸ Olafur Eliasson, interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, in Olafur Eliasson: The Conversation Series 13 (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2008), 24.

¹⁹ Cf.www.starbrick.info/en/research.html.

²⁰ “Mediating experience: A conversation between Olafur Eliasson and Luca Cerizza,” Berlin, July 6, 2009, in Olafur Eliasson TYT [Take Your Time], vol. 2: Printed Matter (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König).

²¹ Paul Valéry, Aesthetics, “The Conquest of Ubiquity,” trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series, 1964), 225.

²² “If we’re aware of what our senses are telling us about our surroundings, we can orient ourselves successfully. But if we ’re mistaken about what we sense and believe that looking at the steam from the inside through a window is a comprehensive experience of the steam, we have a problem. It gets worse if we believe that the music from the walkman is the actual sound of the street or that driving a large jeep is the same as hiking in the mountains. This is why it’s so important to see ourselves sensing things or to sense ourselves seeing—to survey our experiences from a sort of third-person point of view—from a double perspective.” Olafur Eliasson, in Obrist 2008 (see note 18), 25.

²³ In Cosmococa and Cosmodrome, there is an idea of transport to beyond the exhibition space and the imagination is the spaceship/vehicle. Cf. Lisette Lagnado, “Crelazer, ontem e hoje,” in Caderno SESC_Videobrasil 03, Associação Cultural Videobrasil, no. 3 (São Paulo, 2007), 50–59.

²⁴ Cosmococa—Program in Progress: a work conceived by Hélio Oiticica in partnership with Neville d’Almeida as an environmental manifestation. The Cosmococa consists of nine “Blocos- Experiências” (Block-Experiments) numbered with the abbreviation CC1, CC2 ...; each Bloco features a set of slides featuring record albums and posters whose images are retouched with lines of white powder. Each CC includes a projection on various planes in the environment, accompanied by a musical soundtrack edited by Oiticica himself, as though he were a DJ. Instructions to the spectator complete each Bloco. The participation is a criticism of the static format of the audiovisual work.

VOLZ, Jochen (org). Olafur Eliasson: Seu corpo da obra. São Paulo: Associação Cultural Videobrasil/Edições Sesc SP, 2011, p. 185 - 197.

The inner that is outer. The other that I am.

This text analyzes the work of Olafur Eliasson on the basis of conceptual pairs, such as the public and private realms, the dimensions of innerness and outerness, the confrontation between the defense of identity and the recognition of otherness, and the perceptions of clarity and ambiguity. The hypothesis is that, running counter to the trend that seems to be dominant today, Eliasson’s art does away with these dualities, referring to a third conceptual dimension in which these dual entities are rendered unstable and constantly made to switch positions, each assuming the properties of its opposite. This displacement in relation to the canons of Western modern art allows us to risk outlining some tentative similarities between certain artistic strategies Eliasson uses and some important aspects of Brazilian art, present not only in works by visual artists and architects but also in the very organization of Brazil’s cities. This is the starting point for reflecting on some interrelationships between Eliasson’s art and Brazil.

The public space inside out

In his Programa ambiental (Environmental Program, 1966), written two years after the formalization of the Parangolé, Hélio Oiticica declared that “the museum is the world”—that is, the experience of daily life—and proposed that really vital artworks be shown not in museums or galleries, nor in public squares and parks, but, rather, in vacant lots in the city, as “a lost work, set carelessly loose, to be ‘found’ by passersby, loiterers, and casual bystanders.”¹


The materialization of this proposal is Bólide Lata-fogo (Fire-can),² which Oiticica himself described in the following words: “it is the work that I isolated in the anonymity of its origin—it exists there as a ‘general appropriation’: whoever has seen the lata-fogo isolated as an artwork cannot help but remember that it is a ‘work’ when one sees, in the silence of the night, the other works scattered about the city like cosmic, symbolic signs: I solemnly swear that there is nothing more emotionally charged than these lonely cans, illuminating the night (the fire that never goes out)—they are an illustration of life: the fire lasts and suddenly goes out one day, but while it lasts it is eternal.”³

Beyond this example, it can be said that the refusal to attribute an edifying dimension to public space in Brazilian art is not limited to Bólide Lata-fogo, nor even to Oiticica’s oeuvre in a general sense; rather, it is featured in many of the best works made in the country in the 1960s and ’70s, such as the trouxas ensanguentadas (bloody bundles) that Artur Barrio left lying alongside the Arrudas River in Belo Horizonte—an allusion to the bodies of people, arrested for political reasons, who disappeared during the military dictatorship (Situação T/T, 1, 1969–70)⁴—as well as the Inserções em circuitos ideológicos (Insertions into Ideological Circuits, 1970),⁵ by Cildo Meireles, which substitute the notion of “public” with that of a “circulating system” or “circuit.”

Meanwhile, this same sense of the desertification of the city and the public realm is the factor which, by its negation, provided poetic ammunition for the vanguard architecture that began to be made in the 1960s in São Paulo, when the city, after the inauguration of Brasília, became the nation’s center for architectural production. Constructing buildings—especially houses and schools—as windowless boxes of exposed reinforced concrete, architects such as Vilanova Artigas and Paulo Mendes da Rocha based their work on the bitter acceptance that the city was a chaotic and decadent fabric, dominated by the private and irrational interests of real-estate speculation. They understood that the exemplary buildings they designed needed to be conceived in opposition to this, as laboratories of a new sociability. Thus, these buildings were visual negations of the city, paradoxically constructed as small independent cities, both in terms of their rough materiality—consisting of concrete, asphalt, and the cement tiles used on sidewalks—as well as the collectivist logic that rules the organization of their internal spaces, rejecting any notion of comfort or privacy. In this respect, Lina Bo Bardi praised Vilanova Artigas’s houses for not following “the laws dictated by the routine life of man,” but, rather, imposing a vital law, “a moral that is always severe, nearly Puritan.”⁶

In short, at its boldest moment the architecture of the so-called São Paulo brutalism aimed to urbanize domestic life, in an operation that ran opposite to and complemented that of Hélio Oiticica, who experienced intimacy within the Whitechapel Gallery, in London (Whitechapel Experience, 1969). What these architects ultimately wanted was to abolish private space and its secrets in favor of a civic idea of an entirely public life: the house as a forum of urban collective life, where each person’s freedom depends on the freedom of the other, since the rules of social order determine personal subjectivity. Their houses were therefore absolutely exteriorized, though spatially introverted.

Unlike the situation in Europe and the United States—where the value of the public realm is a legacy of the countries’ respective jurisprudences, and the commissioning of artworks in urban space benefits from a percentage of federal, state, and city taxes—in Brazil the “patrimonialist” rule of sociability, inherited from colonial times, has led to a permanent invasion of the public sphere by private interests. This explains sculptor José Resende ’s claim that, unlike in the American situation, a piece placed in urban space in Brazil can be directly considered a work of public art. He states: “I think that the concept of the public thing cannot be defined through the simple presence of the work in a public place. For art to be public, it must also be likewise effectuated culturally.” He adds: “It is difficult to define what is really a public artwork in Brazil. Music, for example, has this character of public domain here. For art to gain this more concrete condition of existence in Brazil, the institutions will need to be better structured.”⁷

Here, it is necessary to also remember that the historical formation of Brazilian cities through Portuguese colonization did not follow abstract plans that imposed public order as a design to regulate the urban setting. Unlike the cities of Spanish colonization, which are organized in a Cartesian grid around a plaza mayor, in Brazil cities are organized around certain key buildings and adapted to rough terrain rather than based on any overriding regulating principle. Likewise, Brazil’s public squares were rarely hubs that generated the surrounding space, but were, rather, spaces left over in the irregular configuration of the lots—as reflected by the term largo (literally a “wide”[open] space at a street intersection) used to denominate many public squares—or else were later developments of the forecourts, patios, and yards of churches.⁸ They were not, therefore, born as public spaces, and only precariously manage to maintain themselves as such. In addition, and not by chance, we can identify a historical alienation of Brazilian cities in relation to the presence of art, which is also reflected in a timid “public culture” of the art in question. 

For all these reasons, a city such as São Paulo seems averse to hosting incisive works of urban art, perhaps because it does not allow them to offer it any possible contrast. This is due to both its unusual, aggressive scale and the precariousness of its accelerated growth, which lends the city a somewhat formless aspect. This characteristic was already noted in the 1950s by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who when analyzing São Paulo observed that the cities of the New World “pass from freshness to decay without ever being simply old.”⁹ Contrary to what takes place in European cities, for which the passage of centuries constitutes an advancement, for American cities the passage of years represents decay.

The city’s interior on the outside

Eliasson’s work is one of the great examples of the fertile sharing of interests between the visual arts and architecture today, often going beyond the scale of the building to interrelate with the urban environment. I will consider this theme not to analyze the architectural character of the way he works and organizes his studio, however, or his direct involvement in architectural projects,¹⁰ but, rather, to investigate the intense entanglements he engenders between the notions of innerness and outerness, or privacy and publicness—as is evident in the title of his recent exhibition in Berlin: Innen Stadt Außen (Inner city out)—indicating an original reflection on the nature of the city and the public sphere today. It is in this sense that I will seek to trace connections between his thinking and the Brazilian context, based on my initial observations.


As we have stated, one of Oiticica’s great artistic contributions in the late 1960s—which influenced the production of artists around the world, such as Vito Acconci¹¹ —was the creation of a short circuit between the public and private realms, profaning spaces of collective and impersonal life, such as rooms in museums and galleries, with modules of intimate life: his Penetráveis (Penetrables). Coming from another cultural context, Eliasson powerfully transgressed this same border in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, without exhibiting, however, any more direct relationship between his work and that of the Brazilian artist. This transgression does not take place through an experiential practice, but through the creation of foggy settings and optical mirroring games, by which the visitors to the museums or galleries simultaneously perceive the inside and outside of these environments, which are transformed into complex spaces in terms of perception.

This operation is complemented by its reverse: anonymous shifts in the urban setting, where other mirroring effects seem to restore, as though by absurdity, a certain intimate interiority within the opaque cityscape. I refer, for example, to the bicycles with mirrored wheels that the artist scattered around Berlin, as part of the exhibition held at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, and also in São Paulo for Seu corpo da obra. And to the video that provides the title for the Berlin show (Innen Stadt Außen), which shows a van carrying a giant mirror as it moves slowly along the streets of the city. This mirror, at the same time that it hides the vehicle, reflects its environment, including the treetops and the sky.

This strange exchange of position between the inner and outer spaces of the buildings and streets in Berlin was continued in the same exhibition by the placement of heavy slabs of granite, typical of the city’s paving, on the wooden floor of the exhibition space, inside the museum’s galleries. This subtly and inversely echoed the simultaneous action of carefully scattering tree trunks around the city (Berliner Treibholz [Berlin driftwood], 2009–10), not in public squares or places one might expect to find artworks, but, rather, in anonymous, ordinary places, purposefully removing any vestige of sacredness from these objects, nearly indistinguishable from mere urban debris. Concerning this work, Eliasson observes that he sought to generate “small frictional dialogues” with the locations, in situations where the light-colored tree trunks, collected from the coast of Iceland, could be perceived as “momentary thresholds” offering a “subtle resistance to our very pragmatic and automaticized relations with the environment.”¹²


This somewhat Situationist scattering of the artistic action on an urban scale was perhaps surprising to whomever may have expected the artist—who has chosen to live in Berlin since 1995—to present this city with more monumental artworks, similar to The New York City Waterfalls (2008). This anonymous subtlety, however, goes back to the magnificent interventions that Eliasson made in the late 1990s, such as Erosion (1997) and Green river (1998). In the former, realized during the second Johannesburg Biennial, the artist emptied a water reservoir near the place where an exhibition of his photos was to be held, creating sudden urban “rivers” that extended for more than a kilometer through the city and affected its ordinary flow. In the latter, realized in various places, such as the unpopulated interior of Iceland and the urban center of Stockholm, he secretly dyed rivers a phosphorescent green, activating a powerful dialectics between the subtlety of the action and the magnitude of the scale.¹³ In this list we can also cite the various works the author has made with mist, beginning with the urban installation Thoka (1995) at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, and followed by Yellow fog (1998/2008), which was originally made in New York and later remounted as a permanent work in Vienna.

For the sake of the argument we are seeking to develop here, it can be stated that this choice for more subtle and derivative urban actions is related to works such as Oiticica’s aforementioned Bólide Lata-fogo. On the other hand, the incognito appearance of these smooth tree trunks in the Berlin cityscape does not possess any “anti-art” content. Because, unlike the marginal character of Bólide Lata-fogo, which aims to exist in a dimension alienated from the official public space—for Oiticica, more of a sterile imposition than an organic product of society—Eliasson’s driftwood aim to create subtle dialogues with anonymous yet public places in Berlin, destabilizing the automaticized perception of these spaces in order to restore a sense of “community.” This action, with all its subtlety and near imperceptibility, could only exist in a place where the notion of “public” is a recognizable and collectively assumed value, as in Berlin. Otherwise, it would break the—still crucial— boundary between art and life, precluding the idea of friction with the city’s everyday life, which is the basis for this work.

In this sense, it seems to me that the choice to hold Eliasson’s exhibition in São Paulo at SESC Pompeia and the Pinacoteca do Estado was a very apt one, precisely because of the architectural character of these buildings, and because they are beautiful examples of an architecture constructed with the urban attributes mentioned above. Installed in the old building of the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios, designed by Ramos de Azevedo in 1896, the Pinacoteca arose as a reinvented place by Paulo Mendes da Rocha, who covered its internal courtyards with skylights and crossed them with elevated metal walkways at various levels, breaking the rigidity of the original neoclassical design. Incorporated into the museum space, these old courtyards, now bereft of their window glass and frames, have become ambiguously interior spaces, because their surrounding walls are facades (now bare). SESC Pompeia, an old storage-drum factory remodeled and made over by Lina Bo Bardi, also masterfully disrupts the border between segregated spaces and the city, being organized around a central “street” that gives access to the various spacious warehouses where events are always taking place. Aptly nicknamed the “Citadel of Freedom” by the architect herself, the SESC buildings contain one of the greatest virtues of a genuinely urban space: varied, unpredictable, and playful use, which can only be created, however, through a very clear and rigorous design.

Thus, Eliasson’s works, together with the urban space of São Paulo, are mediated by the building-scale urbanistic interventions of two great architects. They thereby gain the necessary spatial and institutional framing for the radical environmental experiment they promote to be effectuated in the case of São Paulo, thus becoming strikingly recognizable and transformative.¹⁴

The apparent clearness of things

The powerful exchange of positions that Eliasson carries out, switching the attributes of the interior and exterior spaces, or of the artist’s action and the public’s reception—note that many of the titles of his works begin with the second-person possessive pronoun “your”—has an incisive artistic sense in the contemporary world. It involves a spatial reflection that is formalized in two main ways: by games of mirroring, or by the creation of foggy environments.

One of the great questions of contemporary global experience is the excessive clarity with which it is presented to our perception. On various planes of life, everything around us seems clear and unambiguous: multicultural society is represented in a horizontal and transparent way through the demands of the (ethnic, racial, sexual, gender) minorities; the “level” space of the Internet abolishes physical and temporal barriers, placing everyone with access to it into permanent contact, unfiltered by any moral judgment; and the intensified circulation of images in consumer society—which by their omnipresence wind up occupying the places of their real referents—alludes to a world without gaps, and which seemingly cannot be transformed by any action on the part of the subject, but only by a passive reading of its operational codes. In this case, accessibility also means excessive proximity, which enhances the apparent clarity of things.


Going back a bit in time, it must be remembered that at the beginning of the 20^th century modern art underwent a radical rupture from its preceding history, when it surpassed the dualism between reality and representation, a movement in which it abandoned its old “aura” and assumed its mundane insertion into the market. With this, it inaugurated a new understanding of the artist’s work, understood then as an intrinsic and relational field, where its contents are shown on its surface, without leaving symbolic residues alien to the visual realm. Thus, in the interior of each modern artwork, this desubstantialized reality averse to metaphysical dimensions began to be continuously updated in a field of formal tensions—the so-called modern surface—as elements of a visible game, in a certain way analogous to the existence of a convulsed society, where revolutions were commonplace occurrences. That is, in modern art, reality seemed to be always accessible to manipulation and transformation, which accounted for its power and, at the same time, its instability. The current situation is very different from that one, if not its opposite, since the construction of this “modern surface” as a field of tensions was to a large extent couched in the idea of structuring the formalization of a work based on its creative confrontation with the world. Thus, the modern understanding of the artwork as a “structuring practice”¹⁵ depended, to a great extent, on the resistance of the material to restrain the spirit’s idealism, which tended to bend things by the mere act of its will.¹⁶

In this respect, it is symptomatic how the change in the understanding of art over the last few decades has accompanied the historical decline of the notion of work—made more flexible and increasingly precarious in late capitalism. This involves what Hannah Arendt described as the “wearing down of the world’s durability” in favor of a permanent consumption of things, which she locates in the transition from Homo faber to Animal laborans as the social subject par excellence.¹⁷ And the loss of density and opaqueness in the social relations posited in this transition corresponds, in the cultural field, to an automaticization of the signifiers in relation to the signifieds. According to authors such as Peter Bürger, this is one of the central theses of postmodernism, in which the signs refer only to other signs, making us move horizontally in “an infinite chain of signifiers”¹⁸ without any ballast—as happens in the economic field with the rise of capital. As Rodrigo Naves observed, with the installation of this true naturalism of the signifier, “there is no place for any sort of practice that establishes links between experience and the image— and the world of appearances, a simulacrum of itself, spins autonomously on its own axis.”¹⁹

For purposes of our discussion here, to me it seems necessary to understand the relation between the ubiquitousness of the image in consumer society and the abolition of the world’s opaqueness, or of the resistance of the material, in its inextricable relation with art and with the notion of work, which is also linked to a growing disbelief in the phenomenon of perception as an instrument of intellection.

The true unreal

Going against the grain of the trend to reduce art to flawless and autonomous images, Eliasson works by way of a poetics of dulling, clouding the clarity of the world through environmental installations that wind up questioning the character of truth that normally accompanies this perception oriented toward things.²⁰ In this sense, he is part of a tradition of contemporary artists who, based on a critical view of modernity and postmodernism, seek to recover symbolic dimensions in art, slowing or suspending their moment of signification, and seeking, to this end, affiliations that are often outside the matrix of Western Enlightenment rationalism.

Unlike what occurs in the tradition of modern rationalism, the arts that are more closely linked to the picturesque and the sublime generally blur the limits between nature and artistic practice, allowing for artistic experiments that are developed over a longer period of time. This dilation of experience, which cannot be properly formalized, nevertheless finds a beautiful formal translation in the image of fog, or clouds: a nearly indefinable medium between the material and the immaterial, situated at a pole opposite to the questioning gaze of Enlightenment thinking—where “light” is synonymous with reason—appears to transport us to a transcendent plane, as though in a sky that has surprisingly come down to earth.

According to Lévi-Strauss, fog is a recurring symbolic element in Amerindian mythologies, surfacing in countless variations of a single underlying narrative structure throughout the continent. Thus, in various myths he inventoried in America, the dense fog that falls suddenly and obscures the view of (human or nonhuman) beings is the veil that covers reality for an instant, giving rise to a situation in which things are transmuted and change position. In his words, the role of fog in these cases is “alternately disjunctive or conjunctive between up and down, sky and earth: a mediating term conjoining extremes and rendering them indistinguishable, or coming between them to prevent them growing closer.” ²¹

There are many situations in which Eliasson uses mist as a “material” principle in his spatial constructions, as in the previously cited Yellow fog, but also in Your natural denudation inverted (1999), which consisted of a column of steam over a reflecting pool in the interior courtyard of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, surrounded by rooms with glass walls.


In 2001, Eliasson created the installation The mediated motion at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, in Austria. Made in collaboration with the landscape architect Günther Vogt, this work produced interior landscapes by reacting with the atmosphere of stimuli provided by the building designed by Peter Zumthor. Eliasson established a rising path through the interior of the austere concrete box. It passed through different settings on each of the museum’s four floors, containing logs with mushrooms, pools with aquatic plants, and a floor of compressed earth, to finally arrive in a foggy room at the top of the building, where an unstable suspension bridge extended into a thick cloud and disappeared in the mist, leading the somewhat disoriented visitor to the end of the path before a concrete wall, where he or she was obliged to turn back and thus observe the entire work in reverse. An entire sequence of immersive installations unfolded from this, constructed in the form of labyrinths of fog and colored lights, such as Din blinde passager (Your blind passenger) (2010), in Copenhagen, Your blind movement (2010), in Berlin, and Feelings are facts (2010), in Beijing, which was made in collaboration with the Chinese architect Ma Yansong.


To a great extent, Eliasson’s work deals with phenomena and elements of nature, such as wind, water, and light, as well as fog. But this does not link it to any ecological discourse, which would imply the idea of purity or the return to an essential state of life. On the contrary, in Eliasson’s work, nature is always given as culturally conditioned; that is, it necessarily appears as a construction and not as a redeeming truth. This gives rise to the frequent surrealist aspect of his works, which artificially replicate natural elements and place them into confrontation with their “real” counterparts, thus creating a dimension of the experience in which illusion and reality are interconnected, so that the difference between them becomes indiscernible. In the artist’s own words, “we are witnessing . . . a shift in the traditional relationship between reality and representation.” Thus, “we no longer progress from model to reality, but from model to model while acknowledging that both models are, in fact, real.” Consequently, he continues, “we may work in a very productive manner with reality experienced as a conglomeration of models,” since “rather than seeing model and reality as polarized modes, they now function on the same level. Models have become co-producers of reality.”²² Wouldn’t this change be a loss of aura, in the second degree?

This rupture in the traditional relationship between reality and representation he refers to should be understood in light of a summation of the effects of the postmodern emancipation of signifiers—which, in other terms, is equivalent to the hypertrophy of the image in consumer society—and of the accelerated virtualization of experience with digital technologies over the last decade. It happens that, in Eliasson’s case, instead of reinforcing this effect of artificiality as a total loss of the referent, the works seek to create a field in which these instances are equalized, insofar as they are no longer treated as dualistic polarities. This leads to his focus on the issue of the visitor’s participation as a condition for the experience of the artworks, which means that these works are only realized, necessarily, as intersubjective negotiations between the artist, the space in which they are shown, and the public. It should nevertheless be noted that the aim here is not exactly to convert the observer into an actor, as was the case in many participative installations of the 1960s—including those by Oiticica—but, rather, to negotiate the terms of creation with environments of explicit artificiality, in which perception assumes a constructive role, and to restore a possible experiential subjectivity. This can be found, for example, in the effect of the afterimage created by many of his light works, in which chromatic saturation produces the involuntary perception of complementary colors—something that takes place only in the optical apparatus of each person, and not in real space.

Eliasson’s spatial installations are clearly informed by the light works of artists such as Dan Flavin, James Turrell, Robert Irwin, Anthony McCall, and Carlos Cruz-Diez. But the question of optical phenomenon, as appears in the afterimage effect, for example, far from defines the scope of his work. If the atmospheres Eliasson creates engender a field in which nature and artifice are shuffled, as stated above, they do this spatially by rehabilitating the notion of illusionism, which has been stigmatized by a dominant trend in modern art. This is what is seen, for example, in an urban work such as Double sunset (1999), made in Utrecht, the Netherlands, where the artist created an artificial sun, made of a metallic sheet and lit at dusk by a set of floodlights positioned at the top of one of the city’s buildings. Thus, depending on the angle from which one looked at this strange, artificial, low sun—in a city at a high latitude, in which the sunset is a prolonged phenomenon appreciated daily during the summer—one could see it simultaneously with the real sunset, as an impossible nocturnal sun creating a somewhat sinister doubleness.

In 2003 this unusual—double and omnipresent—Utrecht sun reappeared in an altered form in London, inside the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. Enti- tled The weather project, it was composed of a metallic half disk structured by scaffolding and lit by monofrequency lights. The artist also installed a mirror flush with the ceiling that duplicated the space and reflected the architecture, the people, and the half sun itself, which was made into a whole sun by the reflection—while also enveloping it in an artificial fog, whose air of mystery energized the situation’s credible irreality. Here I’m referring to credible irreality in that the work managed to dissolve these polarities in the implacable heat of its cold light. The result was that people converged on the museum in great numbers during the London winter, with the aim of lying down on that artificial beach and receiving on their skin—mediated through their eyes and brain, albeit in a very believable way—the energy of those beneficent rays of sun.

I am not referring to the success of The weather project merely to praise Eliasson’s work. In terms of the discussion proposed here, it is interesting to investigate the reasons for this success, beyond the most evident ones, such as its intrinsic aesthetic quality—verifiable on the plane of “beauty”—along with the institution’s enormous symbolic and mediatic power. It seems to me that one key to this question is that the installation managed to associate the undeniable public quality of that place with the exploration of what is perhaps one of the few realms that remain truly public: the weather.²³

According to the anthropologist Bruno Latour, one of the great qualities of Eliasson’s work is how it surpasses old, worn-out distinctions between polarities such as wild versus domesticated, private versus public, or technical versus organic. Latour is one of the most important formulators of so-called symmetric anthropology, which, on the basis of questions raised initially by figures such as Lévi-Strauss, proposes readings of contemporary society based on the structural inclusion of otherness; that is, on the criticism of the dominant Western perspective according to which the other should be reduced to the self. The great contemporary issue, Latour states, is the progressive fusion of the two forms of representation that were separated throughout history: the representation of nature and that of people in society, meaning the separation between things and people, science and politics. According to the modern Enlightenment view, the history of civilization is the epic story of the emancipation of man from the primitive, animist state in which he was blended with the world, allowing him to set off toward a rational separation of everything. Thus, the Western rationalist cut, seeking to eliminate that old “confusion” of the natural state, separated subject and object, facts and values. Today, however, Latour observes, human action has been enlarged to such a scale that the old laboratory walls have expanded beyond the limits of the planet. How can we explain phenomena such as the hole in the ozone layer, for example, or the pollution of rivers, frozen embryos, and so on? Are these phenomena situated in the natural or the cultural field? Ever since the entire world was converted into a huge laboratory (an “expanded field,” to use the term established by Rosalind Krauss for art), we have been living within a generalized experiment, in which everyone is an actor. It is the “era of participation,” according to Latour, where experience and experiment have become a single thing, a great contemporary hybrid. According to the anthropologist, this enlarged field of experience requires a new understanding of politics, in the image of a “parliament of things” (Dingpolitik), which once again associates the ideas of “public” and the material “thing”: Res publica.²⁴

How can we extrapolate the scientific experiments, historically confined to laboratories, to the atmosphere of a culture as a whole? This is a crucial question for the new politics, according to Latour, at a moment when every reference to an outside is evaporating. Thus, if we are enmeshed in the world, events happen inside, which is no longer counterposed to an exterior.²⁵ Therefore, if, as Oiticica wished, we can increasingly say that “the museum is the world,” it will also be possible to replicate this idea, considering that the world is, likewise, increasingly the museum. That is, if the museum is dissolving in the world, just as art is in life, the world, on the other hand, is also becoming museumified through tourism, advertising, and the service economy, following a logic of equivalence between reality and model. The singularity of Eliasson’s position lies in his neither accepting the idea of authenticity espoused by the counterculture, where art and life are integrated—with a still-modern matrix—nor defending the artificiality of the postmodern simulacrum. In the midst of the fog, it is impossible to decide if we are on one side of the bridge or the other. All there is is the bridge itself.

1 Hélio Oiticica, “Programa ambiental,” in Hélio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro: Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica, 1996), 104.

2 The Bólide Lata-fogo (1966) is a sort of environmental objet trouvé. It is an appropriation by Oiticica of the kerosene lamps used to signal construction and maintenance work along roadways.

3 Hélio Oiticica, “Programa ambiental,” 104.

4 On April 20, 1970, with the participation of five thousand members of the public, Barrio wrapped up pieces of meat, bones, and blood in fourteen cloth bundles, throwing them along the Arrudas River. Begun in the morning, the action was interrupted in the afternoon by the police and the fire department.

5 The work Inserções em circuitos ideológicos consists of two projects: Coca-Cola and Cédula (Bill). In them, Meireles carried out interferences written on circulating objects, placing decals with phrases on returnable Coca-Cola bottles that would be reintroduced into circulation, and stamping phrases on paper currency. The work was presented for the first time at the group exhibition Information (1970), at MoMA, in New York.

6 Lina Bo Bardi, “Casas de Vilanova Artigas,” Habitat 1(October–December,1950).

7 In Lúcia Carneiro and Ileana Pradilla, José Resende (Rio de Janeiro: Lacerda Editores, 1999),

11–12.

8 See Manuel C. Teixeira and Margarida Valla, O urbanismo português: séculos XIII–XVIII,Portugal- Brasil (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1999), 218.

9 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, tr. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 95.

10 For these cases, see Philip Ursprung, “From Observer to Participant: In Olafur Eliasson’s Studio,” in Studio Olafur Eliasson: An Encyclopedia, ed. Anna Engberg-Pedersen (Cologne: Taschen, 2008); and Henry Urbach, “Surface Tensions: Olafur Eliasson and the Edge of Mod- ern Architecture,” in Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, ed. Madeleine Grynsztejn (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2007).

11 In the film Héliophonia (2002) ,by Marcos Bonisson,Vito Acconci makes a statement declaring the great influence that Oiticica had on his artistic career, assimilated since the group exhibition Information, held at MoMA, New York, in July 1970, in which they both participated. Acconci refers above all to the short circuit Oiticica created between the public and private realms on that occasion, when he encouraged the public to enter his cell entitled Barracão no. 2 (Shed #2), made up of a series of Ninhos (Nests), and “inhabit” it—and, therefore, the space of the museum—in a playful way, transforming the place of passage into a space of permanence. For Acconci, these capsules for the public to lounge in within the museum revealed a new conception of public space, where one could simultaneously “relax in privacy and have a relation with other people.” Statement by Vito Acconci cited in Paula Braga, “Conceitualismo e vivência,” in Fios soltos: a arte de Hélio Oiticica, ed. Paula Braga (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2008), 268.

12 Olafur Eliasson, Take Your Time, vol. 3: Driftwood (Berlin: Studio Olafur Eliasson, 2010), 136.

13 Between 1968 and ’70, the Argentine artist Nicolás García Uriburu had already realized a similar work, called Hidrocromia intercontinental (Intercontinental hydrochromia) in the rivers and canals of Venice, New York, Paris, and Buenos Aires.

14 As observed by Robert Kudielka, art’s movement of rupture in relation to its own internal spatiality, and the consequent escape toward the “real space,” generated, after the radicalness of the first American Land Art, a significant impasse, due to the fact that these environmental works based on the viewer’s experience began to depend on a certain institutional framing for them to be understood as such. To support this thesis, Kudielka cites the installations Toilette (1992), by Ilya Kabakov; Creation Myth (1998), by Jason Rhoades; and The weather project (2003), by Eliasson. And taking into account the outstanding formal and discursive differences of these three installations, Kudielka still ponders on their being in agreement in respect to the acceptance of a fundamental premise: “all of them need an enclosure or a container, in which to organize and in whose interior they can achieve an effect.” He continues: “No artistic measure seems so important as this a priori decision, since only the support of a preexisting frame allows for the maintenance of an organization in such an open way that it gives rise to a space of authentic experience as the viewer moves within it. Within this space, and without previous instruction, the observer can to a certain degree adopt a contemplative gaze.” Robert Kudielka, “Objetos da observação – lugares da experiência: sobre a mudança da concepção de arte no século XX,” Novos Estudos 82 (São Paulo: Cebrap, 2008), 174.

15 See Rodrigo Naves, "Prefácio,” in Giulio Carlo Argan, Arte moderna (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995), XVIII.

16 According to Dewey, the identity between “form” and “substance” is what allows for the establishment of the notion of “experience” in art. See John Dewey, “Substance and Form,” in Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 1980).


17 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2^nd ed., reprint, 1998).


18 Peter Bürger, cited in Rodrigo Naves, “O novo livro do mundo: a imagem pós-moderna e a arte,” in O vento e o moinho (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2007), 229–30.

19 Rodrigo Naves, “O novo livro do mundo,” 239.

20 In a similar register, we can also cite Blur Building, made for Expo 2002 in Switzerland by Diller + Scofidio, and the installation Architecture as Air: Study for Château la Coste by Junya Ishigami, winner of the Golden Lion award at the 12^th Biennale of Architecture of Venice (2010).

21 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Story of Lynx, trans. Catherine Tihanyi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 8.

22 Olafur Eliasson, “Models Are Real,” in Models, 306090 Books Volume 11, ed. Emily Abruzzo, Eric Ellingsen, and Jonathan D. Solomon (New York: 306090, Inc., 2008), 19.

23 Analyzing the repercussions of the work, Eliasson associates the dynamism of the city, the power of the museum, and the fact that it involves a large art project in the sense of its “physical scale.” According to the artist, “there was a really broad interest from the press—a very large percentage of which was not the art press. A great deal of coverage took place in weather reports, for instance. The weather reports in many countries and, of course, mostly in England, mentioned the work, and weather reports are among the most-watched programs on TV.” In Hans Ulrich Obrist, Olafur Eliasson: The Conversation Series, Volume 13 (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhand- lung Walther König, 2008), 40.

24 See Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Karlsruhe: ZKM – Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe/ MIT Press, 2005).

25 See Bruno Latour, “Atmosphère, Atmosphère,” in Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project (London: Tate Publishing, 2003), 32.

VOLZ, Jochen (org). Olafur Eliasson: Seu corpo da obra. São Paulo: Associação Cultural Videobrasil/Edições Sesc SP, 2011, p. 275 - 290.

Epilogue:“Why the House of Color in São Paulo” (extract from an unpublished conference paper)

The Czech-born philosopher and writer Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) lived in São Paulo from 1940 to 1972. This passage comes from a lecture on the proposed House of Color Research Center in São Paulo, initiated by BASF but later abandoned.

I will now speak about how I imagine “house” within the context of the House of Color. A house that is no longer a space, a house that is no longer defined topologically, would become an instrument to be defined functionally, or, as is said today, ecologically. We must stop thinking topologically. . . . A “house,” in the sense of a knot within the fabric of intersubjectivity; an immaterial house that collects information related to color from everywhere, assuming, therefore, not only the decadence of the city but also the decadence of the nation-state as a fact, and accepting the emergence of what McLuhan referred to with a rather unfortunate term, in my opinion, as “the global village.” A house that collects this information, that memorizes it and makes use of instruments to memorize the information in several codes; written code, image code, sound code, and eventually even in color code. And once the information has been recorded, the “house” processes it, builds laboratories, schools, reflection centers, and organizes meetings such as this one, organizes exhibitions; in sum, the “house” should process this information so that from this there shall result new information. It should then immediately disseminate this information, whether in material or immaterial form, that is, as print media, as video, as film, or as disks. This dissemination will be done in such a way that it will provoke spontaneous worldwide feedback, and this feedback will also be collected, memorized, and once again processed. In sum, I wish to see it ecologically, so that there will emerge, vaguely floating above this monster that is São Paulo, a kind of vacuum that sucks up information and that transforms itself into one of the centers of the newly emergent post-civilizing culture.

Of course, what I have said is a utopia, but if it were not utopian, then why should one engage with it? If our objective were to build another little museum—and museums died at least ten or fifteen years ago when multiples substituted originals, so they no longer make sense, given that now the only type of museum possible is an imaginary one like the “Pompidou.” If it were a type of museum, or a kind of center that we travel to, with four walls and located on any old street, this would not be worth it, since it would simply be a continuation of the same brutality that surrounds us here. But if, on the contrary, it were possible—because it depends on people—to bring together a group of highly motivated people to visualize this new type of house within the circumstances I have just described (somewhat mercilessly), then I believe we would be engaged in an adventure well worth the effort.

VOLZ, Jochen (org). Olafur Eliasson: Seu corpo da obra. São Paulo: Associação Cultural Videobrasil/Edições Sesc SP, 2011, p. 471.

An interview with Olafur Eliasson

Jochen Volz

The title of the publication in which this conversation will appear, and of the large exhibition it accompanies, is Seu corpo da obra (Your body of work). It would be great if we could start by speaking about this title: the relation between the work, the experience, the space, the mind, and the body, but also about the kind of accumulation of experiences that shape the body. These questions have been of recurring interest to you.

Olafur Eliasson

I think reflection on the body allows a certain type of thinking to be activated. Acknowledging the felt feeling of the body—or you could say its consciously critical engagement—opens up potentials that have been, to some extent, disregarded or not really fully understood, especially as they are far from being integrated into what is considered “the market.”

You can talk about something as simple as a lamp. The tendency is to first look at the lamp as an object, or even as a two-dimensional representation, such as a picture of a lamp. Maybe you refer to it in a very abstract way — for example, by referring to the price of the lamp. The next step is to understand the lamp as a volume, as an element of something physically apparent. Then you will see how the lamp infiltrates the space when it is lit; the function of the lamp emerges, and the space and the lamp coproduce each other because the object has a way of illuminating the space, but the space also has a way of being illuminated by the lamp. In that sense, they coexist. And the next thing is that you might enjoy the lamp while walking around it, and suddenly you raise your perceptual awareness. This is what I think is a new idea, that by walking around it you can activate it. You see it from different perspectives. These are thoughts that are normally used in perceiving a landscape, when one walks through it, or in perceiving urban space—both of which have what I call socializing potential, when, that is, we approach them from the perspective of movement and activity rather than as stable and hierarchically organized architectures. From different fields of spatial thinking you can take ways in which the body works and apply them to an object and the way it works.

But a lamp can also be a conventional art object. I say “lamp” because I’ve done a lot of sculptures that also function as lamps, and there is a series of lamps in the exhibition in São Paulo [Hemisfério compartilhado (Shared hemisphere) (1–6)]. The key to activating their potential is not cognitive or ocular. It’s very much the combination of physically moving around them and looking at them at the same time, looking at the way they instrumentalize, or activate, the space. This is where the body becomes interesting.

I’m talking about carrying thinking into doing. How is a theory actually implemented in the space? We talk about art in hypothetical ways, but how do we, by making art, translate hypothetical thoughts into modes of doing? This is where the body plays a key role. Not just the body as a physical machine moving from A to B, but the body as a vehicle for how the body and mind collaborate in activating an object in space.

JV

Also, I think that the openness of the title reflects an interesting aspect, the idea of labor, in a sense linked not only to productivity, but also to a notion of work that is related to the Other, that is implicitly based on collectivity, which has always been very present in your work. Often there is this dimension, which could be called a shared experience, a shared moment, or a collective memory that is being produced, or potentially being produced.

OE

I’m interested in the idea that a work of art works at being a work of art. To be a work of art is hard work for the work itself — it’s not easy to be a work of art. An artwork has to be very convincing in how it involves itself in the time in which it exists. This is hard work. The other work-related aspect is that it’s also not always very easy to look at art, or engage with art. It’s also hard work, and to go to a museum requires a willingness to coproduce the experience. And this raises questions about perception: whether the artwork is something that we receive in a more consumerist way, or if it’s something that we produce, phenomenologically speaking, as we constitute the objects that we look at by looking at them. One should not overlook that the objects have interests themselves, or that the artist has intentionally built those interests into the objects, but clearly the way we look at them has great potential for producing meaning. It ultimately coproduces what it is that we see.

We are also working to create a dialogue. And this work might be different from what you normally expect of a work because it requires that you also acknowledge that things sometimes work more slowly than you are used to, and maybe you work on something and the result only comes to you after six months. Or maybe there is no plausible result, and in that way you have to both acknowledge the fact that you have to work, and you also have to acknowledge that the conventional idea of quantifiable success is not necessarily to be understood in this way.

In today’s society, where art is marginalized, this represents a growing challenge. Art and people who use art need to work together. Seu corpo da obra is about the body, both the body of the art and the body of the user, because working is often even just walking through a museum space, or through a work of art, so “your body of work” can also be the way you work when you take in your surroundings or the way you produce them by walking through them.

JV

I would like to return once again to the idea of collectivity. If we understand that the relation between the spectator and the artwork is one of bilateral expectations and dependency, couldn’t we then also affirm that this dependency is, in fact, meaningful only when valid for several people? That it implies an idea of collectivity? Let’s say that in silence you exploit a certain bodily reaction, for example, but it only becomes really describable as a function if it is applicable for two people, at least.

OE

It’s very interesting because we — I’m talking from the point of view of an artist here — very quickly cross the border to where we start making decisions on behalf of others. A great balance is needed. We clearly build intentions into the artwork, as we would like it to coproduce values in our society. We want to share values, we want to be a part of the way society develops in intrinsic ways, but it is also important to embrace collectivity, which does not necessarily always end up in consensus. The consensus-driven collectivity is often a moralizing collectivity. Of course, Jürgen Habermas has worked a lot with this idea of disagreeing, and then, in the end, we all agree, consensus reigns; this is the happy democracy, right? On the other hand, there are Bruno Latour’s ideas about how friction is at the core of democracy. This is a more productive approach, I think. When I look at the world today, it increasingly seems the greater challenge is not to create systems for agreeing, but instead to create space for disagreeing, where consensus is not required. It is difficult, but necessary, to cultivate a position that says: “We have to acknowledge that we cannot all agree on everything, and yet we still form a collective. We are still together, even though we are not the same.”

JV


It is interesting. Not without reason, Hélio Oiticica, in his 1966 text “Position and Program,” points precisely to nonparticipation as an option—to understand the spectator’s decision about the degree of his or her engagement as being part of the making or unfolding of art. This is beautiful and rich, because it implies that art is happening between equally important parties: the poet and the reader, the artist and the nonparticipant, the work and the misunderstanding.

OE

If you look at what artworks and the communication of art can offer, art somehow has proven to be very generous with regard to ways of being together yet different. This is why art increasingly seems to have something to offer society, because society tends to be exactly the opposite. So it comes down to the question of generosity, tolerance, and attitude in the communication of art. I think the possibility for a person who goes to an exhibition, for instance, to use the experience of art in a nonprescribed, totally personal way later on, outside the museum, is a great asset. As long as we don’t quantify it, standardize it, of course, or rationalize the approaches or tools or emotions that our encounter with the artworks evoke when we implement them in other areas of our lives after leaving the museum. It’s up to people — to individuals — to find out for themselves what to do with the experience. That is diversity. There you have a strong collective contract.

This has a lot to do with the confidence that modernity had in art. There was no question that art was a meaningful component when it came to defining reality or defining life in reality. Sadly, people no longer recognize that art is an important part of society. This might be a surprise, since art has never had as much exposure as it does now, but art has become a kind of added extra. It has not become an integrated part of society. Or let’s put it differently: it’s sad that you have to become a brutal entrepreneur like myself in order to become part of society. I’m very much aware of this and critical of it. I have created a position in which I am involved in power structures. I talk to politicians, decision-makers, and it is a very odd phenomenon where they talk to me because they think I am someone who is outside, while I think I am on the inside. Art and artists are simply not considered part of society, especially in today’s pseudo-social democratic idea of society. The political system doesn’t consider cultural production to be one of the pillars of society.

JV

We all know that it ’s a big mistake, actually. Several recent studies have shown that the economic impact of nonprofit arts and culture organizations and their audiences generate considerable income for nations’ economies all over the world. The revenues from the arts and culture industry don’t compare, of course, to the amounts actually invested in culture.

OE

Imagine how many people hated Hans Christian Andersen when he wrote what he wrote in the 18^th century. And, of course, nobody remembers any politicians or businessmen from the time. Personally, I don’t even like Hans Christian Andersen much, but there is no doubt that he has produced more money for Denmark than any politician.

JV


You and I have known each other since 1997. We met shortly after the opening of Your curious garden at Kunsthalle Basel, which, I guess, in retrospect has to be considered one of the most important shows in your career. It was there that you first presented some of the key elements in your work, which continue to have strong relevance today. But from then to now, not only has the scale of your production and of your studio changed tremendously, but your theoretical interests have also multiplied into countless directions. I think it would be very interesting to speak about how you develop your work on a practical level and how you, at the same time, exponentially intensified research and theoretical reflection within your studio. This year, for example, you organized for the fourth time the Life is space experiment and also some weeks ago you hosted a seminar on compassion. Personally, I had the privilege to participate in Life is space in your studio. It was a very inspiring day. Thank you for that. When I speak to friends about it, I describe the Life is space day as a wonderful mixture of group therapy, an art school, and an informal TED conference, taking us from Buddhist meditation to emotional contagion and from Siegfried Zielinski’s concept of the “anarchive” to a black hole that might extinguish all life in a not-so-distant future. Can you talk about the relation between your interest in several scientific and spiritual disciplines and your artistic practice?

OE

The Life is space experiment was a rare opportunity for me to get a lot of raw stuff and raw material, undigested but very inspirational stuff, and inspirational in a very playful and direct and nondidactic manner. The actual day itself might not have seemed, at the time, to be the most creative one for me, but in retrospect it was. I still need to train my ability to enjoy the moment of an incredibly intense day like that. But preparing the day was incredibly interesting, because it’s about expectations all the time—it’s about curating expectations. And thinking back, you also digest and think about the funny, unpredictable interrelationships between the different talks and presentations and experiments. The follow-up is very demanding and requires a lot of discipline, the process of digesting the raw material into usable thoughts—because a lot of the raw materials are feelings.

One thing that strikes me when talking to other artists or other academics or curators is that I have always worked with the idea that language can assist with the development of the works. Language, spoken or written or in the form of a lecture or however else, has always been important to me, and yet I have never been, technically speaking, a person who bases his work on language alone. I guess the key here is that I have really, really great confidence in art, in the most profound and fundamental way. I’ve never really questioned that. Like everybody else, I am uninspired at times, or I run out of ideas, or I feel blocked, and one of the things that have always helped me to connect a former creative period to a coming creative period is to verbalize what I have done and what its consequences were. In that sense, I have often used talking and writing and reading and discussing to create a language around my work, but the language has never found a methodological format of its own; it has always relied on the works as its carrier. I have never considered what I say to be of particular importance in comparison to the importance of the work.

JV

Then isn’t teaching an interesting venture into actually articulating theoretical or scientific research, in a sense that it is not necessarily linked to your artistic production? Teaching in the sense of acting as the provoker, as someone who expands vocabulary or offers a new vocabulary to others?

OE

The teaching I have been more or less successful at is one that is anchored in the current state of where I am and what I am working on at that particular moment, which has at times created a bit of discontinuity. It might be a slightly cacophonic method of teaching with regard to coherence and the program. On the other hand, I acknowledge that there are things I am less qualified at or capable of doing, so I have given these aspects over to others, as I have also done in my studio. At my school, the Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments), there are two codirectors who basically channel the flow of disorganized information into the teaching environment of the school.

JV

Going back once again to the relation between your work and the language around it, one might want to remember the publication you realized with Peter Weibel in 2001, Surroundings surrounded. Isn’t it interesting that you then, in a relatively early phase in your career, organized so many highly respected voices around your work — not that all of them, of course, addressed your work, but they were relevant to your work. In what sense could one call this a very strategic move?

OE

I think at the time, I was — well, I guess as I am now — not theoretically driven, meaning that I didn’t read these texts and then make the work. With regard to strategy, I think my generation of artists, in the late 1990s, was very interested, to the point of obsession, in how things resonate. In the Kontext Kunst exhibition and its accompanying publication, both organized in 1993 by Peter Weibel, the context-specific art did not resonate; it simply created ideas for reflection, which is more static. Implicit to “resonance” is coproduction — this is a more phenomenological approach. From the late 1990s to the 2000s, there was this idea that one cannot separate anything from anything else, that everything somehow coproduces everything else. And still there was a heavy focus on the role of the subject, which is maybe the least interesting thing about the time, a sort of obsessive idea of phenomenology from the point of view of the subject, not the collective.

At the time, I discussed with Peter Weibel this idea that inspirational sources are multiple in their way of creating coherence. In the book there are texts that I actually don’t necessarily think I fully understand, but they resonate very well with what I was working on. This resonance might be content-driven, but it could also be form-driven. The content of some of these texts is less important to me than the form in which they were written. So it was not so much a strategy as an attempt to contextualize my work theoretically. There is actually a lot of not-so-productive art theory in the book, which doesn’t necessarily put me in a good place strategically, but then again, there was a lot of interest in strategy in those years. I was part of a group of artists who were all very sensitive about how they were positioned and would position themselves. Nobody would do anything unless it made sense strategically. It was very reactive, or defensive. In this setting, then, to ask all these people to combine art with natural and social science, and with some spatial thinkers, some of whom are quite obscure, or anthroposophic at least, was an attempt also to broaden the field within which one could position oneself, to break down the boundaries in a way. I don’t know whether that on my part was an act of precision, offense, or maybe just desperation? I simply felt that I needed to include some kind of crazy mathematicians.

JV

In either way, the concept of a Life is space experiment is something much broader. I see an evolution here. It is no longer about positioning your work or about evoking resonance. It is maybe not even about you. Instead, other aspects have gained importance: the studio, the convergence of disciplines, ethics. Doing an event for 180 guests that is not results-driven promotes collectivity, a focus on presence, and it plays out ideas of active memory creation. I feel that there has been a very interesting development, which could be very personal or something more general in art, over the last ten years.

OE

I think it has to do with people increasingly accepting that ethical questions should not be seen only within the context of thinking about things, but that they have a much stronger impact when connected to doing, to the performativity of things. The definition of something ethical, in the sense Francisco Varela means it, has to do with action, and not with thinking about it. As an artist, I think it has historically always proven to be true that the ethical component is much more integrated into society when it is performed, physically performed. In that sense, Life is space is an attempt to investigate, or rehearse, or simply have a closer look at the consequences thinking might have. Thinking as doing. So it was not a thought-through day, but it was thoughts acted out, in a way. And I guess we are increasingly, all of us, understanding that thinking alone is not going to help us. The studio of an artist has always been a space in which the relationship between thinking and doing has been challenged.

The word “ethics” doesn’t really fully account for what I mean, so we should maybe broaden ethics to feelings of responsibility. Responsibility, in a sense, is about a response; it ’s about the reaction, “I feel the world having an impact on me and I act back, I react, I respond to the world.” And that’s why Life is space is also a rehearsal of questions about the consequences of being present in a space together, about how action actually does translate into collective responsibility. Can we change the world in a responsible way? I am not strategically positioning anything with an event like Life is space, but I am trying to build more confidence in the relevance of the artist’s studio as a space for thinking, doing, reconsidering.

JV

Combining what you just said with what you said before when speaking about the privileged position that you are now in, which allows you to actually speak to a politician or at the World Economic Forum in Davos, would you say that there is a side to your doing that can be considered activist? Are you an activist?

OE

It’s a good question. Normally I would say, “No, I do not see myself as an activist.” But having become exposed, and to some extent a public figure, I recognize that this comes with responsibility that I can choose not to accept or, then again, to use. Maybe I haven’t been very precise in the way that I’ve made use of it because I think it’s very time-consuming and often not so inspiring. I have chosen to use a little bit of my responsibility to advocate newer art. I have used it to create an art school that I think is more beneficial to younger artists than a conventional art school. I have used it to try to make my voice heard. I do feel, though, to be honest, that I’m in a position where I’m still rehearsing the way I should speak in such contexts in order to come across convincingly.

JV

But I think in your work, and also in the way you talk about your work, you often address responsibility and decision-making. Take one of the works you are preparing for the SESC Pompeia, for example, Your felt path—it is a work in which one experiences responsibility very physically. You, through your art, call for taking responsibility for our individual actions. And that is, of course, not so far away from actually calling for responsibility in a general, political, or ethical dimension also.

OE

The truth is that I actually do think that art embodies critical thinking that can be applied anywhere. It is just a bit of work to somehow implement this. Art is not necessarily a solution, but it’s a methodology of integrating criticality into doing. There is a self-critical methodological system involved in making art that is such a healthy exercise that one can easily apply it to other fields and sets of questions. How do we educate young people? How do we organize our society politically? How do we make an urban plan? What is architecture? What is science? Who has the ethical responsibility when it comes to organizing a scientific evaluation of something? Of course, I’m not saying that art is superior to other fields, but art is a coproducer and a cultural pillar in defining and shaping society.

JV

When we started to talk about the exhibition for São Paulo, it was right after the opening of the Innen Stadt Außen (Inner city out) exhibition at Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. There you explicitly expounded on the idea of the institutional space and the outside city. And there you worked on different levels of explicitness and subtlety with interventions throughout the city. Parts of the exhibition, in fact, took place in the city, and you brought the city into the exhibition. So when we started talking about São Paulo, our first discussion was very much inspired by that interference. We spoke about the idea of maybe linking the three venues by composing a path between the institutions. We spoke about inserting works throughout the city of São Paulo, to be experienced along the way, in a house, in an abandoned building, on the street, in the passageway, in a shop. And we soon realized that this was unmanageable. Distances are different in São Paulo, different than they are in Berlin, different than they are in New York. You had already come to São Paulo in 1998 when you were invited by Paulo Herkenhoff and Adriano Pedrosa to participate in the Bienal de São Paulo, and at that time, because of different working situations, you had the chance to spend more time in the city then than you have been able to now. It would be interesting to speak about your impressions of the city, of São Paulo.

OE

What I think is exciting about cities is that they reflect the mental state of the social and political and cultural system of a place. Cities are, to some extent, indicators of the momentary states of the countries where they are located. They reflect the history of a place and how history is written by society. One perceives how a city gets a personality and has an ability to be generous or to be less resourceful and not so generous, and so on. And this, of course, changes with different types of governments and political systems, and so forth. But it is all recorded in the skin of a city in the most intrinsic way. It’s important that we develop sophisticated ways of dealing with this generosity that a city shares with us. In many places in the world the potential of public space is again being considered an important vehicle for creating confidence in social systems — the fact that we actually have a space that we share, which is not fully controlled by the media, for instance, not fully controlled by the private market, and not, also, fully controlled by the political system, but instead is something that we all control together. I think this is something that people increasingly understand; the importance of public space is being rediscovered. It is there that political crystallizations take place. Not just in the North African revolutions these days, but also in London last week, with a bit of rioting. Public spaces are a platform both for confidence and for expression of no confidence. It’s very important not just to address the formal qualities of a space or a particular signature of an architect, but to view space as a conglomeration of different uses.

There are contemporary urban discussions going on around the world, where different qualities and evaluations are being brought to the table, all trying to come up with what type of public space will actually sustain a sophisticated frame in which the people living in the city can be together.

The keyword here is “sharedness” — or, better, “community” or “collectivity,” or maybe an even more important word is “connectivity.” Do you feel connected? Do you feel a degree of empathy or some relationship with people you don’t necessarily know but share space with? Does public space support that notion, or does it actually work against the notion that you care for each other? This is less about architecture and more about the management of environments. It even comes down to questions about pedestrian management, traffic management, management of areas for recreational activity, parks and landscape and integration, and so on.

In this sense, it is very exciting for me to look at São Paulo, because of course São Paulo is in a state of transition, as is the whole country. As you said, I was there in the late 1990s for a longer period of time and I have been back at least enough times to form a relationship with the developments in São Paulo and to compare them to all the other cities around the world I have worked in or with in the last ten or twenty years, and this gives me some confidence that public space will have a future that is different than the dogmatic ones we have seen in the past. Normally, one tends to think of public space as a combination of things that produce the space, and then people come in and they kind of consume it, take it in. But my argument is that people are coproducing it. Karim Aïnouz speaks about this quality in a very interesting way. He calls it “leisure trajectory.” There is a lot of leisure and shared space, also in São Paulo, but everybody is clearly going somewhere. I am confident that public space will actually become more vibrant in the future, especially if governmental systems, political systems, and economic interests choose a nonauthoritari- an approach to the management and organization of space.

JV

Do you think that our abandoning our original idea to create an exhibition along a continuous route throughout São Paulo was a reaction to a given urban situation in São Paulo in the dimension you just introduced?

OE


It was a combination of two things. First of all, the two SESCs are in local neighborhoods; they are publically integrated institutions, not museums but community centers. The distance between the inside and the outside is not so big, and on a good day it’s actually totally blurred. At the Martin-Gropius- Bau, which hosted the show that you mentioned, the building doesn’t open up to the outside in the same way, so the ambition was to blur the inside and the outside in order to allow some of the qualities from the inside of the museum to spill out onto the street, which is much needed in the context of Berlin’s increasing commercialization. The scale of the city of São Paulo and the topography and the distances between the institutions make it extremely difficult to physically embrace the public space between the exhibitions. It struck me only after visiting São Paulo again that the journey between the three venues is potentially an undertaking in itself. One could have considered essentially creating a sculpture as a bus. To make the sculpture the movement itself. Had we had the resources for such things, this might have become an option. Maybe a Zeppelin would be an interesting way to deal with this — a Zeppelin can apparently move a thousand people at a time!

JV

It would be nice to conclude our conversation by talking about the most prominent of the three architectural situations that you are reacting to: Lina Bo Bardi’s SESC Pompeia. I just read again her description of how in 1976 she first experienced the shutdown factory, the starting point for her project. She writes that when she visited the factory for the first time, she was there on a weekday and much impressed by the architecture, abandoned on that day, and by its spatial potential. And then she came back on a Saturday and she describes how the population of the surrounding neighborhood actually occupied it, on weekends, and how they had barbecues, how they used the entire space, long before it was turned into an institution. It was simply a shutdown factory. Her impulse then was to basically not do anything, to just optimize the spaces in a sense, but through little interventions. Organizing space, improving the structure, by adding a fireplace for when it’s cold, by creating tables that people can actually sit on, by creating the Solarium-Índio, the so-called “beach,” and so forth, and even by creating a waterfall. How do you position your work under these circumstances, which are not so easy as conventional museum spaces?

OE

I was interested in the diversity of the activities, which somehow allowed for a higher degree of unpredictable behavior. I cannot fully predict what people will be thinking or what they will be doing inside the exhibition. A lot of people may not even know that they are entering an art exhibition. This, I think, is very productive. People may be alerted to the fact that perception of reality is part of reality, rather than something outside reality that reflects upon reality. So there is potential in showing art in what is normally considered a borderline institution for art.

We can also talk about the simple ability to move at various speeds. It’s very clear when you stand at the SESC Pompeia, on the main alley, that you have a rare situation there, where people walk at very different speeds. Some are running, some are running at leisure, some are running because they are in a hurry, some are walking very slowly because they finally have a few hours’ break, some are actually working, some are going to a ceramic workshop, and some are going to eat. The multiplicity of activities is very special. It is like a minisociety, an urban space with a quality that museums have lost, as the tendency in traditional museums is to create a sort of monotemporality, with people moving at the same speed, consuming at the same speed, doing everything at the same speed. The diversity of speed is a very healthy and critical component when it comes to looking at art. You have to understand how the most resourceful spaces are the ones that allow for extremely slow and extremely fast activity, but in the same space, without confusing each other.

I am also quite curious about a small detail, which is the fact that at SESC Pompeia some people simply sit down and take a nap, and some people seem to stroll around with nothing in particular to do. In today’s hyperefficient culture, in Europe and also probably in São Paulo, you almost never see people who clearly don’t have a problem with showing that they aren’t busy. Because today, not being busy is considered the same as not being important, and so if people are not busy, they hide, right? Or they pretend to be busy.

This I find very interesting, that you can have a person who is totally self-confident about having nothing of particular importance to do at this very moment. That the SESCs invite this kind of activity is, for me, an indicator of the true quality of these spaces.

VOLZ, Jochen (org). Olafur Eliasson: Seu corpo da obra. São Paulo: Associação Cultural Videobrasil/Edições Sesc SP, 2011, p. 413 - 425.