Meet Your Maker

By Richard Lacayo

Artists come to a career in art with all kinds of life experience on their resumes. Sometimes it's even pertinent. It makes perfect sense that Andy Warhol started out as an advertising illustrator. Or that the welded-steel sculptor David Smith spent time on an auto assembly line. With the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, it's not so easy at first to connect what he does now--create works that invite you to play with fields of colored light or with lenses and mirrors or with your own understandings of how you see--with what he did as a teenager. What I'm talking about, of course, are the break-dancing years.

In the 1980s Eliasson and two friends formed a break-dance crew and spent four years playing Danish clubs (in silver spandex costumes whipped up by his mother). Eventually they won a Scandinavian break-dancing championship. "I was always dancing," he says. "Four or five hours a day, with a mirror in front of me. It gave me a great sense of what the body could do in space, how you could gain control of your body." He pauses. "Also, it was very cool."

Maybe it's not so hard to connect Eliasson at 17--contorting his reflection into a kinetic art object--with Eliasson at 40, producing works that require you to jump in and take part in them, to see but also to do. That's the secret of one of the most captivating pieces in the big Eliasson retrospective, organized by Madeleine Grynsztejn, now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Beauty consists of a curtain of mist penetrated by a spotlight to produce a floating rainbow wall. The beckoning illusion looks slightly different to each viewer depending on where he or she is standing. Beauty, Eliasson wants you to know, really is in the eye of the beholder.

The SFMOMA exhibition, which travels later to New York City and Dallas, is Eliasson's first American museum show. It arrives at a time when he's the object of intense curiosity in U.S. art circles, largely because of The weather project, a hugely popular installation he produced four years ago for London's Tate Modern. Eliasson covered the 115-ft.-high (35 m) ceiling of the Tate's immense Turbine Hall in mirror foil, added an artificial sun of 200 yellow lightbulbs arranged behind translucent plastic and periodically filled the upper air with mist. During the installation's six-month run, more than 2 million people filed in to enjoy the paradox of the outdoors brought indoors, to lie gazing upward at their reflection in the mirrored "sky" and to meditate on how we can submit ourselves to illusions even when we know that's what they are.

The weather project was Eliasson's Sistine Chapel, and it made him a star of some magnitude, a role he's still not quite comfortable with. He sees his work as an antidote to the consuming spectacles of our time--TV, video, computer games--so he would rather not turn into a spectacle himself. His ambition is not just to delight people but also to awaken them out of a passive relation to the world. Whether this is a job mere art can accomplish remains to be seen. But it helps to explain why Eliasson has given quite a few of his works titles with the word your in them. So, for instance, when he hung the Palazzo Grassi in Venice with a web of light cables, he called it Your wave is. "It emphasizes the importance of the spectator," he says. "The relationship between you and the project is the project."

Since his success at the Tate, projects have proliferated--a light wall for the Oslo Opera House, a kind of artwork/observatory tower in London, the sets for a touring opera. Eliasson lives in Copenhagen with his wife, an art historian, and the two children they adopted from Ethiopia. But his studio is in Berlin, where he employs 30 or more people. On any given day he may collaborate with technicians, architects and mathematicians. Yet the finished product is often remarkably simple. You could say that some combination of straightforward means and subtle effects is the signature of Eliasson's best work. Beauty, after all, is nothing more than a perforated hose and a spotlight. And with those Eliasson made something haunting, complex and even poignant--an object of desire that dematerializes when you try to get close to it. It may be "yours." But it could only be his.