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[olafur eliasson] has erected a fake sun, about 41 yards in diameter, like a billboard, on the skyline in Utrecht, the Netherlands. He designed a waterfall that flowed upward. He dyed various rivers in Europe and America green (eco-friendly dye, naturally). And in Bregenz, Austria, he transformed a museum into a greenhouse of mossy pools, footbridges, fog, dirt, wood, fungus and duckweed. Fascinated by the effects of disorienting optics and eccentric geometry, he also removed the windows of the ironwork skylight in the gallery of his New York dealer, Tanya Bonakdar, a few years ago and installed mirrors to create a dizzy walk-in outdoor-indoor kaleidoscope.
"We have a desire to assume that certain things, like our reactions to the weather, are natural, but they are in fact cultural, and the end result of this can be entrenched ideologies, which we take to be inevitable. This is the path toward totalitarianism."
He rethinks that remark after a moment. "I shouldn't have insisted that everything is cultural and not natural, because that is as dogmatic as the reverse. I should have said that the line separating nature and culture changes through history, and this is what we should be aware of."
Mr. Eliasson cites the ubiquity of white walls in art galleries: "Chalk is white and chalk was used as a disinfectant and so early modernists decided on white walls as symbols of purification, clean spaces. But if chalk had been yellow maybe all our galleries would be yellow today, and we would interpret yellow as a neutral color."
- MICHAEL KIMMELMAN, "The Sun Sets at the Tate Modern," new york times March 21, 2004
posted March 23, 2004 in art, politics, print