Episode 52: Olafur Eliasson’s “Untitled (Spiral)” (2017)

Have you ever tried to change the mind of someone who hates camping?  It’s a losing battle, I’ll tell you that.  Why, they ask, would I ever leave my nice warm house, where I pay a mortgage or rent and certainly an electricity bill, to prop up a claustrophobic nylon room in the middle of nowhere, sometimes in the rain, so that I can sleep on the ground and brush my teeth from a bottle?  And yeah, when it’s put that way, it sounds awful; why would anyone willingly do that?  Unfortunately, I don’t have a great answer, because, I Iove camping.  So to me it’s as obvious as the color red, and they’re the ones who’re color blind.  It’s like I see something that they don’t; I love the exact stuff they hate.  I love the way that camping heightens my awareness of my own senses, the way the campfire smell seeps into my pores.  I love the way the air is entirely unfiltered, the way I can feel the moisture of humidity on my skin, or see my hot wispy breath when I’m bundled up in three sweatshirts and a sleeping bag.  I love watching a spastic campfire dance, hearing it snap.  I know I have a bed in a room in a house, and still, I love, love, the steady drumbeat of rain rap tap tapping on a tent.  Camping is totally immersive; it puts me tune with nature, with the elements, the breeze, the rays of sunlight that stripe the air.  It just…slows me down.  When I can see the air, it reminds me to breathe.

Of course, there are plenty of people who don’t find nature to be quite so relaxing.  And I don’t just mean the unfortunate number of people in my life who hate to go camping.  The natural world, when it’s not calming us down with the crash of ocean waves or the twinkle of stars in the quiet night sky, is totally overwhelming to actually try to process, bigger than we could possibly wrap our minds around.  What if we really tried to open our imaginations to the depth of those oceans, to the wingspan of Saturn’s rings?  I can feel my heart start to pound just thinking about it.  And so we regulate.  We take in only as much as we can.  We filter with sunglasses, we mediate with thermostats, ceilings, with our own senses.  And doing this, mediating our experience of nature, sets us up quite naturally to see ourselves as distinct from it.  We are bodies in space, letting in as much of that space as we can handle, and trying not to succumb to the freaky-deaky reality that if we actually opened our apertures up to the limitlessness of the natural world, at how much we don’t process at any given time, it would be like finding ourselves in the middle of a proverbial Icelandic glacier, surrounded by blinding ice and sky as far as the eye can see.  It would be terrifying.  Or it would be, if we didn’t have the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson right there next to us, extending his hand, telling us that it’s okay, that it’s even good for us, and the world, to take a deep breath and let it all in.

When you walk into his satellite studio in Reykjavik, it’s not easy, as I found out pretty quickly having gone with my young nieces and nephews, to tell, or to explain, what kind of artist Eliasson is.  He’s an installation artist, a Conceptual artist, an artist who works with glass and metal and light and air and time.  He’s an artist who harnesses the natural world with the precision of a scientist.  He’s an artist who uses big blank walls as his canvas, filling raw gallery space with natural phenomena like water and fog, and with perfectly engineered yet organic movement, like we see with this revolving spiral.  He’s an artist who forces you to slow down, to breathe in the elements, and to reconsider your own perceptions of, and your own relationship to, your environment.  When I look at his work, and especially this spiral, I find myself thinking back to the videos my dad loved showing me when I was younger, Jacob Bronowski explaining the music of the spheres: the harmonious pitch of the planets forever rotating on their axes, primordial and pulsing and as involuntary as breathing, but only if you close your eyes and feel them.  The time scale of nature, the machinery operating beneath our feet that we can’t possibly see or hear, but maybe sense, and something that can only be explained with metaphors.

And because Eliasson is a Conceptual artist, his work is underscored by this larger underlying concept, that is, how we perceive ourselves relative to our environments.  The art itself, though, runs the table of size, scope, medium, and location.  In other words, don’t expect any of it to look alike.  There’s the tangible stuff made of manipulated glass or steel, pieces that look like sparkling, kaleidoscopic disco balls, or prisms that explode, Pollyanna-style, into a brilliant flurry of rainbows on a wall, or light shone through curved glass to produce smooth, concentric discs on a wall, like looking through the eyepiece of a microscope.  Or this untitled piece, a giant, quietly spinning corkscrew spiral that ascends both upwards and downwards like an infinite escalator.  And then there’s the intangible stuff: immersive environmental installations that use atmosphere as its own medium.  Like his work “Beauty” from 1993, where he shined a spotlight onto a wall of drizzling water to create rainbows that would be seen from different vantage points throughout the gallery, depending on where you’re standing.  Or his work “Your Blind Passenger” from 2010, where he pumped a gallery full of fog to encourage his blindly groping visitors to recalibrate their other senses, to depend on an internal compass that they never knew they had.  He plays with light, with shadows, with humidity, with mirrors; he alters our perceptions in order to gently draw awareness to perception itself.  “When you leave an exhibition like mine,” he says, “I hope you don’t feel like you’re leaving a dream machine to step back into reality.  I hope you feel closer to reality.”

And the idea of getting closer to reality is big, unwieldy statement, and we’ll come back to all the different things he could mean by that.  But first let’s consider how Eliasson’s personal reality, and particularly his geographic reality, shaped him as an artist.  To anyone who has spent time in Iceland, or Denmark, the two countries that Eliasson calls home, it’s hardly a surprise that his work is shaped so profoundly by the natural elements.  He was born in Copenhagen to Icelandic parents in 1967, parents who later split, and spent his childhood traversing between countries and homes, finding his teenage self-expression not just in art – and he was a notable landscape painter and had his first solo show at age 15 – but also, awesomely enough, in breakdancing.  And his being a breakdancer as a teenager – and apparently a pretty good one – is more than just a quirky little factoid about an artist before he was famous; it speaks to his early and preternatural awareness of his own body in space, at how he learned to use it to make pictures in the air, at how he reconciled his own body in a larger environment with elegance and fluidity. He then went on to establish a multi-disciplinary studio in Berlin, which he tellingly describes as a laboratory, not actually a studio.  A laboratory, he says, is a space for inquiry, for experimentation; here, with optics and precipitation.  A studio, like the one in Reykjavik, which had opened shortly before I went there, is for the experiment’s results, that is, the art.  Or for discarded and incomplete studies, which is what this spiral actually is.  Opening this Reykjavik studio was, to Eliasson, “a very natural step.”  He continues, “I’ve always felt emotionally connected to Iceland; its landscape and unique light conditions have been a strong source of inspiration, an environment in which to test artistic ideas.”  And it’s true; it’s remarkable how little time you need to spend in Reykjavik to find yourself at the mercy of the Nordic’s natural elements, especially with respect to light.  Light in Iceland is feast or famine, always in great abundance or short supply.  Darkness sets in so early in the winter, the summer evenings are bright as day, and through it all dance the green skies of the Northern Lights, which had been promised by our tour brochure, but which nature indifferently withheld.

My point is, though, that when you stand in this studio, you can tell very quickly how vulnerable his work is to natural light, how mutable it was engineered to be.  And watching how the shadows on the wall spin out from the spiral, or how the glass interprets sunlight, how the prisms and reflections project differently on the walls depending on the sun overhead, calls to mind Claude Monet in episode 7, setting up his easel across from Rouen Cathedral and painting canvas after canvas in a gorgeous but insatiable attempt to catch the light on its natural, endless progression.  In a sense, Eliasson, on the other hand, just lets it be, creating artworks that act as intermediaries, as filters, illuminating his walls with vibrant color and then leaving them in shadow, the brightness and darkness slowly alternating as though the space itself is breathing.

And you can feel this breathing with your own body, when you stand on the creaky wooden floor, directly under this spiral.  The organic filling and emptying of breath, the perpetual movement.  It’s certainly not something you can get from a photo.  The spiral is a loop of steel tubing coiled around itself to create a hanging sculpture fitted on a motor, so that it that continually, gently spins in and out of itself.  The outer surface is black, the inner surface is silver, like a mangled yet perfectly engineered bike tire, creating an illusion of undulating wave forms, in and out, back and forth, inhale, exhale.  As I said, it is most likely a study, hanging there solo, of a larger piece that’s located at the Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea.  It’s titled “Care spiral, Power Spiral” and is comprised of two of these spirals spinning in tandem, playing off one another, eternally dancing past each other as one spirals upwards and the other descends.  And the title of the piece, this reference to care and power, transports this physical object back to the larger realm of metaphor.  There’s a larger meaning he attributes to these opposing directions, the belief that the world can be cared for and embraced, and that power controls this from above, and often prevents this care from happening.  Yet there’s also an enormous sense of harmony and balance of the two, as though care and power might just be necessarily, and even symbiotically, entwined.

And this use of metaphor, this larger conceptual meaning, becomes an intrinsic part of Eliasson’s work, especially as he asks us, once we acknowledge that are bodies in space are actually a part of the space, indistinct from it, to think about where we go from there.  As he so succinctly puts it, “if I feel like a part of a space, I feel like I can change the space.”  Step one is to acknowledge that the world affects us.  Step two is to acknowledge that we, in turn, affect it right back, for better and, lately, for worse.  This is where art can come in, not simply a means of decorating the world, he argues, but taking responsibility for it.  “It’s the difference,” he writes, “between thinking and doing.”

This revelation of personal accountability has become a central pillar of his work, which, over the last couple decades, has been fascinated and formed by climate change.  The natural world, as it is mediated by human beings, he argues, is also being affected by human beings – we have a lot more of an impact on the world around us than we think we do.  Some of his work has tackled climate change head on, sometimes not even intentionally – “The Glacier Series,” which began in 1999, when Eliasson photographed several dozen glaciers in Iceland, was originally a photographic essay that explored the country’s natural phenomena; in a fairly conspicuous pivot, he revisited the same glaciers in 2019 and subsequently renamed the work “The Glacier Melt” series as he became aware, in real time, global warming’s dramatic impact on the country he so loves.

But even a project like that is, for Eliasson, unusually on the nose.  The clear cause-and-effect prescriptiveness of the Glacier Melt series, he would probably be the first to say, lacks a kind of larger abstract lyricism that is so foundational to his work.  And so, more to his conceptual MO would be “Your waste of time” from 2006, where he arranged for several blocks of ice from Iceland’s largest glacier, six tons in all, to be transported to a refrigerated Berlin gallery and put on view to the public.  And Eliasson is open about the fact that conceptual art, much like the glacier series, can evolve its concept, especially once an audience is involved.  As visitors came and went, the art unfolded into a statement that was less about our immediate impact on our environment, on warm hands melting ice, and more about our own limitations when it comes to conceptualizing time itself, which, of course, makes our impact so much harder to appreciate.  It’s not unlike Hiroshi Sugimoto’s explorations of time in art that we looked at in episode 31.  Part of the ice on the gallery was thought to have been formed in 1200 CE, predating the great European cathedrals, and this is a span of time, he writes, “that lies at the limits of comprehension,” the equivalent to trying to wrap our feeble minds around Saturn’s rings.  But by seeing this ice, and by touching it, he says, “it is possible to stretch our frame of reference.  When we touch these blocks of ice with our hands, we are not just struck by the chill; we are struck by the world itself… Suddenly I make the glacier understood to me, its temporality… by touching it, suddenly we understand that we do actually have the capacity to understand the abstract with our senses.”

And when we go back to what Eliasson said earlier, how he hopes that by leaving an exhibition of his work you feel closer to reality, it’s almost like his definitions of both reality and the abstract are one and the same.  Everything we can’t begin to wrap our minds around becomes as real as a block of ice.  And there it sits, abstract but tangible, filtered through our senses.  The limitless of the natural world, quietly melting in a manmade gallery, there for us to reach out and touch for ourselves.  And because we’re using our own senses, we’re we can’t help but engage so personally, so subjectively.  The chill of the ice, the rainbows through the water, the yawning terror of the ocean’s depth – all of these realities are going to hit us differently.  Because we all carry with us different realities.  Which is, ironically, something we all collectively share.

Okay.  So what are we supposed to do with all of this?  We have a lot of big, thorny ideas knocking around: reality and abstraction, the individual and the collective, metaphor, personal responsibility, our bodies in space, our impact on the world, the whole of natural world itself.  It’s much too much to hold in one’s palm, and certainly more than we would ever expect to get from a spotlit sheet of falling water or a gently spinning metal spiral.  But what we do get from them is something else, which is the foundation for everything productive that follows.  We get the permission to take a quiet moment and catch our breath.  Just stop.  Watch the spinning.  Feel its meditative calm.  Breathe.  “We need a moment of relief, of beauty, of letting go,” Eliasson writes, “in order to conceive of a better tomorrow.  Before you have hope, you have to have relief.”

This is a simple, deceptively profound statement.  And it encapsulates where Eliasson’s art has gone in the past decade, and how it speaks most acutely to our present moment.  His desire to identify and reconcile the boundaries between our bodies and our spaces has been extended to the space between people, between each other.  And his new medium for this conceptual project is the human breath.  As an endlessly curious practitioner of mediation, he started to integrate breathwork into his artwork, not just implicitly, like we feel with the spiral, but explicitly.  He focuses specifically on the concept of the exhale in his most recent large-scale installation, “Your Ocular Relief” from 2020 – an evocative light show of ever-changing shapes, colors, and shadows that both bends light and deeply soothes your eye.  In a way, it’s the same as his work has ever been: an invitation to relax and unclench, but this time, it’s the release of your own tension, the meditative awareness of your own breath, which attunes your senses not simply to your own space, but to the space you share with others, breathing alongside you. 

And of course it makes sense, coming off of this profound moment of isolation, that Eliasson is so interested in the interaction of bodies in space.  After all, sharing space has, like the winter Icelandic sunlight, been in short supply this past year.  And it’s damaged our impact on one another considerably. It’s bad enough that we’ve been kept apart physically, but that the vacuum has been filled with opportunities to defend, not connect.  Online communities, noxious politics that feed on moral and intellectual destabilization, an eroding and utterly distorted discourse that’s been guided by all the pettiness, tribalism, bad faith, and lack of nuance that can be squeezed into 280 characters.  Of course we’re tense, anxious, craving dopamine hits, poised to attack others, quick to withdraw our hands in self-protection.  Of course we’re further from reality than we’ve ever been.  And yet, despite what the lesser angels of our nature would have us believe, defensiveness as a response is not productive, especially compared to the far more productive response that results from stepping away, taking a deep breath, letting the hormones reabsorb.  That is, the response of introspection, of empathy, and ultimately of compassion.  Again, here is Eliasson inviting us to take some personal responsibility for changing the space we’re in for the better.  And it’s exactly what my meditation app tells me, day after day: we don’t just practice for ourselves, but for the people around us.  Imagine a world where we approach one another with calm and clarity, especially around the subjects of care, and power.  Imagine a world where we feel relaxed, open, and sure-footed enough to engage with each other with all our senses.  After all, as Eliasson says, “the fastest way to make a populist into a humanist is to look them in eye, hold their hand, and listen to them.”

So to that end, I’m not going to try to convince you to love camping.  It can be buggy and gross and you’re well within your rights to want to stay at home in your nice warm clean bed with an en suite bathroom.  And that’s totally fair; I won’t try to change your mind.  You do you.  But I still love it, and I’m still going to describe it, and what it does to me, in loving terms, and they might move you, or they might not.  But the offer is always on the table to come with me sometime and experience it for yourself.  We’ll sit around a warm campfire, bundled in our three sweatshirts, drinking our whiskey, hearing the snap, smelling the smoke, and watching our wispy breath spinning in the air, reminding us to breathe.