Olafur Eliasson

The shimmering visions of Olafur Eliasson want to make you sane. Adrift in sound, or lost in colour, what Eliasson does with his fields of kaleidoscopic noise and geometry defy easy definition. As such, an Eliasson show has become a banner event. With each new one, Eliasson wants to push for change, to strip out the meaning of the sensory experience and encourage change from it. It’s art as a catalyst, as our cue. It’s also, Semaine gleaned in conversation with Olafur, all quite fun.

His impossible art conquers weather, mocks death, stares at the sun. It’s an ancient trope: in Seneca’s Letters From a Stoic, the Roman philosopher asks “Are you telling me not to investigate the natural world? Or the source of light (is it fire or something brighter)? Am I supposed not to inquire into this sort of thing?” That was 4BC, this is now. “I see art, and creativity, as a way of being embedded in the world”, says Olafur—and only an artist “embedded in the world” can make a life in visions that seem not of it.

Some artists change the way we see the world, which is one way of describing what Olafur means to do with his work in natural materials and experiences—work like his fog-engulfing 2003 Tate Modern Turbine Hall weather project, the Heavens-suspended 2016 Palace of Versailles waterfall, the 2020 steel, and glass cyranometer in the Hochjochferner glacier.

After all, to Olafur, “art is not a way of escaping from reality but a way of changing that reality.” In sharing his reality, the Danish-Icelandic artist has become a rock star, occupying a space very few do in the modern lexicon. His sensory experiences seem to create a sort of frequency; something the viewer can tune into or out of, and the extent to which they do so profoundly affecting them. The livewire sensations of his piece are designed, in part, to cajole and comfort: “This can help counteract the numbing effect that is caused by all of the news and information we are constantly exposed to.”

Light lacked in Olafur’s upbringing; it is now the crucible of his art. One memory stands out; visiting his grandparents in Iceland, amid the 1970s energy crisis, when blackouts were imposed: “When the lights would go off indoors, it would take a second for your eyes to adjust, and I remember this very particular experience of the light changing in quality as the long Icelandic dusk took over from the electrical lighting.” It’s now both medium and the message in his work, with Olafur’s convictions about light quality “the result of spending so much time in a part of the world where there are months of very little light”.

Now, well, let there be light. His clean energy non-profit organisation Little Sun is “very much about providing affordable, good quality lighting to people who do not have consistent access to electricity.” Little Sun works to create a thriving world powered by the sun, equipping farmers, students, health workers and refugees across Africa with renewable energy, and looking to artists to guide us all towards climate action. To date, the non-profit has provided power and light to over 3.2 million people who would not otherwise have access to it. Eliasson has described it with trademark wit as “a work of art that works in life.” This caption sits well with all that Eliasson touches. Olafur’s mission for Little Sun is, like the appeal of his art itself, democratic: “The quality and intensity of light affects everything we do – how we feel, how we sleep, how long we can work during the day and the quality of the work.” He and engineer friend Frederik Ottesen wanted to put power back in our hands: “While we were talking about this, the sun was coming down and we thought about prolonging the day by capturing the energy of the sun via a solar panel and then releasing it again through an LED light.”

Despite all this, Olafur has a striking modesty. The primary appeal of Olafur’s art is that it is democratic; you cannot help but have a reaction of the senses to his pieces, and as such, it is accessible to all. “The most profound sceptics I have met have changed their minds once they had a Little Sun in their hands”, Olafur attests. In his art too, there is no gestural pondering before a piece; you are in them, and they are around you. What other contemporary artist affords us this experience?

“In Real Life”, Eliasson’s 2019 show at the Tate Gallery, was a polyphonic weather system, a thirty-year retrospective, a meditation on climate change, and the gallery’s most-attended exhibit of the year. In these three decades, Eliasson has had three major concerns; nature, geometry, and an ongoing investigation into our perception of the two. The year before saw Olafur deposit melting blocks of ice, co-created with geologist Minik Rosing, outside the Tate Modern. Studio Olafur Eliasson crafts such spectacles, amassing premier “craftsmen and specialized technicians, architects, archivists and art historians, web and graphic designers, film-makers, cooks, and administrators”. Olafur has become known as a climate artist, saddled with the grim task of making us look up and pay attention to something, without adding to said thing’s problem.

Some artists veil the world to tell us about it, others expose it, Olafur mythologises it. His smoke and mirrors, such as they are, lend a fabled touch that softens any threat of didacticism; they are monuments of collective beauty, like the world itself. This optimism in his work scans in the frank way he talks about our future, the collective task we face: “Governments and corporations are made up of individuals too, and they ideally respond to concerns that are in the general culture. We too often approach problems in the world as if they are not made by us, as if reality were not malleable, but we are all part of larger systems.”

The elemental quality of his work, married with his devoted charitable efforts, show an artist firmly rooted in the now. If today’s youth are happy to interrogate the climate crisis and unequivocal in demanding change, Olafur is quick to acknowledge that his generation “has often been stuck with a view of the present and of the future that is defined by what came before, basically taking the future for granted as being more or less like the past and depending quite a bit on tradition. I have the sense that the children and young people of today are more attuned to the future, so that they view the present continually from the perspective of the future.”

His art gives us profound glimpses into the biggest problems we face—holding up a mirror to ourselves, allowing us to see our world in all its blazing, brilliant, brutal colours, and ask the question, perhaps, now, the only question there is to ask: “Isn’t this worth saving?” Olafur, for one, will continue looking for the light: “This is the perfect moment to think about how we can shape our future world now.”