Olafur Eliasson: “Art is dialogue”

I have seen that you are working on a big tunnel composed of a lot of colofoul pieces of glass. Could you explain me a little bit this work?

For some time now, I've been interested in how to make time explicit. The passing of time. The idea that time is not something you get or receive or are in. Time is something you... It's almost something you create, something you do. So, I would normally not say that I am in time. I would say that I am off time. I am timing. So, if I could, I would like to turn time from being a noun into a verb. So, I'm timing. Time is something we live. And sometimes the tunnel is a bridge. It's based on a number of earlier works, also, where I work with this idea of how do we make the experience a temporal one, but more explicit? Because of course, every experience is temporal. But one could say that in art history, there is this assumption that you, for instance, are looking at a painting, a great painting, and then it's like a timeless moment. Or you can say this design is such a great design that it's timeless design. So, there is often this association that an experience has to be sort of beyond time. And the problem with that is that it disembodies, it takes away the physical and becomes somehow very metaphysical. I would like to suggest that time is in the viewer, and I guess it can't be metaphysical, but it's something that we physically perform. There's a physical activity. So, all my work with regards to being present as a body, for instance, in an art institution, has to do with movement and it’s almost like a dance, to make explicit or to make clear that being in front of art, being in art or being off art, if you want to say, has to do with being present to your own body and being present to oneself.

That has to do with acknowledging the passing of time or temporality or the process of time, you could say. And these are the considerations that created my interest in artworks that doesn't have one place from which they are perfect. Sometimes the tunnel is a bridge. There's no right position. I mean, it is a tunnel. You go through it, and the going through, that time it takes, and the experience over that sequence, that's the right way of seeing it. So, it's a little bit like a film or a book or something where you can say the book is nice, but of course, it's not like one word in the book. It's the reading of and the process of. So that's the soil out of which the tunnel grew.

So, I guess that, like in many of your works, if not all, the spectator is really important

In my work, I have always worked very much with the eye of the beholder and the role of the spectator. I am always very interested in the spectator outside looking at the work. Is the work a representation of another work somewhere else? Or is the spectator a participant, a co-creator, a co-author? Is the work a work if there is no spectator? I guess if one looks back in time, this very much plays with the origin of the idea of the spectator being an ocular activity which is highly centralized, meaning the central perspective. And it has built into it a hierarchy often resulting in the deprivation of time. I mean, the central perspective was like the perfect view, the vanishing point, a kind of an eye, maybe even God.

And suddenly you had this hierarchy, where should the king be? The king should be here. The best perspective of the queen, oh, right next to it. But the peasants are the people of lower standards according to the system, despite the democratic effort. They were further away. They were not really in perspective. And then of course the later perspective was decentralized, and a number of things happened. But this idea of the eye and the hierarchy is of course highly questionable. So, not just me, but a number of anthroposophic and alternative and other types of architectural ideas came later suggesting, well, the process of the becoming of space. That is, perhaps, a plausible idea for being or existing. It says instead of suggesting that there is this dichotomy or this very binary idea of space and subject, the person and the space, maybe the person is “spacing”, and the space is “personing”. Maybe there's a different rule. And phenomenology opened up to that to some extent. Continental philosophy sort of moved into reconsidering the rules.

Architecture took upon itself to also suggest that maybe walking through the building is the best way of looking at it.

A famous argument was when Mies van der Rohe did the Barcelona Pavilion, I think he was interested in sliding doors. When you move around the building, it would become very professional. It would open and close, a bit like sliding doors. It was like, wow, I can see through here. But every camera, and this is referring to the great work of Beatriz Colomina, every camera who ever photographed this piece of architecture was always perpendicular. It was always very Renaissance, like this or like this. And this means it became famous without time. And now we always stand and look at it. Wow, this is beautiful. But time, temporality, the walking through, the process of experiencing… This is one of the many examples where architecture, even against its own interest, lost its temporal contract, partly because the articulation of the embodied, the physical, was not very well thought through. There are thinkers like Beatriz Colomina who are now introducing these ideas. But another example is a photographer called Muybridge. I believe it was around 1900. He photographed a running horse or, you know, these sort of stroboscope-like photographs. And he said, I have now showed time. I have depicted time. This is time, he said. And Rodin made, as a response, or partly as a response, L'homme qui marche, the walking man. And he moved it out from the world. He was quite two-dimensional very often, right? And he was older at that point, but he moved it out into the space. And the muscle, the sort of the posture of the L'homme qui marche is a composition of different elements of a step, if I understand it right. And the viewer going around the sculpture somehow sees the step unfold as a relationship between the viewer and the sculpture. And Rodin said to Muybridge: the time is in this experience between a person walking around, the person is of time. You know, the passing of time is what time is. You cannot take a picture of time, Muybridge. And of course, at the same time, roughly a little bit later, Bergson came with the book Dürer. And he worked with this, so to say, he worked with this idea of the passing of, maybe seeding phenomenology altogether. So, there are these different places of time and architecture and thinkers and artists and so on. And they, I think, were onto it as a, you know, essentially as a critique of the high modern, you know, neoclassicism, palladio, this idea of the kind of spatial elite. And they wanted to soften things. So, these are all interesting questions when we look at where art is. Where are institutions today? Do they have the courage to somehow insist on the instability of things, to soften things and to host the viewer in a way where the viewer becomes the main protagonist and goes from receiving an experience to creating an experience?

Usually we see tunnels as something that we dig to escape from a place but, at the same time, a tunnel is also a place where we meet each other

Normally we think of a tunnel as something that goes through or under or we dig it. Tunnels are something you dig to escape. But a bridge is something that goes over and through the sky or the rainbow is a bridge. This idea that I think you can go through a tunnel and still see the same thing as on a bridge. And when somebody comes through you, you still have to, because somebody comes against you, through you. That's funny. Somebody comes against you, and you have to be careful not to bump into them. I mean, there's plenty of space, but still this notion of somebody at the other end, somebody closer, very close, who is it? Hello. And then they go by. There's so much going on. And all of that is, you know, maybe in the fleeting moment of the everyday, it's just kind of small stuff. But if you, I think, think about it, on the calendar of the everyday, there is this sort of meeting up. So, let's close that. Oh, it's my neighbor. So, if you want to, you know, just to get back on the topic. I have just one question. Absolutely. I was saying… so in this everyday sort of moment we have everywhere, I think that when we're on the street, on the sidewalk, we call that public space, right? Because we all own it together. It's yours, it's mine. I pay tax. You, everybody pays for it. It's our common space, right? I see somebody walking 100 meters away towards me. I see another person. That's it, right? Nothing more. Then 75 meters away I can see whether they’re dressed warm or dressed cold. Maybe I can see gender. Maybe I can see a busy person, 50 meters busy person, not busy person. 30 meters, very slow person, maybe even loud. Somebody screaming. Is it somebody who's giving a speech, talking on the phone? 25 meters. Is it a drunk person? And for the first time I can see, is this person somebody I will encounter? And public space is complex because we want it to be safe and host our values. We want public space to reflect the high expectations we have of society. And we want it to be democratic. And then you see, oh, is it a drunk person? Or is it threatening behavior? It doesn't happen so often, but I should maybe go on the other side of the street. Or maybe it's a person who needs help. Maybe I should offer something. So, 15 meters, 10 meters, right, and always, oh, it's the woman who lives next door. It's the person who is upstairs from me. Oh, this is the person, oh, it's a very heavy bag, you know. Five meters, you are suddenly in eye contact space. You can see, is the person tired, lost, in love? And you have this sort of sequence of the passing of time. And then you are in the space where you say, hello, how are you today? Or you just don't look, and you just look forward. I'm not going to talk to you, which of course sadly has become so normal. See, now, if you take that passage, and if you think about it, it happens all the time. And I'm not talking about in a pedestrian zone with hundreds of people, you know, I'm not being sort of didactic. But I'm also saying it's our space, it's public, where we own it. And we host each other. We also acknowledge the differences, and we acknowledge our own structural biases. We are blind sometimes. We are not always at all synced with our values. And this is an interesting sort of space to look at. So, this is where my interest in time really comes to full flourishment when it comes to, well, are we actually able to host ourselves? What would we do if we met ourselves? Are we living according to our values? But you know, these questions are very much about the big questions, you could say, about how to be the best version of yourself, how to be the best human version, how to treat more than humans nicely as well.

In the history of art, you can see a painting that is two-dimensional, or a sculpture that is three-dimensional. Do you think that with works that you have done like Green River or the Weather Project, you have changed the way that people perceive contemporary art?

See, I'm an artist who has worked within a certain period of time, which lies in a bigger period of time, which lies in... And I normally don't consider myself as a particular person within that time in which we live. I have made my best effort to contribute, and I'm very grateful for the chances I've had to be a part of a discussion. So, what we could call, should I say, art and such, for me is more like dialogue. And I've been able to speak in that dialogue thanks to many other people. I'm a part of a system, I'm a part of a network, I'm a part of something. And sometimes I've said some things which were more precise, and sometimes I've said some things which were imprecise.

Often it turns out that what was imprecise later became precise, and what was precise in the moment just kind of lost precision. So, it's more complex, and I'm actually more interested in being an artist. It's also being a part of society as a civic person. It's about trying to somehow balance out how do I, as a participant in a bigger system, also address the quality of the system as such and not of the one person. And the system in this particular case is the art world, we could call it. The art world is inside of the culture system, the culture sector, with theater, literature, and dance. Culture is a big thing. Culture is even questions about faith also, in some cases. You could take that in if you want, I normally don't. But you know, so culture in society is big, it's probably bigger than the car industry. So, think of that, there's more labor, there's more jobs, there's more economical turnover in culture than in many other sectors in society. See now, culture is a part of the civic sector, private sector, public sector. The civic sector is us, it's the people. The civic sector is also where we are, and in the civic sector, I would like to state we have universities, education could be there, right? So, it's public or not public, or private. But this is what I want to somehow say, in the culture sector, I'm a protagonist, I'm an ambassador, I'm a participant, I'm a co-creator, I'm a colleague, and I'm a believer in culture and art. And that comes with some responsibility. So, I try to take that very seriously without being egoistic, but also to be very focused on hosting other ideas and not be othering. That's not easy because I'm a Western European, we are the world champions in othering, right? So here we are in a situation where I am trying to be conscious of the potential for being the best version of myself. And that I think is where I hope to be able to contribute. To participate in a voice where we can say culture is what we, I think, can call our common space. It's where we come from, it's what we identify with and what we believe in, but it's also our ability to change that. We don't come from a place, we come from an idea of a place. And if that's the case, we can also change, even the past we can change. We can be more honest about it primarily, because we tend to forget what is liberating to forget.