Friday 28 May 2010

Olafur Eliasson: Innen Stadt Außen (Inner City Out)

"Eliasson is one of the most popular artists in the world and is enjoyed by all age groups because of his gift of overwhelming the viewer with works based on fundamental physical laws. Children in particular are won by the simulated phenomena in artificial analogy to nature, playfully created out of fog and mirrors, headlights and colored light, water and cold. After all, even the idea of landscape is a social construct." (Sonna, 2010)
"Thick chalk stripes meandered into the underbrush of a park or marked a rectangular terrain like a sports field on a city square. Here and there in Berlin he casually distributed tree trunks washed up on the coast of Iceland. With these somewhat homeopathic settings, Eliasson joins up with the Situationists of the 1960s and explores in a kind of democratic act even the inhospitable deposits of public space."
"The faceted glass dome is so targeted, reflected and bundled that the viewer has the impression that it is splitting apart into the ends of the universe. It is as if he were being hurled bodily into a silvery kaleidoscope without beginning or end. In contrast to this loss of orientation in crystalline space, at the end the visitor finds himself in rooms of colored fog of breathtaking intensity. A hard test even for those who don’t suffer from vertigo." (Sonna, 2010)
Sonna, B. (2010) (Trans.: Uhlaner, J.) Olafur Eliasson: The Miracles Happens in the Eye. [Online] http://www.goethe.de/kue/bku/kpa/en6048115.htm [27/05/2010]