A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Given the time of year it’s a temptation to vent spleen and post something by the great Charles Addams. But rather than burden you with churlishness I’ll point instead to Colorscreen, a piece of web abstraction inspired by Olafur Eliasson. By the same programmer, there’s also the Random Color Generator.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The New York City Waterfalls
• Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson
• Olafur Eliasson’s BMW
• Olafur Eliasson’s Serpentine Pavilion
• New Olafur Eliasson
Olafur Eliasson’s big new art project commences in New York today, with four waterfalls being installed at various places around the city. The photo here shows the Brooklyn Bridge installation during its test run on Tuesday and the project begins just as Eliasson’s NYC art show is drawing to a close. Brooklyn Bridge, meanwhile, was memorably trashed earlier this year by the Enormous WTF in Cloverfield.
• From a Master of Weather, 4 Waterfalls for New York
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson
• Olafur Eliasson’s BMW
• Olafur Eliasson’s Serpentine Pavilion
• New Olafur Eliasson
New work by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson is always welcome here and the above is exactly that, a large rotating mirror installed at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, along with other pieces comprising a major survey of his work.
Take Your Time a new piece at P.S. 1, made for the show, consists of a huge, tilted, disc-shaped mirror suspended horizontally from a gallery ceiling. What strikes you at first is the omniscient, bird’s-eye reflection of the room below, with you standing in the middle of it. Then you notice that the mirror is rotating very slowly, and with a subtly undulating motion that causes the room itself feel warped and unstable. You experience this as much with your sense of balance as with your eyes.
The New York Times takes a critical look at Eliasson’s work and complains about his not being radical enough, an objection which seems curiously old-fashioned as well as being the kind of issue that only plagues art critics, other artforms getting on perfectly well without concerning themselves with being avant garde and challenging above all else. Better to ignore the redundant polemic and look at the slide show of his works.
Take your time: Olafur Eliasson runs until June 30, 2008.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Olafur Eliasson’s BMW
• Olafur Eliasson’s Serpentine Pavilion
• New Olafur Eliasson
Art for crack addicts.
Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall is so vast and empty it’s quite a challenge for an artist to do anything interesting with it. One option is to try and fill the space which is what Anish Kapoor did with his enormous Marsyas, the first of the Turbine works I saw there in 2002.
Colombian artist Doris Salcedo has caused a stir this week by unveiling her own offering which seems to ruin the concrete floor with a succession of cracks that run the length of the building. I say “seem” because it looks from photos like she’s installed a series of large concrete slabs over the original floor (she won’t say how it’s been made), something that the structure of the cracks in close-up would seem to confirm. The rationale for this—that the work is “addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world”—isn’t remotely obvious, a perennial problem with contemporary art; a crack in the floor can mean any number of things, after all, and it’s difficult to see how an unbriefed visitor would arrive at that conclusion. However, I’d still like to see this in situ even if it doesn’t match the splendour of Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project from 2003.
Shibboleth can be seen from October 9th 2007–April 6th 2008.
Update: Builders and an architect ponder the mystery of the crack’s creation.
• Shibboleth at Tate Modern
• A video at The Guardian
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Olafur Eliasson’s Serpentine Pavilion
• Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor
Your mobile expectations: BMW H2R project (2007).
A busy time for the artist this month with his design for BMW’s Art Car series (above) going on display for the first time in San Francisco. All the previous artists involved in this series have been content with merely painting on the body of the car. Eliasson’s creation is a considerable departure in that respect.
The new artwork was created on the hydrogen-powered H2R race car, after the artist replaced the body with a combination of steel mesh and reflective panels. The car was then sprayed with 530 gallons of water over the course of several days to create layers of ice.
It was constructed in situ at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where it will remain in a display case with a special cooling unit from 8 September until 13 January next year, as part of the exhibition, Your Tempo: Olafur Eliasson.
According to BMW, the aim of this latest project was to transform an object of advanced industrial design into a work of art that reflects on the relationship between global warming and the car industry.
Continues here.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Olafur Eliasson’s Serpentine Pavilion
• The London Oasis
• New Olafur Eliasson
• The art of Cai Guo-Qiang