Olafur Eliasson: Light Ventilator Mobile

An Opening to Other Horizons
Some Notes on Olafur Eliasson's Light Ventilator Mobile

Few contemporary artists employ what can pass for easily recognizable historical forms with as much comfort as Olafur Eliasson does. There is little surprise in finding that a great deal of what has been written about his work revolves around efforts to link him to preexisting practices. Whether the attempt is to find a connection with the recent past (Earthworks and Light and Space) or much more distant lines of thought (northern European Romantic movements), the impulse is always homeopathic: it aims to mend whatever rupture with historical practices Eliasson's art embodies. There is little doubt that Eliasson borrows from a number of practices that rely heavily on phenomenological investigation and consequently place a high premium on understanding and exploring the position of the viewer. But the doubt should be equally small as to whether or not his appropriation of these practices and their forms is guided by misreading. Many of the practices that Eliasson draws from—let us zero in specifically on those that have come to characterize the 1960s—originally functioned under the conceit that there is a quasi-scientific, ahistorical space, bracketed from social reality, where internal investigations of the art object and its meaning can take place unsoiled by the muddiness of real life. Ultimately, however, the social conditions from which these practices emerged were encoded in the objects produced and even in the process of dematerialization whenever it became the main mode of "production." Eliasson, by exteriorizing his connection to historical practices, doesn't aim for an ahistorical position. On the contrary, he invites historicization. By locating himself within specific lines of thought, Eliasson encourages an investigation of what constitutes his difference within these lines. And the difference in his case is an inherent demand for his work to be viewed in light of the social conditions from which it emerges.

Light Ventilator Mobile (2002) is perhaps one of Eliasson's more subdued installations and, therefore, all the better to help us understand how his work functions without being distracted by theatrical excess. (Of course, the ideas of theatricality and excess have strange permutations in Eliasson's art. Your Sun Machine [1997] is literally a hole in a gallery roof and nothing else, but it can be considered, when viewed from an angle that takes into account the cosmic forces it employs, nothing short of operatic.) Light Ventilator Mobile is composed of an arm on a pivot, which has a spotlight at one end and a ventilator at the other. The ventilator propels the arm to go in circles as the light from the spot glides across the walls of the room. At first glance, there is something mesmerizing about the piece, despite the childlike economy of its mechanics. The light endlessly moving around the room is almost hypnotic. But the fan, which continuously whizzes by at eye level, shatters the mood of serenity as it materializes the possibility of physical peril. The viewer has to literally stay out of its path. Consequently, one can never grow lost in the movement of the light, one can't "sink" into Light Ventilator Mobile the way one would into, say, a James Turrell. The fan disrupts constantly, and keeps the viewer hyperaware of where her body is. It is as if one is granted not so much a place from which to grow lost with the light, but rather a place from which to ponder the possibility of growing lost in this way, of looking at oneself looking—a position of self-reflexivity.

Something happens with this shift. At such a point, it isn't just perception that is thematized, but the representational layers that organize looking. And beyond this, the potential existence of a position from which to interrogate the ideological trappings and institutional frames that channel one's way of engaging the world is allegorized. The viewer of Eliasson's installation, pushed into a place of self-reflexivity, is, of course, critically aware of something very minor—the representational layers between herself and the environment she's in. This awareness is important because it presents the possibility of an analogous position in the social realm, where one becomes cognizant of more perfidious representational structures. In a society that generally promotes passive consumption, such a position clearly has political value. So, unlike the practices that make of phenomenological investigation an end in itself, Eliasson uses it to provide an opening onto a horizon of larger inquiries. This "misuse" of phenomenological investigation is precisely the misreading that activates Eliasson's work, that marks its difference, and that makes it a relevant adversarial force in light of existing social arrangements. It is what channels the piece's political unconscious to a place where it can be activated as a destabilizing agent in a world stifled by an increasingly assimilated logic of passive consumption.

OLAFUR ELIASSON was born in Copenhagen and lives in Berlin. He recently has had solo exhibitions at Tate Modern, London; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Eliasson represented Denmark in the 2003 Venice Biennale.

GEAN MORENO is an artist based in Miami. He has written for numerous art publications, including Flash Art and contemporary