take your time - olafur eliasson

I only see things when they move.

The work of Olafur Eliasson examines the experience of perception, mostly visual perception, which is sometimes felt quite physically, through the alteration of environments. The show is spread out through the Museum of Modern Art and PS 1. Some of the pieces can be dismissed as funhouse effects ("Space reversal" and "Negative quasi brick wall") and almost all of them have a child-like playfulness that seemed to be greatly enjoyed by the small children in museum. Nearly all of them alter perception or expectations of perception and force the viewer to reconsider the authority of sense perception. Though the work in MoMA succeeds in making the viewer reconsider perception, I am not sure yet how far it goes beyond that, how much we take with us when we leave.
I only see things when they move.

"Room for one colour" is a hallway with monofrequency lighting. A long hallway is bathed in yellow-oragnge light that seems to suck all other color out and make the objects in it appear in black and white. The experience makes clear how light dictates the appearance of the world, and how we can never be sure about the colors we perceive. Visitors lingered in the area enjoying the experience of the altered perception. Objects with the color removed seemed to move into sharper relief, sharper focus, as though the color habitually dominates the presentation of the object in my perceptual experience. I tried to photograph what we were seeing--a yellow-orange hallway full of black and white people--but it proved impossible. The digital camera found yellows and oranges everywhere. The closest I could get was when I adjusted one of the images with autolevels in photoshop, and photoshop found a lot of grey and white, but turned the blacks electric blue, the complementary color to the yellowish light.

The monofrequency lights were very harsh on the eyes. I am not sure why, if that particular frequency is harsher when it is not seen in combination with the full spectrum of color and color frequency.

"I only see things when they move" is a large room altered by the rotation of colored glass around a light, surrounding the viewers with steadily changing colors on the walls, colors that merge through one another. It was a peaceful experience, compared with "360 degree room for all colours." That was a much smaller room, with lights in the panels of the walls that changed slowly from one color to another. Exterior rooms glimpsed through the doorway seemed to change in color with the 360 degree room, or against it, in complement. It was very hot and the lights were hard on the eyes. Seeing seemed to be physical, the lights and colors felt on the skin and below it. Green seemed to be left out, with oranges, yellows, pinks and blues featured. We decided we could not stay in the room long enough to see it turn green, because the lights were making our stomachs queasy.

The newest works in the MoMA show were the most minimal in the sense of altering lighting, the most basic element of visual perception and environments, compared to older works where the artist altered landscapes--Green River, for example. Included in the MoMA show was "Moss wall" from 1994, a wall covered with live reindeer moss.
According to MoMA, "Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the curtain of soft moss alters in shape and color, giving off a natural fragrance."

In addition to the playfulness of the works, the exhibition was made more accessible by its friendliness. There were no restrictions on photographing and no guards keeping us a safe distance from the pieces. I was able to lean right into the moss wall, though I did not quite dare to pet it, as I wanted to.

Here is an online exhibition.