Olafur Eliasson

The liminal veil in Beauty, 1993, the mist that envelops you as you pass through this ephemeral sculpture, marks both a ritual passage and a spiritual transit. Using modest but effective means—a misting device, a spotlight and a darkened room— Olafur Eliasson’s work exemplifies an aesthetic predicated on the full complicity of the viewer. From a certain perspective as you move around and then through the piece, your eye seizes upon its silver lining, an unlikely treasure in the form of a rainbow hidden in the mist. The welcome spectrum of coloured light lends the aqueous element the suggestion of a portal and a point of transit between states of being. Tremulous, diaphanous and lovely in its mien, the rainbow rewards our complicity with a sense of startled wonder, and it is no exaggeration to suggest that the experience of passing through the moist veil of the waterfall is almost baptismal.

This is Eliasson’s terrifically engaging first solo exhibition in Canada and, as with all the works presented in this cogent and compelling selection of works from 1993 to the present, Eliasson has built brave habitable structures for perception to which it is impossible to remain indifferent. Multiple Shadow House was just that: a structure for vision constructed from spare physical and immaterial elements that implicate body, image, movement and the perception of self. Eliasson effectively puts the spectator squarely at the centre of his creations. The title of the show is instructive, because the installations conjure up restless ghosts, optical poltergeists, ethereal pleasures, like Ouija boards that summon those ghosts up and out of our own eyes and bodies.

It should be emphasized that Eliasson discourages passive viewing. Rather than simply observing the work, spectators discover that their seeing and motility complete the work, and they become eager and active participants. For instance, after passing through the freshening portal of Beauty, I was surprised by how much water there was to brush off my clothes. If I had stood there any longer, I would have been soaked through to my skin. The installations were guided less by sleight of hand— although this is not to suggest that the artist’s technical virtuosity was anything less than first rank—than our own sleight of eye as we tried to make sense not only of what was seen but of the act of seeing itself. Epistemological questioning is at the heart of this artist’s project. In this sense, Eliasson demonstrated an unlikely kinship with the work of American installation artist Robert Irwin, whose lifelong investigation of light and space is a worthy precursor to Eliasson’s own.

It is tempting to place Beauty in the lineage of works the artist has executed before and since. Eliasson’s four-month exhibition at the Palace of Versailles—the iconic 17th-century château that once housed the court of Louis XIV—included an imposing waterfall behind the Fountain of Apollo in the estate’s extensive gardens, from which the water drops at a height of 40 metres. He also installed a veil of fog in the gardens. And one of his most praised projects was comprised of four artificial waterfalls installed along New York City’s East River in 2008.

In the works exhibited here, Eliasson shows himself to be a sophisticated magician—and a dedicated seeker after truth. More importantly, he is a supreme poet of the liminal. A Wallace Stevens of the perceived image, where light and shadow play in new and unexpected ways, Eliasson works with the liminal to explore its status as threshold. The transformations possible only within the ambit of this space can be spatially and temporally complex and profoundly disruptive. In this moment of passage, neither linear nor chronological, in which everything is possible, we arrive at the so-called breach wall in seeing.

In cultural anthropology, liminality is the sense of phenomenal dislocation and ambiguity that characterizes the middle stage of rituals. Participants stand on the threshold between their previous way of structuring identity and time and a radically new way, which the ritual establishes. In Beauty the light above the veil of water propels us to the midpoint, and we arrive at the far end of the mist, on the other side of the waterfall, transformed.

In addition to Beauty, which closes the show with such exalting punctuation, Eliasson employs water to create morphologies of light in Big Bang Fountain, 2014, in which a strobe light transforms a jet of water into a tumultuous and hypnotic, if ethereal, sculpture. The work that lends its title to the exhibition, Multiple Shadow House, 2010, is a free-standing “house” in which the individual walls are screens. It is a moving meditation on light, architecture and transformation that gives a whole new meaning to the shadow games we played as children, casting wolves and birds in flight on a wall and bringing them to life through improvised fictions. Here, the shadows of visitors are cast from different angles, in a range of colours on both sides of the walls. In this updated version of the child’s game of Shadow Tag, the viewer gleans vicarious pleasure from the frenzied antics of other viewers’ cast shadows.

In Your space embracer, 2004, a work newly acquired by the Musée d’art contemporain, a ring of mirrored glass rotates slowly overhead, suspended from the ceiling of the darkened exhibition hall. A focused spotlight illuminates the ring and creates a restless shadow behind the rotating disc. It also reveals an arc of reflected white light that slowly moves across the walls and ceiling. The smooth, wavelike motion of the light induces an hypnotic effect much like that of a psychoactive drug.

Wherever objects and light collide to make a lesser darkness, you can find Eliasson at work. He steps into shadow as readily as he steeps its mysteries in the revealing clarity of light. He is a gifted illusionist who works with building blocks, both material and immaterial, to create new spaces in which to feel and think. ❚

“Multiple Shadow House” was exhibited at Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal from June 21 to October 1, 2017.

James D Campbell is a writer and curator in Montreal, and is a frequent contributor to Border Crossings.