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OLAFUR ELIASSON : WEATHER PROJECT
Olafur Eliasson has established an international reputation for works that suggest evocations of nature - from fog-filled rooms to rainbows - which, combined with modern technology, produce situations of sublime beauty. His practice explores human perception and subjectivity, and the boundaries between nature and culture. In this book, Eliasson takes the ubiquitous subject of the weather as a point of departure, examining ideas of representation, mediation and the temporal qualities of space, a process that culminates in his extraordinary installation in Tate Modern.
- GenresArt
160 pages, Hardcover
First published February 10, 2003
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July 7, 2022
In the winter of 2003, I saw the Sun with new eyes. It was a vast glowing ball of fire, far larger than ever before, and I stood in awe.
A short while before, my brother had asked me, “Are you going to see the Sun at the Tate? It’s said to be huge – massive!” I hesitated, realising that this must be an Art “event”, and thinking I preferred paintings and sculpture. But there he was in the sterile, clinical, environment of a hospital bed, surrounded by unnatural paraphernalia, and enduring what must seem like endless treatments. Perhaps I could share this experience, and tell him about it when I returned … “Yes,” I said.
And it was indeed massive. The “Tate Modern” on London’s South Bank is housed in the old Bankside Power Station, which was decommissioned in 1981. After some redevelopment it reopened as a modern Art gallery, significantly in a new century, 2000. What made the gallery unique was its Turbine Hall; the room which used to house the turbines and electric generators. It is an immense space, which must have given the architects pause for thought.
This unique space lends itself beautifully to Installation Art. The first project of all was a monumental female spider constructed from steel, and overlooking three tall steel towers, each thirty feet high. Entitled “I Do, I Undo, I Redo” by the artist, Louise Bourgeois, the intention was for visitors to climb the staircases to the platforms, and interact. It was open for 5 months, and although it was the very first commission for the new gallery, I carefully avoided that one...
Then came Juan Muñoz’s piece, “Double Bind”, another conversion of the space in the Turbine Hall into several floors; this time playing on perspective and illusion, visibility and invisibility. It incorporated an upper bridge level, from which visitors could see a patterned floor, through which two would elevators rise and descend, in perpetual motion. There seemed to be large black holes in the floor, but some of these were illusions.
The third construction was “Marsyas”, an unnerving fleshy sculpture which comprised three steel rings joined by a membrane or skin of PVC, by Anish Kapoor. The title referred to Marsyas, a satyr in Greek mythology, who was flayed alive by the god Apollo, and Anish Kapoor intended his construction to be “rather like a flayed skin”. After three such challenging installations, perhaps my trepidation about Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project was understandable. But I need not have worried. It was quite simply awe-inspiring.
Unlike our ancestors, we don’t tend to think much about the sun, or live in fear of its power. We forget that it is a fiery ball of hydrogen and helium, on which all life depends. Even though we know that heatwaves can kill thousands of people, it seems unbelievable in the dreary city of London, England, especially in the winter (October 2003 - March 2004, to be exact). But Olafur Eliasson managed to put back some of that primitive feeling; a sense of awe which gladdens your heart. The sun in the Turbine Hall was immense, and demanded your total attention.
We all saw a giant yellow circle suspended in a red-black sky, and the people in the Hall were dwarfed by its presence. I could see them, but they were like diminutive ants, just gazing at the huge ball in wonder. The ordinary had been rendered extraordinary, and it was easy once more to believe that our ancestors worshipped this momentous entity. We had stepped in from the cold dank streets of a London winter, and found ourselves facing a dazzling sun, shining out into an almost duotone setting, its outlines blurred by mist. Walking slowly towards it down the long sloping floor of the Turbine Hall, was a unique experience.
It was the sheer scale of the piece which quickened my pulse rate. Mixed feelings of being in outer space, much closer to the sun – or maybe to Mars – or an alien planet. I felt disoriented, and no longer inside a building. The Turbine Hall is massive: 500ft long and 75ft wide, and Olafur Eliasson had effectively doubled the space, replacing the ceiling with a huge mirror. If you looked up, you could see yourself as one of those tiny black ants.
And yet … just as in the “Wizard of Oz”, I could also see the man behind the screen, metaphorically, and know that it was an illusion. If I tore my eyes away from the glowing ball, I could climb up to another level and look behind to see how the effect was created. I could hear the constant hum of the machinery. I lurched back from these early sun-worshippers to the 21st century. My brain now understood the mechanics of the effects.
At the far end of the hall were two hundred lamps in a semicircle. They were the special type of mono-frequency lamps used in street lights, and were placed behind a translucent screen. The artist had deliberately selected mono-frequency lamps, because they emit light at such a narrow frequency, that any colours other than yellow and black are invisible.
Because of the overhead mirror, made from projection foil, they were repeated to form a vast, dazzling sphere. In addition to this, from the sides of the hall, machines gently blew a ghostly haze, which rose in a gentle gauze. The effect was magical, and hypnotic. Not only that, but it changed constantly, just as the sun and the weather changes in the natural world. This fine mist permeated the space, as if it were creeping in from the winter outside. Throughout the day, the mist would accumulate into faint, cloud-like formations, rising just as outside, before dissipating across the space. Visitors to the Tate would go and “sunbathe” for a while (although there was no heat), lying on the floor to gaze at their own reflections in the ceiling, taking time out from their grey offices, to bask in the seeming beneficence of this solar apparition. Sometimes they would climb the aluminium scaffolding, for a closer view. Newspaper articles reported spontaneous meetings, celebrations, people embracing and enjoying the artificial light - and even episodes of civil protest. It was indeed an “Experience”.
Olafur Eliasson’s creations tend to be elemental and ephemeral. Born in Copenhagen in 1967, the artist is now based in Berlin. His “tools” are not chisels and stone, or brushes loaded with paint, but light, steam, moisture, and ice. During the last two decades he has created rainbows, dyed rivers green, and made water flow uphill. For one of his most popular works “Your Natural Denudation” in 1999, he created a pond in the courtyard of a Pittsburgh museum complete with a geyser which pumped out steam. He loves to make us question what we see, and describes his works as “devices for the experience of reality”. What is the use of a sun which does not generate heat? And what is all the scaffolding?
It is no coincidence that for a commission in Britain, Olafur Eliasson chose the weather as his theme. He was poking fun at our national obsession with all things meteorological. The great eighteenth-century writer Dr. Samuel Johnson said:
“It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.”
Olafur Eliasson is inviting us to reflect on our perceptions of the physical world. He refers to the moment when you pause to consider what you are experiencing, as “seeing yourself seeing”. Perhaps there are other wry unspoken jokes. He began work on the project during a month when the newspapers were full of articles about global warming. Is this then a reference to the idea of sustainable energy, our great “Sun”, housed in a former power station?
Yet much as I enjoyed the installation, this book added very little to my experience. Olafur Eliasson is fascinated by the way museums mediate the reception of art. We have all experienced the way we are offered an array of information before we even see a work of art – from the marketing poster and press reviews, to the “helpful” (if distracting) interpretation text panels, on the walls of the gallery or museum.
Olafur Eliasson suggests that such information overly influences our experience and understanding of the work. In The Weather Project he decided to incorporate these aspects into making an exhibition, so that the experience of the work could be as free from this as possible for the viewer. This book represents part of the extra directed mediation. He conducted a survey of staff at the museum, posing a series of twenty-odd wide ranging questions, examples being, “How often do you discuss the weather?”, “Do you think the weather or climate in any way impacts on your salary?”, “In which season do you kiss someone other than your partner the most?”, to “Do you think the idea of the weather in our society is based on nature or culture?”
The statistical data he collected from this study was then used in the promotional campaign for the exhibition. For example, no photographs of the work itself were used. Instead there were simple statements about the weather on the adverts in magazines, the tube or on the internet. Olafur Eliasson explained that he did not want people to have any preconceptions: I think there is often a discrepancy between the experience of seeing and the knowledge or expectation of what we are seeing.
The Weather Project, produced as a catalogue to the exhibition, does indeed contain photographs of the installation, and I enjoyed these as a reminder of the experience. And herein lies the problem: How do you produce a catalogue for an exhibition which is essentially to be experienced? And moreover, an exhibition which not only questions one’s sensory perceptions, but also the entire function of Art and Art institutions?
The catalogue of the project describes the entire process of mounting it. It covers such museum operations as brainstorming sessions, staff meetings, through to the publication of information for the press and the preparation of advertising campaigns. The whole is Olafur Eliasson’s vision. Starting from the idea that the institution is first and foremost an organism made up of people, he encouraged the active involvement of the employees of Tate Modern right from the beginning, with “mediation” being a key concept.
With the close co-operation of Susan May, the author of this book and project curator, Olafur Eliasson used the answers to the questionnaire from various departments in the museum. Those represented included Education and Interpretation, Operations and Front House, Communications, as well as the Director of the Tate and the museum’s architect. The discussions examined issues such as representation, experience, interpretation and display, and the discussions are recorded here verbatim, as a “Round Table discussion”, along with the questionnaire.
In his essay, “Museums Are Radical”, Olafur Eliasson critically addresses the broader issues of the museum’s structure and functions, as well as its power to control information or display art in mediated forms of experience. He is clearly also interested in the particular features of the Turbine Hall, especially its gigantic proportions, and the potential of its open, undefined spaces. He views such areas as places of encounter, affirming the social role of the museum, and its function in daily life.
He also examines some of the reasons for his lasting interest in the subject:
“The weather has been so fundamental to shaping our society that one can argue that every aspect of life – economical, political, technical, cultural, emotional – is linked to or derived from it. Over the centuries, defending ourselves from the weather has proved even more important than protecting ourselves from each other in the form of war and violence. If you cannot withstand the weather, you cannot survive.”
Olafur Eliasson uses the subject or theme of weather as the basis for exploring more fundamental questions and ideas he has about Art and society: about experience, mediation and representation, explaining:
“The reason is obviously not because of the relationship between the institution and the weather, but for me it’s the relationship between the institution and society. Fundamentally the work is about people, passing information back and forth, at every stage spreading into the next chain, so that a sort of human nuclear reaction is taking place.”
The catalogue also contains articles by the philosopher Bruno Latour, the geographer Doreen Massey, and a related story entitled, “On Predicting the Weather and the Behaviour of Worms and Human Beings” by the writer Israel Rosenfield. In addition there is an article about “Freak Weather Events and Weather Statistics”.
Some of the articles are interesting, although the language is a little abstruse for those not involved in either contemporary Art or committees. For instance, the response by the Director to Olafur Eliasson’s initial question to the Round Table about how the Tate Modern worked, was:
“I think it’s an interesting concept because you’re essentially unpacking and de-layering the museum, which is itself a construction. We recognise it to be a construction, but we are not always conscious of what the elements of the construction are”.
The discussion followed on in much the same way. Interestingly, this part of the book was printed on very flimsy paper, as if it had been an insert, rather than the heavy glossy paper of the rest of this oversize paperback.
I cannot see a rationale behind including some of these features. It all feels rather random – choosing pieces about the weather to include – to fill a thickish book. On the other hand, I cannot think what would be suitable and appropriate for a book about an Art Installation, so I will keep this rating at my default of three stars.
And I will keep my impression of the experience fresh in my mind for as long as I can. Olafur Eliasson attempted to bring a part of the world into the building, and through the experience and memory of the work, a part of it was taken back out into the wider world by myself, and countless others.
It was mesmerising.
“Every city mediates its own weather. As inhabitants, we have grown accustomed to the weather as mediated by the city. This takes place in numerous ways, on various collective levels ranging from hyper-mediated (or representational) experiences, such as the television weather forecast, to more direct and tangible experiences, like simply getting wet while walking down the street on a rainy day. A level between the two extremes would be sitting inside, looking out of a window onto a sunny or rainy street. The window, as the boundary of one’s tactile engagement with the outside, mediates one’s experience of the exterior weather accordingly.”
A short while before, my brother had asked me, “Are you going to see the Sun at the Tate? It’s said to be huge – massive!” I hesitated, realising that this must be an Art “event”, and thinking I preferred paintings and sculpture. But there he was in the sterile, clinical, environment of a hospital bed, surrounded by unnatural paraphernalia, and enduring what must seem like endless treatments. Perhaps I could share this experience, and tell him about it when I returned … “Yes,” I said.
And it was indeed massive. The “Tate Modern” on London’s South Bank is housed in the old Bankside Power Station, which was decommissioned in 1981. After some redevelopment it reopened as a modern Art gallery, significantly in a new century, 2000. What made the gallery unique was its Turbine Hall; the room which used to house the turbines and electric generators. It is an immense space, which must have given the architects pause for thought.
This unique space lends itself beautifully to Installation Art. The first project of all was a monumental female spider constructed from steel, and overlooking three tall steel towers, each thirty feet high. Entitled “I Do, I Undo, I Redo” by the artist, Louise Bourgeois, the intention was for visitors to climb the staircases to the platforms, and interact. It was open for 5 months, and although it was the very first commission for the new gallery, I carefully avoided that one...
Then came Juan Muñoz’s piece, “Double Bind”, another conversion of the space in the Turbine Hall into several floors; this time playing on perspective and illusion, visibility and invisibility. It incorporated an upper bridge level, from which visitors could see a patterned floor, through which two would elevators rise and descend, in perpetual motion. There seemed to be large black holes in the floor, but some of these were illusions.
The third construction was “Marsyas”, an unnerving fleshy sculpture which comprised three steel rings joined by a membrane or skin of PVC, by Anish Kapoor. The title referred to Marsyas, a satyr in Greek mythology, who was flayed alive by the god Apollo, and Anish Kapoor intended his construction to be “rather like a flayed skin”. After three such challenging installations, perhaps my trepidation about Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project was understandable. But I need not have worried. It was quite simply awe-inspiring.
Unlike our ancestors, we don’t tend to think much about the sun, or live in fear of its power. We forget that it is a fiery ball of hydrogen and helium, on which all life depends. Even though we know that heatwaves can kill thousands of people, it seems unbelievable in the dreary city of London, England, especially in the winter (October 2003 - March 2004, to be exact). But Olafur Eliasson managed to put back some of that primitive feeling; a sense of awe which gladdens your heart. The sun in the Turbine Hall was immense, and demanded your total attention.
We all saw a giant yellow circle suspended in a red-black sky, and the people in the Hall were dwarfed by its presence. I could see them, but they were like diminutive ants, just gazing at the huge ball in wonder. The ordinary had been rendered extraordinary, and it was easy once more to believe that our ancestors worshipped this momentous entity. We had stepped in from the cold dank streets of a London winter, and found ourselves facing a dazzling sun, shining out into an almost duotone setting, its outlines blurred by mist. Walking slowly towards it down the long sloping floor of the Turbine Hall, was a unique experience.
It was the sheer scale of the piece which quickened my pulse rate. Mixed feelings of being in outer space, much closer to the sun – or maybe to Mars – or an alien planet. I felt disoriented, and no longer inside a building. The Turbine Hall is massive: 500ft long and 75ft wide, and Olafur Eliasson had effectively doubled the space, replacing the ceiling with a huge mirror. If you looked up, you could see yourself as one of those tiny black ants.
And yet … just as in the “Wizard of Oz”, I could also see the man behind the screen, metaphorically, and know that it was an illusion. If I tore my eyes away from the glowing ball, I could climb up to another level and look behind to see how the effect was created. I could hear the constant hum of the machinery. I lurched back from these early sun-worshippers to the 21st century. My brain now understood the mechanics of the effects.
At the far end of the hall were two hundred lamps in a semicircle. They were the special type of mono-frequency lamps used in street lights, and were placed behind a translucent screen. The artist had deliberately selected mono-frequency lamps, because they emit light at such a narrow frequency, that any colours other than yellow and black are invisible.
Because of the overhead mirror, made from projection foil, they were repeated to form a vast, dazzling sphere. In addition to this, from the sides of the hall, machines gently blew a ghostly haze, which rose in a gentle gauze. The effect was magical, and hypnotic. Not only that, but it changed constantly, just as the sun and the weather changes in the natural world. This fine mist permeated the space, as if it were creeping in from the winter outside. Throughout the day, the mist would accumulate into faint, cloud-like formations, rising just as outside, before dissipating across the space. Visitors to the Tate would go and “sunbathe” for a while (although there was no heat), lying on the floor to gaze at their own reflections in the ceiling, taking time out from their grey offices, to bask in the seeming beneficence of this solar apparition. Sometimes they would climb the aluminium scaffolding, for a closer view. Newspaper articles reported spontaneous meetings, celebrations, people embracing and enjoying the artificial light - and even episodes of civil protest. It was indeed an “Experience”.
Olafur Eliasson’s creations tend to be elemental and ephemeral. Born in Copenhagen in 1967, the artist is now based in Berlin. His “tools” are not chisels and stone, or brushes loaded with paint, but light, steam, moisture, and ice. During the last two decades he has created rainbows, dyed rivers green, and made water flow uphill. For one of his most popular works “Your Natural Denudation” in 1999, he created a pond in the courtyard of a Pittsburgh museum complete with a geyser which pumped out steam. He loves to make us question what we see, and describes his works as “devices for the experience of reality”. What is the use of a sun which does not generate heat? And what is all the scaffolding?
It is no coincidence that for a commission in Britain, Olafur Eliasson chose the weather as his theme. He was poking fun at our national obsession with all things meteorological. The great eighteenth-century writer Dr. Samuel Johnson said:
“It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.”
Olafur Eliasson is inviting us to reflect on our perceptions of the physical world. He refers to the moment when you pause to consider what you are experiencing, as “seeing yourself seeing”. Perhaps there are other wry unspoken jokes. He began work on the project during a month when the newspapers were full of articles about global warming. Is this then a reference to the idea of sustainable energy, our great “Sun”, housed in a former power station?
Yet much as I enjoyed the installation, this book added very little to my experience. Olafur Eliasson is fascinated by the way museums mediate the reception of art. We have all experienced the way we are offered an array of information before we even see a work of art – from the marketing poster and press reviews, to the “helpful” (if distracting) interpretation text panels, on the walls of the gallery or museum.
Olafur Eliasson suggests that such information overly influences our experience and understanding of the work. In The Weather Project he decided to incorporate these aspects into making an exhibition, so that the experience of the work could be as free from this as possible for the viewer. This book represents part of the extra directed mediation. He conducted a survey of staff at the museum, posing a series of twenty-odd wide ranging questions, examples being, “How often do you discuss the weather?”, “Do you think the weather or climate in any way impacts on your salary?”, “In which season do you kiss someone other than your partner the most?”, to “Do you think the idea of the weather in our society is based on nature or culture?”
The statistical data he collected from this study was then used in the promotional campaign for the exhibition. For example, no photographs of the work itself were used. Instead there were simple statements about the weather on the adverts in magazines, the tube or on the internet. Olafur Eliasson explained that he did not want people to have any preconceptions: I think there is often a discrepancy between the experience of seeing and the knowledge or expectation of what we are seeing.
The Weather Project, produced as a catalogue to the exhibition, does indeed contain photographs of the installation, and I enjoyed these as a reminder of the experience. And herein lies the problem: How do you produce a catalogue for an exhibition which is essentially to be experienced? And moreover, an exhibition which not only questions one’s sensory perceptions, but also the entire function of Art and Art institutions?
The catalogue of the project describes the entire process of mounting it. It covers such museum operations as brainstorming sessions, staff meetings, through to the publication of information for the press and the preparation of advertising campaigns. The whole is Olafur Eliasson’s vision. Starting from the idea that the institution is first and foremost an organism made up of people, he encouraged the active involvement of the employees of Tate Modern right from the beginning, with “mediation” being a key concept.
With the close co-operation of Susan May, the author of this book and project curator, Olafur Eliasson used the answers to the questionnaire from various departments in the museum. Those represented included Education and Interpretation, Operations and Front House, Communications, as well as the Director of the Tate and the museum’s architect. The discussions examined issues such as representation, experience, interpretation and display, and the discussions are recorded here verbatim, as a “Round Table discussion”, along with the questionnaire.
In his essay, “Museums Are Radical”, Olafur Eliasson critically addresses the broader issues of the museum’s structure and functions, as well as its power to control information or display art in mediated forms of experience. He is clearly also interested in the particular features of the Turbine Hall, especially its gigantic proportions, and the potential of its open, undefined spaces. He views such areas as places of encounter, affirming the social role of the museum, and its function in daily life.
He also examines some of the reasons for his lasting interest in the subject:
“The weather has been so fundamental to shaping our society that one can argue that every aspect of life – economical, political, technical, cultural, emotional – is linked to or derived from it. Over the centuries, defending ourselves from the weather has proved even more important than protecting ourselves from each other in the form of war and violence. If you cannot withstand the weather, you cannot survive.”
Olafur Eliasson uses the subject or theme of weather as the basis for exploring more fundamental questions and ideas he has about Art and society: about experience, mediation and representation, explaining:
“The reason is obviously not because of the relationship between the institution and the weather, but for me it’s the relationship between the institution and society. Fundamentally the work is about people, passing information back and forth, at every stage spreading into the next chain, so that a sort of human nuclear reaction is taking place.”
The catalogue also contains articles by the philosopher Bruno Latour, the geographer Doreen Massey, and a related story entitled, “On Predicting the Weather and the Behaviour of Worms and Human Beings” by the writer Israel Rosenfield. In addition there is an article about “Freak Weather Events and Weather Statistics”.
Some of the articles are interesting, although the language is a little abstruse for those not involved in either contemporary Art or committees. For instance, the response by the Director to Olafur Eliasson’s initial question to the Round Table about how the Tate Modern worked, was:
“I think it’s an interesting concept because you’re essentially unpacking and de-layering the museum, which is itself a construction. We recognise it to be a construction, but we are not always conscious of what the elements of the construction are”.
The discussion followed on in much the same way. Interestingly, this part of the book was printed on very flimsy paper, as if it had been an insert, rather than the heavy glossy paper of the rest of this oversize paperback.
I cannot see a rationale behind including some of these features. It all feels rather random – choosing pieces about the weather to include – to fill a thickish book. On the other hand, I cannot think what would be suitable and appropriate for a book about an Art Installation, so I will keep this rating at my default of three stars.
And I will keep my impression of the experience fresh in my mind for as long as I can. Olafur Eliasson attempted to bring a part of the world into the building, and through the experience and memory of the work, a part of it was taken back out into the wider world by myself, and countless others.
It was mesmerising.
“Every city mediates its own weather. As inhabitants, we have grown accustomed to the weather as mediated by the city. This takes place in numerous ways, on various collective levels ranging from hyper-mediated (or representational) experiences, such as the television weather forecast, to more direct and tangible experiences, like simply getting wet while walking down the street on a rainy day. A level between the two extremes would be sitting inside, looking out of a window onto a sunny or rainy street. The window, as the boundary of one’s tactile engagement with the outside, mediates one’s experience of the exterior weather accordingly.”
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