take your time

olafur eliasson’s exhibition, take your time, is up at both moma and ps1. i went to the ps 1 exhibition today. (the g train was running regulary this weekend, so brooklyn flea first, then art.)

this is absolutely the worst exhibition photo–the ones on the moma site are excellent but not copyable.

i should say first that i first saw eliasson’s work at the ica boston (your only real thing is time). i dragged along my mother and one of my sisters (who were not so appreciative as i). it struck me that he had re-created something beautiful in nature as an unnatural thing–i mean that, rather than just trying to replicate nature, he made a piece that recalled and used elements of nature but which was definitely a thing made by human appreciation and curiosity. i loved the dark pool of water. and i generally love best the pieces that reveal for us how complicated nature is.

like the waterfall on the ground floor of ps 1. it is a contraption of metal boxes, various kinds of tubing, a pump and water, which bubbles up into each of the small metal boxes and overflows into the metal pool in which the whole things sits (i should be a better describer).  it does only what a spring would do–bubbles water up to a surface–but we see how much that takes. nature looks effortless; eliasson shows us that it is not, and makes it more beautiful.

i also liked the slowly rotating circular mirror that took up most of the ceiling on a room in the third floor, but it’s full worth depended on the audience. when i came into the room, the floor was full of people lying on their backs and looking up into the mirror. after a few minutes, some left and other took their places; the new people were more fun. one man walked himself around while lying on his side. another lay face down and pretended to climb upward on the floor. a little girl could not be coaxed into being silly, but the woman with her held her legs up in the air. i went through again, after looking at the roomsfull of models (impressively prolific, and i like seeing the mind at work) and there was almost no one on the floor. patience may be rewarded in this room.

olafur eliasson is the new york artist this summer–aside from these two exhibitions, the public art fund has organized and is producing four seemingly independently-standing waterfalls mostly in the lower Mahattan waterfront (with a pile of money from, among others, mayor bloomberg). it seems that the gates (that awful series of construction-orange giant croquet hoops conceived of by jeanne-claude and christo and placed in central park) made a bunch of tourism money for the city, and so eliasson has the chance to made something beautiful and profitable this year. i hope that the waterfalls are beautiful and thoughtful, rather than merely ornamental. there are already fountains in new york.