Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Olafur Eliasson: Your Orange Afterimage Exposed/Your Blue Afterimage Exposed

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Olafur Eliasson: Your Orange Afterimage Exposed/Your Blue Afterimage Exposed

by John McGee

Olafur Eliasson, your blue afterimage exposed, 2000 (Image courtesy Masataka Hayakawa Gallery)

Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder in Olafur Eliasson’s current Tokyo show(s). Running simultaneously at Ginza’s Koyanagi Gallery and at Ebisu’s Masataka Hayakawa Gallery, the art experience, the “work” in this exhibition (entitled your orange afterimage exposed at Koyanagi and your blue afterimage exposed at Hayakawa) is a color afterimage produced within the spectator’s eyes. An afterimage results from first staring at a strong color, saturating your optic nerve, and then removing the color stimulus. Seconds later, the eye responds by producing the complementary color--blue begets orange, orange begets blue-- which then seems to float in front of the eye, in the same direction as the former stimulus. Eliasson uses a powerful spotlight to project a 65 cm x 65 cm square of monochrome light (blue at Koyanagi, orange at Hayakawa) onto the gallery wall. A 15-second dimmer slowly raises the light to a piercing intensity and then abruptly shuts off, leaving only the white gallery wall as a background upon which to “see” the phantasmal afterimage. Like the slow buildup of the colored light, the afterimage builds in intensity and, just as quickly, vanishes. 

In installations everywhere from the Venice Biennale to the Sydney Biennial, the young Icelandic artist’s desire to “dematerialize” the art object highlights his interest in the nature of subjectivity and perception. Eliasson says that, “I want them (the spectators) to experience...that it’s important whether they stand here or there for the understanding of their surroundings.” 

To explore these ideas, Eliasson relies on a trio of elements. “I try to create a situation consisting of a spectator, a spatial or contextual situation, and an artifact.... My work is the interaction between these three things,” he says. However, the elements are not of equal importance. Eliasson notes, “the experience is the central part of the work: the spectator is at the center...” He further asserts the primacy of the viewer by often employing the possessive "your" in his titles. Your windless arrangement, an artificial wind piece, and your strange certainty still kept, an artificial waterfall piece, indicate that the perception, the experience of the work is unique and individual, something "you" alone possess, "you" alone create, coaxed, as it were, by his machines.

The second element, context, is broad and variable for the artist. It is not only the physical space of the installation (inside a gallery, in front of a museum), but also the preconceptions of the audience, their recent experiences, their memories, etc. Context, Eliasson says, is “the knowledge of the spectator before seeing the work as much as the actual physical context.” His notion of context thus further underlines the premium he places on viewer subjectivity.

The third element, the “artifact,” may be an open water spigot gushing effusively into an urban street (Erosion, 1997), moss sprouting from the gallery wall (Mossroom, 1994), or a waterfall produced by massive industrial pumps and a pool of water (your strange certainty still kept, 1996). The artifacts are what we usually see in the photographs from his shows. Eliasson asserts, however, that his artwork cannot be reduced to, nor should it be confused with, the material objects alone. In fact, he says, “I try to integrate it (the artifact) to the extent of taking away the objecthood so that it looks like it’s already a part of the existing situation, of the architecture, so it becomes disappearing. That leaves more space for the experience of the spectator.” He continues, “I make a machine and put it in a space, and only when the person walk in, there’s a work.”

Not surprisingly, Eliasson names Robert Irwin and Michael Asher as two artists whose work he admires. In the 1960s, Light and Space artists like Irwin began to address the subtleties of phenomenological experience vis-à-vis art, presenting installations that referred to, utilized, and abstracted effects of the natural/physical world. They also began to ask questions not only about the nature of light and perception, but also about the nature of the art object. Michael Asher, famous for his subtle-to-the-point-of-invisibility installations, addresses the socio-political, cultural, and historical contexts of spaces via “interventions” that raise questions about how institutions frame our knowledge. 

Eliasson updates some of these cultural questions in his dual show(s). The pairing of cross-town galleries parallels the duality of the color image/afterimage in the artwork. Koyanagi Gallery projects blue light (with an orange afterimage) and Masataka Hayakawa Gallery projects orange light (with a blue afterimage). The artist says, “the afterimage [in one gallery] is a window to the other gallery.” They don’t form the same concise, ephemeral complements as the colored lights do, leaving the spectator to consider the relationship between the galleries, or among galleries in general. Indeed, Eliasson states that he wants to “play with the notion of ‘what is a gallery?' and ‘what is an original piece?’” He sees the dual installations as a “game between the galleries but also between the work and the inside (of the spectator).” Although the media of his current show(s) may seem more abstract than natural, Eliasson is known for using a variety of natural elements such as rainbows, ice and moss. However, the artist dislikes the easy prescription that his work is “about” nature. He asserts that, just as Irwin is often misunderstood as being primarily about the aesthetic qualities of California light rather than broader social issues, he sees himself using nature and natural effects as media by which he can address subjectivity and awareness. He uses nature as a medium, he says, because it comes naturally to him and his Northern European sense of space. Furthermore, natural elements lack the elitist punch of paint, thereby increasing the accessibility of his work. As he puts it, “everybody has an awareness about ice, a rainbow.” 

At the same time, though it is a rainbow, Eliasson’s Beauty is clearly not the same rainbow that follows a rain shower. It is, like your orange afterimage exposed, an effect produced by one of his machines. He suggests that his work is neither purely representational nor purely abstract but “hovers between the two, going back and forth all the time.” Ultimately, he sees his work as exploring “the difference between...representation and real knowledge.” As he puts it, “from the knowing to the physical interaction, there’s a big gap.”

This exhibition was held Feb-Mar 2000 at Koyanagi Gallery in Ginza and the former Masataka Hayakawa Gallery space in Ebisu, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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