Waterfalls + Weather and Spice
I will go and visit this Chelsea gallery when I return to NYC.
Ernest Neto and
Olafur Eliasson are both represented by this Gallery.
I very much appreciate the ART of both of these installation artists.
Why, you might ask?
I like the scale, magnitude and ambition of Olafur's work. I like the questions he asks about our environment and how he challenges our senses and interpretation of light and color. His use of mirrors is magical and I feel as if he can bring out wonder and awe in his audiences. It is hard to do anything better than nature itself can do -- but by bringing the sun indoors or by creating false waterfalls -- he is paralleling the success of nature and honoring it's beauty and brilliance.
Ernesto Neto's installation/sculptures I have also yet to see in person. But looking at his sculptures of squishy spice filled pillars stretched and draped around a space inspires the tangible playful part of me. I will include a photo of his after this bit about the Waterfalls and Weather.
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
521 West 21st Street
New York, NY 10011
t: 212 414 4144
f: 212 414 1535
The gallery is open Tuesday - Saturday
Gallery hours: 10am - 6pm
I was reading today about the Waterfalls just placed in NYC -commission by the city for $15.5 million dollars and created by Olafur Eliasson. After doing some online research, I am reminded of his Weather Project that he installed at the Tate Modern in London 16 October 2003 - 21 March 2004. I saw the pictures of it on the wall of my friend Dan Lutzick's wall. I like the Weather Project more than I like the NYC Waterfalls Project. Probably because the enormous sun dominates the space and transforms the environment much more dramatically than these waterfalls.
I have not seen them in person - but here is a photograph of it from the NY Times article I read today.
The NY Times says this about it:
Mr. Eliasson, 41, a Danish-Icelandic artist who was born in 1967 and is the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and the P. S. 1 Contemporary Art Center that closes on Monday, is known for using color, lights, mirrors and natural materials to immerse viewers in sensory-challenging environments.
“The New York City Waterfalls” is also one of the largest works of art, public or otherwise, of our modern era. .) The piece is an heir to the monumental site-specific artworks whose most spectacular examples were made (and in some cases still are being made) in the distant reaches of the Nevada and Utah deserts starting in the late 1960s and the ’70s by earth artists like Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, James Turrell and Michael Heizer. Ever since, younger, less isolationist artists have figured out ways to do something similar in the urban environment, within reach of a large public. In this they have followed the example of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose 2005 “Gates” ostentatiously swathed Central Park in orange.
The waterfalls are an astounding feat of engineering, municipal coordination and fund-raising (given their $15 million price tag). But they are also actually relatively unobtrusive and brilliantly insidious. They go against the grain of the often spectacular nature of quite a bit of the best-known public art, including some made by Mr. Eliasson himself.
Mr. Eliasson likes to think big about ways to enhance the experience of light, space, scale, nature and community. His best known work is the 2003 “Weather Project,” an immense installation of the jaw-dropping kind. Using bright yellow fluorescent lights behind a scrim and a mirrored ceiling, it created an immense glowing sun on the end wall of Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall, while also mechanically adding bits of mist and fog to the view.
A photo of the Weather Project.
The Tate Modern website says this about this installation:
The subject of the weather has long shaped the content of everyday
conversation. The eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson famously
remarked ‘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.’ In The Weather Project,
the fourth in the annual Unilever Series of commissions for the Turbine
Hall, Olafur Eliasson takes this ubiquitous subject as the basis for
exploring ideas about experience, mediation and representation.
In this installation, The Weather Project, representations of the sun and sky dominate the expanse of the Turbine Hall. A fine mist permeates the space, as if creeping in from the environment outside. Throughout the day, the mist accumulates into faint, cloud-like formations, before dissipating across the space. A glance overhead, to see where the mist might escape, reveals that the ceiling of the Turbine Hall has disappeared, replaced by a reflection of the space below. At the far end of the hall is a giant semi-circular form made up of hundreds of mono-frequency lamps. The arc repeated in the mirror overhead produces a sphere of dazzling radiance linking the real space with the reflection. Generally used in street lighting, mono-frequency lamps emit light at such a narrow frequency that colours other than yellow and black are invisible, thus transforming the visual field around the sun into a vast duotone landscape.
The weather
Eliasson views
the weather – wind, rain, sun – as one of the few fundamental
encounters with nature that can still be experienced in the city. He is
also interested in how the weather shapes a city and, in turn, how the
city itself becomes a filter through which to experience the weather.
‘Every city mediates its own weather’, Eliasson has said. ‘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.’ In The Weather Project,
Eliasson has sought to bring a part of London into the building, and
through the experience and memory of the work, a part of it is taken
back out into the city by the viewer.
Experiencing the work
This project is linked to Eliasson’s fascination with the way museums
mediate the reception of art. In a museum, visitors are offered an
array of information before they even see a work of art – from the
marketing poster and press reviews to the interpretation text panel on
the walls of the gallery. Eliasson recognises that this information
influences the experience and understanding of the work. In this
project he decided to direct these less overt aspects of making an
exhibition, so that the experience of the work would be left as
unscathed as possible for the viewer. He conducted a survey of staff at
the museum, posing a series of questions ranging from the everyday to
the abstract (‘How often do you discuss the weather?’, ‘Do you think
the idea of the weather in our society is based on nature or
culture?’). The statistical data gathered from this study was then used
in the promotional campaign for the exhibition. Instead of photographs
of the work, simple statements about the weather can be seen on
advertisements in magazines, taxis or on the internet. Eliasson
carefully chose information which would not prejudice or influence the
visitor’s expectation of the work of art: ‘I think there is often a
discrepancy between the experience of seeing and the knowledge or
expectation of what we are seeing’.
The way in which Eliasson’s works harness the precarious and fleeting aspects of the natural world might initially evoke the spiritual and emotional attachment to nature found in the Romantic tradition. Yet the transcendent experience at the core of this tradition is disrupted in Eliasson’s work by exposing the structure and apparatus delivering the installation: ‘The benefit in disclosing the means with which I am working is that it enables the viewer to understand the experience itself as a construction and so, to a higher extent, allow them to question and evaluate the impact this experience has on them.’ For this reason, as well as Eliasson’s subversive engagement with the construct of the museum, in The Weather Project there is the opportunity to walk behind ‘sun’ to see the sub-structure and electrical wiring, as well as the machines distributing the fine mist.
Eliasson’s impressive installation draws attention to the fundamental act of perceiving the world around us. But, like the weather, our perceptions are in a continual state of flux. The dynamic variations in the composition of the ephemeral elements of The Weather Project parallel the unpredictability of the weather outside, which despite the efforts and sabotage of humankind still remains beyond our control.
here are a few images of older Ernesto Neto installations from the Tanya Bonakkdar gallerywebsite
leaders of brazil’s contemporary art scene.
ernesto neto works with abstract installations
which often take up the entire exhibition space.
his materials are gossamer-thin, light,
stretchable fabrics in nylon or cotton. like fine
membranes fixed to the ceiling by long,
stretched threads his works hang down into
the room and create shapes that are almost
organic. sometimes they are filled with scented
spices and hang in tear-shaped forms like
gigantic mushrooms or huge stockings
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