Eliasson: Nature as A Special-Effects Show

At MoMA, the Artifice of Light & Water

Olafur Eliasson is the other foreign superstar getting big play, and drawing crowds, in New York right now. His splashy retrospective fills huge spaces at both the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan and at PS1, the center for contemporary art in Queens.

This Danish artist might be almost the anti-Murakami. His art seems to address lofty, timeless ideals rather than our present commodity culture. It is often too big and ambitious to buy.

By far his most famous installation looked something like an artificial sun, 50 feet across, installed high up in the soaring Turbine Hall of London's Tate Modern museum. Vast throngs showed up to soak under its light.

The works at MoMA include a curtain of strobe-lit water in which drops look frozen in mid-fall. There's also a hallway with narrow-spectrum lights that make the people in it seem to be in a movie playing out in black and white. (The work's placement near MoMA's photo galleries makes it particularly effective.)

At PS1, Eliasson's got a wall of mist with lighting that yields an artificial rainbow. There's also a room with a light-box ceiling that duplicates a sky full of clouds, and the ever-changing illumination leaking through them. There's even a work usually described as a waterfall that runs backward.

In June, Eliasson is due to install four more artificial waterfalls in the East River, this time running in the usual direction but as much as 120 feet high.

Where Murakami's art revels in the worst of the man-made, Eliasson's often invokes the purity of nature, and even strives to duplicate some of its most pristine phenomena.

Which, strangely, can make the work seem more artificial than Murakami's.

Eliasson's pieces generate spectacular, crowd-pleasing sensations whose closest analogues aren't found in nature so much as in Hollywood. At its most impressive and popular, his is an art of special effects. Which means that it can feel deliberately deceptive; it seems divorced from reality, rather than out to explore and expose it.

Despite a sense that the work sets out to worship nature, it is technology that seems most fetishized in it. In his frozen rain shower, we're as aware of the power of strobe lights as we are of the water drops they freeze. His cloudy sky is as much an impressive light fixture as it is a picture of a landscape that asks us to look up.

In its weaker moments, the Eliasson retrospective feels like a trade show for the latest in consumer gear. It's as much about the gadgets themselves as any truly important needs they fill. It seems to buy into the culture of technology rather than question it.

The retrospective is better when its projects fail. When you first hear about that up-flowing waterfall, for instance, you expect something grand. Instead, it's just a crude scaffolding supporting a series of metal tanks, and jets of water shooting up from one to the next. It is a cruddy fountain rather than a reverse Niagara.

Like several other of the best artworks in the show, it makes its mechanisms absolutely clear. Their failure to compete with nature is more enlightening than the show's most successful special effects.