Issue 14, September 2007

By Sally O'Reilly

Apparently typical of Olafur Eliasson, we conducted our interview on an intercity train, following a run-through of his contribution to Il Tempo del Postino, a show of time-based work by a clutch of artists in the Manchester Opera House. Co-produced by Hans Ulrich Obrist, with overall direction by Philippe Parreno and 10-minute contributions by Carsten Höller, Tacita Dean, Pierre Huyghe and others of a certain international standing and social milieu, the piece promised to be like a potluck picnic or getting dressed in the dark, with all the serendipity and arbitrariness this implies.

Eliasson's piece comprised a mirror filling the stage, with the orchestra in the pit mimicking any noises produced in the auditorium: potentially a theatrical reconstruction of the audience with bassoon coughs and viola fidgeting. Rather than allowing their work to become theatre in a traditional sense, Eliasson maintains that all the artists involved had simply continued their usual practice. Perhaps this is due to the autonomy of individual pieces and lack of narrative continuity between, say, Dean's film of John Cage's longtime collaborator Merce Cunningham sitting silently for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, Huyghe's two monsters playing tennis and Liam Gillick’s pianola in a fake snowstorm. But then a narrative arc is not necessarily a prerequisite for contemporary theatre, and in fact there is much less to distinguish it from visual art these days. One of the predominant tropes of the artists in Il Tempo del Postino is their assertion of the socialising and empowering agency of art, which has long been an aim of theatre of the left, from Brecht to Invisible Theatre, developed by Augusto Boal in the 1970s, when social-issue plays were staged in public places, such as shopping centres, often drawing nonperformers, or 'spect-actors', into the debate (a tactic recently adopted by mobile phone companies, who pay performers to talk in bars about their fabulous network contracts).

The efforts of a number of these artists to orchestrate socialising contexts have been criticised in recent years for being patronising or for actually stultifying exchange. A distinguishing factor of Eliasson's work, though, is that he doesn't consider language the primary socialising agent. His installations and events operate on the audience's sensory perception, prompting not a conversational exchange but a subjective psychophysical experience. Although, as Eliasson points out, there is no unmediated neutral state of perception in a gallery, as by definition any aesthetic proposition demands sensory manipulation, he tends to expand effect beyond optical or linguistic cognition. Utopian claims for art creating solidarity through authentic communal discourse become redundant when the subjectivity of perception becomes the means as well as the subject of an artwork. Collectivity, suggests Eliasson, is more about the production of difference, and yet there remains a misperception that representation in the form of language creates a productive space, when in fact it simply describes a space that remains uninhabited. As it was for eighteenth-century romantic ironists, such as August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, for Eliasson it is the employment of the gap between representation and the actual world, between the sun and the evocation of a sun or an audience and their reconstruction, that generates poetic effect.

This year the Serpentine Gallery pavilion, designed by Eliasson in collaboration with the architect Kjetil Thorsen, will attempt to become just such a place of production. Instead of the usual verbal representations delivered with varying levels of formality, from boozy chats to lectures, Eliasson intends to fill the programme with experiments. Now, I have reservations when the words 'experiment' and 'research' are used by artists. If artists truly did conduct laboratory-style experiments, they would be dull artists indeed, employing a prescribed method over and over to prove a statistical or behavioural norm or anomaly. Perhaps the term 'investigation/demonstration' would be a more accurate, if less wieldy, way to describe the tabletop activities in the pavilion, as it suggests a procedure much more in line with that of art, where an outcome may be speculated upon, even known beforehand, or it might be a total mystery until it happens. This may seem a touch pedantic, but it is an important point when thinking about collaborative use of social space that extends activity beyond the realm of representation into that of experience.

Durational time, insists Eliasson, is at the root of this phenomenon, as it drags us away from the abstraction that language constructs and tethers us to: "The moment we sit down and try to find a truth, we think we have left this idea of constructed reality, and I think that is always counterproductive," he says. Henri Bergson's identification of durational and abstract time becomes useful here. In Creative Evolution (1911) he asks us to draw a line with a pencil on paper with our eyes closed. When we open our eyes the line represents the abstract time that corresponds to the durational time we experienced. It's a simple idea, but its consequences are far-reaching, an aspect of which was perfectly demonstrated on the train, as luck would have it, by a conversation at the next table between a businessman and his office junior (or perhaps they were Invisible Theatre performers hired by Eliasson to make his point):
Junior: Ooh, look at this car. What a beaut.
Businessman: Mmmm, classic isn't it.
Junior: Timeless. It says that right here, look: 'a timeless classic'.
Businessman: Well, that's what they say. I mean, it isn't really timeless, is it? It's not a car for all times and it won't last forever, they just want you to think that if you pay that much now it’ll be worth that much tomorrow. That's what they're implying by the word 'timeless'.
Junior: Nnnnnngh… [mouth full of mashed potato flavoured crisps]
Businessman: They could say, 'This is going to be a very nice car tomorrow' if they wanted to attract speculators. As J.K. Galbraith pointed out, financial euphoria before a drop in the market is always based on mass speculation on something apparently new.
Junior: Yes, it's called the futures market, after all. Not the pasts…
Businessman: But we're talking utility here. The buyer would want to use the car now; it's not symbolic of something notional to be sold on later. But by showing us a picture of a nice shiny car that will stay that way forever in our memory, they are indeed showing us a timeless car.
Junior: Not quite what you get then, is it? Want a crisp?

Value, suggests Eliasson, is conferred upon the image rather than the experience of the object itself, on Bergson’s drawn line rather than the time lapsed. The trick is to try and preserve the full dimensional experience of an artwork without it being involuntarily flattened into the timelessness of historiography. Depriving an artwork of time, Eliasson warns, locks us into a perspective grid and denies its production of difference and the 'parliamentary thinking' required of a productive space. His programme for the pavilion, then, endeavours to demonstrate rather than illustrate ideas, to produce events based on actions in time rather than the abstracting effect of language.

In light of the inherent problem of image and language, Eliasson's approach to making a survey show at SFMOMA in September, which will go on to New York and Dallas in 2008, is to reinterpret the works each time, changing the lineup so that it is clearly a new show, not a static retrospective – an idea he likens to making a series of mix tapes from the same record collection, drawing out different cadences each time. What's more, like all performative work, from the most chaotic improvisation to tightly scripted theatre, each outing will essentially make for a different piece, as the subjectivity of the viewer eclipses any essentialist tendencies of the museum. Eliasson's enduring project, it would seem, is to use movement, change and differentiation to turn us all into spect-actors.