Olafur Eliasson: In real life- Exhibition at Tate Modern
Olafur Eliasson is interested in nature and the weather. From the start, he connects his experiences of the Icelandic landscape to the practice of making sculpture. In the last part of the exhibition you can discover “Ice Watch” which was staged in front of Tate Modern in 2018. Is an installation of ice blocks fished from the water off the coast of Greenland. It offered a direct and tangible experience of the reality of melting Arctic ice.
“Rainbow assembly” is an experiment of creating a rainbow. With a darkened space, multiple spotlights illuminate a curtain of fine mist. You have to move and find the perfect spot to see the rainbow, because from certain perspectives you would not see it. This gives the viewer a big responsibility in understanding the artwork. Indeed for Eliasson’s practice the audience is very important, in particular how we perceive and feel the world around us.
Eliasson discovers a special yellow light which deletes all the colors. Under this light you can understand if an object as colors but your eyes can not see them. This experiment makes you not rely on your eyes anymore. This special light makes you even more sensitive about your surrounding and the people around you. These can create a new sense of responsibility in the viewer and associating to art a strong impact.
When the artist was younger he moved to Germany and he assisted the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. The event was very touching and difficult to understand, it was impossible to get the scope of that episode. Years after he decided to make this tangible contest into something more abstract: “Your blind passenger” 2010. This artwork is an aisle of 39 metres long and filled with fog. You can see about 1.5 metres ahead as you go through. Walking through this corridor makes you feel lost and unable to understand what is next to you. This artwork expresses the moment when you experience life and you do not know what will happen, putting people’s experience at the centre of Eliasson’s art.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
He begun to write this novel in 1932 when he moved to Berlin to study with Martin Heidegger, the pioneer of existentialism. Heidegger says “Man's existence lies in its own being” approaching the question of Being, of what it means for something to be. He called the human experience of being Dasein "being-there". Heidegger argued that Dasein is defined by care: a human's practically engaged and concernful mode of being-in-the-world.
Sartre, brings the question of existence to another level: the meaningless of life, exploring the world of Roquentin, the main character. Unemployed, living in deprived conditions, represents a follow-up of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Lacking human contact, Roquentin fully represents the theme of loneliness and isolation.
Roquentin spends his days in the studio writing a book about a spy. Absorbed in his novel he mixes his life with his book's one. Sartre uses the fictionality of his fiction to ask us to reflect on the fictionality, or at least on the arbitrariness of reality itself. Nausea’s subject is the randomness, the contingency, the superfluity of the world, which suits with Roquentin’s own randomness and his contingency as an invented character.
This philosophical novel discusses and dramatizes the logic of a world without meaning. Roquentin is visited by a deeper and more philosophical ailment of what he calls “Nausea”. The main character is affected by his sense of no reason of living. He is simultaneously alienated and over immersed in reality. He feels that nothing looks real and anything can occur and can happen. The main character feels “surrounded by cardboard scenery which could suddenly be removed”. Reality begin to lose his outlines and the boundaries with fiction disappears.
The burden of representation- John Tagg
When photography was invented, in the 19th century, it slowly took the place of portraiture, in particular of miniatures. Baudelaire offers a testimonial of the cult of our own image during the 1859. He was saying that his foul society was admiring its trivial image, like Narcissus. When photography was invented people from all the classes were flung themselves to have a portrait. Now you can have a picture of yourself using your phone. Portraits and carte-de-visite were not object of aesthetical debate.
It took time before photography became a form of art. Photography had a major role in surveillance and records because of its commodity of representation and because it represent a very concise and comprehensive form.
In the 1950s photography, as long as the writings, acquired a dimension of realism in the US. Started to represent a real world with people’s aspirations and faiths. Realism meant documentary value and to be a good photograph, at that time, the image would have not been falsified by exaggerated technical manipulation. At that time photography started to be associated with art, and it's thanks to realism. Every photography must be done deliberately in order that the artist would represent the souls of the city. In each photo, done with sensitive and delicate emulsions to reveal the photo, the moving detail must be balanced with the design and the significance of the subject.
Susan Sontag thinks photography as “the usually shady commerce between art and trough”. Photography has a necessary connection between reality and the lenses. To be a good photographer some technical skills, an eye for composition and a sense of light are necessary. As well as this quality, I think, a photographer must have a strong sensitivity to understand what, once existed, will be a reality that one can no longer touch.