feature Olafur eliassOn
above: Open House, Olafur Eliasson’s contribution
to Il Tempo del Postino, Manchester Opera House.
Photo: Joel Fildes
apparently typical of olafur eliasson, we conducted our interview the 1970s, when social-issue plays were staged in public places, such as
on an intercity train, following a run-through of his contribution to shopping centres, often drawing nonperformers, or ‘spect-actors’, into
Il Tempo del Postino, a show of time-based work by a clutch of artists in the debate (a tactic recently adopted by mobile phone companies, who
the Manchester Opera House. Co-produced by Hans Ulrich Obrist, pay performers to talk in bars about their fabulous network contracts).
with overall direction by Philippe Parreno and 10-minute contributions The efforts of a number of these artists to orchestrate socialising
by Carsten Höller, Tacita Dean, Pierre Huyghe and others of a certain contexts have been criticised in recent years for being patronising or for
international standing and social milieu, the piece promised to be like a actually stultifying exchange. A distinguishing factor of Eliasson’s work,
potluck picnic or getting dressed in the dark, with all the serendipity and though, is that he doesn’t consider language the primary socialising
arbitrariness this implies. agent. His installations and events operate on the audience’s sensory
Eliasson’s piece comprised a mirror filling the stage, with the perception, prompting not a conversational exchange but a subjective
orchestra in the pit mimicking any noises produced in the auditorium: psychophysical experience. Although, as Eliasson points out, there is
potentially a theatrical reconstruction of the audience with bassoon no unmediated neutral state of perception in a gallery, as by definition
coughs and viola fidgeting. Rather than allowing their work to become any aesthetic proposition demands sensory manipulation, he tends to
theatre in a traditional sense, Eliasson maintains that all the artists expand effect beyond optical or linguistic cognition. Utopian claims for
involved had simply continued their usual practice. Perhaps this is due art creating solidarity through authentic communal discourse become
to the autonomy of individual pieces and lack of narrative continuity redundant when the subjectivity of perception becomes the means
between, say, Dean’s film of John Cage’s longtime collaborator Merce as well as the subject of an artwork. Collectivity, suggests Eliasson,
Cunningham sitting silently for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, Huyghe’s is more about the production of difference, and yet there remains a
two monsters playing tennis and Liam Gillick’s pianola in a fake misperception that representation in the form of language creates a
snowstorm. But then a narrative arc is not necessarily a prerequisite productive space, when in fact it simply describes a space that remains
for contemporary theatre, and in fact there is much less to distinguish uninhabited. As it was for eighteenth-century romantic ironists,
it from visual art these days. One of the predominant tropes of the such as August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, for Eliasson it is the
artists in Il Tempo del Postino is their assertion of the socialising and employment of the gap between representation and the actual world,
empowering agency of art, which has long been an aim of theatre of between the sun and the evocation of a sun or an audience and their
the left, from Brecht to Invisible Theatre, developed by Augusto Boal in reconstruction, that generates poetic effect.
Artreview 72
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