Review: The listening dimension

If Olafur Eliasson wasn't already one of the world's most interesting living artists, he would be my very favorite science museum exhibit developer.

Eliasson's elegant grasp of the connections between art and science are on display in his show entitled "The listening dimension" currently on view at the Tonya Bonakdar Gallery in New York City.

Eliasson says: “The listening dimension emerged against the backdrop of the 2016 US elections. At a time when oversimplification is everywhere, I believe that art can play an important role in creating aesthetic experiences that are both open and complex. Today, in politics, we are bombarded with emotional appeals, often linked to simplistic, polarizing, populist ideas. The arts and culture, on the other hand, provide spaces in which people can disagree and still be together, where they can share individual and collective experiences that are ambiguous and negotiable. At its best, art is an exercise in democracy; it trains our critical capacities for perceiving and interpreting the world. Yet art does not tell us what to do or how to feel, but rather empowers us to find out for ourselves.”

Each of the pieces packs a big visual punch starting with Rainbow bridge, a series of glass spheres that have sections of mirrored, colored, and back pieces placed so that balls of color shift and change depending on your position --- creating eclipses, rainbows, or mirrors.

Three room-sized reflective panels, The listening dimension  (orbit 1, orbit 2, and orbit 3) , form the centerpiece of the exhibition.  As you enter the room you see a set of what appear to be rings floating in space.

But as you approach the reflective walls and look behind, you realize that Eliasson has created a carefully-crafted illusion, and the rings disclose themselves as semicircular tubes mounted to frames behind the mirrored surface.  This aspect of "revealing the perceptual trick" is classic Olafur Eliasson, and one of the reasons I find his installations so appealing.

Behind the mylar

Upstairs, the artist continues to play with light and perceptions. 

Midnight sun creates a visual dialogue between intense light and a concave mirror to give the viewer a sense of peering into a portal to another world.

One of my favorite pieces in The listening dimension is Colour experiment no. 78.

As you enter a room bathed in a yellow sodium light you notice a series of vaguely monochromatic circles.  In the center of the room hangs a long cord with a round knob at the end.  When somebody pulls the cord, a large incandescent lightbulb hanging from the ceiling illuminates and instantly changes the circles to a series of different-colored paintings.

But what really changed?  Colour experiment offers a big Wow! followed by a quieter Aha! as viewers think about and investigate the experiment Eliasson has provided for us.  While the craft of the experience is completely evident, Eliasson also invests time and resources in working with scientists.  This particular piece is the result of Eliasson’s ongoing research into color phenomena, a process that began by working with a color chemist to create colors that match each nanometer of light in the visible spectrum. 



The last piece that Olafur Eliasson has put together is a room filled with point-source lights and the rings from a deconstructed Fresnel lens, of the type found in lighthouses.  Eliasson experiments with combinations and positions of light and lenses to create stunning effects of light, shadows, and spectra.

I really can't say enough about the impact of Olafur Eliasson and his art.  I encourage you to check out his website and to seek out opportunities to view his work in person at galleries or museums around the world.

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Revealing Process to Relieve Museum Visitor Boredom?

Museums are great at showing off end-products, but the process(es) that created those products --- not so much.

Every time I'm in an art museum and hear someone nearby mutter "my kid could do a better job than that ..." I think that if only the disgruntled visitor could get a better sense of HOW the artist created the artwork in question, that they might feel differently.

But in many museums (especially art and history museums) visitors are faced with thousands of items plainly presented with the assumption that any "thoughtful" person will simply be amazed/inspired/transported by what's on display.  And what many visitors often find "boring" about museums is this endless parade of encased or hung objects without any context.

So what's to be done?  I'd say it's no accident that two of the current trends in museums relate directly to this context/process challenge in museum exhibition design:

• The rise of co-curated or community-curated exhibitions deliberately busts the normally opaque process open, and gives people a sense of the messiness involved in creating what often is seen as a tidy end result.  Of equal importance, creative/community partners take tremendous pride and ownership in the end results.

• Maker spaces or design education spaces inside museums (including non-science museums like the Denver Art Museum) give visitors an opportunity to directly participate in activities that interest them and that "pull back the curtain" on many, many aspects of the processes involved in creating products.


Of course large, traditional collection-based institutions may find it hard to pivot toward more process-oriented exhibition experiences.  However, even straightforward approaches in exhibition design can address this. 

Take for example the "Hopper Drawing" exhibition currently on view at The Whitney Museum of American Art.  The basic premise is simple: display classic paintings by Edward Hopper alongside preparatory drawings of those same paintings to give visitors a better sense of the artist's evolving and changing process.

Perhaps if more museums could become as involved in revealing process as well as product, fewer visitors would think of museums as "boring."

Have you visited a museum or exhibition recently that adeptly revealed process?  Then give a shout out in the "Comments" Section below!


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