We checked out the new show of Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Los Angeles last week. The show is titled “Open” and if you’re in L.A. and there’s only one art exhibition you go to this year, this is the one! GO!
Eliasson presents a warehouse-filling number of large-scale, architectural-like installation artworks that suck viewers into engagements with light — both artificial and natural — and the manifold, clever photonic manipulations through mirrors, glass, color, materials and surfaces and kinetic and kaleidoscopic objects.
You don’t so much view Olafur Eliasson artworks like these as much as you experience them by walking through them, under them, around them, becoming a part of the dynamic. Your presence itself skews the play of light across surfaces and mirrors and its effect on other viewers.
Eliasson has had a love affair with epic creative deployments where light, color, energy and movement collide, evoking the natural world and environment when not directly making it the center of his work. There is technology in the mix here, but it’s usually fairly low-tech and practical, squarely in service of the output, rather than part of a message or merely for the sake of it.
Technology and the natural world do come together in one work that departs from all the others in the show insofar as light, mirrors and glass are absent. It’s a kind of robotic drawing machine titled “Weather-drawing observatory for the future (2024).” It uses changes in real-time local meterological data like temperature to effect the trajectory of a ballpoint pen attached to a robotic arm. The pen moves across a rotating disc throughout the day, a new drawing on a new blank disc for each day of the show, each with its distinct pattern.
GLOBAL GRAPHICA 