On a recent trip to San Francisco, I was delighted to find several fresh exhibitions on the upper floors of SFMOMA. Among them was a retrospective of Jeff Wall's photography, displayed in very large format on light boxes. Complementary to these works, there was a thorough survey of historical and contemporary photography which, curiously, housed a 90's era (still fresh) Rirkrit Tiravanija video depicting post pubescent Scots and Brits dancing and acting awkward in front of the camera while trying to connect to the house music in another room.
On the top floor, Danish artist Olafur Eliason's works fill the space, splayed out like the very guts of our planet. A lovely architectural feature of SFMoMa's top floor is the suspended walkway with grated floor that must be crossed before entering the top floor exhibition space. On the ascent, you'll pass remnants of a Matthew Barney action, climbing wall pegs and a scrawled drawing in a place that can only be reached by rope. When you reach the top level, a blue red spectrum, crystalline cave/tunnel await your entry and on the other side, you've entered Olafur Eliasson's world.
Eliasson's work is friendly, interactive, and at points as I wound my way through the exhibition, I felt a bit more like I was at Epcot Center or a science fair than at a major artist's exhibition. In the same breath, the integration of engineering, technology or science is an element of dialogue in fine art that I find very valuable, because it is both populist and accessible due to the mass appeal of popular science and the cross-over audiences that it attracts on the one hand, and on the other because some of the optical effects that are wrapped up in cognitive science's discoveries are really, really cool. One of the coolest examples of cognitive op/art/science in effect in the exhibition is the Room for One Color. In this room, once your eyes have adjusted and you can actually believe that you're perceiving what you're perceiving, everyone and everything that you see, excepting the light of course, appear black and white! In an adjacent room a hole is cut in the wall... you stick your head through the hole and it is a hall of mirrors framed in the blackness of an endless chasm. You can see yourself and whoever sticks their head through the hole, and the light coming through the hole itself thousands of times in every direction, becoming more faded and smaller as images of your moving self in real time move into infinity. These two pieces described were the greatest works of the show in my opinion. But the whole show wouldn't be complete without all the parts. What might have been better undone? The wooden plank room in the back. Phenomenal, but a little gimmicky.
On the whole, Olafur Eliasson, a refreshing populist artist who wants to make people happy.
