Jacqueline Burckhardt Ol afur Eliasson’s ‘Oscill ation bench’
Olafur Eliasson, born in 1967, is a Danish-Icelandic artist based in Berlin where he operates a gigantic studio in Pfefferberg, a converted beer brewery. With a staff of some 90 people, he works on numerous and often extremely complex projects located all over the world. As in a laboratory or an architectural office full of sketches and models, his staff do research on a wide variety of scientific, physical, optical and cosmological phenomena, while in the large kitchen, organic vegetarian meals are prepared every day for the entire team. Eliasson considers cooking a creative, experimental undertaking and eating together a ‘social glue’. From 2009 to 2014, he conducted a pilot project on artistic research and teaching in his studio, the Institute for Spatial Experiments, under the aegis of the Berlin University of the Arts. Periodically he also publishes the magazine ‘TYT’ (an acronym for ‘take your time’), a forum for thoughts and comments on work underway in the studio. Issue number five was devoted exclusively to the kitchen and cooking recipes. In 2007 Eliasson started work on his project for Park Süd of the Novartis Campus. ‘Oscillation bench’ is embedded in landscape architect Günther Vogt’s park next to the building by Herzog & de Meuron. Vogt designed the park with a view to the ideal landscaping of 18th-century English gardens. It is a boldly condensed narrative of the Rhine from its source in the mountains to its ocean delta. He has permitted the fictional riverbed to dry up and laid out its course at a right angle to the real flowing Rhine, so that the latter plays the role of the ocean in his scenario. Walkers in their Seven Mile Boots explore the typologies of the landscape in time-lapse as it were, discovering a wealth of meticulously cultivated details, precisely placed stones and erratic blocks, terracing and accurately modelled strata of sedimentation, the whole interspersed throughout with richly varied vegetation. On the way, they encounter works of art: Ulrich Rückriem’s stone sculpture ‘Breakwater’; Eva Schlegel’s airy, glazed corridor with lettering silkscreened on the panes of glass; Dan Graham’s disconcerting mirror pavilion; Peter Regli’s ‘Bee Opera’; and now, down on the banks of the Rhine, Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Oscillation bench’. As friends and kindred souls, Eliasson and Vogt have long been experimenting with different forms of collaboration, as in 2001, when Vogt created the landscaping for Eliasson’s major exhibition, ‘The mediated motion’, mounted at architect Peter Zumthor’s Kunsthaus Bregenz. Now it is Eliasson who demonstrates their affinity in his response to Vogt’s park. His poetic and paradoxical image shows a gigantic drop petrified at the moment when it hits the water and produces expanding concentric ripples; it represents a fleeting moment that a camera would capture in a split fraction of a second. Now, captured in stone, it has become solid and manifest for ever. Eliasson’s colossally enlarged drop of water responds to Vogt’s wayward treatment of scale in his dramatically condensed landscape, additionally drawing attention to the might of natural forces in the face of which we humans are mere Thumblings. In the core of the sculpture, the drop recoils to form a table that is slightly concave so that rain and melting snows remain for a while, as they do in the valleys of the ripples around the seating, where they reflect the sky and the world. The weather and the elements join in contributing to the work while the sensual impact of the deliberately staged reflections confound perception, undermining assumptions about levels of reality and luring us into self-reflection.
19