Frost Activity: Chilling Icelandic Art Hafnarhus, Reykjavik Art Museum
By Isabelle Schiavi
The first and largest hall of the exhibition, at street level, consists of a cavernous room with a stone floor, seemingly empty. A mirrored ceiling reflects six unembellished concrete columns, effectively doubling the perceived height of the room. The viewer progresses through this open space, as if on stage, with every bodily movement reflected in the ceiling above. Soon, the awareness of one’s own presence comes to fill and dominate this space as it shrinks back to its real proportions. The gaze is then drawn to the floor, a flat tiled surface of Icelandic volcanic rock laid out in a colourful hexagonal pattern, which, when viewed from different angles, appears to protrude and recede in three dimensions. Unlike the columns, the floor is not part of the building’s architecture but created by Eliasson and his long-time collaborator, the Icelandic architect Einar Thorsteinn Asgeirsson. Its pattern evokes columnar basalt, a unique natural feature in the Icelandic landscape which occurs when lava cools, spliters, and hardens into dramatic formations of surprisingly regular hexagonal columns, recalling crystals. The ground we tread on is more than the passive platform for the goings-on of mankind. Although it supports and shapes our movements, it is highly active in itself, driven of its own accord, possessing forces, directions, and movements all of its own.
Eliasson’s interest in the Icelandic landscape continues upstairs where two grids of colour photographs confront each other from opposite sides of a room. One, the Horizon Series, 2002, consists of vast panoramas of unpopulated Icelandic nature. The other, the Reykjavik Series, 2003, comprises straight-on images of varied building types, unrelated in scale, usage or historical provenance. Presented as impersonal, quasi-scientific collections of visual data and recalling the work of the Bechers, both series form part of a larger project that began in1993 to document different features of the Icelandic landscape. This ongoing photographic archive of natural formations indexes the relationship of time and space in human, geological, and metaphysical terms. Here, the natural and the man-made are reconciled: both are revealed as spatial inscriptions of time itself, albeit on different chronological scales.
Your Activity Horizon, 2004, the third room of the exhibition, works to phenomenologically inscribe the viewer’s own perception in the central position. In an empty, darkened room sensations are heightened. Encircling the walls, a sharp horizontal recess has been traced at eye-level and out of it a bright light emanates, bathing the room in its incandescent hue. This colour continuously and subtly changes, revolving through the entire colour spectrum. One is aware of the "artificial" indoor setting, of the neon quality of the light, of the constructed basis of the representation. The overall effect is like watching the last rays of a sunset disappearing over the horizon. Is it possible to have a "natural" experience in an obviously man-made or mediated environment? Eliasson has stated that experience is always mediated, if only through the very act of perception itself. Nonetheless, we experience reality through our bodies’ natural senses and thus every experience is categorically natural. There can be no authentic or inauthentic experience, only shifts in the intensity of perception itself.
In the last two rooms, Eliasson exhibits dozens of quasi-scientific models, plywood and cardboard structures and stands, devised in collaboration with Thorsteinn. These mock-crystalline molecular forms index science’s relentless pursuit to master and conquer the natural while paying homage to the Deleuzian "minor" trades of applied sciences and crafts. These mediums are based on collaboration with, not domination of, nature’s singularities. The artist also provides workstations where we may engage in constructing our own models.
Eliasson continues to maintain strong ties with Iceland, the birthplace of his parents and a source of inspiration for much of his oeuvre. As an ever-evolving land mass in the throes of constant geologic activity and change, Iceland is the ideal location for a show that attempts to rescue nature from its perceived inertia. The show redresses our misconceptions on the subject of nature, culture and our own position as sentient beings within these two mythical constructs.
