| I grew up in Southern California, a place where the car canvassed the land, moved through earthquakes, fires, floods, toxins, and anguished Santa Ana Winds. The romance of the automobile was accompanied by countless films like Rebel Without a Cause, an illusion of freedom, youth, long drives out to the desert or across the border into Mexico, to “see” nature. It is this desire to envision or preserve a landscape that is explored in the two independent exhibits by Olafur Eliasson currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The first, Your Tempo curated by Henry Urbach, includes the first showing of Eliasson’s contribution to the BMW Art Car commission, entitled Your Mobile Expectations: BMW H2R. The second, Take Your Time curated by Madeleine Grynsztein, is a retrospective of work from 1993 to 2007. | 
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Cecilia Muhlstein on Olafur Eliasson
Take Your Time through February 24, 2008 at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art
Your Tempo through January 13, 2008
I grew up in Southern California, a place where the car canvassed the land, moved through earthquakes, fires, floods, toxins, and anguished Santa Ana Winds. The romance of the automobile was accompanied by countless films like Rebel Without a Cause, an illusion of freedom, youth, long drives out to the desert or across the border into Mexico, to “see” nature. It is this desire to envision or preserve a landscape that is explored in the two independent exhibits by Olafur Eliasson currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The first, Your Tempo curated by Henry Urbach, includes the first showing of Eliasson’s contribution to the BMW Art Car commission, entitled Your Mobile Expectations: BMW H2R. The second, Take Your Time curated by Madeleine Grynsztein, is a retrospective of work from 1993 to 2007.
For the interactive Your Tempo, visitors wait to enter a walk-in freezer that contains Eliasson’s reconstructed version of a BMW, while in a subsequent gallery, the Glacier Mill series—a series of photographs of shafts contingent on the melting water of Iceland’s Vatnajökul glacier—address the transformation of the environment through global warming. The museum has blankets on hand for those entering the gallery, which in point of fact is actually a walk-in freezer, or a sort of cryogenic lab. Ice covers a steel frame, replicating hydrogen—an element that powers stars—used to reconsider the use of fuel for racecars (BMW has been using the environmentally cleaner liquid hydrogen in its race cars). Eliasson’s intent here is to think through the dilemma of industry and natural phenomena, and raises the question: Will BMW be able to transform hydrogen fuel into the future of consumer cars or will it remain unique to the racing industry?
Take Your Time continues Eliasson’s inquiry into design and natural phenomenon. The site-specific One-way colour tunnel holds a profusion of color, and leads you to the 360ÃÅ¡ room for all colours, a room with florescent light used to create a gradient across the walls. From the intensity of light, one passes into the coolness of Beauty—a piece where back-lit mist forms an amorphous rainbow.
Eliasson’s work raises many questions, from the topical (issues of fuel consumption) to the existential. But the pleasure of both exhibitions is the experiential.
