Olafur Eliasson: Ice Watch 2015
Timothy Morton has written a very interesting book on the relationship between object orientated ontology and eco-awareness. In his book 'All Art is Ecological' he suggests that one of the biggest problems facing artists when dealing with global warming and its consequences is that it is such a big issue that rather than confront it, we are tempted to simply ignore it.
Morton worked with Olafur Eliasson during the 'Ice Watch' project. Eliasson worked with a geologist in order to understand the implications of ice melt in the Artic and in order to raise awareness of the problems associated with rapidly melting ice sheets, he then transported12 glacial ice blocks from Greenland to the centre of Paris. At the same time the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference was being held in Paris and the ice blocks were arranged in a circle to symbolise how little time was left for action. Rather than a diatribe against the inaction of global leaders, Eliasson's work was a poetic spectacle, that allowed people on the streets of Paris to touch and engage with 25,000 years of frozen water. All the data, news, and scientific papers in many ways went over people's heads, but the poetry of frozen ice blocks suddenly appearing on the streets was much more affective in raising media attention about the problem and helping people to find an image around which to develop their own thoughts about it. This was six years ago now and a new summit is about to start, many people believing that far too little has been done since then, but that doesn't mean we should all just give up and ignore the issue.
Eliasson works in a space between design and fine art, which it is what I have in the past referred to as 'disegno'. An old term, but one that allows for a practice that uses drawing as a problem solving or planning tool and which if you go back to its original use during the Renaissance, allowed for a practice that could include painting, sculpture and architecture, which were the main visual arts of the day, and which in my mind now includes video, film and computer based technologies. The point being that behind the use of any technology there will be a thinking process and drawing, in its many guises is still a powerful thinking tool. This definition is useful to me and hopefully to others who believe that fine art practice should be be able to respond to societal change and be able to reflect on big issues such as sustainability, gender assignment, post-colonialism and eco-awareness.
Timothy Morton was asked by Eliasson to help shape the various texts emerging from his intervention and as Morton was already known for his use of object orientated ontology (OOO) as a philosophical framework or lens through which to see what was happening, it was also understood that a particular non-human centric response might be developed. The world seen from the point of view of the ice, from the pavement, from the pigeons flying past and from various insects interacting with a change in Parisian temperature and moisture, was just as or even more important than the responses of people to an encounter they had not previously expected to have.
Eliasson presented his work in the form of a lecture to the assembled climate change dignitaries and at the end of his presentation, he cited a passage from Lynn Margulis’s book Symbiotic Planet.
"We need honesty. We need to be freed from our species-specific arrogance. No evidence exists that we are “chosen,” the unique species for which all others were made. Nor are we the most important one because we are so numerous, powerful and dangerous. Our tenacious illusion of special dispensation belies our true status as upright mammalian weeds". Lynn Margulis
"We need honesty. We need to be freed from our species-specific arrogance. No evidence exists that we are “chosen,” the unique species for which all others were made. Nor are we the most important one because we are so numerous, powerful and dangerous. Our tenacious illusion of special dispensation belies our true status as upright mammalian weeds". Lynn Margulis
Lynn Margulis points out in 'Symbiotic Planet' that human beings are no more than large moving carriers designed by bacteria for bacteria, and that most of evolution can be regarded as a process led by and carried on by bacteria. The more, she points out, that we are aware of this, the more we might see ourselves as in a symbiotic relationship with nature and be more prepared to give up our search for control over nature and accept that control over nature is a dangerous illusion.
Eliasson demonstrates the need for collaborative working, he also shows us that an artist can work in a variety of ways. The artwork he points out needs to have a life of its own, one that touches on a magical thing like 'beauty' in all its strangeness and awe. He is also aware that art on its own needs to be supported by other means and ways of getting an idea across, so he also gives talks and lectures, which themselves he points out, need to be delivered more as poetry than as factual documentation and protest.
Morton explains the way art works in a way that reminds us of much older forms. He reminds us that Plato thought art was inherently disturbing and 'demonic'. (P. 67)
(All quotes in this section taken from Timothy Morton (2021) All Art is Ecological London: Penguin)
An artwork Morton states, 'does something to you'. By this he means that art reminds us that non human things can also have agency. If we can be affected by a carving or coloured marks on a surface, then we should equally be affected by an animal or a rock. Communication is not, suggests Morton, all about human to human exchange, it is about the interconnected network of everything communicating to everything else. As Morton also points out, (P. 63) "A plastic bag isn't just for humans. It's for seagulls to choke on" as well.
Morton uses the term 'thinkfeel', which is about 'grasping the ungraspability of a thing'. He refuses to separate out 'beauty' from 'usefulness', because it is 'wild, spectral, haunting, irreducible, uncanny and causal.' He scraps the art v craft v design distinctions, seeing them as political, and reminds us that we have to choose what we care for. 'You have to 'design your street knowing that, at some point, frogs are going to be crossing over it... At some other point a glint of light will reflect off a small puddle of water, blinding a driver and killing a pedestrian.' The universe we are reminded, was never going to be formatted by human desires. Because of this art should include those things we cant control, and 'must include ugliness and disgust, and haunting weirdness and a sense of unreality, as much as of reality. (P. 80). Once we start embracing difference not as a rigid separation but as uncanny affinity, ... we see that humans are more like non-humans, and non-humans are more like humans than we think'. (P. 81)
Morton reminds us that we are frightened of been regarded as objects. He turns this around and suggests that if only we could simply accept that we are just like all the other things in this universe, simply an 'object', then we would begin to finally accept our proper place in the scheme of things. Equality, he suggests, begins in recognising the purchase things have on us and how we are inseparable from our complex interconnectedness with other things. If we cant treat other people with equality, this may reflect the fact that we are too myopic to see that small on-coming bacteria filled puddle of water, that will be the end us.
Boat drawing: Olafur Eliasson in collaboration with Elias Hjörleifsson, 1998.
Although mainly remembered in England for his weather project tenure in the Tate Turbine Hall, Eliasson has for many years used drawing as a way to reflect upon his awareness of the world and our human place within it. This boat drawing (above) was the result of a coordinated approach to drawing that Eliasson produced in consultation with his father, Elias Hjörleifsson, who was an artist as well as a sailor. Hjörleifsson, working from instructions supplied by his son, created the drawings on the boat where he worked. He dipped a ball of about 3 cm diameter into black ink and allowed it to roll across a sheet of paper, following the motions of the boat for a time jointly agreed on by him and Eliasson. According to Eliasson, these works had cosmic attributes, as they illustrated the varied and unpredictable movement of the ocean but they also for Eliasson contained traces of the everyday, since they were created by his father Hjörleifsson during the course of a normal work day.
As a model for how to produce work that responds to our current changing world, Eliasson's practice is very interesting as it begins to break down distinctions between art and design. I strongly believe that art and its uses and as well as its definition are all being questioned at this time, and that that is a good thing, even though it might also be slightly unnerving.
Olafur Eliasson: The weather project: Tate Modern
References:
Timothy Morton (2021) All Art is Ecological London: Penguin Green Ideas
Lynn Margulis (1999) Symbiotic Planet New York: Basic Books
See also:
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