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For the next three weeks (until June 30) New York’s Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1 are featuring Take Your Time, a survey-exhibition of works by the Berlin-based, Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. Prior to the show’s arrival in New York, a smaller version of Take Your Time was on exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (where I found myself lost one weekday afternoon in January.) Later this year, four waterfalls (already under construction) will arise out of scaffolding around lower Manhattan—there will be boat tours, environmental protests, and no shortage of scoffing hipsters—and there will be me, wandering, curious but not anxious, telling whomever might listen about Eliasson and mirrors, and why mirrors are like windows to God.
beauty I’m in San Francisco, wandering the galleries of the SFMOMA, traipsing the last two decades of Olafur Eliasson and his workshop’s creations. In one room, a black curtain covers the door; inside, black curtains drape over the walls. At the center of the room, a single light hangs above a thin curtain of mist, while upward-staring faces are aglow and distorted like the faces of saints looking to Christ in a decaying Renaissance fresco. One saint walks through the mist, laughs, and then another walks through. I walk through, and as I enter the light, I see a perfect rainbow form before me in my peripheral vision, as if by magic or divinity. I know it is only an effect of science, light reflecting off the drops of water, nothing particularly special. But the saints march through: a line of rainbow disciples all of them, again and again, through this piece from the early-nineties— titled Beauty. As I move toward the black-curtained exit, I strain from the back of the room to see the rainbow, made slightly visible as saints enter and break the mist, and I think of the millions of droplets, the infinite rays of light, their wavelengths—all of high school science rushes back—and I find myself like these others were, with my head upturned, in awe not of Eliasson but of what he’s made me see. Through this simple process of light reflecting off one thing and than another—and then my eye, retina, and brain—beauty is created. Something as basic as a rainbow is unimaginably complicated, and yet so easy to understand. infinite There’s a line in the hall between exhibits at the MoMA in New York. I walk past with my partner, get in line. A few minutes later we climb some steps to a platform. Before us is a window looking out to the early summer streets three floors below, while in every other direction we are surrounded by flat mirrors at right angles, recessed into the walls so that, where we were standing in line, we had no idea before climbing the platform of what the piece looked like, or what it even was. This is why those who had seen, laughed and smiled when they climbed back down and we moved a little bit closer to the front of the queue. Now on the platform, we are surrounded by our infinite selves, seeing angles, perspectives of our bodies we’ve never seen: above from behind, below from behind, from on top, from on bottom, from a great distance, from miles and miles away, our head a tiny dot of endlessness. I remember reading once that laughter is the natural reaction of our brain when it cannot make immediate sense of something. “Humor,” is, scientifically, confusion. And so we too laugh and smile as we exit, the person at the front of the line wondering, as we did, what the hell is so funny up these steps.  curtains At P.S.1, a giant tilting mirror hangs from the ceiling, rotating slowly. Admirers stare up at their distorted selves. They sway, they swoon, they almost fall over at times. The mirror plays tricks; the world changes. People laugh and smile. Olafur Eliasson likes to make his audience laugh and smile. Through this, he’s a rock star of art. The Old Testament tells us that God made man in His image. Growing up as a Sunday school Catholic boy, this never made much sense to me. How can we all look like God? It makes sense now, but only when I’m happiest and at the lowest point of my staunch misanthropy. It makes sense because we laugh when we see ourselves in ways we haven’t before. When we see some other part of God’s image, we don’t know what to make of it, but it makes us smile. And, in Judaism, after a family member dies, the mirrors of the house of mourning are covered with black curtains or turned to the wall, out of respect for God’s image—for with every death, a little bit of that image is depleted. It is a nice thought, recalling the infinite reflections that make a rainbow, or the infinite ways in which one’s own image can be reflected back with the simple application of a few mirrors. Perhaps Science, Art, and Religion need not always be so separate. - Joe Riippi
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