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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. |
