Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, there is something deliciously ironic about seeing Ólafur Elíasson, this Icelandic-Danish artist, playing with our senses like an eccentric physicist in his laboratory. While contemporary art revels in abstract concepts and rare materials, Elíasson manipulates light, water, fog, these elements so ordinary that they become invisible to our eyes tired by screens. That’s where all the splendor and audacity of his approach lies: making us rediscover what we see without ever really looking.
Born in 1967 in Copenhagen, Elíasson is not simply an artist, he is an orchestrator of sensory experiences, a sculptor of environments that transforms us into active participants rather than passive spectators. This transformation is not trivial; it fits into a deep intellectual lineage that goes back to Marcel Duchamp and his rejection of “retinal” art in favor of “cerebral” art. But where Duchamp intellectualized, Elíasson embodies. He brings art back into our bodies, making our sensory perception the true medium of the work.
Consider his emblematic installation “The Weather Project” that invaded the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in 2003. This fake solar light passing through artificial mist created a quasi-religious experience for two million visitors who came to contemplate this simulacrum of a star. I see in it a brilliant demonstration of what the philosopher Henri Bergson called “intuition as method”. In his Creative Mind, Bergson wrote: “Philosophizing consists in inverting the habitual direction of the work of thought” [1]. This is exactly what Elíasson does: he reverses our perceptual habits to allow us to rediscover what we thought we knew.
Bergson distinguished intelligence which “divides, immobilizes, conceptualizes” from intuition which “grasps movement, duration, quality”. Elíasson’s work precisely forces us to leave our conceptual grids to return to direct experience. When he fills a room with colored fog in “Din blinde passager” (2010), he invites us to navigate a space where vision becomes tactile, where sight gives way to other modes of perception. Bergsonian intelligence cuts the world into fixed objects to better manipulate them, but intuition connects us to the uninterrupted flux of reality. Elíasson immerses us in this flux, in this “pure duration” that Bergson considered the very warp of the real.
The beauty of this approach is that it transcends mere aesthetic pleasure to become a true philosophical praxis. When you walk through his “Beauty” (1993), this simple installation where a curtain of water under a projector creates an ephemeral rainbow, you literally experience Bergson’s theory of perception. You become aware that your perception is not passive but active, that it constructs reality as much as it receives it.
But let us not stop at this Bergsonian reading. For Elíasson also operates in the field of theater. His practice resonates deeply with the theories of the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht and his concept of “Verfremdungseffekt”, the distancing effect. Brecht sought to break the theatrical illusion to force the spectator to adopt a critical stance rather than abandoning themselves to emotion. In his Short Organum for the Theatre, he explained: “A distanced representation is one which allows us to recognize the object represented, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar” [2].
Is this not exactly what Elíasson does when he installs his artificial waterfall “Waterfall” (2019) in front of the Tate Modern? He shows us a natural phenomenon while ostensibly exposing its artificial structure, the scaffolding that supports this waterfall. This laying bare of the mechanisms is typically Brechtian. It tells us: look, this is an illusion, but an illusion that reveals something about our relationship to the world.
The mirrors that constantly recur in his work also play this role of distancing. When you stand in front of “Your spiral view” (2002), this giant kaleidoscope that fragments your reflection, you are both a participant and an observer of your own experience. This is precisely what Brecht sought to provoke in his spectators: an acute awareness of their own position. As the dramatist wrote, “Distancing is historicizing, is representing processes and people as historical, hence changeable.”
Elíasson’s entire body of work can be read as a vast Brechtian distancing enterprise applied to natural phenomena. When he dyes rivers green with his uranine (“Green River”, 1998-2001), he literally realizes what Brecht called “making the familiar strange”. The river, an element of the urban landscape that we no longer notice, suddenly becomes visible, strangely visible. Passersby stop, question, emerge from their perceptual lethargy.
This theatrical dimension is also expressed in his collaborative practice. His studio in Berlin, where more than 80 people work, is not unlike a Brechtian theater troupe. From craftsmen to researchers to architects, all participate in the creation of works that are true scenic devices. For make no mistake, Elíasson’s installations are scenes where we are invited to play our own roles, to become aware of our movements, our reactions.
“In Real Life”, his retrospective at the Tate Modern in 2019, was literally a succession of scenes where visitors were placed in different perceptual situations. From the “Moss Wall” (1994) that could be touched to the “Room for one colour” (1997) that transformed everything into yellow and black, each installation was a small piece of sensory theater where the public became actors. As Elíasson himself says, “I try to use light as a material to create a sense of space, but also as a way to suggest that space is always changing.” This dynamic and relational conception of space is deeply theatrical.
And what about “Little Sun”, this commercial and humanitarian project of solar lamps for regions without electricity? Is this not a form of social theater, a way to extend the artistic stage beyond institutional walls to directly transform daily life? Brecht would have applauded this dissolution of borders between art and social intervention, he who dreamed of a politically effective theater.
Elíasson does not merely theorize about ecology and climate change; he acts concretely. His blocks of ice from Greenland installed in public spaces (“Ice Watch”, 2014-2018) allow passersby to touch, feel, see this Arctic ice melt, turning a statistical abstraction into a sensory experience. As Brecht wrote, “Theater must make knowledge possible and make it agreeable.” This is exactly what Elíasson does with these public interventions.
This dual reading, Bergsonian and Brechtian, allows us to grasp the complexity of Elíasson’s work, which operates simultaneously on several levels. On one side, it renews our intuitive relationship to the world, reconnecting us to a direct perception of phenomena (Bergson). On the other, it distances us from our perceptual habits, forcing us to adopt a critical stance towards what we see (Brecht).
But do not be mistaken: despite this conceptual depth, Elíasson’s work remains of a disconcerting accessibility. That is all his genius. While so many contemporary artists lock themselves in an elitist hermeticism, Elíasson creates works that immediately touch the broadest public, while satisfying the intellectual appetite of the most demanding connoisseurs. He is a tightrope walker who walks on the rope stretched between affect and concept, between the immediate and the mediate.
In “Your rainbow panorama” (2011), this circular walkway with colored windows installed on the roof of the ARoS museum in Aarhus, Elíasson offers an experience that is both playful and profound. Visitors stroll in this rainbow corridor, seeing the city transform with the colors. Children run laughing, while philosophers meditate on the relativity of perception. Who other than Elíasson can thus simultaneously satisfy so many levels of reading?
Some might object that this accessibility sometimes borders on the spectacular, even entertainment. One might fear that the “wow” effect of certain installations is reduced to a mere Instagram-worthy wonder. But this is to misunderstand Elíasson’s strategy. If he seduces our senses, it is to better engage our reflection. The sensory beauty of his works is not an end in itself, but a means to bring us to a more acute awareness of our place in the world.
Consider “Riverbed” (2014), where he transported a complete rocky Icelandic landscape inside the Louisiana Museum in Denmark. Beyond the technical feat, this work confronts us with a destabilizing physical experience: walking on unstable stones in a museum, navigating an artificially displaced natural landscape. This cognitive dissonance between our expectations (the smooth floor of a museum) and reality (a rough terrain) provokes an awareness of the conventions that usually govern our behaviors in cultural spaces.
In the line of Brechtian distancing, Elíasson always exposes the mechanisms of his illusions. His installations show us their functioning, refusing black magic in favor of a white magic that reveals its own tricks. This transparency is political: it invites us to adopt the same critical attitude towards the illusions that structure our societies.
Elíasson’s aesthetics, while drawing on natural phenomena, is never naturalistic. He does not seek to reproduce nature but to create situations that question our relationship to it. His artificial waterfall does not imitate a real waterfall, it exposes its artificiality to make us aware of our mediated relationship to nature. As Bergson wrote: “Art is only a more direct vision of reality.”
Elíasson’s work offers us a way out of the double impasse of contemporary art: on one side, conceptual hermeticism that speaks only to initiates, on the other, empty spectacle that aims only at immediate effect. He achieves this feat of creating an art that thinks and makes one think, but that always starts by making one feel. An art that, as Brecht wanted, entertains to better instruct, and as Bergson suggested, reconnects us to the direct intuition of the real.
This is perhaps, ultimately, the genius of Elíasson: making us rediscover that we are not simply disembodied brains navigating a world of abstractions, but sensitive bodies immersed in a physical environment with which we constantly interact. In times of ecological crisis and increasing virtualization of our existences, this lesson is more precious than ever.
- Henri Bergson, Creative Mind, PUF, 1903, p. 213-214.
- Bertolt Brecht, Short Organum for the Theatre, L’Arche, 1963, p. 65.
