”I have often referred to my work in a more utilitarian manner,” he says of such functions. “It’s a kind of situational context, and you need people around it. You need temporality and life around it. Without those, there’s not much sense to evaluate the nature of the work. I tend to shift what I call it, but I’d rather use the idea of a ‘device’ than saying ‘a work of art’, because that seems somewhat high-rolling and exclusive.” This approach informs the wide swath of his very prolific and ambitious oeuvre. He speaks about this work with the confidence of a man who has been repeatedly celebrated, and with the humility of an artist simply trying to do something meaningful in the world. The seeming grandiosity of his claims to be “working with what we can call the production of reality” is met by what seems to be an almost ethical belief in the importance of speaking from an art history-informed position. In fact, he’d make a pretty inspiring professor, were he not so busy constructing “devices for the experience of reality”. But even this he approaches with more of a question mark than an exclamation. “It’s really not about how you say what you want to say. It’s really about what and why you say it,” he asserts. “This is not a criteria for artistic quality, but I personally find great potential in being accessible.” This is certainly apparent in his upcoming exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. On view September 8, 2007 through February 24, 2008, before embarking on an international tour, it will be the first major U.S. survey of Eliasson’s works created in the last fifteen years.