One-way Colour Tunnel, 2007. Digital Rendering courtesy of the artist

     The show is called Take Your Time and it offers a direct address to viewers. “It is almost sending out a message that people can read as they want,” Eliasson says. “To take your own time is handing the responsibility for what we say, do, and think on to the people that seem to do all the doing, saying, and thinking.” He suggests that “the museum is sliding into a model in which it suggests how people will use their time (i.e., at what speed or pace they will see the works). This is not any more convenient, but handing back the time to the spectator implies that the spectator has a need to be a proactive element in the show. The show is just a machine. If you don’t engage in it, it won’t produce anything.”
     A team of smart people once determined that museum-goers spend an average of twenty seconds looking at a work of art. The sidebar to this observation is that the spectators are very often rushing past works of art in order to get to the museum store and purchase a postcard that “proves” that they saw it. In this sense, time and consumption are very much linked, particularly at the site of the art museum. That said, there has come to be a sort of status quo in the way people breeze through writing about Eliasson’s work. There’s a sort of fairy tale about him that goes something like this: Eliasson was born and raised in Iceland to Danish parents. His love of the sky and the fact that he grew up atop a giant glacier (exaggerating a bit here) have made him infatuated with ice, water, and the primordial landscape.