This story sort of melts under closer scrutiny. “I’m not primarily interested in nature,” he clears up, “I’m primarily interested in people. Nature holds a dominant position in art history, so it’s hard for art historians to go down that path. My interest in nature is, of course, autobiographical; but on the other side there is something which is very broad. Everyone has an opinion about a rainbow and has a relationship with rain. When I do a project using some kind of commonly known phenomena, it gives me a broad accessibility to that.” In other words, the critics have gotten things only half-right, because they are as invested in the fairy tale of art historical discourse as they are in the one about Olafur Eliasson, Nature Boy.
     There are other strong references for his work, ranging from the laboratory-like experimentalism of old school arte povera to the more contemporary context of participatory media and internet-based work. “I think today it has become more common to look at art as a participant in the world, rather than a picture of the world. The formal language in which you work has become secondary to what you want to achieve. The media is not the core of my work. The media is the stuff that integrates the content into reality.”
     This work also evokes the exciting period in which ocular novelties were popular, just prior to the development of film. Like the flip-books, kinetoscope, and panorama of the late 1800s and early 1900s, most of Eliasson’s works put the thrill of looking on display — not as something to gaze at, but as something to throw your body into. His 360° Room For All Colours (2002) invites visitors to stroll around its circumference, their eyes responding to its control of the perception of color as a phenomenon. Multiple Grotto (2004) is a large freestanding object that challenges the notion that works of art are to be seen from one vantage, or one point of entry. Shaped like a giant rendition of a child’s toy jack, the interior of the object resembles a kaleidoscope in which the fractured image of one’s peeking is a core component of the vista.
     Even for someone as interested in spectatorship as Eliasson, this is a precarious model of consumption. Most of the time, his “devices for the experience of reality” do not hang on a museum wall. “The issues I use as a method are often related to the dematerialization of the object; suggesting a methodology of using natural phenomena.” Multiple Grotto is actually one of the few works in which Eliasson sculpts an object as much as a situation.
     However, concurrent with Take Your Time at SFMOMA, the architecture and design gallery will feature Your Tempo, an exhibition of the work produced through Eliasson’s participation in BMW’s Art Car program, including Your Mobile Expectations: BMW H2R Project (2007), which reminds visitors that the need for speed leads to environmental damage.