YOU MADE ME SMILE, OLAFUR ELIASSON
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A few months ago, here in San Francisco, I went to see the Olafur Eliasson show, “Take Your Time”, at SFMOMA. It is the best show I’ve ever seen in San Francisco, and probably the best one-man show I’ve ever seen, period. Maybe that’s because I’ve seen more review-type shows than one-man shows, especially of contemporary artists, but this thing made me feel so, so good about living in the art world and it gave me hope for art as we know it currently.
This show was so well-designed, so thoughtfully responded to the space of the museum and to the flow of the viewer’s parade through the works, it made me feel like I was being welcomed openly into Eliasson’s process and his state of mind. The show was free of pretense, free of the self-awareness and sarcasm that has pervaded hipster art in the last five-ten years. I’m surely guilty of creating work that’s sarcastic, but I’m trying to move away from that and embrace an open-source philosophy about my work and the world at-large. Eliasson’s show seemed to embody a mentality of openness and interaction (though perhaps controlled, single-channel interaction) without relying solely on technology-based pieces to provoke a viewer-response or interaction.
I highly recommend this show to anyone, now that it’s open again, this time in New York. It’s a playground of serious thought about serious work that is anything but serious.
