I just received an invitation to Olafur Eliasson and Ma YanSong’s Feelings are Facts at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, in Beijing.
The press release notes that “Feelings Are Facts showcases the first collaboration between world-renowned Danish-Icelandic artist, Olafur Eliasson, and leading Chinese architect, Ma Yansong. Their collaboration is specifically designed for UCCA’s big hall inviting the Chinese audience to enter an endless space of fog, with color emanating from fluorescent tubes of red, green and blue. By moving about in the locations where the colors blend, viewers will endlessly creates their own color spectrums.”
“Here the spectator, rather than simply viewing an art object from the outside, surprisingly witnesses himself becoming an integral part of the artwork. The dialogue between Olafur Eliasson and Ma Yansong has invented an inspirational synergy between nature and our current urban environment, allowing the viewer a new perceptual encounter with himself.” says UCCA Director, Jérôme Sans.
I gather the installation was specially crafted to fit the Big Hall of the UCCA, the dimensions of which were altered by substantially lowering the ceiling and constructing an inclined wooden floor. Basing this project on a series of previous experiments with atmospheric density, Eliasson introduced condensed banks of artificially produced fog into the gallery. Hundreds of fluorescent lights have been installed in the ceiling as a grid of red, green, and blue zones. By permeating the fog, these lights create colored walk-through spaces that, in Eliasson’s words, function to ‘make the volume of the space explicit’.
It’s hard not to see the similarity to the work of Ann Veronica Janssens and her exhibition Are You Experienced? at Valencia’s Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló in February 2009. The EACC exhibition consisted of three enveloping sensorial installations of sound, color, and light. Included were the artist’s mist sculptures disorienting participants with a sensation of submersion or suspension in pure color.
Olafur Eliasson has created an interior light and fog piece that is remarkably similar to Ann Veronica Janssens installation. For me this raises the spectre of originality: zeitgeist and precedents. Is it possible to be original these days and does it matter- or could we argue that coloured light in mist is just in the air these days as a zeitgeist- a spirit of the times.
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Creative Commons Zero is a radical solution for artists.
Rather than let lawyers decide what we can and cannot use within our artworks, Lawrence Lessig and his colleagues at Creative Commons have come up with a number of licenses that allow copyright holders to choose from a range of permissions for copyright designations that can be assigned publicly to our artworks.