Art / Olafur Eliasson in the New Yorker

Two win­ters ago, I trav­eled to Lon­don for work. It was cold as hell, as a witch's tit, as the blood that runs in Dwyane Wade's veins dur­ing the fourth quar­ter. The sky was deep gray, hard, heavy and for­bid­ding, and it felt as if it wasn't more than 10 or 12 feet above my head, ready to come crash­ing down at any moment. One after­noon, in a jet-lagged haze, I wan­dered over to the Tate Mod­ern, where it seems they always have some thought-pro­vok­ing instal­la­tion (for instance, Anish Kapoor's gigan­tic lev­i­tat­ing horn which blew my mind for a while), and as I descend­ed the ramp into the muse­um, I was struck by the absolute inver­sion of win­try, out­door Lon­don. I took lots of pho­tos, but none could real­ly com­mu­ni­cate the immer­sive aspect of Ola­fur Elias­son's work, called "The Weath­er Project." It was all reds and oranges, all warmth and mist, envelop­ing you in a hap­py, gauzy glow. Cyn­thia Zarin recent­ly pro­filed Elias­son for the New York­er, and she com­ments that the Weath­er Project cement­ed Eliasson's rep­u­ta­tion in the art world … (Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I can't find a link to the arti­cle online, but by all means dig through back issues of the mag­a­zine at the laun­dro­mat, if you get a chance. The arti­cle pro­vides inter­est­ing insight into Eliasson's process, and includes some fun­ny anec­dotes relat­ing to his impulse to immerse the view­er in an envi­ron­ment. For instance, in mid-long-dis­tance-phone-con­ver­sa­tion with Cyn­thia Zarin, he places his cell phone on the lug­gage con­vey­er belt at the air­port, lets it go around the carousel once, then picks it up and asks her what the expe­ri­ence was like. Hmm.).