Orientaciones para el desarrollo de la evaluación didáctica

The work of Olafur Eliasson is of particular interest to me, not only for his concern with how perception of ‘landscape’ can be transformed into an immersive environment, but also for the philosophy that underpins his practice. The idea of the ‘living edge’ is fundamental to his work, described eloquently in the following passage about Notion motion [Figure 22], in which the viewer’s participation is an essential component of the work:

Located fully in neither the object nor the actions of the subject, the piece is situated instead in an elastic unfolding ‘between the spectator and the machine’- in experience. Ultimately Notion motion proposes an evocative cancellation of the line along which each body understands itself as apart from its surroundings, a reduction of our estrangement from a now more fully enveloping universe. Eliasson describes his works as “devices for experiencing reality,” and that reality is not to be found either inside or outside the body. It lies at the living edge between the haptic self and a heterogeneous

78 _{Ibid., p. 341.}

22. Olafur Eliasson, Notion motion (2005), MI spotlights, tripods, water, projection foil, wood, nylon, & sponge. Installation view, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, on loan from H+ F Mecenaat.

and constantly changing universe, in an encounter somewhere between a concrete event and a luminous apperception. What the works compel, then, rather than any settled endpoint, is a process of negotiation. The philosophy posited by Notion motion stands at the heart of Eliasson’s entire enterprise, which at its core coheres clearly and powerfully as a serious argument for an embedded and exhilarating being in the world.79

The idea that we are all inextricably entwined with the environment that surrounds us is designed in his work to empower and humble – it seems to suggest that we have the potential to affect our environment through our perception, but that the environment is also indivisible from us. The work of Eliasson prompts the viewer/participant to question the normative or habitual processes of perception by creating devices and environments that instil a heightened sense of the self in the act of perceiving.

In the work Room for one colour [Figure 23], Eliasson, deploys a chemical response in the human retina that creates an afterimage of the opposite colour to the one to which it is responding. In a room that is saturated with yellow light emanating from a ceiling hung with a bank of monofrequency bulbs80, the viewer is immersed in a three dimensional field of yellow light. Neurologically, the brain/eye reacts by compensating for the lack of other colours in the room, which produces the effect of seeing a white wall outside the installation room bathed in a deep purple. This effect, like many in Eliasson’s constructions, is reliant on the spectator’s visual processing being intrinsic to the aesthetic experience. Thus it can be understood in a very compelling way that the artwork is not the object in the outside world, and it is not purely within the mind of the viewer. Rather it is a simultaneous interaction between the spectator’s mind and the outside world; an intra-action that cannot exist independently of the agencies involved. In this way, his work epitomizes the proposition that the human and non-human worlds are inextricably intertwined and that this interconnection can be expressed as a single interconnected space. By placing the viewer in a principal role of the aesthetic production of the artwork:

79 _{Grynsztejn, M (ed.) 2007, Take your Time: Olafur Eliasson, Thames and Hudson, New York, p. 18.}

80 _{The explicit exposure of the apparatus in the production is a trademark of the artist; the objective being to expose the mechanics of the ‘experience’}

and thus ask the viewer to question their own perceptions of what is ‘real’ and what is manufactured.

23. Olafur Eliasson, Room for one colour (2005), monofrequency lights, Malmö Konsthall, Sweden.

Eliasson thus makes the spectator’s visual processing part of the aesthetic equation, opening the space of his work to the generative working of human vision and in turn interweaving body and room, ‘external’ events and ‘internal’ sensations. Meanwhile the work of art itself becomes the interface between the site and subject and an emergent property of both. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote on perception generally, ‘The properties of the object and the intentions of the subject…. Are not only intermingled; they also constitute a new whole… it is impossible to say which started first in the exchange of stimuli and responses.’ Room for one colour invites us to see that the

substance of experience is not prescribed but rather corporeally enacted from moment to moment, a realization that is subsequently available for transposition to the world at large. This perceiver-dependent world – proof positive of our capacity to influence what influences us – makes us aware that if reality may be in part a given, we can continually negotiate and widen the field of possible experience.81