I went back to see Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project again today at Tate Modern and took a camera with me. This is really jonny baker territory but I couldn’t resist posting a picture here. Besides, it seems to me that this sort of art is not without theological import. I don’t doubt that this extraordinary installation will mean different things to different people. But surely it says something about our yearning for transcendence - not just to perceive mystery but to experience it, to be absorbed, overwhelmed, by it. In many ways the responses of people there are as startling as the installation itself.
Bill Viola’s remarkable video work Five Angels for the Millennium has a similar impact, though it’s too dark in there to see people’s reactions. It was still on the 5th floor a few days ago but has disappeared from the Tate website so you may be out of luck. Another video work that impressed me was Mark Wallinger’s Angel - it was that same mystery and transcendence thing.
The Christian Associates study group had a colloquium on the theme of Transcendence in the postmodern matrix. You can read the papers here.
observers, actors and art
I can’t help but agree with you on this one. I myself was fascinated by the way in which people’s experience of the installation varies depending on the time (weekend [lots of children, for example]/week-day [lots of suits on lunch and art students]) and volume of people at the installation itself. The noise in that space played something of a role for me in the piece too. Art here is something of a lived experience. Perhaps it represents the way in which more and more we are beginning to spell out and make explicit our role as actors in settings (the turbine hall, south bank in this case), rather than simply standing observing matters. That said, in the case of this work my comment is held in tension by the clear desire for a kind of self-elevation to the position of observer (the view from the mirrors). We find ourselves suspended between observer and actor in Eliasson’s project, but obviously not in a way that folks have found contradictory or unpleasant.
Oh and the keep an eye on "Angels in America" on channel 4, 9pm on Saturday and Sunday evening this weekend - aside from an all-star cast, reviews seem to suggest viewers could be in for a curious quasi-theological experience! I’d love to know what people think.