Word: eliasson
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They opened the faucets Thursday for The New York City Waterfalls, the industrial-strength art project by Olafur Eliasson at four locations along the city's eastern waterfront (see pictures at the Looking Around blog here). Each of them consists of a steel scaffolding between 90 and 120 ft. high, about 27 to 37 meters. River water is pumped to the top and spills back down in a wide cascade that will flow daily...
...rainy morning started with a dockside press conference with Eliasson, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Susan Freedman, president of the Public Art Fund that was the guiding force behind the project. Then the mobile media mosh pit, including myself, toured The Waterfalls from the deck of a Circle Line boat. Something just like it will take people around the sites several times a day between now and when the Falls come down on October 13. If you're familiar with The Maid of the Mist, the boat that tootles around Niagara Falls, you've got it pictured, though Eliasson...
...anything, at a couple of the locations - the ones on the Brooklyn and lower Manhattan waterfronts - The Waterfalls are almost comically thin and humble. This would be in keeping with Eliasson's general practice. Even for a project like this one, in which he's operating within (and undercutting) the Baroque tradition of massively theatrical artworks, the ordinary mechanical workings of his spectacle - the exposed steel framework, the visible spill trays at the top - are deliberately exposed to view. To borrow Frank Stella's phrase, "What you see is what you see." Which, of course, even when Stella said...
...though Eliasson has emphasized how important it is that people enter into the experience of The Waterfalls, that they don't just stand before it as spectacle, the works are hard to engage as anything other than spectacle. They invite but don't allow the immersion that people experienced with Eliasson's own most famous work, The weather project, his hugely popular artificial sun installation five years ago at Tate Modern in London...
...with hundreds of flowing curtains suspended from goal post supports. Both projects put aggressively human devices into a semi-natural setting - a city park, a city waterfront - and invite you to make of that what you will. But I think there will be less opportunity to commune with Eliasson's cascades, which are located mostly in places it's not that easy to reach by foot or bicycle, than there was with the easily accessed Gates, which you could enter simply by stepping into Central Park...