“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, September 21, 2015

Get Ready for This Olafur

I am of course a fully posable action figure who really enjoys attuning to whatever directives my hosts want to send my way. It's more fun like that.

So next week, in Stockholm, at the Moderna Museet, I'm going to be doing the philosopher equivalent of cracking a bottle of champagne against a ship. The ship in question is a fantastic huge exhibition of work by Olafur Eliasson.

The bottle of champagne is a talk about the poetics and politics of geometry. You can't help but notice the astonishing work Eliasson has done with geometrical figures. For instance, as I've begun to see, some of them are in fact 3D renderings of 4D structures. And even when they aren't, they are, because they are “about” (yuck) time. It's better actually to say that they are fire hydrants that gush time.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

All super exciting except one must throttle the fire hydrant metaphor and say that time does not "gush" any more than it might "flow" but is a construct. I think Astrida Neimanis may be onto something like this in her very poetic work up in Canada. Have followed Eliason's amazing work for 11 years now although each event is independent and does not form a sequence. It would be even better to hear Morton talk in spatial prox to Studio Eliason's work.