With fall upon us, I’ve been thinking back to the pleasures of summer. For me, those have come to include a day trip to New York in the languorous and steamy month of August. Two summers ago, that meant a pilgrimage to MoMA and PS1 for the Olafur Eliasson survey. Art world sophisticates don’t seem altogether sure what to make of Eliasson as though worried that, if they like him too much, they’ll be accused of giving into sentimentality or succumbing to the siren call of beauty.
But in the Eliasson extravaganza that was New York in the summer of 2008 — the year of the waterfalls in the East River — it was quite literally Beauty that blew me away.
We went first to the MoMA and were charmed by much of what was on show there. My husband was taken with Ventilator, the suspended electric fan that described looping arcs above our heads in the Atrium; I loved the wall of live reindeer moss; and we both got vertigo from Space Reversal, the enclosed platform rigged up with mirrors that reflected ad infinitum.
To be honest, the waterfalls, while impressive, were a bit less than I’d hoped for: I liked the cascade off the Brooklyn Bridge the best, but overall the project seemed more like a triumph of engineering and sheer determination than “the remnants of a primordial Eden” that Roberta Smith described in her Times review.
But then we went to Queens.
At first, we were a little disappointed by the PS1 half of the survey. Take your time, the circular, ceiling-mounted, rotating mirror installation, was closed for repairs, and Reverse waterfall was fun, but not spectacular — again, as much an engineering feat as anything. We were about to go on our way — still admiring Eliasson but perhaps not loving him — when we realized that we’d missed one of the basement rooms.
We retraced our steps back downstairs and there found another installation, one that Eliasson had titled, with supreme self-confidence, Beauty.
First created in 1993, Beauty is an artificial rainbow made from a Fresnel lamp, water, nozzles, hose, wood, and a pump. The ceiling-mounted nozzles emit a fine spray of water that undulates down to a black rubber floor. The rainbow, which appears as a shimmering curtain at the far end of the gallery space, is created by refracting light off the water droplets. You can walk through the mist/wall — through the rainbow itself — and as Eliasson points out, what you see changes according to where you stand. From one view, you see the rainbow; from the other, you are blinded by the light from that Fresnel lamp.
But wherever you stand, Beauty delivers as promised.
Still, Eliasson’s explicit interests here — the subjectivity of vision and thus of experience — doesn’t altogether jibe with my take on the piece. His description seems a little too modest to me, as though he were missing his own point.
What Lies BeneathThinking about the piece one day, I realized that it put me in mind of the Basilica of San Clemente in Rome and what lies beneath. As at PS1, the experience there is one of descent: you enter the modern church — an 18th-century restoration of a Medieval sanctuary — but make your way downstairs, to a fourth-century church and then, even deeper in, to a second-century Roman temple.
You start in the light of day and the blare of modern-day Rome. Enter the church and you’re one step removed from the din but still in the realm of the sun. (The interior of the basilica is dominated by the spectacular gold Tree of Life mosaic in the half-dome behind the high altar.)
Descend into the lower sanctuary and the light falls away. There, you wander through the subterranean remains of the original church with its ghostly images of the Virgin and Child and a crowd of Byzantine believers waiting for the Last Judgment.
Even deeper in, you hear the sound of running water – an abandoned spring? – and then you enter the ancient site and find yourself inside the temple of Mithras. To call the space a temple is to suggest that you have entered into something as splendid as the sanctuary above. In fact, the Mithraic temple is a cave, dank and just a little sinister.
No one knows much about the god Mithras or his worship. Mithraism revealed its secrets only to initiates, handing down no written scripture and thus leaving generations of frustrated scholars at a loss about the exact nature of the cult. The best evidence anyone has comes from places like this temple room. Similar cave-rooms — they’re called mithraea — are found throughout the Roman Empire (from England all the way to Palestine), and they all feature depictions of Mithras, accompanied by a dog, a snake, a raven, and a scorpion, in the act of slaying a bull.
Theories abound about the meaning of the iconography. One holds that Mithraism is an adaptation of an Iranian cult. Another that, like Christianity, it involved the worship of a cosmic, monotheistic deity and the promise of rebirth. All seem to agree that the figures describe a cosmological system that maps out a journey of the soul from life through death and, through the agency of the god, back again.
Whatever your stand on the idea of resurrection – and on that count, I’m very much a non-believer – the experience of what the Greeks called katabasis (literally, going down) has a long lineage. In Classical mythology, you could hardly be a hero without descending into the Underworld on some errand or another and returning to tell the tale: Orpheus brings back Eurydice, Odysseus consults with Tiresias, Herakles rescues Theseus, and so on. Nor has it escaped scholars that Christ, too, was dead and entombed, only to rise back to life.
The Sublime Comes to Queens
Fast forward a couple of millennia and there we are, standing in a darkened, underground cavern and contemplating the sublime – in Queens of all places.
And while I don’t for a minute think that Olafur Eliasson is spreading the Word, I would argue that he’s invoking some powerful and ancient motifs. Using the elements themselves – water, light, earth – Beauty turns us into participants in the kind of experience that mystery religions, like Mithraism, addressed.
We do so, of course, in the thoroughly modern, thoroughly domesticated setting of the art museum.
But still we partake of the mystery. We come face to face with the two sides of awe: the delicate beauty of that rainbow and the terrible beauty of that blinding light.
Next up: Room 3, The Metropolitan Opera House in Philadelphia
