Making Sense of the Rainbow

Olafur Eliasson has a piece called “Beauty” in his current DMA exhibition Take Your Time. “Beauty” is a piece that involves light breaking in a spectrum via drops of water creating a rainbow for observers. Depending on the angle of the light, the particular shape of the drop of water, and the position of our eyes, different colors appear, and consequently different rainbows. Eliasson points out that because a rainbow only occurs in perception (because it is the product of light, water, and the eye) its existence is contingent on the presence of the observer. No observer, no rainbow. Eliasson calls this making sense. We are not passive recipients of reality, but rather we construct reality. We make sense, sense doesn’t make us. The rainbow is a product of our particular perspective, our individual act of seeing and the reality in which we are embedded.

I know what your thinking. “Does that mean that if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound?” Well….. yes. Now that wasn’t so hard. Was it? Watch this You Tube video to hear Eliasson explain his idea of art as a model of reality.

Olafur Eliasson: The Chiasm of Art and Philosophy

On a recent visit to the Dallas Museum of Art my wife and I experienced the intersection of art and philosophy in the work of Olafur Eliasson. His current exhibit is called Take Your Time, and I highly recommend it to anyone who questions the boundaries between reality and perception.

Eliasson’s work is indebted to the phenomenological insights of Husserl, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty, all of whom emphasize perception as a moment of embodied consciousness. For these thinkers there is no such thing as consciousness but only conscious acts. We are not disembodied minds detached from the world but embodied minds embedded in reality and creating reality.

Xavier Zubiri drawing from this same tradition has emphasized what he calls sentient intelligence where the senses are turned towards the intellect and the intellect is turned towards the senses so that perception is not a disembodied act of a mental subject to a physical object, but rather a physical moment of perception where the outside is inside and the inside is outside. Zubiri points out that man is not simply before things, but moves among them, deciding in each case what they are. Eliasson echoes this insight in his work. He describes his current exhibit as the experience of “seeing yourself seeing”.

In one of Eliasson’s most dramatic pieces, light and color are used to bring the visitor into a co-creative role with the exhibit. My wife and I entered a circular screened area illuminated with color that changed as we moved within it. Our physical movemnents altered the exhibit. We were clearly part of the exhibit. The closer we moved towards the screen the more the boundary between the light and us became less clear. For a moment I experienced a oneness with the light where I could not tell where I stopped and the light began. It was simply a moment of being immersed in color and light. I experienced myself in the other and the other in me.

Olafur Eliasson is one of the most important artists of our time, in my opinion. His work is a chiasm of art and philosophy that calls us back to our bodies that are not just in reality, but of it.