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The artwork relaxes your sense of depth and time, confronting you with a choice to see the immediate site anew. Now these spaces, like the artwork itself, are open to our interpretations.
Olafur Eliasson
Lifeworld is an invitation to contemplate who you are and where you are, here and now.
On the occasion of his public artwork Lifeworld appearing across public screens in London, New York, Berlin and Seoul. This new series continues the artist’s long-standing investigation of colour phenomena. To create each screen-print in this series, Eliasson analysed the light levels and colour palettes featured in Lifeworld, dematerializing the cityscapes where the public artworks appear. The artist explains: The consumerist crossroads of Piccadilly Circus encapsulate the direct, explicit demands that are placed on citizens, particularly through advertising. “In the ‘not-blurred’ world, we are being told, to a large extent, what to think: buy this car, live like those people, subscribe to those values, then you're happy.” By contrast, the misty glow of whites, reds and purples against black represent something that is harder to extract, package up and sell.
Eliasson is frustrated by the way that things are done to us in public space, from the way that we are forcibly advertised to on our commutes, to the state surveillance and hostile architecture that dictate how we move through the world. The blur of Lifeworld doesn’t tell us to do anything at all; instead, offers up some subjectivity and agency to viewers.
“I want to trust that people know what to do with something soft,” explaining that there are prompts for viewers to make sense of the work themselves. “It unblurs a little bit, then it blurs again,” he says, comparing it to J. M. W. Turner’s landscapes, whose hues Eliasson meticulously studied as part of a 2014 color experiment. “The fog goes away a little bit, and then the fog comes back in. I particularly like this idea of a moment of hesitation.”
“Lifeworld” relies on technology, but Eliasson is equally skeptical about how emerging technologies may reduce opportunities for ambiguity. Take the video call we are speaking on right now, he says, keen to break the interview’s fourth wall once again. “We are constantly seeing optimisation of the functionality of every pixel on these screens. [But] every pixel actually holds opportunities.” For Eliasson, there is a kind of symbolic potential opened up by blocky pixelation, blur. “If we can make space more ephemeral, we can feel our way through.”
Titled Your opaque lifeworld, Your soft lifeworld, Your tender lifeworld and Your gentle lifeworld - these four circular artworks offer no vanishing point or corner to rest your eyes on. With nothing at their centres, you’re left searching through the array of blurry colours that fade smoothly from one to the other. Each print is created by overlaying minute dots from the CMYK colour palette, similar to how pixels on a screen combine to form images. Displayed together, the blurs represent four different atmospheres from Lifeworld.’
This time-limited edition harks back to Eliasson’s extensive ‘colour experiment' painting series, which he has produced since 2009 to explore colour theory and the spectrum of light visible to the human eye.
Further reading | Olafur Eliasson