“OLAFUR ELIASSON: YOUR ONLY REAL THING IS TIME”
At the Institute of Contemporary Art through April 1.
“CUBA, CUBA”

At Space 12 Gallery, through February 28.

Clunky metal scaffolding rises to fill the usually open interior of the Institute of Contemporary Art’s central stairwell, gently goading you to walk a crooked path up the stairs through a smallish opening into the darkened second-floor gallery. Your instinct is to emerge cautiously, alert to the obviously just-constructed floor (you have passed exposed support structures on your way up) and the dim illumination. Even so, it’s still surprising to find that when you stretch yourself up to your full height, your head is a lot closer to the ceiling than you remember from previous visits to this architecturally challenging building — in fact, you are now at eye level with the structural beams that support the ceiling.

At your feet is a shallow pool of water. You can tell it’s shallow because you can examine the unfinished edge of the wood platform that supports it — for me, it was only at this moment that I looked back to notice the new steps that had been built to extend the original staircase into this new, higher, shorter second-floor gallery. There is light moving on the water, and that looks at first as if it were caused by something being silently tossed into the still pool, but soon you see that it’s reflections from a series of concentric neon lights installed on the ceiling and blinking on and off in a pattern to give the impression that they are forming ever-widening circles, then blinking off altogether for a flicker of complete darkness before starting up again.

Circles, reflections, water, darkness, and exposed construction (as if to say, “Nothing up my sleeve!”) are some of the repeated elements in the ICA’s new exhibition of work by Olafur Eliasson, a 33-year-old artist who was born in Denmark to Icelandic parents and now lives in Berlin. This is Eliasson’s first major US museum exhibition, and as in his previous indoor and outdoor installations around the world, he calls upon us to orient and reorient ourselves in relation to the elements he presents, to give real significance to our perceptions, and to our perceptions of our perceptions.

Eliasson says that for him, the experience of the work of art is more important than the work itself. If you’re at all familiar with his art, you’ll enter this exhibition with your animal alertness turned up — you’ll be prepared to be taken off guard, poised to experience the unexpected. You’ll know it’s a mistake to assume that a closed door just opens into an office or some other private, “non-exhibition” museum space, or to assume that the changes you notice in the light, seemingly caused by the natural movement of sun and clouds overhead, are not part of the show. In this way, Eliasson has taken kind of an Andy Kaufman–like position in the contemporary art world, locating his activities in the rich juncture between the presented and the real. Like Kaufman, he keeps us guessing as to what’s part of the show and whether it’s started yet. And like Kaufman, he’s a bit of a prankster. He has dyed rivers in Stockholm, Bremen, and Tokyo vivid green (in eco-friendly ways, he swears); he’s opened a faucet to set off a little neighborhood flood in Johannesburg, and in Utrecht he inserted into the urban landscape an illuminated fake sun, glowing but fully flat, propped up from the back — like the life-size photographs of famous people you used to be able to have your picture taken with.

But humor is just one part of what makes Eliasson’s endeavors so charming. He focuses his inquiry on the crossroads where nature and culture meet — humankind in the art museum, or in the city, or in the 21st century. Not nature in an elevated or mystical sense, but simply (or not so simply) our own modern-day experience of natural phenomena: neon light, gas heat, reflections off glass and steel, water from the tap. He is interested in how culture and nature locate us differently in our environments, and in how our perceptions and experiences help to create our surroundings. He likes to turn things on their heads: in this show, ærial photogravures of Icelandic mountains are found below ground level, whereas ærial photographs of the course of a river cutting deep into rocky terrain are found upstairs, arranged in a large grid where the river’s source in the mountains is located in the lower right corner and the image of its eventual flow into the sea is shown at the upper left — so where we would expect to see the river’s source we see its mouth, and vice versa.

This is perhaps a nice reference to an earlier work in which Eliasson made a mechanical-looking artificial outdoor waterfall that ran up rather than down. It also points to his fascination with the scientific method — that is, with the way a seemingly objective collection of information about nature becomes raw material for subjective experience or formulation. Eliasson’s scientific bent and ephemeral materials connect him to other artists concerned with our experience of nature, including James Turrell and Walter De Maria. Bringing the outside in and the inside out, or making this distinction ambiguous, is his way of exploring the space we inhabit on this planet, and of giving visual and perceptual expression to ideas about how we create our environment through our perception and description of it.

Having said all that, I found, besides the unexpectedly low ceiling upstairs, the biggest surprise in this show to be its quietude (though it is by no means quiet — machines breathe, fire roars). It was only on later reflection that the real depth of Eliasson’s disorientation/reorientation took effect. After spending the morning inside, watching and listening to a room expand and contract, being mesmerized (and warmed) by a ring of burning gas, letting a twirling prism of light encompass me in its bright orbit, and letting my mind complete the circle of an unblinking metal eyeball, I concluded that it all acts like a medium at a séance. Eliasson allows you to reflect on reflections, illusions, illuminations, and projections; in my case they evoked ghosts and spirits from the art world, my past, the ICA’s past, and everything in between. I felt the presence of the spirit of Bill Viola’s video projections of fire at the ICA several years ago, as well as the ghost of Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room, not to mention a personal experience watching a group of homeless people gathered around a burning garbage can on a freezing night.

“The art without the viewer is nothing,” states a Scandinavian scientist after the final credits roll in the ICA’s terrific 15-minute video about Eliasson (it plays downstairs). This phenomenological approach to art aptly describes “Your Only Real Thing Is Time,” in which Eliasson has transformed the ICA top to bottom, physically and psychologically reorienting us until we locate the horizon line of this exhibition within ourselves.

AFTER A VISIT to Cuba last February, Gregory Shea, owner of Space 12 Gallery in the South End, went through labyrinthine diplomatic channels to form a cross-cultural alliance with Espacio 52, an art gallery he had happened upon in Havana, and with which he felt an affinity that went beyond the kinship between the galleries’ names.

Space 12’s second exhibition of work by Cuban artists (the first was last July) provides a rare look at art in Cuba today. Despite manifold differences, the four artists Shea has selected share a vigorous relationship with color, pattern, and symbolism that seems to stand outside of politics. Their paintings recall Surrealism and early abstraction — this is not work with a conceptual or ironic edge, but art from the heart, with a somber, soulful side. From Bárbaro Reyes, or “Pango,” whose abstract paintings are based on Cuban cave drawings and his experience of teaching learning-disabled children in Havana, to Alejandro Lazo, who has evolved a symbolism based on his religious beliefs, and whose brick-colored paintings evoke the earth itself, these artists reach deep into their own culture for their expressive language. Regina Fernández’s dynamic paintings are alive with mosaic patterns and charming folk imagery; Mario Ayras actually collages pieces of fabric and string onto his paintings of jazz musicians, causing these works to swirl with patterns and textures. These days, we associate Cuba with the music of the Buena Vista Social Club, but “Cuba, Cuba” proves there’s a busy visual-art scene there as well.

At Space 12 Gallery, through February 28.

Clunky metal scaffolding rises to fill the usually open interior of the Institute of Contemporary Art’s central stairwell, gently goading you to walk a crooked path up the stairs through a smallish opening into the darkened second-floor gallery. Your instinct is to emerge cautiously, alert to the obviously just-constructed floor (you have passed exposed support structures on your way up) and the dim illumination. Even so, it’s still surprising to find that when you stretch yourself up to your full height, your head is a lot closer to the ceiling than you remember from previous visits to this architecturally challenging building — in fact, you are now at eye level with the structural beams that support the ceiling.

At your feet is a shallow pool of water. You can tell it’s shallow because you can examine the unfinished edge of the wood platform that supports it — for me, it was only at this moment that I looked back to notice the new steps that had been built to extend the original staircase into this new, higher, shorter second-floor gallery. There is light moving on the water, and that looks at first as if it were caused by something being silently tossed into the still pool, but soon you see that it’s reflections from a series of concentric neon lights installed on the ceiling and blinking on and off in a pattern to give the impression that they are forming ever-widening circles, then blinking off altogether for a flicker of complete darkness before starting up again.

Circles, reflections, water, darkness, and exposed construction (as if to say, “Nothing up my sleeve!”) are some of the repeated elements in the ICA’s new exhibition of work by Olafur Eliasson, a 33-year-old artist who was born in Denmark to Icelandic parents and now lives in Berlin. This is Eliasson’s first major US museum exhibition, and as in his previous indoor and outdoor installations around the world, he calls upon us to orient and reorient ourselves in relation to the elements he presents, to give real significance to our perceptions, and to our perceptions of our perceptions.

Eliasson says that for him, the experience of the work of art is more important than the work itself. If you’re at all familiar with his art, you’ll enter this exhibition with your animal alertness turned up — you’ll be prepared to be taken off guard, poised to experience the unexpected. You’ll know it’s a mistake to assume that a closed door just opens into an office or some other private, “non-exhibition” museum space, or to assume that the changes you notice in the light, seemingly caused by the natural movement of sun and clouds overhead, are not part of the show. In this way, Eliasson has taken kind of an Andy Kaufman–like position in the contemporary art world, locating his activities in the rich juncture between the presented and the real. Like Kaufman, he keeps us guessing as to what’s part of the show and whether it’s started yet. And like Kaufman, he’s a bit of a prankster. He has dyed rivers in Stockholm, Bremen, and Tokyo vivid green (in eco-friendly ways, he swears); he’s opened a faucet to set off a little neighborhood flood in Johannesburg, and in Utrecht he inserted into the urban landscape an illuminated fake sun, glowing but fully flat, propped up from the back — like the life-size photographs of famous people you used to be able to have your picture taken with.

But humor is just one part of what makes Eliasson’s endeavors so charming. He focuses his inquiry on the crossroads where nature and culture meet — humankind in the art museum, or in the city, or in the 21st century. Not nature in an elevated or mystical sense, but simply (or not so simply) our own modern-day experience of natural phenomena: neon light, gas heat, reflections off glass and steel, water from the tap. He is interested in how culture and nature locate us differently in our environments, and in how our perceptions and experiences help to create our surroundings. He likes to turn things on their heads: in this show, ærial photogravures of Icelandic mountains are found below ground level, whereas ærial photographs of the course of a river cutting deep into rocky terrain are found upstairs, arranged in a large grid where the river’s source in the mountains is located in the lower right corner and the image of its eventual flow into the sea is shown at the upper left — so where we would expect to see the river’s source we see its mouth, and vice versa.

This is perhaps a nice reference to an earlier work in which Eliasson made a mechanical-looking artificial outdoor waterfall that ran up rather than down. It also points to his fascination with the scientific method — that is, with the way a seemingly objective collection of information about nature becomes raw material for subjective experience or formulation. Eliasson’s scientific bent and ephemeral materials connect him to other artists concerned with our experience of nature, including James Turrell and Walter De Maria. Bringing the outside in and the inside out, or making this distinction ambiguous, is his way of exploring the space we inhabit on this planet, and of giving visual and perceptual expression to ideas about how we create our environment through our perception and description of it.

Having said all that, I found, besides the unexpectedly low ceiling upstairs, the biggest surprise in this show to be its quietude (though it is by no means quiet — machines breathe, fire roars). It was only on later reflection that the real depth of Eliasson’s disorientation/reorientation took effect. After spending the morning inside, watching and listening to a room expand and contract, being mesmerized (and warmed) by a ring of burning gas, letting a twirling prism of light encompass me in its bright orbit, and letting my mind complete the circle of an unblinking metal eyeball, I concluded that it all acts like a medium at a séance. Eliasson allows you to reflect on reflections, illusions, illuminations, and projections; in my case they evoked ghosts and spirits from the art world, my past, the ICA’s past, and everything in between. I felt the presence of the spirit of Bill Viola’s video projections of fire at the ICA several years ago, as well as the ghost of Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room, not to mention a personal experience watching a group of homeless people gathered around a burning garbage can on a freezing night.

“The art without the viewer is nothing,” states a Scandinavian scientist after the final credits roll in the ICA’s terrific 15-minute video about Eliasson (it plays downstairs). This phenomenological approach to art aptly describes “Your Only Real Thing Is Time,” in which Eliasson has transformed the ICA top to bottom, physically and psychologically reorienting us until we locate the horizon line of this exhibition within ourselves.

AFTER A VISIT to Cuba last February, Gregory Shea, owner of Space 12 Gallery in the South End, went through labyrinthine diplomatic channels to form a cross-cultural alliance with Espacio 52, an art gallery he had happened upon in Havana, and with which he felt an affinity that went beyond the kinship between the galleries’ names.

Space 12’s second exhibition of work by Cuban artists (the first was last July) provides a rare look at art in Cuba today. Despite manifold differences, the four artists Shea has selected share a vigorous relationship with color, pattern, and symbolism that seems to stand outside of politics. Their paintings recall Surrealism and early abstraction — this is not work with a conceptual or ironic edge, but art from the heart, with a somber, soulful side. From Bárbaro Reyes, or “Pango,” whose abstract paintings are based on Cuban cave drawings and his experience of teaching learning-disabled children in Havana, to Alejandro Lazo, who has evolved a symbolism based on his religious beliefs, and whose brick-colored paintings evoke the earth itself, these artists reach deep into their own culture for their expressive language. Regina Fernández’s dynamic paintings are alive with mosaic patterns and charming folk imagery; Mario Ayras actually collages pieces of fabric and string onto his paintings of jazz musicians, causing these works to swirl with patterns and textures. These days, we associate Cuba with the music of the Buena Vista Social Club, but “Cuba, Cuba” proves there’s a busy visual-art scene there as well.