The Language of Art - Olafur Eliasson at the Tate

I went to an Art lecture on Saturday at the Tate Modern. It was a discussion in their Topology series entitled “Spaces of Transformation – Continuity / Infinity”, featuring inspirational Danish / Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson who is fascinated by the nature of spatial perception. He was sharing a platform with Bruno Latour, the French sociologist of science and theoretical anthropologist alongside Peter Weibel, the German mathematical theoretician and artist.

I’ve always liked Eliasson’s work, particularly “Your Blind Passenger”, which was at the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Denmark when we visited last year. (Check it out on: - www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhQqtNUIlTY )

I spent a large proportion of the afternoon feeling intellectually inadequate. Eliasson was as erudite and entertaining as ever, Latour was dryly sardonic and quick-witted, but Weibel’s English was unfortunately completely impenetrable. At times it felt as if I was being given an introduction to Alzheimer’s; total incomprehensible confusion punctuated by occasional moments of brief lucidity.

The problem I had with the discussion was that the language seemed almost deliberately obtuse, with far too many concepts for my simple brain to grasp. As I looked around the lecture theatre I wondered just how many of the audience were keeping up, or whether they were all as confused as me. However the afternoon did perfectly illustrate a simple truth for me; don’t use forty words when ten will adequately suffice. It reinforced the feeling that brevity and sparseness are the elements that I most admire in writing (see Josephine Hart), and that’s what I should aspire to achieve.