When Olafur Eliasson, the multi-award winning artist, polymath intellectual, first tried making and selling consumer electronics, he got it as wrong as he possibly could.
It was autumn 2011, and he was touring villages a few hours' drive south of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, to promote a solar-powered rechargeable LED lamp he had developed to draw attention to the cost and inaccessibility of electricity to Africans. Sales of the lamp in Europe were to subsidise those in Africa, where the distribution network would create a wealth-generating social business. Eliasson's first presentation was in a village whose residents averaged an income of $1 (65p) a day. Holding up the prototype, which was the size and shape of an iPhone 4, the kindly, bearded Icelandic-Dane explained he had invented a lamp to help poor people like them, who had little access to electricity.
It was a lovely idea, said the people, but he was unlikely to sell any here, because this was a prosperous village. Had he tried their less well-off neighbours down the road? Eliasson tried them -- they averaged the same income as the first group -- but this time he said, "Lamps for rich people!" The interest was immediate and keen -- and only became keener as he refined the aspirational sell.
After the promotional tour, Eliasson decided the lamp had to be more attractive and with a design embodying the message about power supply. The idea was that owning a lamp would make customers consider where electricity came from, feel connected to other owners, and thus be an empowered and active part of the energy debate. It wasn't an easy brief, but what Eliasson produced did more than just appeal to consumers. The Little Sun lamp also attained the status of being an eco-friendly product people liked as much as bright, shiny, non-eco-friendly goods.
With his LED lamp, Eliasson might just have reinvented the idea of what a consumer durable can be. "Nowadays, art has great potential for changing the world and improving people's lives, partly because it can nurture a degree of trust," Eliasson says one morning in his airy, white, lightly cluttered small studio in Copenhagen. "It's important, because as politics, business and finance are losing people's trust, artists are retaining it. Culture has the highest public trust levels of any economic sector. And it can bring about not only the potential for feeling, but also for acting."
Eliasson, born in Copenhagen to Icelandic parents in 1967, is still best known for his large-scale installation art works, particularly The Weather Project, the 2003 creation in London's Tate Modern comprising a huge artificial Sun, mirrored ceiling and mist machine. His output is prolific and attracts interest because of the unique scope and variety of his projects: Art Review magazine recently reinstated him in its Power 100 specifically "for his work in pushing the boundaries of what an artist does."
Over the next few months, his work will have included the set design for a modern dance piece, Tree of Codes, a collaboration with Jamie xx, Jonathan Safran Foer and choreographer Wayne McGregor; retrospective exhibitions in Stockholm and Vienna; a project involving the transportation of ice from Greenland to Paris; plans for a building that will stand in Copenhagen's harbour; a cookbook; the running of his NGO (121Ethiopia) and his organisation for helping children transitioning between families; and a new product for the social business startup based on the solar lamp. Oh yes, and the small matter, which he mentions only in passing, of a project to improve the public's perception of the United Nations.
It's become fashionable for creatives to be diverse, renaissance men and women, but Eliasson is conspicuous for his thinking and popular appeal. To put it crudely, he's done stuff you've heard of even if you're not interested in art, and his ideas about human thought and behaviour have relevance well beyond the gallery gift shop. Two million people experienced The Weather Project, and countless more admired the four man-made waterfalls he constructed in New York Harbour in 2008 and have enjoyed New York's Highline park, a project on whose committee he served. Having attended climate-change conferences with an Icelandic president, and collaborated with world-class scientists, as well as corporations such as BMW and Louis Vuitton, he mixes art with science, politics and commerce. This makes him well suited to a time in which, as Christie's head of contemporary art observed, entrepreneurs have become interested in "understanding the world through the eye of the artist".
He scorns the notion of the artist as visionary genius. "I like to take away the posture of the artist as some kind of mystical, divine world-shaper. I'm very sceptical about that idea," he says. "I am interested in the relationship between you and the artist. Because the artist makes no demand of you, does not try to sell to you, you feel you are co-producing your experience. Art, the creative muscle, is a trust machine. Some business is realising that, though the McKinsey machine [by which he means global corporations] has underestimated its power."
His interest in social contracts and public space is key to his work, and comes partly, he says, from his upbringing in Denmark, where the civic life of the individual is taken seriously. He lives there with his wife, Marianne Krogh Jensen, an art historian, and their 11-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter, both of whom were adopted in Addis Ababa. Their house is just around the corner from the studio, formerly the home-studio of Jens Ferdinand Willumsen -- a 19th and 20th century Danish artist, best-known for his symbolist and expressionist work -- in the calm, affluent area of Hellerup on the northern edge of Copenhagen. This is his "contemplative" space, where he can "exercise, spend time with the kids, read and think"; for a couple of days each week, he commutes to his multi-disciplinary studio in Berlin, a four-storey "reality-producing machine" where he employs around 80 people. The work is intense.
People who work with him say the secret to his productivity is his interest in collaboration. He's particularly interested in scientists and engineers: he worked with Einar Thorstein, Buckminster Fuller's former friend and colleague, on geometric structures, for example, and scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change when he brought ice from Greenland to melt in Copenhagen for a work dramatising a climate report. According to Felix Hallwachs, the executive director of Little Sun, who was previously director of the studio, "Olafur likes to extend his own abilities by finding people who can do things he doesn't have time for. He built the studio with people who are inspired by his thinking, but who also had their own visions."
Eliasson agrees. "I'm very curious to access fields in which I am less knowledgeable and see if the creative muscle can translate into action. I am very respectful of the people who are knowledgeable, and I say, 'I don't have an answer to the challenge, but I have a tool -- it's called creativity.' As an artist, I think I can co-produce answers."
The studio, a tidy, airy, white chamber, evidences an unpredictable, eclectic but organised mind: experimental paintings, sketch pads, a random selection of stuffed owls, an electric guitar ("for when I can't stop my brain"), and neatly geometric brainstorming diagrams on the walls. Eliasson - designer specs, Asics trainers, basic black shirt and jeans - could be a cool, social democrat "star-cademic" from a Scandi-noir TV series. Well-read, and more given to abstraction and theory than human interest, he does not talk down to those he's addressing. In the first hour of conversation with WIRED he references philosophers Gilles Deleuze, William James, Bruno Latour, Evan Thompson and EB Holt, buddhist Matthieu Ricard, phenomenology, interpretive research, radical empiricism and gestalt theory.
Eliasson developed the rechargeable lamp with his friend Frederik Ottesen, the engineer and "solar nerd" who works with Solar Flight, the California-based solar plane company. Ottesen guarantees they have the most effective solar tech; their army-grade panels convert up to 24 per cent of sunlight to stored energy; bottom-end kit might do as little as one per cent, which is why cheap garden lights from DIY stores are so dim.
It was energy that Eliasson thought about when he was designing the lamp, beginning with a question like one a school teacher might ask a class: how did it feel to hold energy in your hand? "It felt exciting," he says. "And possible." You were connected to everyone else in your ability to take free energy from light; you had your own mini-sun in which to store energy from the real one. He made the black box into Little Sun, a yellow star with a lanyard, that worked both as a symbol and an object of desire.
London's Tate Modern exhibited and sold it, department stores stocked it, and two years later Bloomberg Philanthropies invested $5 million (£3.2m) in the Little Sun startup, which runs out of an office near the Berlin studio. The lamps are now sold by 250 museum shops at a higher price in "on-grid" areas, to support low-price sales by local agents to communities without electricity in eight African countries. Sales have exceeded 200,000.
This autumn, Little Sun, with the help of a crowdfunding campaign, launches its second product, a solar mobile-phone charger. People in Africa had asked Eliasson's team to make a charger for their next project: wireless penetration is more than 60 per cent and rising quickly as people use mobiles to overcome weak landline infrastructure, but lack of access to electricity means they must resort to expensive and inconvenient means of charging, such as adapted bicycle dynamos, and kiosks where you (over)pay to hook up a phone to a car battery for $1 (65p).
9800054[/i], 1996##DisplayStyle¬18]
No Nights in Summer[/i], 1994##DisplayStyle¬18]
Green River[/i], Moss, Norway, 1998##DisplayStyle¬18]
360° Room for all Colours[/i], 2002##DisplayStyle¬18]
Your Space Embracer[/i], 2004##DisplayStyle¬18]
Your Black Horizon[/i], 2005##DisplayStyle¬18]
Your Mobile Expectations[/i], 2006##DisplayStyle¬18]
New York Waterfalls[/i], 2008##DisplayStyle¬18]
Grey Sheep[/i], 2009-present##DisplayStyle¬18]
Your Rainbow Panorama[/i], Denmark, 2011##DisplayStyle¬18]
Emergent Fade, colour experiment no. 48[/i], 2012##DisplayStyle¬18]
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The Berlin studio is a converted brewery in the Mitte district, comprising workshops, a test space for new installations, an administration and archive area, an elegant, vegetarian refectory in whose kitchens all studio employees take turns to help, an architectural practice, and rows of desks with people working on various projects. The idea is that everyone helps everyone else. At one point, as one member of the team shows me a model of the Copenhagen harbour building to show how part of it will have no floor but just enclose some of the harbour water, people at one desk comment favourably on a set of page designs for the cookbook while, simultaneously, a group of people congratulate a designer on a new prototype Studio Olafur Eliasson website that imitates a black hole. The esoteric, creative discussions appear to contrast with what's happening in the workshop, where men pack pieces into crates. "Well, you can be actually pretty creative packing a crate! Seriously, you can," Hallwachs says.
In the middle of the building there's a studio, where Eliasson works and meets staff (on average they each get 10-15 minutes when he visits, the schedule tightly organised by assistant and "diarymeister" Florian). Among sketches, models and desks, this floor also houses Eliasson's collection of vintage light bulbs, and an archery target with arrows embedded in it. Sometimes, in order to make himself start work (Eliasson draws and conceptualises in the morning because he claims he is more focused then, and makes things in the afternoon), he shoots an arrow, first asking it a question: "Should he begin now, or delay?" Or, "Should he alter the size of a piece?" He takes a bullseye as a yes or a go-for-it, and if the answer's not what he wants, he shoots again until "the answers and I have synchronised".
Over lunch of roasted tomato salad, Hallwachs, a young, energetic German who trained as an architect, explains the thinking behind the phone charger. He and Eliasson believe it could make westerners think about energy even more than the lamp. "Because whereas you don't go out to buy a lamp often, you do buy replacement batteries and power packs for phones and, at home, most families are constantly charging devices, maybe ten or more. We take the power for granted, but if you can watch a solar charger draining, it makes it palpable." So in developed countries, it's not about energy saving per se (in Europe and the US it costs only about £7 to keep an iPhone, iPad and laptop charged for a whole year) but about using that great mini-ritual of device-charging to make us think. In the developing world, however, a cheap phone charger has vast potential: in terms of communication and information, mobile internet access is currently catapulting people to developed-world standards from a pre-mass-telephony age. It is as if someone had invented the mobile in Europe in 1920, but only the richest five per cent had electrical sockets.
When Eliasson's parents Elias Hjörleifsson and Ingibjörg Olafsdottir, two 21-year-old Icelanders, moved to Copenhagen, he had just been born. Hjörleifsson's family belonged to Reykjavik's small Bohemian arts set, his father a publisher and his mother a photographer. Olafsdottir was from left-wing fishing stock; in the 60s and 70s her father, a communist trawlerman, used to sail across the North Sea to visit the communist German Democratic Republic. In Copenhagen, Olafsdottir worked as a seamstress, Hjörleifsson as a cook.
They struggled financially, though while Olafsdottir "worked her arse off," tells Eliasson, Hjörleifsson was more interested in his art; in the early 70s they divorced, Olafsdottir subsequently marrying a stockbroker and moving to a farmhouse just outside the city. Eliasson lived with his mum and stepfather, and spent occasional weekends with his father in his art studio in his spare time. These visits to his father are the strongest childhood memories. "As my father was an artist, and I wanted him to like me, I took the drawings I had made throughout the week. And I over-performed in drawing; by the time I was nine, I could draw all the bones in the hand." Five years later, it was every bone in the body, executed with a remarkable photorealist accuracy.
In the summer holidays, the young Eliasson visited his grandparents - and later his father, after he returned in the late 70s - in Iceland, and his experience of its unique landscape would later be a huge influence on his work. It was here he learned the power of defamiliarisation - the feeling you have when seeing things presented in a surprising way that makes you feel you're seeing them for the first time. He has said that, because the Icelandic landscape is unique and under-represented in art, his responses to it were rawer and less-preconditioned that they would have been to, say, the Alps or a European pastoral setting.
Here, too, he learned the effects of weather and light. Because of the latitude, shadows are long most of the time and "everything is such a drama", he explains. Eliasson has a particularly strong memory of the Icelandic twilight, and it is not difficult to see that in works such as The Weather Project or Your Rainbow Panorama. "During the oil crisis in the early 70s, he recalls, "there was an embargo on the use of oil, and at 8 o'clock every night the government turned off the power. After cooking a meal, you would hear the city bell ring and then all the power turned off, and people moved everything they did in the house to the windows, because it was still light outside. I was five or six years old, so I remember very well that we took our books, magazines, toys, games to sit in the windows with that blue light. It was very beautiful, and this blue light from the twilight of the Icelandic midnight became a very strong influence for me."
2007
This ten-metre-long passageway is made from steel, colour-effect acrylic glass and mirror, and black paint. Walk through it one way, and you get a kaleidoscope of colours; turn and walk back through, and the panels turn black.
His childhood influences are not all about nature and Scandinavian civic values, however. Interviewers often point out that, in 1984, performing as part of a trio called Harlem Gun Crew, he won a Scandinavian breakdance championship. They tend to present this as a quirky aberration but, as he explains, the dancing contributed to his art. Aged 15 he was quiet, heavily into drawing, a nerdy country kid. Then, one day in Copenhagen, he saw a fellow teenager on the street, moving like a robot. "It was one of my epiphanies," he says. "Immediately, from that minute on, I did everything like a robot. Pouring milk on my cornflakes, riding my bike to school - which is actually very difficult because of the circular motion of the wheel - everything, I did it like a robot; every movement on a 90-degree angle."
Olafur cut and dyed his hair to look like Limahl from Kajagoogoo ("quite brilliantly"), and went to the local disco where he stood alone on the dance floor and did the dance. He had no idea that anyone else had thought of doing it to music. "I wasn't connected to a dance scene! I was just like, Country Robot. And then this other guy came along and danced like it, and he explained that what we were doing was related. I said, 'Oh, no it isn't! I don't know what you're doing, but I'm a robot...' Anyway, we became friends and met another guy whose mum had a dance school. My mum made us silver costumes, and I became famous as an insane robot. I had a nice 'freeze' movement."
He relates all this in his studio, in the same thoughtful, "Scandi-llectual" tone of voice he uses for everything - philosophy, climate change, the open ryebread sandwiches he orders in for our lunch. The dancing, he continues, "gave me a body that I could connect with the drawing I had done. And being able to express myself, and to be part of a youth culture, gave me great confidence." When he began art school - his father, who had been suffering from alcoholism, helped with the application - he was drawn to installation art, which then led to architecture. Had he not danced, he would "not have had that interest in the way people and light work in spaces. And also, I wanted to be as successful at school as I was at the dancing."
2015
Many critics comment on the scope and variety of Eliasson's projects, which range from weather-based installations to flocks of sheep in Iceland. Eliasson says that for him, the strands are always connected - and to prove it, he drew this mind map illustrating how just a few link up.
The conversation moves on. He talks about research, and how he sees more interesting, challenging work being done in the private sector than in academia; about our age's discovery that accessing more data leads people to take less, rather than more action; about how the most creative part of a project for him is the process of hands-on making, "That's when I learn. But there is an interesting moment of fear, especially when you feel afraid that starting something could bring you failure. You can end up talking about something you want to do, as if talking about it is the same as doing it, and because it allows you to test it out on others. You can have a full night in the bar, talking about everything you want to do, and you wake up with the feeling that you've done it because you cashed in on all the appreciation already. And the next day, you find the cashing in took away the momentum."
This loops back to the Little Sun. One could ask if this isn't all just intellectualised Fisher-Price trickery but, in the context of debates about climate change and the environment, the answer would have to be no. The big problem for campaigners has always been intangibility. Something you can neither see nor feel is hard to think about and easy to ignore; religion is helped by its icons and ritual, whereas environmentalists must rely on over-familiar, depressing footage of melting ice caps and denuded rainforest. The Little Sun demonstrated an optimistic belief in renewable energy that allowed anyone to buy into it, and feel part of a movement. As a tactic, it offers a route for anyone promoting an intangible technology, a service or a campaign, or tackling a social problem: how do you put something inspiring into people's hands that both represents, and is part of, a solution?
Hallwachs cannot imagine the project without the artistic element; there is little chance, he says, that they would have had the idea without it. Fundamental to Eliasson's work is the belief, rooted in phenomenology and gestalt psychology, that in changing an individuals' perception of their surroundings, art actually changes the world. The studio is based on a shared conviction on art and creativity as means of change, and "because we are looking at things from an artistic angle, we consider things relevant that other people would not. The combination of business, design, global activism, a movement, lobbying comes from the artistic perspective. If there was no art involved, it would not only be a different project - we would not have started it in the first place."
Richard Benson is a journalist and critic, based in London and Yorkshire, and author ofThe Valley (Bloomsbury Publishing)
Photography: Paul Dukovic, Tate; Sun Lee
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
