Eliasson at Tate Modern

To Tate Modern, to see the big Olafur Eliasson retrospective, In Real Life.  Strangely - and I've been a great fan for years of Eliasson's inventiveness, environmental and social commitment, use of space and air and light, and his insistence that art is about experience - I came away feeling that delighted, and occasionally awed though I was by it, I prefer one Eliasson piece at a time.  I'll almost certainly go back, if I can, and spend more time with some of the installations (though not Big Bang Fountain, which gave me the kind of nauseous and disorienting reaction that seemed entirely inappropriate for someone who's written a book on flash photography - nothing like the transfixing beauty of the frozen fountains that were shown at the ICA Light show a few years back.  But some highlights: the Din blinde passager  (Your blind passenger) (2010) in which one groped through 39 metres of foggy tunnel; 

In Real Life (2019) - crazed disco ball meets the kaleidoscopic -

Beauty (1993) - the work I most want to return to - I failed to let it work on me, somehow - too many people at that point;

the truly huge Moss Wall (1994), which obviously was my ostensibly main reason for going, since Reindeer Moss isn't moss, but lichen ... and which was interestingly hard to photograph in any way that gave a sense of its size ... and which called my father to say, in a puzzled fashion, when he saw my photos - so what's the point of that?  It's a provocation to think about lichen, I said: lichen, which normally one passes over, takes for granted, is here yelling at one (ok, he was unconvinced).

And then How Do We Live Together? (2019) was perhaps a bit too obvious - our bifurcated selves reflected back to ourselves (I'm bouncing off the mirrored ceiling on the bottom left) - but, like so much (and maybe this was the main-take away from the show) - was better as experience than as subsequent image.  I had trouble, a couple of years back, in forgiving Eliasson for not letting me reproduce a (still) image of the flash-frozen fountain in Flash! - but, yes, I'll admit - he was right.