Simone Hancox

Seeing our Place in a Global Age: Olafur Eliasson’s Phenomenology

Theories of globalisation often focus on how an increasingly interconnected and media-saturated world affects our understanding of time and space; implied in this is also globalisation’s impact upon relationships to places and people. These concerns over globalisation’s negative effects are evidenced in a rise in relational aesthetics (Bourriaud) in the past few decades, seen to counter the passivity induced by a society of the spectacle (Debord). Rather than question performative practice that specifically frames a space in which social engagement takes place, I question how the constructed spectacle (mediated in space) may reclaim seeing as a politically active process in a world which arguably induces greater passivity through image-saturation. My key questions are:

-How does the framing of the spectacle impact upon how aaudience receives it (i.e. expectations set up in museum space versus an intervention witnessed in public space)?

-How does the production of spectacle through mediation of space produce affect and encourage political agency?

I will base these questions on the work of Olafur Eliasson, who has worked globally producing urban interventions and institutional installations, and will draw on theories of politics and aesthetics that question the politically efficacy of what it means to see (Rancière). I explore how Eliasson’s oeuvre stages the act of seeing as very much a phenomenological experience (Merleau-Ponty), thus interrogating the significance of the performativity of seeing itself, and the spectacle’s ability to provoke reflection on how we interpret the contemporary social space we live in.