Not a traditional gallery-going experience ... visitors at Tate Modern's Weather Project by Olafur Eliasson. Photograph: Linda Nylind
Those of us who basked in the sun of Olafur Eliasson's Weather Project at Tate Modern in London, know the Danish artist makes his installations with participation in mind. Eliasson's first major US show, Take Your Time, is no exception. It opened this weekend at San Francisco Moma with a form of caveat. You, the visitor, might have to do some work here.
Certainly there's a great deal of peering and investigating. As one of the gallery attendants told me, this exhibit presents a challenge to the public and the museum: "We can't just put it up, we have to watch what's going on with it".
Eliasson's light works flatter, then drain, visitors into self-consciousness. Mirrors make couples of complete strangers, pairs peering into an abyss to face themselves together, over and over.
It's all about sensations, some given to us by the artist, the rest depending on our input. A moss wall looks fabulous enough from a distance; but its vulnerability over time is only confirmed by closing in to scrutinise. Viewing Tempo, Eliasson's hydrogen-powered BMW, three floors down, involves putting on a wool shawl; the car's metal shell is coated in ice.
All of this preceded by another nod to the environment at the museum entrance. A work called Ventilator, an inverted, swinging, electric fan on a cord, appears about to scythe its way through the visitor lines. It's a fine visual gag - with a warning about time running out at its heart - which perpetuates a tension, even when the mind and eye have worked things out.
In terms of visitor experience this was quite a contrast to Matisse: Painter as Sculptor which was showing at the gallery on the same weekend.
While many Eliasson visitors looked bemused, as if wondering how exactly they were supposed to be experiencing the work, some I spoke to thought the interaction had made the show. Others were less impressed. One American visitor suggested the intense yellow glow that greets visitors fresh from the lift should be used to "drive people out of the building at closing time".
Is it a cultural thing? Are British - or European - artists and curators particularly comfortable with making us uncomfortable, demanding that we be part of the process of gallery-going, more than just onlookers?
Years later, I still remember the sensation of first encountering Richard Wilson's sump oil installation - not least my battle to keep my balance as my senses started to spin. More recently witness the long queues to be discombobulated in Antony Gormley's mist-filled room at London's Hayward gallery.
What other testing art memories come to mind?
