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1. Olafur Eliasson
Ice Watch Paris
Place du Panthéon
depending on weather conditions, expected to be on view until December 11th
2015
Published at Hyperallergic as
Olafur Eliasson’s Sundial of Melting Icebergs Clocks In at Half-Past Wasteful
http://hyperallergic.com/260217/olafur-eliassons-sundial-of-melting-icebergs-clocks-in-at-half-past-wasteful/
Photo by Martin Argyroglo © 2015 Olafur Eliasson
In the aftermath of the November Paris terrorist attacks and the ruling Socialist Party meltdown
following a strong first-round showing for Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front Party, I
glummly went to the Place du Panthéon to see Ice Watch Paris, a melting iceberg artwork by
Danish relational artist Olafur Eliasson. The project, which is theatrically artificially light at night
to good effect, is underwritten by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Eliasson is known for re-creating, or presenting, natural phenomena through artificial means, like
a wall of mist to create indoor rainbows Beauty (1993) but here he works in collaboration with
geologist Minik Thorleif Rosing (whose work on photosynthesis in the Greenland sea beds reset
the date for the beginning of life on Earth from 2.8 billion years ago to 3.7 billion) to drag to
harbor from Greenland’s Davis Strait twelve immense iceberg chunks, lift them up by heavy

2. cranes to place them in storage in large icehouses, transfer them in six refrigerated containers
from Nuuk to Aalborg to Denmark by container ship, and take by road a ten-hour petro-truck to
Paris, so that the visitor may stand with them and watch them melt to nothing.
The installation is tied to COP 21, the United Nations Conference on Climate Change and can be
easily placed in the category of art made in wake of the Anthropocene (see Art in the
Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies edited
by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin - part of the open access book publishing series by Open
Humanities Press’s division Critical Climate Change. Full disclosure: they also published my
book Immersion Into Noise.)
Eliasson’s exhibition is a circle, with a circumference of twenty metres, of ‘lost’ chunks of
Greenland ice (made of compressed snow) that have been ‘harvested’ from the sea. A sea which
is losing the equivalent of 1,000 such blocks of ice per second throughout the year. This free
public show opened last week and is already half gone. It should remain “up” untill it elaborately
and slowly melts to nothing.

4. Though timely and quite beautiful with sun carved forms reminisent of Henry Moore emerging -
that in the sunlight contain marvelous luminiious surface details - this sculpture is nothing new.
The process art movement of the 1970s and the Environmental Art movement are directly related,
especially Puerto Rico born Rafael Ferrer’s process-oriented 50 Cakes of Ice (1970) that Ferrer
showed melting in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at the exhibition Information
at the Museum of Modern Art. So Ice Watch Paris slides smoothly into what Simon Critchley has
described in 2010 as Contemporary Art’s dominant trend: the in-authenticity of mannerist
situations of reenactment. Critchley goes on in 2012 to describe the circumstances further, as the
“taste for appropriation and reenactment that has become hegemonic in the art world.” But it also
slides smoothly into what Chris Hedges points out to be the record of lofty rhetoric and
ineffectual cosmetic reforms typical of climate summits. As Hedges states: “Since the first
summit more than 20 years ago, carbon dioxide emissions have soared. Placing faith in our
political and economic elites, who have mastered the arts of duplicity and propaganda on behalf
of corporate power, is the triumph of hope over experience. There are only a few ways left to deal
honestly with climate change: sustained civil disobedience that disrupts the machinery of
exploitation; preparing for the inevitable dislocations and catastrophes that will come from
irreversible rising temperatures; and cutting our personal carbon footprints, which means
drastically reducing our consumption, particularly of animal products.” That reduction of
consumption may have to include exorbident works of art, like Ice Watch Paris, as well.
As openly stated in the project’s Executive Summary, the carbon footprint resulting from the
exhibition of Ice Watch Paris is 30 tons CO2e. The transportation of the 12 blocks of ice,
weighing 80 tons, from the Nuup Kangerlua fjord outside Nuuk in Greenland to Paris accounts
for the majority of the emissions: 28.03 tonnes CO2e (93%). The exhibition Ice Watch Paris
results in 0.45 tonnes CO2e (2%). The remaining 1.53 tonnes CO2e (5%) are from the travel
undertaken by the team from Olafur Eliasson Studios and sponser Julie’s Bicycle (a London
based global charity) travelling to Paris for the exhibit. But this is not the first footprint laid
down. In 2014, Ice Watch was first executed in Copenhagen while the I.C.C.P. climate report was
being written.

5. Harvesting ice at Nuuk Port and Harbour, Greenland, Photo by Jørgen Chemnitz © 2015 Olafur
Eliasson
Loading ice at Nuuk Port and Harbour, Greenland, Photo by Group Greenland © 2015 Olafur
Eliasson
In process art, as in the Arte Povera movement, nature itself is lauded as art and the
symbolization and representation of nature is often rejected. So the realization of an immense sun
clock formation of 80 tons of ice on the Place du Panthéon, placed to melt so as to sensitize us to
the larger issue of climate change, may be itself a sign of what is going wrong: scale. Sounding
very much like the utopian wishes that Tomás Saraceno shares around his mega installation

6. Aerocene: Around the world to change the world at the Grand Palais, Eliasson says “Art has the
ability to change our perceptions and perspectives on the world and Ice Watch makes the climate
challenges we are facing tangible. I hope it will inspire shared commitment to taking climate
action.” Inspire whom, I might ask? As Chris Hedges points out, “The global elites have no
intention of interfering with the profits, or ending government subsidies, for the fossil fuel
industry and the extraction industries. They will not curtail extraction or impose hefty carbon
taxes to keep fossil fuels in the ground. They will not limit the overconsumption that is the engine
of global capitalism.”
In light of the past-the-tipping-point era in which we live, Eliasson’s romantic and hopeful vision
is something visually beautiful that may make him absolutely wonderful to some today, but in the
coming distopian hot future, perhaps one of the most hated, selfish, wasteful, mega-artists of our
post-Anthropocene times.
Joseph Nechvatal