Random Installation’s Rain Room at Barbican Art Gallery
When we imagine artworks that use water, the initial thought tends towards the more conventional, such as the briny, atmospheric landscapes of JMW Turner (he painted more than a thousand seascapes) or Claude Monet’s many visions of the weather-beaten Normandy coast and his sensuous, immersive water lilies.
If you are not a traditionalist, then it might be sculptures integrating water as a feature that capture your imagination – think Belagio to Versailles – “fountain art” in public spaces, especially loved by Instagrammers, pigeons and small children.
Actual water in the gallery space – an environment that is carefully monitored for temperature and humidity – is seemingly an oxymoron.
But as early as the 1960s artists were challenging that assumption. From being pummeled by a raging torrent or seduced by the smell and sound of rain, these ten artists use water as an evocative and immersive medium – and people love them.
Rain Room as experienced at the Barbican Centre, London
1. Rain Room
Water, injection moulded tiles, solenoid valves, pressure regulators, custom software, a water management system and grated floor – they are not the usual materials expected in an art gallery.
Random International’s Rain Room was first unveiled at the Barbican Centre, London in 2012. It is a 100-square meter space of continual rainfall where the sound and smell of rain creates an intense immersive environment, and yet visitors leave dry.
Sensors triggered by the human body pauses the rain, giving them that seemingly impossible experience of controlling rain. The Barbican explained: ‘The unique installation is yet another example of how the role of digital technology is taking audience participation, response and interaction to the next level within the world of art.’
Random International is a collaboration between graduates from the Royal College of Art: Hannes Koch, Florian Ortkrass and Stuart Wood. The installation has also been presented at MoMA in New York; Yuz M in Shanghai; LACMA in Los Angeles and The Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art, USA.
Still from Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s first film made underwater that explored Vietnamese identity; courtesy Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba
2. Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba
Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba was born in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and a Vietnamese father in the same year that the Tet Offensive was staged by the Viet Cong. His films explore national identity and often reference the displacement of “boat people” after the Vietnam War. It is not surprising then that he has used water to tell that story.
His first video work, Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam: Towards the Complex—For the Courageous, the Curious, and the Cowards (2001) was a spellbinding image of local fishermen pulling cyclos (rickshaws) underwater, eventually reaching outstretched mosquito nets across the sea bed. The submerged cyclos represent the weight of Vietnam’s historical past in the context of the country’s struggle with modernisation.
Film still from The Ground, the Root, and the Air: The Passing of the Bodhi Tree (2004-2007); courtesy Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba
Other works in which Nguyen-Hatsushiba has used water as a central motif include Happy New Year (2003), also from Memorial Project Vietnam series, which features a processional dragon swimming around a reef while capsules of coloured dye explode to form underwater fireworks; Flag Project (Memorial Project Okinawa) (2003) filmed in the sea off Okinawa and featuring a remixed James Bond movie soundtrack played underwater with portraits of movie stars who have featured in Hollywood movies about the Vietnam War; and The Ground, the Root, and the Air: The Passing of the Bodhi Tree (2004-2007), realised with 50 students of the Luang Prabang School of Fine Arts in Laos and taking their landscape painting class onto the Mekong River. It was presented at the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane.
Cloud Parking (2011) gives people the sense of walking through clouds on a carpark rooftop in Linz, Austria
3. Fujiko Nakaya
Now in her early 80s, Fujiko Nakaya created the world’s first fog sculpture at the Pepsi Pavilion, Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. For the next decade, she focused on politically oriented video art, using her fog sculptures as a platform for collaborations with the choreographer Trisha Brown and the multimedia artist Bill Viola, among others.
In 1998, she installed a temporary fog sculpture to accompany her friend Robert Rauschenberg’s exhibition at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain. Rauschenberg subsequently purchased the work and donated it to the museum so that it could remain on view as a permanent installation.
Nakaya said of her fog works: ‘I didn’t want to concoct something that is just using fog as a material. I wanted to use it as a means to access and appreciate what nature can give you … The fog is reading its own environment and making it visible. That’s the purpose of the fog sculpture, so I don’t care if it’s permanent or not.’
Powerful pumps blast out water at very high pressure through custom-designed nozzles, which have holes just 120 microns wide, transforming it into dense fog. To create her fog sculpture called Veil (2014), to interact with architect Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, Nakaya spent nearly a year testing wind patterns and carefully calibrating the 800 mist-generating nozzles that are now installed across the landscape.
A fascination for atmosphere and moisture runs in the family – her father Professor Ukichiro Nakaya was credited with making the first artificial snowflakes.
Nakaya’s work is permanently installed in collections of the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; Showa Kinen Park, Tokyo; the Museum of Snow and Ice, Kaga, Japan; and in the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery of Australia. She also created a site responsive piece for 18th Biennale of Sydney, at Cockatoo Island.
Condensation Cube, Gallery label, July 2015
4. Hans Haacke
In 1962, Hans Haacke began producing works that incorporated Plexiglas containers filled with water. Condensation Cube (1965) exemplifies his interest in such basic physical processes as the evaporation and condensation of water.
It consists of a sealed Perspex box filled with a small amount of water. Condensation begins to form and to run down the sides of the box, changing according to the ambient light and temperature. The work’s appearance therefore depends upon where it is placed.
Haacke explained: ‘The image of condensation cannot be precisely predicted. It is changing freely, bound only by statistical limits. I like this freedom.’
A physical process as basic as water condensation allows Haacke to redefine not only the work of art as a living system, but, most significantly, the role of the viewer or user of art.
Path of Silence; Photos by Frédéric Boudin and Studio Jeppe Hein
5. Jeppe Hein
Berlin-based, Danish artist Jeppe Hein works across materials, one of which is water. He is well known for his playful, interactive installations that draw on traditions of Op Art, Conceptual Art and Minimalism.
He made his first large-scale water pavilion in 2002, Space in Action – Action in Space, a circular pavilion, which initially looks inaccessible for the viewer. However, when moving closer, the visitor activates a sensor that opens up the wall of water shooting up from jets in the ground.
After entry, the water starts flowing again, enclosing the viewer in a space surrounded by walls of water. It was presented at 50th Venice Biennale.
The same idea is used in Appearing Rooms (2004), which is subdivided into four squares or rooms. The 2.3 meter-high water walls randomly rise and fall in sequences of ten seconds, allowing the visitor to move within the structure from space to space. It was presented in 2010 at the Perth International Arts Festival and PICA, among other venues.
Path of Silence (2016) is Hein’s most recent work using water, created for the Kistefos Sculpture Park in Norway. It combines his extensive mirror labyrinths in stainless steel with the water sculptures. The rushing water creates a different kind of silence, a noise behind which everything else fades, encouraging visitors to clear their minds and listen to their inner voice.
One of Hein’s mirrored stainless steel installations is currently on show at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV International) until 5 March.
6. Leandro Erlich
Swimming Pool by Argentinian artist Leandro Erlich is permanently installed at the 21st Century Museum of Art of Kanzawa, Japan, and has also had temporary installations at MoMAPS1 (2008) and the Venice Biennale. He represented his country at Venice in 2001.
Conceived in 1999, it allows visitors to look down into a seemingly full pool of water with fully clothed visitors walking around the bottom. From below, the blurry vision of looking up when underwater is recreated using a thin piece of glass with water running over top of it.
Complete with a climbing ladder, Swimming Pool is a fun and interactive installation that creates the illusion of being underwater whilst remaining completely dry.
7. Bill Viola
Pioneering video art in the 1970s, Bill Viola is now considered one of the great masters of the medium. His work is renowned for its atmospheric purity and haunting beauty, tackling themes of birth, death, transformation and transcendence.
Among his videos, water has been a key medium. His signature pieces The Messenger (1996), initially installed in England’s Durham Cathedral, and The Crossing (1996) are both projected life-sized on a continuous loop and presented a figure which is eventually engulfed by water.
In The Messenger a naked man slowly materialises, and upon surfacing takes a huge breath only to descend again into the dark water. The elemental force of water is made more explicit in the two-channel work The Crossing, which revolves around a freestanding, double-sided projection screen. On one side, a man walks in slow motion out of the blackness to eventually confront the viewer. Dripping water from above gradually becomes a torrent, overwhelming the figure, whose form is eradicated. The scene replays after the water dissipates. On the reverse side, the same man approaches, this time to be consumed by rising flames.
They were both presented recently in Australia at the 2015 Adelaide Festival exhibition Bill Viola: Selected works (2015).
Other works where Viola has used water include: Ocean without a Shore (2008) for the 52nd Venice Biennale, where a group of people seemingly produces gallons of water gushing out of their bodies as if they were waterfalls; Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) (2014), gifted to the Tate and on long-term loan to St Paul’s Cathedral. It shows four individuals being martyred by the four classical elements, including water. The work has no sound.
And another is The Raft (2004), which shows a group of men and women from various ethnic and economic backgrounds waiting in line. Suddenly they are pummelled by a massive onslaught of water. It knocks over some; water flies everywhere; they are drenched and exhausted. Then, as suddenly as it arrived, the water stops, leaving behind a band of suffering, bewildered, and battered individuals.
Described by the artist as “an image of destruction and survival”, this powerful and extremely moving work is a symbol of hope in the difficult times we find ourselves. It was presented by ACMI in Melbourne in 2011.
8. Olafur Eliasson
Many of Olafur Eliasson’s works explore the relationship between the spectator and the object. Water, light, temperature and pressure are materials that Eliasson has used throughout his career, and the outcome might be a glistening rainbow, a fog-filled room, a misting screen or a gushing water geyser.
The first to use water was Beauty (1993), which was a thin veil of mist illuminated obliquely by spotlights that produced a hazy rainbow effect.
Having been raised partly in Iceland, weather has played a huge influence in Eliasson’s work. By introducing ‘natural’ phenomena such as water or mist into an ‘unnatural’ setting – the traditional gallery white cube – he recontextualises elements such as light, water, ice, fog, arctic moss and lava rock to create altogether new circumstances that shift the viewer’s consciousness and sense of place.
Among his most iconic works using water is The weather project, installed at the London’s Tate Modern in 2003. He used humidifiers to create a fine mist in the air via a mixture of sugar and water, as well as a circular disc made up of hundreds of monochromatic lamps radiate a yellow light. Open for six months, the work reportedly attracted two million visitors.
However, it is Eliasson’s waterfalls that are most impressive when it comes to water as a contemporary art medium. Olafur was commissioned by The Public Art Fund in 2008 to create four man-made waterfalls, called the New York City Waterfalls, ranging in a height from 90–120 feet, in New York Harbor. At $US15.5 million, it was the most expensive public arts project since Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s installation of The Gates in Central Park.
And most recently, Eliasson has installed a giant waterfall at Palace of Versailles (2016), which appears to fall from midair into the Grand Canal with no discernible source. A latticed tower pumped the water through a system of pipes to emerge from a platform at the top of the tower.
In 1995 he established Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, a laboratory for spatial research. He represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. Eliasson’s survey exhibition was presented at Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) in 2010. It broke previous attendance records for a paid exhibition at the MCA.
Photograph: Vija Celmins
9. Vija Celmins
The Latvian-born, New York-based Vija Celmins seemingly is able to calm an ocean’s swell and rolling waves. Her immense graphite drawings in monochrome greys are constructed from thousands of hours of tiny marks that capture the expanse of an ocean. They appear almost photographic in their detail.
He oeuvre is not confined to water alone. She draws natural phenomena such as spider webs, star fields, the moon’s surface and close ups of rocks. While starting as a painter, she turned to drawing in the early 1980s, finding a balance somewhere between the abstract and the photoreal.
Her works are distinctive for having no reference point – no horizon, depth of field, edge or landmarks to put them into context. The location, constellation, or scientific name are all unknown – there is no information imparted.
She has been the subject of over 40 solo exhibitions since 1965, and major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Bridge at Dilston Grove commissioned for the London Design Fair
10. Michael Cross
Ever wanted to walk on water? British artist Michael Cross has made that possible with his installation, Bridge (2006).
Housed in a former church that is filed with 60 inches of water, visitors approach the liquid installation where they are met by a single stepping-stone. Stepping onto it causes another to appear, rising out of the water, and then another and another, creating a pathway to the centre of the space. However, they disappear in their wake, creating a sense of isolation, fear and meditation. The only way back is to return the way one came.
Cross works in the area between experimental design, art and architecture. His Bridge has no power and is driven by the weight of the participant, and is completed by the location and the audience. ‘I obsess about this project. I lie awake at night and think about how to make it work better,’ Cross says of Bridge, adding that he feels it will never be finished.
His work has been shown in group shows and solo installations including at the Design Museum, London; Tokyo, Moscow, Milan, Taipei and Istanbul. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2004.
