The Weather Project

Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project at Tate Modern is the latest in a string of projects about landscape and the environment.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

ALKARIM JIVAN:
I think the man is a complete genius. If anybody can pull conceptual art out of the arid corner it's boxing itself into, this is an example. In Stockholm, he put a non-toxic substance into the river and turned it bright green for a short period. It was unexpected and it changed people's lives. That's what the best art should do. I went to see this again after the press showing. There was a small child pointing up at the sun just gurgling with delight. That's the thing about Eliasson's work. You can respond to it elementally or intellectually. It forces you to accept things. So it's a trick done with smoke and mirrors which simultaneously forces you to work out, and tells you how the trick is pulled off. So when you enter the Turbine Hall from the west entrance, the upper half is broken up into shards. As you get closer to it, it become as sphere. When you get behind it, you see a series of lamps with the wiring.

JULIE MYERSON:
I couldn't disagree more. I think the Turbine Hall is a work of art. It's a completely unnerving, fantastic experience walking down into the Turbine Hall. But I thought this was just a pleasant thing that had been put into it. It was just the sun in a sky. It was like a million stage sets I have seen before. It was utterly unchallenging. I felt I would rather look at the sun outside, to be honest. If he had done something exciting, like placed 89 suns there, I might have felt or thought something. I might have been startled.

TOM PAULIN:
I agree with Alkarim. Great sublime symbol. Slightly Japanese, slightly Nordic. Promoted good feelings among everybody. Young people lying down looking at themselves high up in the mirror. People chatting to each other. A great glow of radiance.

TOM SUTCLIFFE:
He is very suspicious of sublime. Do you think he is kidding himself?

TOM PAULIN:
He is using mist and light? I didn't get the mist. I just got the pure sun. No. I think it is sublime, but it's playing great jokes with nature and technology, I think.

ALKARIM JIVAN:
Absolutely. There is a wonderful in joke. His favourite films is The Truman Show, and in the end he walks into the sunset and opens the door and it turns out to be a painted flat. I think it's actually a rich piece. It's a minimalist piece and yet it has so much in it. It provides for three of your five senses. You get the sight of the sun, but because the lamps have a light emitted at lower frequency, everything appears mono chromatic, so everything appears white. As you get closer, there is a humming as you get nearer the sun. It's shimmering. Then there is the faint smell created by this glycerine based water vapour which smells almost like incense.

JULIE MYERSON:
I didn't sense that. The weather doesn't feel like that. It felt like a stage set. Is it dry ice?

ALKARIM JIVAN:
Dry ice is very acrid. But the whole point is a stage set pretends to be something it isn't, and at the same time telling you that it wasn't that.

JULIE MYERSON:
Er, yes! Context matters a little. It took him more than a year from conception and presumably quite a lot of money from Unilever. If he had done it on a small budget with things found in skips and a little help from his friends, I would have been impressed, but the Turbine Hall was doing a lot of the work.

TOM SUTCLIFFE:
He plays a trick with the ceiling which makes it into a kind of abstract Sistine chapel.

TOM PAULIN:
It was really extraordinary going there