Uncluttered.(Take Your Time )(Brief biography)

Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic inventor and engineer of minimalist spectacle, is so much better than anyone else in today's ranks of crowd-pleasing installational artists that there should be a nice, clean, special word other than "art" for what he does, to set him apart. There won't be. "Art" has become the promiscuous catchall for anything artificial that meets no practical need but which we like, or are presumed or supposed to like. Still, play with the thought at "Take Your Time," the Eliasson retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and at MOMA's affiliate, P.S. 1. By the way, please make the P.S. 1 trek--three stops on the No. 7 train from Grand Central. That part of the show details and deepens a sense of Eliasson's creative integrity, which may remain slightly in question amid his stunts on West Fifty-third Street: an electric fan swaying on a cord from the ceiling of the atrium, rooms awash in different kinds of peculiarly colored light, a wall of exotic (and odorous) moss, a curtain of falling water optically immobilized by stroboscopic flashes. I had a little epiphany in Queens while looking at Eliasson's contemplative suites of photographs of Icelandic landscapes, seascapes, glaciers, icebergs, and caves: here's someone for whom beauty is normal. His character suggests both the mental discipline of a scientist and the emotional responsibility of a poet. If leadership in public-spirited art extravaganzas were a political office--and it sometimes feels as if it were--he'd have my vote.

Eliasson was born in Copenhagen in 1967 to Icelandic parents, an artist father and a mother who was a seamstress. They separated when he was three years old. His father returned to Iceland and lived in the countryside; Eliasson spent his holidays there while growing up. He received a degree from the Royal Danish Academy of Arts in 1995, after having moved in 1993 to Cologne for a year, and then to Berlin, where he maintains a well-staffed studio that is part laboratory and part factory. These days, the indispensable skills of a globe-trotting artist are as much managerial as technical. Eliasson seems highly adept at firing up his many collaborators, such as Madeleine Grynsztejn, who was until recently a senior curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where the show originated, and the MOMA curators Roxana Marcoci and Klaus Biesenbach, who oversaw its incarnation here and have mounted a concurrent show, "Geometry of Motion 1920s/1970s," to sketch the artist's historical pedigree. (Walking me through the shows, Marcoci and Biesenbach bubbled with enthusiasm, and pretty soon so did I.) Among other believers are the municipal officials, including Mayor Bloomberg, who have signed off on the incipient whoop-de-do of four colossal mechanical waterfalls to be set up at different sites in New York Harbor in late June, for a three-month run.

There is an earlier waterfall by Eliasson at P.S. 1, "Reversed Waterfall" (1998), which happens to flow uphill. There's no mystery about it. The requisite awkward system of troughs, spouts, and pumps is mostly visible--an example of classically post-minimalist procedural candor. (Dating from the late nineteen-sixties, that principle obliged you, if your work was, say, electrical, to expose the cord and the plug.) Eliasson sometimes allows himself a theatrical illusion, as in a circular installation at MOMA, "360[degrees] Room for All Colors" (2002), in which enveloping hues shift like the weather on a neon planet, and you can't see how it's done. More usual is "1m3 Light" (1999), also at MOMA, in which spotlights and a fog machine plainly account for the apparition of a luminous white cube in the air. Likewise self-evident is the nearby "Room for One Color" (1997), a corridor lit by yellow monofrequency tubes, which suppress all other colors and startlingly clarify your vision of your fellow-viewers. Then there's that locomotive fan, "Ventilator" (1997), a witty finesse of the MOMA atrium's space-splurging grandiosity. Propelling around on a course dramatically varied by ambient air currents--at some moments a vicious zoom, at others an indecisive hovering--the fan becomes an economical point of fascination that makes the space feel designed for nothing else. Its equivalent at P.S. 1 is "Take Your Time" (2008), a vast, overhead, tilted disk of mirrored plastic that rotates slowly, gradually ...