Water, Water.(The Talk of the Town)(The New York City Waterfalls)

Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic installation artist, whose work has been on view this spring at both the Museum of Modern Art and its Queens affiliate, P.S. 1, is about to take over a large stretch of the East River. "The New York City Waterfalls," his latest project, opens on June 26th. It features four tall, widely separated, openwork steel towers housing powerful pumps that will pull river water up to a high basin and send it cascading down again, continuously, from seven in the morning until ten at night, through mid-October. Eliasson wants New Yorkers to sharpen their sense of the city as a waterfront place. "I am not trying to bring nature to the city," he explained last month. "It's a kind of counter-numbness project."

Standing beside the tower situated at Pier 35, just north of the Manhattan Bridge, Eliasson seemed more New York than Scandinavia: black mackintosh, rimless glasses, three-day stubble, darkish hair worn long in the back and at cross purposes on top. "This tower is a hundred and ten feet high," he said. "That one over there"--pointing across the river, under the Brooklyn Bridge--"is ninety feet. Can you see the one on Governor's Island, to the left of that white building? The fourth one is in Brooklyn Heights, near the promenade." Eliasson and the sponsors of the $15.5-million project, the Public Art Fund and the City of New York, have made a deal with the Circle Line to run boat tours for viewing the falls; the boats will leave from Pier 16, at frequent intervals, all summer. "The city is so big that it's hard to tell the scale of that space," he said, indicating a wide sweep of river. "It seems very big, but also very small, because we just pop over it all the time. When we see a waterfall, though, we can get a sense of the distance, because, the farther away it is, the slower it seems to fall."

As a child who spent summers with his father in Iceland--his parents were divorced when he was three--Eliasson took waterfalls for granted. "When you walk in Iceland, you have the highlands on one side and the ocean on the other side," he said. "So you are always running into waterfalls." He remembered this when he was an art student in Copenhagen, and getting involved with the dynamics of water, wind, light, and other natural phenomena. "I was interested in how we engage the world. How do we use our skin as our eyes?" He went on, "If you read a cityscape or ...