Sheyi Bankale (SB): Using the tools of art, the Art Car has become a renewed prestigious tradition for BMW. However, you have moved away from your predecessors such as Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg to not use the BMW car as a canvas. Since this project has become the latest Art Car since Jenny Holzer’s piece in 1999, was the conscious shift to working in a totally new artistic way the challenge for you?

Olafur Eliasson (OE): I think the challenge in many ways was to work with an object, the car which is such a profound part of everyday life. To engage with something that has such an iconic status in society as an artist is really quite exciting, as art has a tendency to be exclusive. My aim with the project was to address the status of movement in our society today.

SB: Andy Warhol created his BMW Art Car in thirty minutes; you took two years. Was this an extension of the new approach?

OE: There was a long development of Your mobile expectations: BMW H2R project, and it was almost divided into two: the research, the experiments and the construction of the work on one side, and on the other, the question of how we then put the car into the world. Quite quickly I became aware of the way that I morphed the distance between the mediated car and the actual car. It’s hard to tell where they differ from one another. The actual car is the car produced in the factory, and is a result of years of engineering research and design processes, whereas the mediated car is the image of the car that is being communicated by the marketing department of the car company. As research for Your mobile expectations I visited different design, communication, and research departments, and half of my work was just looking at what languages they were using, what they were doing, and why they were doing as they did. This was very inspiring. I was struck by the fact that what you say about the car and the amount of complexity going on in the research laboratory doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand — the complexity doesn’t necessarily get communicated to anyone unless it can be used in the branding of the car.

SB: This conscious intervention in the exhibition space addresses issues of perception and time, and opens up traditional ways of seeing. Generally, how do you view this experience?

OE: Traditionally, car design has been branded as timeless, as this seems to have been most profitable. I, on the other hand, wanted to make a car that had an affinity to temporality and was relative to the context and to the engagement of the viewer.

In the case of Your mobile expectations, I used ephemeral and changeable materials like stainless-steel mirrors and ice to establish a stronger sense of temporality. If the material can change, the time embedded in the material becomes more present. I’ve tried to create a car that is very reactive to its surroundings. The car is different depending on the perspective from which you look at it, and if too many people enter the cooling room where it is exhibited, the ice covering the car starts to melt. My idea was to create an object where your way of looking at it constitutes it. Normally, when you talk about cars, you discuss what the car does to you, but not what you do to the car. I, of course, would like to suggest that a work of art is to a higher extent constituted by our engagement than a design object is: if you don’t look at a photograph or if you’re indifferent to it, it isn’t necessarily there. This means that an art experience is relative to your engagement. I believe that if you create an object that is engaged in society and takes on responsibility, it can have a socializing effect on people, and thus can co-produce reality and procreate the time in which it exists. By focusing on the environmental conditions of the car in the design process, I wanted the spectator to reflect on environmental questions.

SB: In a conversation with Thomas Girst, head of BMW Cultural Communications, he talked with a passion of the artist Joe Goode who actually for every month, showed artists Alfred Stieglitz and James Turrell hanging out of cars and waving. I thought that this was a good example of the car being a permanent theme in the arts as well as mobility. Matthew Barney comes to mind, smashing Chryslers in Cremaster 3 to William Hunt’s Put Your Foot Down, a black 1980s BMW filled with water, where the artist submerges himself and sings the lyrics to a specially composed but audible love song. The artists are dealing with the theme of art and the car and mobility…

OE: I think the point is not necessarily just to make a work of art but also to make a car. I don’t mind seeing things from a different position than the common one, but being a person in the world today, I have an interest in being inside the world and not outside it, I want to make art that is engaged in and takes on responsibility towards the world. In that sense I was struck by the relationship between corporate events and companies and an artistic project like the Art Car; it suddenly made quite a difference to talk about non-normativity in the context of a corporate brand. When I told BMW about my ideas for Your mobile expectations, we spoke frankly, very open and direct, and I had a really good time discussing my ideas with BMW.

What I actually did creating Your mobile expectations was to take away the outer shell of the car I was given from BMW. The car body, containing the steering wheel, brakes and everything, I kept. Then I clad it with an inner and outer skin made of stainless steel. The idea of covering the car with ice was that ice has the ability of both being elusive, hard to see, and very tangible and visible. Therefore you have to engage with the material in order to sustain a relationship with it. Ice is hard to predict because it can melt, it’s fragile, it breaks — it’s a bit like glass. Unlike the skin of a normal car, which isn’t that vulnerable, Your mobile expectations have this sensitivity built into the surface and is very reactive to the way we maintain it.

You may have noticed that the space where Your mobile expectations is exhibited is kept at minus ten degrees, so the visitor basically walks into a freezer. The normal indoor temperature is roughly twenty degrees which means that there’s a discrepancy around thirty-something degrees between the outside and the inside of the cooling room, which is roughly the heat of the body. This means you go in, and you experience this instant temperature shock. When you’re freezing you’re suddenly forced to consider how you spend your body heat. So one could look at the exhibition space as a little climate-controlled environment, in which you are forced to evaluate the nature of your own energy, and depending on how much you have eaten on the day of entering the room, you will have a different length of survival in there. So it comes down to the rationalisation: if you don’t take a blanket, you have an hour and a half before you faint, deteriorate and maybe even die. Because of the physically hostile environment, you’re forced to take in this message, not with your head, looking at the object, but with your body, experiencing the cold.

SB: In terms of having to evaluate your relationship with the environment not consciously as a theory but as actions?

OE: Yes. We love discussions about what is the good life, or what is the right thing to do, as a concept, and we read about it in the paper every day. Everybody knows how to treat the environment; that’s not the problem. The problem is the discrepancy between knowing and doing. The point is to challenge the way that people transmit an idea into actions. And essentially, art has always been about this: having a feeling, having an idea, formulating a manifesto or a dogma and then transmitting it into some kind of language that has a physical entity, a form, and is about causality and action.

SB: In the sequence of how you work things and your relationship with the car itself, and the way the car reacts to you, was it not relative to the movement properties to make the car move?

OE: The tendency is to claim that the car, and not the person in it, is the one that moves, but that’s not the truth, because it’s the person in the car that makes the car move. This is what I try to point out insisting on the fact that you need to move around the car in order to experience it. In the expectations that one has of a car, there is also an idea of movement. According to Chris Bangle (Head of BMW Design) the development of a new car can be divided into five stages, and if I understood it right, I am on stage three. I am very happy because I think art has more potential in stage three than in stage five because in that stage it comes close to design-making. The project is maybe more interesting when it’s sort of intermediate, inconclusive because it’s more thought provoking in its muddled states.

SB: I understand that the BMW Art Car series is not as polarized as executives sitting around a table suggesting how to enhance the brand on the back of the arts and that this whole series evolved organically through the labours of love and tight friendship of Hervé Poulain and a number of artists of the time. Moving forward, how do you view this relationship and the questions that touch on the fundamental issues of this new direction of design and art?

OE: I think that in order to be successful, a design object needs to take on a responsible attitude in relation to the world, and this goes for cars as well. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be talking about these things in the context of this exhibition. BMW is not the only car company changing its attitude towards the environment and starting to act more responsibly, for instance by experimenting with hydrogen driven cars. We’re seeing an increasing number of car companies trying to engage themselves with values that are also values in society. Traditional car-marketing would consider the values of society and say, Oh no, we wouldn’t touch that in the identity of our car. And it’s really interesting that now they are forced by the consumer to be participants in society.

Of course, design has different links with utilitarian functions and demands than art does. But if you think about the art world, in which you have all these spaces and museums and signs, and one corner of it is the art market, you have the exposure of the art world: ninety percent takes place in the corner and ten percent is real art. So in this respect, I want to point out that the conception of art is strangely related to the art market. But yet that doesn’t represent the truth either: there are nearly sixty thousand artists in Berlin, who don’t live from their art, but they also don’t compromise in order to live from it. We need to pay some respect to them for not compromising. And that goes for design as well. If you can set out with a mission in your life and go through with it without compromising, it’s admirable. There’s a culture of compromise in design; it’s in the nature of design to integrate into a project, product or display, and art has a very hard time doing that.