It is most disquieting to encounter the idea that contemporary art is pre-eminently the province of childhood in the Baltimore Museum of Art, site of the recent acquisition of Olafur Eliasson’s Flower Observatory. The sculpture casts a decidedly negative set of connotations over the surrounding phalanx of paintings, the Warhols, Stellas and Rothenstein, which provide a brightly colored field to which the kaleidoscope converts into chromatic punctuations within a network of pretty patterns. Jonathan Borofsky’s Male/Female 2004 piece, sited outside Baltimore’s railway station, is marginally less distressing, since it stands in splendid isolation and does not co-opt the work of any other artists. The piece stands on its own four feet, totally anonymous. Two cut-out figures intersect at right-angles with a purple glow-in-the-dark heart at the center, uniting them forever. Or at least whenever it gets dark outside, when the flickering purple-blue light makes the work glow with its own inner pulse. Flimsy paper dolls become a monstrous metallic colossus, which merges the male and female into an androgynous whole and dominates the public square with its vapidity. 

Flower Observatory is a conglomeration of stainless steel cells forming a flower-like dome. Though its exterior is as spiky and utilitarian as a desert plant, the ethereal and highly decorative interior is no surprise, telegraphed by the highly reflective nature of the material. Two architects, Einar Thorsteinn and Sebastian Behmann, collaborated with Eliasson on the piece, and as one would expect of such collaboration, the size of the Flower Observatory is keyed specifically to human proportion. Despite rather garbled claims on the informational wall plate, apperception plays no significant part in experiencing the piece. In fact, the multiple decorative cells rely precisely on scrambling one’s visual references. The human agent determines the height of the piece, neither built too high to easily see the reflections, nor too low to discomfort or cramp the viewing space, it reminds one of a garden pergola or summerhouse. Naturally, the observer activates the artwork by walking into and around it. Does this activity lead one to a heightened sense of apperception or self-awareness? Hardly.

Apperception goes to the heart of modern art, beginning with the work of Paul Cézanne and extending to the work of Richard Serra, in which scaling is pre-eminently an issue of human agency and size is simply intransigent.

By contrast, Eliasson’s object is conceived as beautiful symmetrical artwork set in contemplative space with no recourse to scaling. As sculpture, it functions exactly the same way that a David Smith or Anthony Caro would--pictorially. If, however, the piece were sited outdoors it would present a far different set of visual referents. Placed outside the museum confines, the piece would reference concerns not dissimilar to those explored in David Smith’s stainless steel works designed to be seen outdoors, where the changing light animates the artfully ground steel surfaces. Eliasson’s piece Flower Observatory is radically misplaced in a closed interior setting; natural light from a window or even from skylights would animate the piece to its advantage. Putting it outside would make it a stronger piece of work, adding immensely to understanding its historical credentials by allowing the work to filter changes in the available light and weather conditions.

Does the piece lend itself to that sort of interpretation? Flower Observatory belongs to an unbroken tradition of contemporary art that is underpinned by a vitalist philosophy. In broad terms Vitalism is based upon holism, and a major component of its longevity and attraction is the perception of it as something fundamental.  The basic idea is that vitalism is essential to the human being as that vital spark essential to life. Understanding vitalism as the province of organic entities paves the way to establishing human reality as irredeemably vitalist. Vitalism becomes primary--essential and immediate. The attempt to enliven the surface of a piece of sculpture is the attempt to imbue it with life, to animate the inert material by “invigorating the surface” or “making the form dynamic.” In short, the artist attempts to produce in an inanimate object an effect of the vital force of life. In this regard, Vitalism is fetishistic.

Borofsky’s piece unabashedly advances a pro-vitalist position, with the flickering inner light suggesting a literal spark for the inert mass of surrounding material. Surfaces have been titivated to enliven the expanses of flat material, vide Smith’s Cubii series. While Flower Observatory would benefit from an outdoor setting, the size of Borofsky’s piece demands that it be sited elsewhere, in an enclosed space. Since the artwork is pictorial, its interaction with the continuum of space around it is inconsequential. An enclosed space would make the work appear even more colossal, its vapidity thus more of an agenda. Currently, the work’s relative inconsequentiality in relation to its location dilutes its insipidity, masking its value or intent as a comment or reflection on the emptiness of pop-psychology -culture.

Eliasson and Borofsky’s works not only perpetuate a conservative aesthetic viewpoint but they compound the insult by reducing the status of contemporary artworks to decorative objects bereft of critical thought. Given the political mood prevalent in the United States over the past few years, this seems to be an all-too-appropriate attitude. Vitalism is still undisputedly the dominant visual ideology in the United States. Eliasson’s metallic botanical and Borofsky’s androgyne reify simplified ideas about the transcendental and render them as bland aesthetic confections.