Design Matters with Debbie Millman · Design Matters Media

Best of Design Matters: Olafur Eliasson

May 26, 2025·1 hr 4 min·5 clips

Olafur Eliasson describes how his father taught him to find cats and houses in abstract drawings as a child.

The conversation starts with trust. Debbie Millman introduces Olafur Eliasson as an artist who cares about what happens when people enter the work, not just what they see from a polite distance. Nature is the pressure in the room. The cold open names the visual artist's old problem: scale, form, and force may already belong to the natural world. Eliasson's answer, at least in this framing, is to invite the viewer in. Looking, sensing, and being there are not extras; they are part of the work. Then the biography slips in sideways. The strongest section goes back to his father's job in the canteen at the American base in Keflavik. A jukebox becomes a strange family pipeline. New American records arrived every week, and the older ones passed through the kitchen staff before ending up at home. Those leftovers gave him a different soundtrack. While others were listening to ABBA, Eliasson remembers Coltrane, Miles Davis, Herbert Hancock, and the rest of that route into sound. Hip hop hits him in the body. George Clinton, Curtis Blow, African Bambaataa, the Soul Sonic Force, and Johnny Guitar Watson are not dropped as cool references; they explain why movement took over. Breakdance became an obsession. He found like-minded people before it went mainstream, became champion, and still keeps the memory loose, checking it against dancers elsewhere and admitting the limits. The thread lands back in the present, with Peggy Goo asking him to make a music video after seeing him dance, but only if he danced in it. The episode closes on the Auckland Art Gallery retrospective, over 30 years of installations, sculptures, photographs, and experiments with perception and involvement.

As heard by us

An artist interview that starts with perception and keeps widening into music, movement, and memory.

Olafur Eliasson comes through as an artist whose work asks the viewer to step in, and Debbie Millman keeps returning to perception, nature, and the line of influence that runs from a canteen jukebox in Keflavik to Coltrane, Miles Davis, hip hop, and breakdance.

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Why you'd press play

You get Olafur Eliasson thinking out loud about art, music, and the viewer's place in the room.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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