Giant waterfall takes over Versailles

ART IN THE SKY: A towering waterfall appears to fall from midair into the Grand Canal at the Palace of Versailles as part of Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson's latest exhibition.

VERSAILLES: It is so big he claimed it “almost holds up the sky.”

But Danish artist Olafur Eliasson refused Monday to reveal just how tall the giant waterfall he has created at France’s Palace of Versailles actually is.
“The height is perfect,” he told reporters as he unveiled the spectacular installation which cascades into the Grand Canal of the famous royal gardens outside Paris.
“Just as I intended it will obscure the sun when it sets” on Midsummer’s Day, said the artist, who has previously wowed New Yorkers with his 10-story urban waterfalls and Londoners with a huge trippy sunset at the Tate Modern gallery.
“Of course I could tell you how many meters it is, but I am not going to because we need to leave it to the public to make up their minds how high is high,” he said.
Earlier he admitted to AFP that he was “behaving like a small arrogant king” in not revealing its height, adding cryptically that the “size (of the waterfall) is decided by the confidence in the more cosmic Baroque.”
Eliasson said he wanted to get away from a “world where everything is reduced to statistics... to resist the idea that we have always to quantify the unquantifiable.”
Instead, he insisted the eight works he has created for the palace built by “Sun King” Louis XIV, the most absolute of France’s absolute monarchs, were created to give “everyone the chance to become a king and queen.
“It is about decentralizing the hierarchy of the perspective... (to let everyone) winkle out the secrets” of the visual tricks Louis XIV and his architects used to impress and overawe visitors to Versailles.
His other works include what he hopes will be an enchanted misty ring in one of the gardens’ many groves called the “Fog Assembly” in which visitors are encouraged to “lose themselves.”
Unfortunately, its full effect was somewhat obscured by a real fog on the morning of its opening. The waterfall too was sometimes lost in the mist.
An enormous fountain had featured in the original plans for the baroque 17th-century palace drawn up by Louis XIV’s architect Andre Le Notre, but was never realized despite attempts to pump water over a hill from the river Seine.
“We are going to make the impossible possible,” Eliasson had earlier declared, “to make dreams come true.” But Mother Nature in the shape of the floods that swelled the Seine last week almost undid his plans, the 49-year-old artist admitted.