For an hour or so yesterday, I found myself functioning as a willing lab rat in an elaborate, real-time psychological experiment orchestrated by the acclaimed artist Carsten Höller. As I settled onto the mirrored carnival swings installed as part of Carsten Höller: Experience—a sweeping mid-career survey of his boundary-pushing work at Manhattan’s New Museum—and began to rotate at a remarkably slow, hypnotic pace, a profound sense of self-awareness washed over me. It became unmistakably clear that my gentle carousel ride was designed just as much for the casual entertainment and amusement of the surrounding gallery visitors as it was for my own personal sensory engagement. A mobile of suspended cages housing live, tweeting canaries hanging in the very same gallery space not-so-subtly drove that exact point home, reminding everyone present that observation is a two-way street in the modern art institution.
This somewhat awkward, destabilizing shift from being the passive viewer to becoming the active exhibit happens reliably across much of the Brussels-born artist’s diverse body of work. Höller’s practice uniquely combines physical disorientation and childlike play with the rigorous, clinical dynamics of behavioral research, all balanced with a healthy, spectacular dose of theatricality. Witness, for example, his striking 1999 installation Giant Psycho Tank, which audaciously dares museum visitors to completely undress, step gingerly into a large plastic tank raised a few feet above the standard gallery floor, and float alongside similarly prone, vulnerable strangers in a sensory-depriving pool of salt water meticulously warmed to exact amniotic temperatures. With this piece and numerous other radical installations, Höller systematically transforms the pristine, traditional white-cube spaces of the museum into an authentic-feeling experimental laboratory—albeit one entirely stripped of any identifiable, practical research objective.
It comes as little surprise to learn that Höller originally earned a PhD in agricultural science, focusing his academic research on the intricate communication patterns of insects, before ultimately transitioning to a full-time career in the contemporary art world. His installations cleverly activate the complex social dynamics of the museum gallery, yet they do so in a way that primarily elicits deep self-awareness rather than genuine, cooperative interactions with other visitors. In Höller’s universe, everyone else in the room is simply there to silently remind you that you are constantly being watched, evaluated, and measured.
Perhaps the most dramatic, structural inversion of the typical museum-going experience, however, is realized in Untitled (Slide) (2011), a monumental intervention that physically alters the museum’s striking architecture. Designed by the renowned Pritzker Prize-winning architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the Tokyo-based firm SANAA and completed in 2007, the building itself is a masterpiece of contemporary design. Yet Höller’s piece violently cuts through it. An iteration of a concept executed by the artist in several other prominent international venues—most sensationally at the Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall in London back in 2006—Untitled (Slide) consists of a massive steel tube that protrudes directly through the solid concrete floor of the museum’s fourth floor. It then drops in a steep, terrifying twist down through the third floor before finally terminating at a cushioned landing area on the second.
As courageous visitors slide down the vertical chute, they are unexpectedly examined by their watching peers through clear Plexiglas windows strategically lining sections of the tube. Upon exiting, they are deposited directly among a series of surreal fluorescent sculptures depicting fatigued-looking animals. These strange creatures look like some unsettling combination of a natural history museum diorama, outsized children’s toys, and beached whales gasping for air. Disoriented thoroughly from the sudden two-story drop, and thoroughly dazed by the flashing horizontal stripes of harsh white neon that illuminate the gallery space, one cannot help but feel an immediate, ironic camaraderie with the day-glo animal specimens scattered across the floor.
Although the actual ride down the steel tube takes only a few breathless seconds, the physical installation of the slide was by no means a small feat of engineering or logistics. The museum had to carefully cut through two of its heavy, nine-inch concrete floor slabs and underlying metal decks in order to properly insert the massive structure. This required extensive consultations with Gensler’s New York office, which originally served as the executive architect for the building, as well as structural engineering firm Simpson Gumpertz & Heger. According to the museum’s deputy director, John Hatfield, the intricate process involved taking precise X-rays of the reinforced floors to determine the absolute best insertion points, meticulously adjusting the physical twist of the slide to fit the tight spatial constraints, and even severing some electrical wiring while drilling through the dense concrete.
The invasive intervention took just a couple of months to officially permit and execute, and museum officials confirm that the floors will be completely restored to their original condition immediately after the exhibition officially closes on January 15. Yet within the context of the show itself, two delicate Pyrex-looking glass models and an architectural section drawing—detailing a proposed skyscraper complex and a private suburban house, both featuring living spaces intricately connected by a vast nest of similar tubular slides—quietly allude to much bigger, more radical urban possibilities.
Of course, Höller’s artistic experiments can occasionally begin to feel somewhat one-note, or even deceptively shallow, as a visitor grows increasingly accustomed to the heavy-handed self-awareness they inevitably provoke. Yet the vast majority of his installations remain cunning, subversive, and giddily effective in their disruption of institutional norms. Tucked away discreetly in a dim alcove located within the exceptionally narrow, four-foot-wide stairwell leading between the third and fourth floors, Höller has placed a simple industrial water cooler alongside a curious, unlabeled pile of white gel-caps. As another museum-goer and I stood there contemplating whether we were actually meant to swallow the unidentified, unregulated drug, we both jumped audibly when an unseen mechanical device hidden high above dropped yet another few mysterious pills onto the growing pile. In that fleeting moment, I felt uncomfortably like a helpless subject navigating a complex laboratory maze as I scurried hurriedly up SANAA’s notoriously cramped and claustrophobic stairs.
Carsten Höller: Experience is currently on view at the New Museum in New York City, running from October 26, 2011, through January 15, 2012.
