For a brief hour or so, art becomes an active behavioral study, and the visitor is no longer just an observer, but the primary specimen. Sitting down on the mirrored carnival swings installed as part of Carsten Höller: Experience—a sprawling mid-career survey of the Brussels-born artist’s work at Manhattan’s New Museum—and beginning to spin very slowly, one becomes acutely, self-consciously aware that this carousel ride is mounted as much for the entertainment and amusement of the surrounding gallery visitors as it is for the person riding it. A mobile of suspended cages housing live canaries in the same gallery space not-so-subtly drives the point home, drawing a parallel between the caged birds and the human participants navigating the curated environment.
This awkward, disorienting shift from being the viewer to becoming the exhibit itself happens in much of Carsten Höller’s work. The artist’s practice consistently combines physical disorientation, sensory play, and the calculated dynamics of behavioral research with a healthy dose of public spectacle. One need only witness Giant Psycho Tank (1999) to understand the premise. The installation dares museum visitors to completely undress, step into a shallow plastic tank raised a few feet above the gallery floor, and float alongside similarly prone, anonymous strangers in a sensory-depriving pool of warm salt water heated precisely to amniotic temperatures.
Through works like this and other large-scale installations, Höller effectively transforms the pristine, neutral territory of the museum’s white-cube galleries into a functioning laboratory—albeit one entirely stripped of an identifiable research objective or scientific outcome. It comes as little surprise to learn that Höller earned a PhD in agricultural science, studying insect communication and behavior, before transitioning full-time to the contemporary art world. His installations cleverly activate the social dynamics of the gallery setting, but they do so in a way that elicits deep self-awareness rather than genuine social interactions with others. Everyone else in the room is simply there to remind you of an inescapable reality: you are being watched, evaluated, and analyzed.
Perhaps the most dramatic and structurally disruptive inversion of the typical museum-going experience, however, is Untitled (Slide) (2011), a monumental intervention that directly cuts into the New Museum’s striking building. Designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architecture firm SANAA, led by Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, and completed in 2007, the building itself is a landmark of contemporary architecture. Höller’s intervention is an iteration of a piece he has executed in several other prestigious international venues, most sensationally at the Tate Modern’s massive Turbine Hall in London back in 2006.
Untitled (Slide) takes the form of a polished steel tube that protrudes dramatically through the concrete floor of the museum’s fourth floor, dropping in a steep, terrifying twist down through the third floor before finally terminating at a landing area on the second floor. As adventurous visitors slide down the chute, they are examined and scrutinized by their peers through transparent Plexiglas windows lining sections of the tube. Upon reaching the bottom, they are deposited squarely among fluorescent sculptures of fatigued-looking animals that appear to be some strange hybrid of a natural history museum exhibit, outsized children’s toys, and beached whales. Completely disoriented from the sudden two-story drop, and dazed by the flashing stripes of white neon light that illuminate the landing space, participants can’t help but feel a sudden, strange camaraderie with the day-glo specimens surrounding them.
Although the actual ride down the slide takes only a few fleeting seconds, the engineering and physical installation of the piece was no small feat. To make it happen, the museum had to cut directly through two of its nine-inch-thick concrete floor slabs and underlying metal decks. This required extensive consultation with Gensler’s New York office, which served as the executive architect for the building during its original construction, as well as structural engineering firm Simpson Gumpertz & Heger.
According to the museum’s deputy director, John Hatfield, the complex process involved taking detailed x-rays of the gallery floors to determine the safest and most structurally sound insertion points, carefully adjusting the precise twist of the slide to fit within the building’s layout, and even severing some electrical wiring while drilling through the reinforced concrete. The entire engineering and architectural intervention took just a couple of months to permit and execute. Furthermore, the museum has committed to restoring the floors immediately after the exhibition closes on January 15. Yet, within the current show, two Pyrex-looking glass models and a detailed section drawing—depicting a speculative skyscraper complex and a suburban house, both with spaces interconnected by a wild nest of similar slides—allude to much bigger, more radical architectural possibilities for the future.
Höller’s elaborate experiments can occasionally begin to feel a bit one-note, or even somewhat shallow, as visitors become accustomed to the predictable self-awareness that his immersive setups provoke. Yet, the vast majority of his installations remain cunning, subversive, and giddily effective. Tucked away discreetly in an alcove located within the four-foot-wide stairwell leading between the third and fourth floors, Höller has placed a simple water cooler positioned directly next to a pile of unlabeled white gel-caps.
As another visitor and this writer recently contemplated whether we were actually meant to swallow the unidentified pharmaceutical capsules, both of us jumped visibly when an unseen mechanical device hidden in the ceiling above abruptly dropped yet another small batch of pills onto the pile. Standing there in the cramped stairwell, the sensation of navigating a laboratory maze while scurrying up SANAA’s notoriously narrow and confined stairs felt uncomfortably real.
Carsten Höller: Experience is on view at the New Museum in New York City from October 26, 2011, through January 15, 2012.
