Carsten Höller, installation view, Hayward Gallery, courtesy of the artist
Carsten Höller’s retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery has opened to a slightly hysteric fanfare; with photos of punishing queues to enter Holler’s wonderland populating Instagram feeds as frequently as the Belgian artist’s infamous slides. It’s a show of cumulative possibilities, and a platform for interaction, bearing similarities to the fun of a playground while still indulging the cerebral qualities of more conventional contemporary art.
Carsten Höller, installation view, Hayward Gallery, courtesy of the artist
The artist is, as his work implies, a lapsed scientist – he did a doctorate in biology, specialising in the ways that aphids (plant lice) navigate the world. One outcome lands you in a pitch-black metal maze that forms Höller’s first participatory project of this expansive show. Forced to follow the voices and metallic clamber of those in front, it takes five laborious minutes before any shaft of light appears. It’s an ambitious entrance, and indicative of the artist’s free reign to completely reimagine the Hayward’s brutalist concrete space. The space can immediately feels claustrophobic, uncomfortable, frustrating and playful, and the interaction with it is probably closer to an encounter with existential dread than any traditional gallery excursion.
Carsten Höller, installation view, Hayward Gallery, courtesy of the artist
Bourriaud’s “Relation Aesthetics” might provide the most exquisite conceptual framework for Höller’s practice, which takes as its theoretical and practical point of departure, “the whole of human relations and their social context”. Where relational aesthetics assert the aesthetic nature of relational works, and hence their value as art, it’s these formal qualities that become quickly identifiable in the interpersonal relationships Höller seeks to engage. Yet, “Alice in Wonderland” could be an equally fixed visual reference, with red and white pills, optical experiments, and giant mushrooms all punctuating proceedings at Höller’s “Decisions”.
The rules are simple and Höller recreates a carnival atmosphere. The Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin discussed the carnival as a place that “celebrates temporary liberation […] from the established order”, a place where hierarchical division is negated. It might be a lofty link, but the show feels like a genuine engagement with passion and experience when you see both adults and children crawling around, popping pills, plunging multi-storey slides and sticking their heads into a giant dice. It’s a decadent indulgence of Bakhtin’s spirit of the carnival, as a space where social order is freely suspended and where people relate to each other freely and openly.
Amid the fairground fever of Höller’s world, simplicity also reveals itself as the artist’s choice weapon and undoubtedly the most effective one. Höller’s split-screen film titled “Fara Fara”, 2014, (shown at this year’s Venice Biennale) is a true highlight, documenting Congolese sound clash tradition where two groups play simultaneously and the one playing the longest wins. Visceral, and exacted with stunning precision, it captures the vibrant music scene of Kinshasa with emotive clarity.
Carsten Höller, installation view, Hayward Gallery, courtesy of the artist
Höller offers up a compendium of choices in this show, largely governed by whether you choose to participate or observe, but do we really want to make any kind of choice when we experience art? The average working adult already makes about 12 decisions before 9 o’clock in the morning. This decision between active experience and more passive observation is a pertinent one and bluntly administered by Höller. Yet, eschewing participation would probably make this exhibition in its dramatised sense of nonsense fall flat on its acid-tongued face. You need to strap yourself to the flying machine and spin on the roof or put on upside-down glasses and blunder around. It’s a show that demands to be physically probed and played with, however impractical or socially awkward that might be.
Text by Kam Dhillon
Carsten Höller: “Decision” is on at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre in London until 6 September 2015
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