Carsten Höller is an artist working in the realm of rapture. From carnival rides to flying machines, slides and otherworldly sculptures, Höller generates opportunities for his audiences to experience whimsy and delight. He is often associated with relational aesthetics—a style coined in 1996 by Nicolas Bourriaud that focuses on human exchange and social context over object-based art. Born in 1961 to German parents in Brussels, Höller holds a doctoral degree in agricultural science and worked as a research entomologist until 1994. He began to make art in the late 1980s, alongside other artists experimenting with space and experience such as Pierre Huyghe, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Philippe Parreno.
Read MoreOne of Höller's earliest works was Flugmaschine (Flying Machine) (1996), a large steel structure to which viewers are strapped with a paragliding harness and hoisted through the air by an electric motor. Yet Höller is perhaps best known for his enormous, tubular slides, the first of which were made for the 1998 Berlin Biennale. Interested in the temporary loss of control while descending a slide, Höller compares the slider's experience to a phrase describing vertigo by the French writer Roger Caillois: a 'voluptuous panic in an otherwise lucid mind.' Or, in the artist's words, it is 'an emotional state . . . somewhere between delight and madness.' In 2000, Höller installed a slide in the office of Miuccia Prada in Milan, and in 2006, he erected what came to be his most widely recognised project: Test Site—a set of five giant slides in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall.
In the same year, Höller's carnival rides were exhibited at at MASS MoCA in North Adams. Titled Amusement Park, the machines moved at dramatically slowed speeds and were kinetic sculptures rather than functioning rides. As in his slides, Höller embraced novelty and play while welcoming the viewer's bewilderment upon encountering carnivalesque 'entertainment' in a museum setting. Similarly, in 2014, his Golden Mirror Carousel was installed in an open-air sculpture court at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. The spectacular carousel was a shining, gilded structure that also revolved at a slowed pace—approximately one rotation per five minutes. By extracting velocity from where it is expected, Höller asked viewers to contemplate the speed expected from both the entertainment industry and everyday life. Höller again dramatically transformed the museum environment for the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum's theanyspacewhatever exhibition in 2008, when he presented Revolving Hotel Room: an installation comprising large rotating glass disks that became fully operational hotel rooms at night.
The effect of Höller's scientific studies are still evident in the artworks of his that incorporate plants, birds, animals and insects. Singing Canaries Mobile (2009) is a gigantic mobile comprising seven birdcages housing live singing canaries—one of the many kinds of birds that the artist keeps in his Stockholm home. Höller has incorporated mushrooms into his work since 1994; in 2000, he fixed massive, whimsical fungi sculptures to the ceiling for Upside Down Mushroom Room at Fondazione Prada in Milan. Alice in Wonderland-like mushroom replicas (Giant Triple Mushrooms [2010]) were seen in his aptly titled 2011 survey exhibition Experience at the New Museum in New York. Höller selected the species of mushrooms (often fly agaric) based on their psychotropic properties. Also seen in Experience were: Giant Psycho Tank (2000), a sensory-deprivation pool that invited viewers to feel temporarily bodiless; Experience Corridor, in which viewers were invited to undertake self-experiments; and Animal Group (2011), an assemblage of life-sized and surreally coloured replicas of creatures.
Höller often describes his art as experiments and likes to bring his work outside of museums. In late 2017, he opened a nine-storey site-specific slide at the entrance to a mall, titled Aventura Slide Tower (2017)—his first permanent slide tower in the United States.
Höller is currently based in Stockholm and shares a house in Ghana with Marcel Odenbach.
Elliat Albrecht | Ocula | 2018
