Carsten Höller : Experience

Carsten Höller exhibit at The New Museum is simply called: experience; and it is quite an experience since the moment you enter the museum and are faced with the option to wear the visors that put your world upside down, destabilizing your perception of space. The first thing to see after that,  is some blown up mushroom sculptures right behind the café. With the visors, you feel you have eaten the mushrooms instead of just observing them.

After signing the waver you rush to the fourth floor to jump down the gigantic corkscrew slide, that has become Holler signature, and will take you two floors down in a few second. The slide is a pipe, which upper half is transparent and its lower half is solid. The idea, as Höller explains is to experience ‘almost’ a free fall. The fourth floor also contains  “Mirror Carousel”, as its name describes it, it’s a typical carrousel in shape, but instead of decorated circus like walls, there is only mirror surfaces and light bulbs that rotate in opposite than the flying chairs. No major effect is experienced, everything is very slow. Other pieces in the room like a mobile made out of birdcages.

Being there, in the fourth floor, makes you feel in an amusement park for adults (the waiver excludes people smaller than 5ft)  but you cant help but start questioning the context in which the piece is inserted, and what is this ‘experience’ giving to you.

The third floor instead, contains pieces that make you feel like a rat, in a laboratory. From a sensory deprivation pool, a flickering light installation, colour rubber animals lying on the floor, pills falling every 15 seconds from the ceiling daring you to ingest them (Pill Clock), plastic models and paintings of the slide…

For the un conscious mind is only about having fun, like a dog running after a ball, but for the conscious mind there is a slight discomfort. You don’t know if you are the player or part of the game, besides none of it seems to make sense in an art museum.

That is probably because Mr Höller  holds a doctorate in agricultural science, specializing in the area of insects' olfactory communication strategies’, so he is used to experimentation and  the laboratory environment, hence the ‘experimental’ nature of his work. He creates ‘situations’ that expose the viewer/participant to unfamiliar modes of perception. This is what he calls “influential environments”.

It was not until the late 1980 that Mr Höller started making ‘art’. A definition that maybe was only possible after the re-definition of the concept itself by Nicolas Bourriaud in the beginning of the 1990 with the introduction of ‘relational aesthetics’.

Relational aesthetics introduces artwork that deals with issues of the post-Internet era. Artist reinforce direct public interaction as a way of contrasting electronic forms of communication such as e-mail or phone texting, as well as electronic social networks (twitter, face book, my space, etc). It also reacts to a production-consumption based society.

“In Relational art, the audience is envisaged as a community. Rather than the artwork being an encounter between a viewer and an object, relational art produces inter-subjective encounters. Through these encounters, meaning is elaborated collectively, rather than in the space of individual consumption”

Partly a reaction to the “white cube’, the traditional way of presenting art, this curatorial position encourages a more interactive experience at the museum, as well as works of art that in themselves are in perpetual flux (either always changing or ‘in progress’) where ‘people’ are just another material added to the piece. Many pieces, in fact, are ‘constructed’ by the individuals who participate in the social situation presented to them. From the ‘experiments’ of Carsten Höller, to the lunches with Rirkrit Tiravanija (“pad Thai”), this pieces look to erode the distinction between the institutional and social space and between artist and viewer

Nevertheless, Relational Aesthetics have often been criticized for just replacing one marketing strategy for another; from ‘good and services/ production-consumption’ to a ‘ leisure and entertainment’. And this is a dangerous place to be for art institutions because the work might become just spectacle. Also, because there is an over dominance of the curator, who is ‘running the show’, over the artists that take part in the exhibit. Finally, because what the statement is and what the viewer is getting from this experience is often questionable.

Has society become so numb that socializing has become an artistic practice? Really, is this art proposing something other than what we could do by ourselves going to a plaza? Or at a lunch with a friend? Is displacing the interaction from the public/private scene to the museum a conceptual shift that is worth calling art? I don’t think so.

Carsten Höller exhibit is definitely a experience worth the ticket and it is a lot of fun,  and certainly I applaud the initiative of the New Museum to open its doors to a different concept, but as the artist himself is able to recognize:

“What I’m doing is certainly not science, but maybe it’s not art, either; it’s something in between, a third thing,”.

So all the pieces of the show might just be in the wrong place and with the wrong label.

September 11 at PS1

Dr. Eric Berne (1910-1970), psychiatrist and founder of transactional analysis

Describes in his book: “games people play”, a game called ‘kick me’.

In this game, the person acts most of the time as a victim that constantly remind us not to kick him, but in reality is acting as a provocateur that pushes and pushes until he or she crosses the limits of tolerance, provoking a strong reaction: getting kicked. At this point another games starts called ‘why this has to happen to me’, which may generate enough serious thoughts and constructive criticism to actually generate change, in the form of another game called ‘what did I do to deserve this’, which is in short, a position of reflection on the player personal actions.

Somehow, the description of this psychological game reminded me of the events that took place around September 11, 2001. After the attack, George Bush in his speech that night about the attack said:

-“Americans are asking, why do they hate us?

-They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other” (George Bush, September 11, 2001)

The next day, I remember listening to BBC interviewing people in the streets and the answers to the same questions were much different than that. Most people agreed on both, that was an accident waiting to happen (the USA has been playing the kick me game for a while) and that in spite of the provocations, it was unjustifiable; indeed it was, as many violent acts are.

In recent history, the US only has had two attacks on its own land: Pearl Harbor in the morning of December 7, 1941, and the Twin Towers in September 11, 2001. Both, have been said to be known by the government and let happen in order to initiate war. After all, war is a business as lucrative as oil, but then again, there will always be conspiracy theories and denial when we cannot deal with reality.

Conspiracy or not, denial or not, the causes, we will never know but the facts are there and they are tragic.

In the 10th anniversary of the attack, a relative low profile has been maintained, particularly in art institutions in NYC, which is surprising, for an event that impacted the entire nation heavily, justified political, military and security decisions world wide that even allowed the breach of human/legal rights in the name of the war on terror, and was witnessed by an estimated of 2 billion people (becoming the most televised news to date).

Never the less, The Metropolitan had a small commemoration of the attack with the 9/11 Peace Story Quilt by faith Ringgold; the Brooklyn Museum showed pieces from their permanent collection with no relation with the event whatsoever, other than the fact that that collection served as a relieve, on September 12,2001, for all the people in the area; the Whitney did not even acknowledge it.

 The MoMA though, in its extension in Queens, PS1, put together a very complete show, commensurable with the importance of the attack,  simply called: September 11. It included major artist such as: Janet Cardiff, John Chamberlain, Sarah Charlesworth, Christo, Jeremy Deller, Thomas Demand, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jens Haaning, Susan Hiller, Roger Hiorns, Thomas Hirschhorn, Ellsworth Kelly, Barbara Kruger, Mark Lombardi, Gordon Matta-Clark, Willem de Rooij, James Turrell, Stephen Vitiello, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, etc

Interesting enough, the curatorship decided to feature “ Art made in the context removed from 9/11”, meaning, all of them made prior 9/11. This curatorial position talks about how  9/11, becoming part of the collective memory, changed the way we see the world, changing our set of associations. But also, regretfully, this exhibit is there to prove that history repeats itself and that in spite of all the pain produced by hatred and violence, they  continue to exist, and art continues to be a palliative that helps to deal with the issues related with them.

“ Art has a long and complex history of engaging with violence and catastrophe, and we often turn to it to help make sense of trauma”.

In the days around 9/11, the question of how would the artist respond to the attack was raised once again, as Arthur Danto explains in his article “Art after 9/11”. Artist did not know any better how to deal with it, than any other person. They were, as everyone else, dealing with the shock of the circumstances.

In circumstances like this one, gestures are able to communicate more effectively, in their meaning, than words. So spontaneous artistic expressions populated NY, and other cities of the globe, as an act of empathy and compassion: flowers, shrines, candles, altars, pictures, messages, etc.

What is interesting about this exhibit and its curatorial position is the fact that it looks at the past art examples to give meaning to the present accomplishing two things:  removing the public from direct exposure to the pain of  9/11 (a delicate geture respect)  and,  by indirectly triggering memories referring to ‘the pain of others’ in similar circumstances it creates  a link that places the tragic events of 9/11, not in the local but in the global and historic context. Giving life and death a perspective that is common to a larger demographic sample.

Barbara Kruger piece in the show,  (Untitled (Questions), 1991) questioned the very core of Bush’s answer.

An American flag, whose white stripes are made by a list of questions about freedom.

The artwork, from 1991, is a form of political activism that still current.  Having it as part of the show, re states its relevance and asks us to reflect:

Who speaks? Who is silenced? 

Is there really freedom of religion? Of speech? Freedom to disagree with each other?

Other being the government, the corporations, the main institutions holding power.

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Questions), 1991.

A country that just made legal the corporate sponsorship to political campaigns, is really democratic any more? When Coca-Cola Esso, Verizon, etc might just make it (next period) to the letter head of the White House correspondence….. These were the questions were being raise then and they remain valid now.

The Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s piece "Untitled" (The End), on display on the show, consist of a pile of paper, a simple heavily outlined rectangle with nothing on it, that visitors were invited to take, contributing to the slow disappearance of the sculpture. This 'removable installation’ was used as a metaphor for the process of dying. Although the piece is from 1990, after 9/11 we could not help but to associate the pile of rectangular paper with the footprint of the disappeared twin towers, and the gesture of taking one sheets makes the dialogue possible, becoming a very powerful statement and poetic gesture.

Similarly, what Jem Cohen’s Little Flags-a 8mm black and white  6min.video- brings first, is the memory of September 11 debris on the streets, is only after you look carefully that you realize that in fact is just paper on the streets of lower Manhattan  after a Military parade, filmed in 2000.

The problem of destructiveness has been a constant element along human history as if it was just an unavoidable component of human nature. In seeing the pain of others (in the multiple pieces of that refer to events un related with 9/11) we can relate to the rest of the world in a general level and also connect with the event that closer to our skin, in a personal level, because we can find a common ground. At the same time given the recurrence of the events/and art associate with them we are forced to re-visit common questions about freedom, human rights, death, power, etc. Willem de Rooij piece, by simply displaying newspaper images of “ Riots, Protest, Mourning and Commemoration” makes this point very clear.

Willem de Rooij. Index: Riots, Protest, Mourning and Commemoration (as represented in newspapers, January 2000-July 2002) (detail). 2003

And so are the multiple conflicts that the war on terror brought to the earth. We, as humans, are always face with duality: life and death, war and peace, good and evil…we struggle to keep a balance.

The exhibit is a fantastic example of how we can get more involved by, ironically, removing ourselves and taking the place of others.