Twisted ways of seeing
Carsten Höller has a PhD in insect communication, but he abandoned the rules of science for the “subjective experience” of art
By Sarah Douglas | From issue 227, September 2011
Published online 24 Oct 11 (Features)
Carsten Höller’s disorienting works are better described as “experiential” than merely “visual”. He’s made sculptures of giant mushrooms that viewers walk around and through, losing a sense of perspective; he’s made carousels, slides that are meant to be slid down, glasses that “turn” the world upside down, a functioning restaurant/nightclub, sensory deprivation tanks, hotel rooms situated in museums. His career to date has been dedicated, in many ways, to the pursuit of what he has called “doubleness”.
The artist has his first major solo exhibition in New York, a show curated by Massimiliano Gioni at the New Museum, from 26 October to 15 January 2012. His Double Carousel with Zöllner Stripes—the set of brightly lit merry-go-rounds spinning slowly in opposite directions that won him the Enel Contemporanea prize—goes on view at Rome’s Macro Museum of Contemporary Art from 30 November to March 2012.
Höller, 49, trained as a scientist, earning his PhD in agricultural science, with a specialisation in insect communication strategies, from the University of Kiel. Even after he started making art, in the late 1980s, he continued to work as a research entomologist until 1994.
Since 1996, when curator Nicolas Bourriaud first defined the term “relational aesthetics”, Höller’s work has been associated with the concept, as has that of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pierre Huyghe and other artists whose work encourages interaction. Three years ago, Höller’s Revolving Hotel Room—an opportunity for an overnight stay in the Guggenheim Museum in New York—was included there as part of the exhibition “theanyspacewhatever”, a survey of work by relational-aesthetics artists.
