The exhibition “Carsten Höller: Experience” is on display at the New Museum in New York until January 15, 2012 - have a look at it while you are looked at. Objects by Brussels-born artist Carsten Höller is now on display at the SANAA-built New Museum in New York: An exhibition focusing on the artists interest in combining “physical disorientation and play with the dynamics of behavioral research and a healthy dose of spectacle.”
To install one of Höller’s works, “Untitled (Slide)”, it was necessary to cut through two of the Museum nine-inch concrete floor slabs and metal decks: Untitled (Slide) is a steel tube that protrudes through the concrete floor of the museum’s fourth floor and drops in a steep twist through the third floor to a landing area on the second. Visitors sliding down the chute are examined by other visitors on the third floor through plastic windows lining sections of the tube, before they are deposited on the second floor among a group of fluorescent sculptured animals.
Another piece displayed at the exhibition invites for example visitors to undress and step into an enclosed white plastic tank that is raised about five feet from the gallery floor. There they are to float in a sensory-depriving pool of salt water warmed to amniotic temperatures while other visitors can watch their bobbing shadows from outside the backlit container.
It is not surprising that before becoming an artist, Carsten Höller earned a PhD in agricultural science, studying insect communication: His use of the social component of a gallery generates self-awareness rather than interactions with others— the visitor is there to be watched him-/herself.
The exhibition “Carsten Höller: Experience” is on view at the New Museum in New York City, October 26, 2011 — January 15, 2012.
More information:
www.newmuseum.org
