Experience
Vivid stripes disrupt my gaze, and as I attempt to renegotiate myself in relation to my luminous environment, unfamiliar hands place a cumbersome device around my head. I open my eyes and my vision has been utterly flipped. I begin to move upwards, although, nonsensically, I feel instead that I am being lurched downwards. Close by, naked silhouettes enter an enclosed tank one by one. I walk on and stumble by a line of people who are seemingly oblivious to the trailing echoes of screaming coming from within the silver vortex, swallowing bodies through a chasm in the building’s floor. At my feet are neon animals, and in the air are caged birds. I venture past a black curtain and am faced with an infrared image of myself. I leave; a mechanical device offers me a small white pill. Someone faces me and asks me if I want to try the Pinocchio effect with them. I sit down on a mirrored carousel, and quite abruptly everything stops.
Situated at the New Museum, New York, ‘Experience’ is the first comprehensive large-scale retrospective of Carsten Höller’s practice, within an American Institution. The much-anticipated exhibition by the influential artist, boasted record attendance figures over the New York winter holidays. The title Experience is borrowed from post-1990 art theory, in which Höller and his peers have been contextualised; this is primarily, Nicholas Bourriaud’s ‘Relational Aesthetics’1 and B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore’s ‘Experience Economy’2. Coming to art after a career in science, Höller has conceived of his practice as a laboratory for the investigation of an array of subjects, including entertainment, transportation, participation, sexuality, and psychedelic intoxication. Höller’s ‘artist-as-scientist’ agenda