Carsten Höller

If anyone has the power to challenge the viewer, it’s an artist like Carsten Höller. To start with, you never know what he is going to surprise you with, and secondly, his art cannot be approached with a distanced eye as we are accustomed to do in the case of more traditional art – which is to say by looking and reflecting. Höller demands a different kind of engagement. He plays games with your senses and disorients your body. When Höller invites you to a private view it’s like going to a party where you’ve not entirely sure whether the host has spiked the punch with LSD. Höller is a scientist by training and has a reckless, unorthodox approach to art making, with no specific, recognizable style. Since the beginning of the 1990s, Höller has accordingly fluttered the dovecotes with taboo breaking, experimental works that addle the senses. He has created works with which to kill and maim children, fairground rides that are barely perceptible, ‘double’ installations, where the entire show is depicted twice, experiments with lights whose flickering is synchronized with the brain, and the stupendous slides that were installed in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall last year. This is all aimed at creating in the ‘participant’ (‘viewer’ in Höller’s terminology is an obsolete phenomenon) the sense of losing balance, losing sync, with reality. He’s a tease, and no mistake, Carsten Höller. Moreover, Höller deliberately evades categorization by, for instance, disguising his identity. He has a adopted a variety of pseudonyms – sometimes a mere orthographical variant like ‘Karsten Höller’, at others something different altogether like ‘Baldo Hauser’ – which align with a variety of moral stances. In consequence, Höller’s artistic practice is forever mutating. Like a species of ‘mad’ scientist, he conducts physical experiments with an ever-fascinated art public. That Höller’s spectrum of interests ranges from insects through experiments on the senses to African music doesn’t exactly make him more straight-up and accessible. Perhaps he’ll arrange for a band from Congo to show up at Karriere. Or perhaps it’ll be goggles that invert the wearer’s world (the upside-down vision we are in fact born with). Or something else altogether. With an artist like Höller, mystification is always a key element and you never know what he has up his sleeve. (MKT)

Carsten Höller, born 1961, Germany