I Hate Carsten Höller: Experience @ The New Museum NYC

don't waste yr $16.

more later.

OK. Firstly it's $16 for entry, and the show's popularity guarantees some sort of wait, but this is compounded by the further amount of waiting we had to do just to get out of the lobby. After purchasing a ticket, you may wait in one or two lines (or both!). The first is where you sign a waiver, this is if you wish to "ride" the carousel or go down the slide. The second is where you can check out a set of the "upside down goggles" - someone was waiting in this line from when we entered until we left. I assume the goggles simply flip your vision, signs by the stairs said guests must remove the goggles to use the stairs.

We signed our waivers and elevator'd up to the 4th floor, where the slide and carousel are installed, along with a hanging mobile of bird cages (with actual birds). Two of our party (myself included) opted out of waiting in the line for a trip down the slide, choosing to bide the time with a few circumambulations on the carousel. About to take our seats, we are asked if we have a wristband ("a wha? we signed the waiver etc" "well you can't ride the carousel without a wristband and you should have received a wristband upon signing the waiver"). well OK, then lets go back down 4 flights and get this wristband, cutting the waiver line and asking the attendant for our due wristband, and get berated for not waiting for a wristband after signing our waiver (no signage or attendant mentioned that we needed to wait for a wristband). Fine, banded, back up for a ride.

The carousel is, visually and functionally, pathetic. Fine, it's chrome, light and mirror signifies its duty of art over function, but the languid pace is not measured by any degree of pleasure in the ride. Firstly, an attendant has to place you in a particular seat, lest you tip the balance of the artwork. My feet rest comfortably on the ground, given the shallow height of the seat, so I lose any experience of suspension, and the seat bucket tips rather forward so it's a bit of a task to keep from slipping off. We circumambulate while others wait to ride the slide. Only one of had properly received a wristband, so yet another of our troop dashes down four flights.

The report from the slide is similarly less than enthusiastic, if not entirely disgusted. Like the carousel, the slide is chrome, with some plexi, and by all accounts no fun at all, the joins between sections causing a regular pain in the ass. Well great let us move on, there are two more floors of "Experience" to be had.

The rest of the show similarly fails to excite, if not entirely disappoint. There are smaller pieces distributed about: a plexi aquarium with little recesses at which you can recline, setting your head underneath a view of the aquarium. Dull. Some decently sized animal sculptures strewn about, and a gigantic, slowly strobing fluorescent wall piece which only managed to elicit my sympathy for the security staff assigned to monitor that floor. I passed through a corridor of smaller installation pieces which in no way asked for a moment of my time. I paused by one out of curiousity, crossing my fingers that something on one of these floors would engage me, a bottle with a sign "Please remove rubber stopper," I do, no odor of any kind proceeds forth, a label reads that there is an essence of some kind in there, but this olfactory story is clearly fictional and, as you can tell, not the least memorable. Fine, descend to the next floor.

On the second floor the slide deposits its riders. This is also where the somewhat notorious isolation/floatation tank is installed, and as none of the four of us wish to soak in random, unwashed art museum-goer lukewarm water (there is no shower as at a normal isolation/floatation tank). Visually the tank is the most striking thing in the whole show, but as the true experience of it is only reserved for those willing to wait for their turn in the tank (given that my average soaks in floatation tanks clock in at an hour), it's purpose is lost on us unwilling to spare the luxury or patience for something that I know is better experienced outside the context of a museum.

Fine that's the show. Part of my frustration is not simply that I "didn't like it" or "didn't get it," neither of these reductions are accurate. I feel that whatever the artist was going for, whatever his intentions are/were, completely fail to connect. Moreover, given the raised price of admission for the duration of this exhibit, the pure hassle of attempting to "experience" "Experience" produces little aesthetic value or meaning for me. It is not simply that there is a lack of "beauty," this void is not filled by anything at all. The "fun" aspects of this huge show are simply no fun at all, they are uncomfortably and cursory, and while lacking in actual fun, they fail to signify "fun" in their presentation. The absolute arbitraryness of the entire show fails in every way to address it's audience, a gaggle of various art types and tourists there to see the big hoopla, yet also fails to show disdain, to actually challenge its audience in their presence. This apathy leads to so many fundamental "why?" types of inquiry that I can only conclude that the artist and the curators (and by extension the donors and sources of funding that makes what is clearly a massive undertaking possible) have little insight into the work as well, and that it's function as spectacle is the only "point" of the show. I can't even label this thing a "failure" or "debacle" - the absolute flat affect in the face of "play" and "spectacle" seems the height of a kind of cynicism in blue-chip, line up and pay for it contemporary art, taking home the cultural captial merit badge of "hey I rode the slide and the carousel and took a dip in the tank."

Go to Sperone-Westwater a block north on Bowery and see two great, deceptively expansive shows on marble and portraiture. It's free and immensely enjoyable.

Hey, thanks for the surrogate experience.

I always say that all art depending on audience participation is necessarily going to be shitty, since I'm such a lousy viewer.

What I find interesting is that much contemporary art I like depends on that simple act of taking something from the everyday (or science and other reaches of life) and putting it in a white cube (straight or with luxury frills attached). Why not a slide or a floating tank? I suspect the old Oscar Wilde adage that "all art is quite useless" (which had become pretty useless itself) might be the rule of thumb that works for me here: if I really can slide down, if I can eat it, be good at it, learn from it, then at the end it's just like watching too much telly.

yeah exactly.

that's too bad. i saw his show at the ICA in boston in . . . 2003? (yes, 2003: http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/exhibit/holler/), and while i knew a lot less about art generally and relational aesthetics specifically, i enjoyed it and found the slide actual "fun" fun.

-jesse.

that's too bad. i saw his show at the ICA in boston in . . . 2003? (yes, 2003: http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/exhibit/holler/), and while i knew a lot less about art generally and relational aesthetics specifically, i enjoyed it and found the slide actual "fun" fun.

-jesse.

I don't know if this exhibit in particular was more "relational aesthetics" or "institutional critique" - two "genres" of contemporary art that I'm a bit hazy on (despite having done actual research on the former). the tough thing with both of these is that the audience's circumstance is crucial - if the New Museum was less crowded, the staff accommodating, etc, would my critique differ (even slightly)? I think that is definite.

could the curation and installation of this work also have changed my experience from yours? of course. I think these areas of subjectivity are rich in an any art form, but for my party in this case, it did not result in pleasure, aesthetic or otherwise.

oops, just seeing this. yeah, i wasn't so much disagreeing as saying "too bad." i think he was less of a celeb then, plus museum-going in nyc is always "museum-going in nyc", so it might just be a different, more horrible mix now.

fwiw, i read him as more "relational aesthetics" than "institutional critique," although maybe we count it as the latter even when toothless and completely incorporated into said institution like his work seems to be.

-j.