Carsten Höller
"Carsten Höller" by Christine Redfern, Fall 2007, pp. 143-44
This is the fifth consecutive summer that the National Gallery of Canada has exhibited contemporary art at its satellite space in Shawinigan, Quebec. A visit there takes you an hour and a half by car east of Montreal, to a cavernous industrial complex formerly occupied by Alcan’s aluminum smelter. This summer, the Belgian artist Carsten Höller was featured, with his exhibition “One, Some, Many.” Having seen images of the slides that Höller designed for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London, I admit that I approached the show with fairly shallow thoughts of having some fun.
The site consists of three separate exhibition spaces. Just in front of the doorway to the first gallery, you pass between two monitors facing one another. A two-channel video titled Tokyo Twins presents identical twins in conversation. One says, “I always say the same as what you say,” and the other responds, “I always say the opposite of what you say.” Then the first answers, “I always say the opposite of what you say,” to which the second replies, “I always say the same as what you say.” This circuitous conversation was a tip that the exhibition would not be the simple visceral experience I envisioned.
The installation The Belgian Problem occupied the first gallery. The work involves two aviaries containing starlings—one with birds from Ontario, the other with ones from Quebec. The idea behind showing birds from two different regions was to allow the viewer to hear the differences between their calls. The much-maligned starling is an incredible linguist: able to sing beautiful songs as well as mimic human speech, the sounds of machines and animal noises. When isolated geographically, it develops its own starling dialect.
The second gallery extended Höller’s interest in the double. Here, two corridors face one another on either side of an old Mercedes-Benz station wagon, which is inscribed with the words “The Laboratory of Doubt.” When you enter either corridor, you are plunged into complete darkness and must thus make your way through convoluted passageways. While it sounds like an adventure, the end result does not feel like a lighthearted delight. Höller seems to enjoy messing with your mind as much as with your perceptions.
The third gallery contained an amusement park. It had a Gravitron, Twister, bumper cars and flying billiard balls. There is no real amusement at this fairground, however; the rides have been set to travel so slowly that their movement is almost imperceptible. In the end, Höller’s works aren’t fun, but they aren’t boring either.
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