Carsten Holler Tour Outline

I would like to talk to Holler himself about the works, I have watched videos of him speaking, read other people talking about him, and I am left as a translator with strong ideas of my own. 
Welcome to the New Museum.  I would like to remind everyone of a few basic rules before we head in, please do not touch the few art objects that are not interactive, most of the show is intended to be activated by you and you will have a chance after we are through to use all the works on your own.  I think it is enriching to take the tour, to learn some of the ideas, then to come back through and give each piece its due time.  In order to use some of the pieces you must first sign a waiver and get a red wristband, if you want to check out the upside down goggles you do so at the desk in exchange for your credit card.  Large bags are not allowed inside the museum and photographs are allowed for this show.  We have three exhibitions open at the moment, Carsten Holler: Experience, open through January 15^th, next door is Spartacus Chetwynd: Homemade Tasers through January 1^st, and upstairs in the Museum as Hub on the 5^th floor is Steffani Jemison and Jamal Cyrus: Alpha’s Bet is Not Over Yet, through December 4^th.  If you will all follow me we are going to continue our discussion in the gallery with the mushrooms so you can hear me better. 

How many of you have been to the New Museum before?  The New Museum was started in 1977 by Marcia Tucker whose philosophy was to combine a traditional museum with grassroots efforts.  The New Museum does not have a permanent collection, it is set up to show new art and new ideas, it is based on a sustainable philosophy rather than a single movement.  The museum will renew itself with artists and will continue to be a home for emerging concepts that question the standards of political and artistic norms. 

This building opened in 2007, it is designed by SAANA a Japanese architecture firm.  Chosen for its industrial elegance this building utilizes the small footprint of the museum and gives the curators adaptable gallery spaces.  The exterior is covered in an aluminum mesh that changes with the times of day.  Inside there are skylights or windows on every floor, this gives an uplifted airy quality to the practical materials.  The vertical model was necessary and inside the space is used economically, for example the freight elevator and fire stairwell is appropriated for public use, but the galleries are tall, we could have put in more floors and added wall space into the structure but it would have dissolved the ability for grand displays.

After 9/11 the museum wanted to keep its home in Lower Manhattan.  The choice of the Bowery is in keeping with the history of the many artists who had their studios or homes below Houston where the rent was cheap.  Even now the museum is changing the landscape of the Bowery, galleries are opening, fancy clothing stores are cropping up next to family run pizza joints, and so the dialogue about what is progress is very much alive. 

The New Museum tries to exhibit artists who are well known abroad but who have yet to be recognized in America.  This is the first New York retrospective of Carsten Holler and it covers about sixteen years of his work.  Carston Holler was not trained as an artist, he has a PHD in Entomology specializing in communication systems among insects.  This exhibition is a test site as much as it is a gallery space where you are placed in situations that hopefully suspend your equilibrium and give you slight sensations of madness.  These trials are both entertaining and moralistic, so on today’s tour we are focusing on how these tests subtly draw awareness to the fragility of human perception. 

Our gallery spaces have been re-imagined to create moods.  This is similar to when you walk into a movie theater just as people are exiting and you see the look on their faces.  You have a sense of what you might be getting into, a pervasive atmosphere has descended on all of them, each one has a different expression, they process the information in their own way, but never the less, everyone exits affected.  Holler is interested in that transition, the way we are all moved in similar ways to situations.  It is remarkable with how much we struggle to get along, to abort our loneliness, our isolation, that we have more similarities with each other than differences.  We are all working from these bodies that yield endless repetitions in human behavior.  Marketing exists because the bum on the corner, Liz Taylor and the President can all drink the same coca cola and enjoy it as Warhol said.   Holler creates elaborate scenarios that we activate to make democratic experiences where no one misses the show.

These settings grab our attention.  He takes the artwork off the wall and makes it physical.  The mushrooms that we are standing next to are sized in relationship to our bodies.  We are not only moved by the sight of them but are shaped by their material stance in the room.  They conjure up narratives in each of us.  What do you think of when you look at these?  Alice in Wonderland, fairies, gnomes, fabricated mythological creatures and stories that invite us to remember the wonder and playfulness embedded in each of us from childhood. The way the sculptures are placed controls our pattern of using the space.  We are conducted by their material and by what they represent.

Magical wonderlands such as these are given to children all the time, but the mushrooms are a reminder that most of our experiences take place inside altered, crafted, dream-spaces of human invention.  Most of us live our lives jumping from interior location to interior location, home, subway, work, subway, home, repeat, all of these are created by someone to alter our behavior and change the way we function.  Not only are the environments false but we are incapable of perceiving objectively.  We constantly wonder through half created worlds around us and in us.  Subjective and objective, art and science, are in direct conversation with who we are, with the interests and curiosities that define humanity.  We examine everything through a limited skill base, and we are all agreeing based on similarly trapped perspectives.  Even when we are learning facts they are processed by our unique and imaginative psychologies.  These narratives of our environment are conjured through imagination and the physical effects of belief.  Placebos have proven the force of our minds to play tricks on us, so maybe the suggestion presented in this room is a subtle medicine pulling from a collective mythology to alter and layer the space. 

The weight and magic of imagined realms relates to the shamanistic use of the mushroom.  The Amanita mascaria grows naturally in Eurasia and reportedly was used by shamans in Siberia.  You can identify these mushrooms in the wild not only by their red and white tops, but by the bulbous bottoms that distinguish them from their poisonous sisters.  The mushrooms are spliced as though one could collage with nature.  The dark black mushrooms with thin steams allegedly have great flavor.  What if we could create a delicious tasting psychotropic meal?  It is good to remember the line between scientific inquiry and its roots in playfulness.

Many of these works are about taking the viewer out of the driver’s seat so we stop analyzing and start reacting, activating, playing and succumbing.  Normally when we stand in front of an artwork such as Monet’s Water Lilies we become contemplative, we hopefully slow down to absorb the language and voice of the work, which is an individual experience.  We go to museums to essentially be with ourselves.  Not alone like when we are exhausted on our couch, in front of a great work we are stimulated, and inspiration is a mirror that points towards our individual subjective identity.  The upside down glasses passed out at the desk allow for a different take on this individualized viewing experience.  By watching our environment upside down the art object transforms from observing an object to an investigation of how the guide of our eyes changes the capability of our bodies.  Normally light reflects off of an object, enters the eye where it is received as an upside down image to be flipped right side up by the brain.   While wearing these goggles the brain is constantly trying to correct the error.  There are many ways that our brains fill in gaps for us, such as how you can see something out of the corner of your eye, and before you have the full information your brain has given you an answer, and sometimes that answer is completely absurd.  These glasses are playing with this struggle.  Because we can’t wear the glasses at this moment I have brought another way for us to explore.

Cover your right eye and look at the number one with your left eye.  Go down the numbers and around four the gap between the stripes should be filled in and around seven it should return. 

Can anyone tell me what the optical trick of the Zollner stripes is?  Exactly, the stripes appear to not be parallel because the cross hatching’s angle plays with our eyes.  When we look at the stripes it is easy for us to recognize that our senses are duping us, and its fun.  Here the struggle with what we see verses what we acknowledge as true is very clear.  We can see reality and deception in the same instance.  In some ways this show wants you to stop conceptualizing and start being, it is an attempt to shake you of your notions and remind you of the things that make you human.  Our bodies are our first and last language, yet habits allow us to stop thinking about our basic functions. 

There is an industrial repetition at play, everyone who looks at the stripes is processing the same information, but how they adapt, react, is different, subjective.  The artwork is not the stripes, all these works are tools, established rules, set ups for a joke, or a game, a struggle without practical purpose, where the end result is to transform us, make us check in with our animal nature, and remember that we are restricted.  Every system, be it the language of math, science, or art is a limited expression in the midst of a larger truth. 

Try to imagine the infinite and you will start to see yourself, or look at yourself and you might start to doubt everything.  In the larger concepts, such as what we know about the natural world, we start to recognize our receivers, the limitations of our knowledge.  The childlike atmosphere generates playful wonder and curiosity within the confines of set activities.  By drawing attention to the roadmap of our senses, we can at least admit to our inadequacies and make allowances for them.    

We can look at the stripes and doubt our perception in a way that is entertaining.  In general Holler examines our mental capability through tools of play.  The way a child spins around until they fall over in order to make everything keep moving after they have stopped is the M.O. of a lot of this work.  On the first floor the art shakes our most dominant sense, vision, but let’s go upstairs to the fourth floor where Holler investigates transportation. 

(Elevator)

One of these twins actually works at the New Museum’s visitor service desk.  I run into her sister all the time on the train and twice I have started up a conversation mistaking her for her twin.  In these looped videos the sisters go back and forth repeating and negating each other as though in and out of sync, watching them we too get drawn into the similarities and differences that define the way they look and maybe how they act. 

(4^th floor). 

We are going to talk in the corner so you are able to hear me.  The most famed piece in the show is the slide.  I think it is fun to leave the Alice and Wonderland mushrooms and to come up here to a magic rabbit hole entrance.  This slide is unusual compared to other ones he has made at different institutions, as if you were Alice, you can’t see where you are going, you just let it take you.  You entrust yourself to the safety of the machine and end up on the second floor in a whole new and unknown environment. 

Holler’s whimsical devise is meant to alter your state.  I personally am easily frightened and it took me a couple tries to actually force myself to slide down the tube.  Not everyone is going to have the same reaction; in fact many people are thrilled at the top of the ride.  As humans we are constantly surrounded by anxiety but very rarely are we forced into situations where we have to conquer our bodies.  It reminds me of rabbits or deer who constantly live their lives running from potential threats; they live in a constant fight or flight mentality.  Especially as adults we control so much of our environments, and while safety is the ultimate goal checking in with our mortality is important to compassion.  Being vulnerable is an entrance into understanding that we are not invincible, nor is anything or anyone else.  The slide for some is a joyride, and I have to admit that I jumped up and down when I got to the bottom.  This is what Holler wishes we had instead of stairs, a rush.  How different would we be if once a day we put ourselves through an exhilarating experience where we lose control?  What do you think, would a small joy ride everyday help people?  Is this point profound or moot? 

Our slide at the New Museum is 102 feet long, and takes about five seconds to shoot around the 45% degree curves.  An interesting point about these works is where the art starts?  What is the spectatorship that Holler is most interested in?  What would you say?  Is the work viewed most accurately when you are watching, or riding?  Or is the slide just a tool for the artwork which is created by the unique adrenaline rush that fills each spectator, the chemical change before, during, and after the experience of the slide?   What do you think? 

It can be noted that Holler did not invent the slide structure.  Nor did he invent the Zollener stripes, and the upside down goggles were created by George Stratton to study perceptual adaptation in the 1890s.  If Holler is appropriating objects, similar to Duchamp who is famous for signing the toilet and coining the phrase ready-mades, then where does the artwork exist?  Though this is a very visual and physical show it is also conceptual, the body speaking through reaction rather than the contemplative passivity of watching a stagnant object. 

We all approach the same tools, we all slide down the same slide, but my experience will be subjectively different than yours.  I imprint the object with my own narrative because the artwork exists not only in front of our respective eyes, but by the changes it makes in me.  This is art in a nutshell.  What artwork was ever created that was not intended to convey meaning?  The artist creates in order to speak through a visual language and transmit the final message into you, the viewer.  The ideal Holler presents is not the perfect David, but the vulnerable audience, our ability to react is essential to our nature beyond any concept of perfection or truth. 

The thought processes of animals are unknown to us.  Their mental states have been pondered by philosophers and children alike for a very long time.  Maybe the key to understanding them is to not think like a human, not to sculpt solutions, regiment pathways that can be repeated by their logic; sometimes the only way to understand is to imitate, to be like the animal, to adapt. 

Some people have compared these machines to scientific experiments where the result is never the same.  Maybe our only entrance into knowledge is through the door of doubt.  Doubting the extent of what we can know.  Doubt that we have the right solution, doubt that history repeats itself.  To do something the same way we have done it before, to let it yield the same results, and to wonder what has changed, even on a finite level, because the curiosity of science and the mystery of art are necessary for us to advance as a society.   So why put a slide in a museum?  Maybe because museums are one of the few places we can look at the same old thing and see it in a different light, including ourselves.  We submit to Holler’s tools, and that is also human, a desire to test and play, to be curious, to find out how we are unique and what we have in common. 

Unlike the solo journey of the slide, eight people at a time are allowed to ride the mirrored carousel.  Name something that is unusual about this carousel?  Name anything at all.  It is reflective and it is moving much slower than a normal carousel.  Both the carousel and the slide have to do with transportation, both move through space and hopefully change how you think while you participate.  While the slide rushes you down to the second floor the carousel doesn’t take you anywhere and that is the point.  The room reflected on its surface slowly rotates for you.  You are the center of the world, and because nothing much is happening all you can do is watch.  The expectation of a ride is that it is going to dazzle you, thrill you, but here we just slowly wander in circles as though we were floating in a stream or a brook.  You can even here the chirping of birds, which brings us to the final artwork that we are going to discuss today, the mobile with singing canaries. 

Canaries don’t exist in the wild; they are an extension of human behavior.  They can be breed for one of two traits, how they look and how they sound.  These canaries are breed for the way they sound.  In the same way that we breed dogs for personality, and poodles are not roaming in the wild, these birds exist as they are because of our desires.  Why do birds sing?  If a bird is farther away from another bird will it sing louder?  The polls for these cages are measured mathematically through acts of division, breaking each length into its halves.  If you were to keep dividing you would go on for infinity.  The birds are placed in a mathematical relationship to one another which dictates their song and the movement of each cage.  Every time a bird flies the cages shift weight, they are in communication with one another vocally and materially.

The beauty of animals is their mystery.  They are something that is so close to how we are but completely unknowable.  We can watch them and they us but we will never be able to crack the case, and our lives are consumed with them, we eat them, love them, observe them.  They constantly demand that we are more considerate, that we treat the gaps in our vision with a band aid of curiosity and not authority.  That we keep growing by accepting infinity, that we wonder rather than dictate and mainly that we keep testing ourselves to stay kind.

That is all for our tour today.  Thank you very much for joining me.