I grope my way round corners, walk into walls. My footsteps clang in an eerie, unpleasant way on the steel floor, which slopes up and down to queasy effect. The corridors seem to go on forever. There is no light, and no one else in there. The word Kafkaesque has become a bit of a joke, but the installation does simulate that state of blind panic, the individual lost in a labyrinth. Finally, I come out into the bright space of the gallery. The experience is not exactly fun, but it makes an impact.
Before I entered the exhibition, I was asked by a “host” to choose between two doors: the left or the right. I chose the right, which led straight into the corridors of darkness. I don’t know what was behind the left. As the title of the exhibition suggests, the visitor must make a series of decisions without knowing the consequences in advance. In this way, it is like life.
Höller was born in 1961 in Belgium; he now lives in Sweden. He trained as an agricultural scientist, and many of his experience-based art installations are concerned with consciousness and perception. He was aligned with the relational aesthetics movement of the 1990s, which promoted an idea of art as participation. Rather than merely looking at an object or a painting in a gallery, visitors were often called upon to get involved. This has the cringe potential of audience participation in the theatre.
Unfortunately, the rest of the exhibition fails to make the impact of the first work. I would have liked more encounters with existential dread, but there are none. Instead, there is an atmosphere of a children’s playground. When I visit, there are children running all over the exhibition, shrieking with delight. The inclusion of all ages in art is a good thing, but a more adult, more serious, and more coherent exhibition could have asked interesting questions about the nature of choice, free will and responsibility.
The next installation is Flying Mushrooms (2015), which consists of huge bulbous red and white mushrooms, made of polyester and “rigid foam.” They are dissected and ragged, suspended above a big white circular wheel. I push the wheel as instructed, and the mushrooms start to rotate or “fly” above me. It is a sort of mushroom mobile.
As I look up at them, the song “Pure Imagination” from the 1971 version of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory begins to play in my head, evoking the jangly, discordant weirdness of that film, and particularly the scene where Charlie and the children wander around the indoor garden full of similar red and white mushrooms.
This seems an obvious reference for Höller. Along with Alice in Wonderland, Willy Wonka has become shorthand for fantasy otherworld, the favourite of fancy dress parties everywhere. Höller himself has been compared to Willy Wonka, a mad scientist of the art world, offering both horror and pleasure at once. To me, he’s more like Heston Blumenthal – reliant on novelty.
In the next room, a small girl is crawling through a pile of red and white pills. A pill drops continually from the ceiling onto the pile. The girl is not part of the exhibition, but a visitor. My host asks me if I want to try one – they are placebos. He gestures to a water fountain on the wall. After hesitating, I do try one. Despite knowing that the pill will have no effect on my body, I feel an element of risk. It seems counterintuitive to find a pill on the floor and swallow it. This kind of irrational response is perhaps what Höller is trying to provoke.
In this room there is also a bed on wheels moving of its own accord. It has glass sides, which, combined with the starched white sheets, creates an aesthetic of hospital meets minimalist boutique hotel. Visitors can book the bed for the night for £300 and sleep over at the gallery. It has already been booked up for the duration of the exhibition.
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I sit on the bed; its slowness creates the impression that the room, not the bed, is moving. It is like watching the clouds move across the sky and believing you can see the world turning. I wouldn’t like to spend a night in the bed, though, as sitting on it for only a few moments makes me nauseous.
The following works do not resonate at all. Half Clock (2014) is a sculpture made of neon-filled glass tubes, twisted into a sphere. Lights blink on and off according to the passing minutes. The Forests (2002/2015) is a virtual reality film. Earphones provide muffled forest noises. You see ghostly green trees against a black background. It’s quite pleasant to be completely insulated from the outside world for a while, but the image has no impact.
In all these works, the role of decision-making becomes obscure. There are decisions to be made – to look or not to look – but they seem part of the normal process of wandering around an exhibition.
A highlight is Fara Fara (2014), a two-screen film installation in a large dark room. The films show archive footage of live music from the Congo, which is great – energising and a relief after so much trickery. It is straightforward. However, it is incongruous with the rest of the exhibition.
The upstairs room is the least successful. Works include a large dice that you can peer into; mirrors; a photographic print of an eye; sculptures of bright pink snakes wiggling along the floor, their bellies engorged with creatures recently swallowed. They remind me of the tromp-l’oeil game-playing of Maurizio Catellan, a peer of Höller. Catellan’s works are crowd-pleasing, often gimmicky. Contemporary art should be more than a joke.
And then there are the slides. These stainless steel snake-like tubes have been fitted to the front of the gallery. I join the back of a queue of mostly under-10s and walk up to a windy platform on the roof, where a kind woman is waiting with a pile of mats. Children shoot down the steel tube, one by one. Then it’s my turn.
I sit on the mat. The woman instructs me how to cross my arms over my chest and move my torso from side to side with the direction of the slide, as though I were on a toboggan. I have never been on a toboggan.
This feels weird. I am quite happy to be a grown-up and leave my sliding days behind me. However, I do as she suggests, and push myself down into the tube, which is similar in design to the corridors at the beginning of the exhibition. Is this infantile fun or dystopian fall? A conceptual game of snakes and ladders? I am in the belly of the snake, like one of those creatures swallowed by Höller’s pink snake sculptures upstairs. I go down; it is surprisingly fast. Like the corridors, it seems to continue for a long time. Finally, I land at the bottom.
Some artists seem to feel a pressure to make work that is a spectacle in order not to bore the visitor. But here the spectacle becomes boring through its determination to grab and hold attention. Quieter work can be powerful.
Decision. Carsten Höller. Hayward Gallery, London. 10 June to 6 September
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