Artist Hideout

I wanna ride the circle slide

by William Lehman on January 5th, 2007

I’d go to London just for this if I had the money. I would get there early, wait in line and then walk up five flights of stairs just to do this. Then I’d wait in line again like I used to do on the playground. Then I would be next. I’d sit down and relive childhood for 45 seconds and ride the ultimate spiral slide. Five stories of pure pleasure. No it’s not a water slide. It’s art.

Tate Modern says this about Carsten Höller on it’s website :

For Carsten Höller, the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a ‘voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don’t have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the ‘inner spectacle’ experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend.

This may be the kind of anxiety that I need on a daily basis. Carsten Höller is not so motivated by the art as he is by the experience of the viewer. The art is a byproduct it seems of the experience. Someone recently told me that they had read in a book somewhere that people in your life can be an integer between -2 and 2 and equal up to either a positive or negative overall average in your life. I wish I knew the name of the book so I could read it, but if we experience people like this it would stand to reason that our other experiences would be likewise.

I would chart riding a slide as a positive 2 in that case. What have you experienced today?

Tags: slide, spiral slide, holler, tate modern, art, artist, sculpture

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