- Venue
- Tate Modern
- Location
Carsten Höller's Test Site, the seventh commission in Tate Modern's Unilever Series, links floors five, four, three and one with the Turbine Hall via coiling metal slides. There are two viewpoints for the work, one as participant, and the second as a spectator.
Alongside merry-go-rounds and swings, slides sit comfortably in our memories as icons of childhood vibrancy. But it is not the child in us that is celebrated here, rather something innately human.
Spiralling earthbound, the drawls of keen yowls punctuated by the structural ridges of the inner slide thudding against their backs, bodies materialize with a distinctly jazz-like cadence, asymmetrically and vigorously. Upon their delivery onlookers are treated to visions of human life in all its diversity, framed by the hollow tubes behind them and unified in brown potato sacks. For no more than a second or two, their expressions are that of panic personified; each on their back and reduced to a new born, fragile and confused, bringing the participant within touching distance of their mortal reality. In sliding we reveal our façades of success, wisdom and beauty as tenuous, reducing us to our collective essence.
Höller is attempting to compete with the rectangular functionality of the Turbine Hall in a way that other Unilever Series artists have not before. Anish Kapoor's enigmatic Marsyas loomed dominant above the heads of onlookers like an epic celestial epiphany; conquering the length of the room, whilst Olafur Eliasson chose to pervade the hall in a much more ethereal way, saturating the space in golden light and mist in The Weather Project. Höller's intervention allows the audience to experience the height of the hall in a truly corporeal sense; thrusting their bodies into the void.
Test Site's playful façade belies the issues at the heart of its conception. Höller himself has described the piece as "propaganda" for the case of using slides in suburban and commercial environments, and whilst seeming to avoid high-art intellectualism, Test Site subtly critiques the formality of art galleries and the nature of adult social-interaction. Höller demands that individual potential is realized, both by his audience and the gallery itself; the act of sliding as a means of liberating conservative notions of what it is to be an adult, what it is to live.
Though the physical potential of the Turbine Hall is alluded to in the work, Test Site is distinctly underwhelming as a sculptural presence, submitting to the space rather than dominating it. But does the visual impotence of Höller's installation disqualify him from mention within the context of Eliasson and Kapoor? Not in the least, for Test Site delivers the same kind of collective spiritual experience that the best of the Unilever Series have thus far offered, for it is in sliding that the work truly takes form; the slides themselves merely functional vessels for the art within.
The "inner spectacle" of the slide, as Höller describes it, is a fractious experience that offers short-lived disorientation. In a high-paced society, Test Site demands the audience to lose control temporarily, to elude responsibilities and transcend all sense of logic; to have an experience that is purely sensual, dangerous and exciting. For a few seconds, and in a legitimately spiritual sense, Test Site illuminates the senses, elucidating our existence in an inexplicable way.
An artist living and working in the east midlands.
