Carston Höller, Experience, The New Museum, Oct 26, 2011 - Jan 22, 2012
Carston Höller, Birds and Mushrooms, Carolina Nitsch Project Room, Oct 7 - Dec 23, 2011
I'm really glad that I didn't wait in line for hours to put down a supposed 1K+ credit card deposit for the "Upside-Down Goggles." I'm glad I didn't get undressed and float in a sub-par sensory deprivation chamber (dubbed Psycho Tank), where I would have been fully aware that that I was in the New Museum, in an overcrowded gallery, in a dank tank, with another line waiting behind me to experience sensory deprivation at its weakest. I'm even glad I didn't pay the hiked admission fee for Carsten Höller's Experience. The show was thoughtlessly sparse and obnoxiously glitzy at the same time. There were flashing lights for flashing lights' sake. If you want to talk about Relational Art, human interaction and perception, let's talk about Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's Phantom Truck, let's talk about Roman Ondak's In Good Feelings in Good Times, let's talk about Jack Strange's Staring into Seeing...hell let's even talk about the Damien Hirst Spot Challenge.
In contrast to the Experience at the museum, Carolina Nitsch Project Room put on a delightful, demure presentation of the artist's work, Birds and Mushrooms , at the end of 2011. On view were two suites of luscious, velvety photogravure etchings of crossbred birds that Höller has studied as an ornithologist. There was also a suite of four-color photogravures of rare and poisonous mushrooms from the Scandinavian region of Europe. The images are printed off register, and viewers were encouraged to use a pair of 3D glasses to get the full effect. One pair for the gallery, no lines. Beautifully printed photogravures, of magnificently odd and normal creatures. In comparison to the show at the New Museum, bigger and brighter is not always better.
Back at the big show —the 100-ft slide, ads all over the subway show— even the lesser pieces in Experience failed to impress. In one of the staircases there is an enormous pile of while pill capsules, accompanied by a generic water cooler. There is a sign that says, something along the lines of, "Please take one. All pills are placebos." My brother remarked to me, "What is interesting about that?" and he then proposed perhaps one the most mysteriously genius ideas that Höller could certainly take a hint from: "Please take one. All pills are placebos. Except for one."
