At Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria, a golden carousel has been installed in the forecourt, the latest version of a series of works by Belgian artist Carsten Höller that interrogate and confound human perception.
The work is clad in gold coloured mirror. Instead of horses, you sit on a gold seat suspended by gold chains. The usual dizzying ride of a merry-go-round is slowed here to a gradual revolution, with seats spaced so that, even while riding the machine, you feel solitary. The floor underfoot does not rotate, and the centrepiece rotates in the opposite direction, creating a gently confounding experience that is not only reflective in the sense of providing a series of mirrored images, but also reflective in that it inspires a state of reflection – a slowing down of the fast pace of life.
The work, called “Golden Mirror Carousel,” is a gold version of an earlier work, called “Mirror Carousel” which was installed at the New Museum in New York in 2005 as part of the exhibition Carsten Höller: Experience. That exhibition showed a number of other works by Höller, who is perhaps best known for installing a series of slides twisting through the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London as part of a work called Test Site.
At the New Museum, other works demonstrate Höller’s interest in human perception and play, inviting adults and children alike to participate in artworks based on rides, or that create a unique experience, viewing the world from a new angle. Some of these can be disorienting, such as Giant Psycho Tank (2000) which invites visitors to float weighlessly in a sensory-deprivation pool. Or Upside Down Glasses (2001) that flip your vision of the world upside down when you wear them.
Höller’s works have often been described in reference to relational aesthetics – a term coined by French philosopher Nicholas Bourriard to describe works of art that are focused on the interaction between people – the artwork becoming the medium for a dialogue between the artist and the viewer.
Others reference Höller’s past as an agricultural science PhD, describing his works as a series of scientific experiments. In a recent interview with Lucy Rees of ARTAND magazine, he says: “Science is just one attempt to try and explain the world. It’s based on a certain methodology, which has produced some fantastic results, but I’m interested in what could come before science or after science.”
For me, the experience was a beautiful combination of design and art – of unnecessary machinery and intellectual contemplation – and also a bit of fun.
More on NGV website
