Interactive art: 'dumb stunts' have gone too far
Why art should not become a fairground attraction
| 25 August 2015
An artist’s impression of how Carsten Höller’s slide will look when it is installed in the ArcelorMittal tower in east London
Matthew Collings. Photo: mopcap
It’s great to cheer folks up with dumb stunts, but the dumb aspect of spectacular conceptual art isn’t frankly acknowledged enough. It exists but we are not allowed to speak its name: we have to pretend it’s something more important.
At Holler’s current show at London’s Hayward Gallery, the only people over 25 are kindly guards and dutiful schoolteachers. First you have an experience of truly unpleasant claustrophobia. Then you trip out. And then you come down—down a slide.
There are pills to swallow, druggy giant toadstools to marvel at, goggles that make you see upside down, and you can be hung on a harness over a busy street. The awesomeness of the principle of cosmic unpredictability is symbolised by, wait for it, giant dice. Besides being stunned by literalism, it’s possible to be struck by Höller’s sadism, his contempt for the audience with his relational-aesthetic interactive activities, as if he’s a populist for the sake of seeing how far he can debase the populace.
There’s a will to be falsely positive about bombastic art entertainment and, while celebrating its appeal to down-to-earth people, grant it powers that are out of this world. An interestingly hasty Artnews online report (which has since been corrected) stated the following about the forthcoming addition to Kapoor’s construction in east London: “For an affordable £5 ($7.80) entry fee, users will circle the tower five times before sliding down a 50-metre toboggan towards the ground. Not fit for the faint-hearted, the ride will take around 40 seconds to complete,
with users reaching a speed of 15 miles a second.”
Fifteen miles a second is 54,000 miles an hour. We might be reminded of that 1950s newsreel showing a man’s face distorted by g-force in an experiment in a wind tunnel. The earth’s core is only 4,000 miles away. You’d soon be there. In a little over seven hours, if the earth was at the correct angle—and who knows what conceptual art can’t do nowadays?—you’d go through the entire planet and reach the moon.
Matthew Collings’s book Painting After Painting: a Violent Guide To Painting Now will be published next year by
Thames & Hudson
Interactive art: what's not to love?
Banksy's former agent explains why experiential shows are so popular
| 25.08.2015
Carsten Höller at the Hayward Gallery, London
Steve Lazarides. Photo: © Ian Cox
I live for big, interactive exhibitions such as the slides that Carsten Höller recently installed at the Hayward Gallery. So I welcome the news that the artist is collaborating with Anish Kapoor to add the world’s longest tunnel slide to Britain’s tallest sculpture, Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Orbit in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
I started my career facilitating the insane shows of Banksy and followed this by organising events such as Hell’s Half Acre and the Minotaur in the dark tunnels under Waterloo station in London, in collaboration with Kevin Spacey’s Old Vic Theatre. Part art show, part theatre, part theme park, these were designed to engage the public who came to visit: you did not view them passively but experienced them by making your way through murky spaces to discover spectacular, often site-specific, creations.
Next year, with the help of the events and festival firm Vision Nine and Knight Dragon, the company that is developing the Greenwich Peninsula, I’ll be staging my most ambitious event yet: Loki’s Playground, a temporary funfair designed by artists, on a ten-acre site next to the O2 arena in south-east London. There will be a wall of death, a carousel, shooting ranges, live music and gourmet street food.
Artists love these events and they have a much wider appeal to the general public than your average gallery show. In fact, the only people who don’t seem to embrace them are those in the art world, particularly the critics, academics and other so-called intellectuals who are incredibly disparaging about such initiatives.
One reason more people in the art world don’t facilitate these interactive, pleasurable shows is to do with money. The art world’s only interest nowadays seems to be making lots of it, and if something can’t be monetised, what’s the point?
Despite this, an increasing number of artists are pushing the boundaries of what constitutes an exhibition. These are artists whose work is embraced by the general public—and this is no bad thing, particularly when museums and galleries are still seen as inherently elitist by many.
Should we all just subscribe to the notion that something only constitutes a legitimate exhibition if it takes
place within the confines of a white-walled, polished-concrete-floored gallery? Fuck that.
Don’t get me wrong: I love museums, and the experience of contemplating Mark Rothko’s sublime paintings in silence at Tate Modern is irreplaceable. But surely there’s room for other, more interactive experiences with music, food, performance and fun thrown into the mix? One does not cancel out the other.
I want to see more shows and fewer exhibitions; I want to see interesting events in which artists, dealers and gallerists take risks, both financial and conceptual, and push the boundaries. Yes, such events are incredibly challenging to stage, cost a fortune to put on, are hard to monetise and are frowned upon by the art-world hierarchy. But the general public flocks to them. What’s not to love?
I started my career facilitating the insane shows of Banksy and followed this by organising events such as Hell’s Half Acre and the Minotaur in the dark tunnels under Waterloo station in London, in collaboration with Kevin Spacey’s Old Vic Theatre. Part art show, part theatre, part theme park, these were designed to engage the public who came to visit: you did not view them passively but experienced them by making your way through murky spaces to discover spectacular, often site-specific, creations.
Next year, with the help of the events and festival firm Vision Nine and Knight Dragon, the company that is developing the Greenwich Peninsula, I’ll be staging my most ambitious event yet: Loki’s Playground, a temporary funfair designed by artists, on a ten-acre site next to the O2 arena in south-east London. There will be a wall of death, a carousel, shooting ranges, live music and gourmet street food.
Artists love these events and they have a much wider appeal to the general public than your average gallery show. In fact, the only people who don’t seem to embrace them are those in the art world, particularly the critics, academics and other so-called intellectuals who are incredibly disparaging about such initiatives.
One reason more people in the art world don’t facilitate these interactive, pleasurable shows is to do with money. The art world’s only interest nowadays seems to be making lots of it, and if something can’t be monetised, what’s the point?
Despite this, an increasing number of artists are pushing the boundaries of what constitutes an exhibition. These are artists whose work is embraced by the general public—and this is no bad thing, particularly when museums and galleries are still seen as inherently elitist by many.
Should we all just subscribe to the notion that something only constitutes a legitimate exhibition if it takes
place within the confines of a white-walled, polished-concrete-floored gallery? Fuck that.
Don’t get me wrong: I love museums, and the experience of contemplating Mark Rothko’s sublime paintings in silence at Tate Modern is irreplaceable. But surely there’s room for other, more interactive experiences with music, food, performance and fun thrown into the mix? One does not cancel out the other.
I want to see more shows and fewer exhibitions; I want to see interesting events in which artists, dealers and gallerists take risks, both financial and conceptual, and push the boundaries. Yes, such events are incredibly challenging to stage, cost a fortune to put on, are hard to monetise and are frowned upon by the art-world hierarchy. But the general public flocks to them. What’s not to love?
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