Carsten Höller (b. 1961, Belgium)
Test Site, 2007

No, I am not building slides. Unless they are in PowerPoint or, possibly, in one of those old-fashioned projectors. What gets Test Site on my list is that it is an interactive work where audience and their responses (sensemaking, in a way) become an important part of the work. For my purposes, however, audience response is a bit too directed – there is not much room for interpretation for how to interact with it (and I would guess that the gallery staff would stop any unorthodox response attempts). And the object itself is too obvious as to its identity and function, only its placement in gallery and particular spatial arrangement that is novel. But nevertheless, it is an interesting reference to consider when I am staging my interactive situations. Of what I’ve done so far, perhaps the Anticipation Piece would be the most related one – as it is also using standard unambiguous props (egg timers) and made participants using them a rather central part of the work.

I also admire the scale… big is beautiful… and, potential access to the scale, perhaps might be the only serious argument for me to try to construct some kind of “artist name” that would open gallery doors. And still, I am not sure that it is at Tate I’d want to build my large scale installations…

And the final observation, a bit on a tangent. Höller is described as “German artist”. Internet sources say that he is born in Belgium and works in Sweden. So I am rather curious in what sense he is “German” artist and to what extent – and how – that Germanness is significant when discussing his art… I keep recording birth years and countries here, which I started mainly as reproduction of convention found on many gallery labels… but as one of my central projects is dissolution of identities, it might seem a bit contradictory to do that – yet as I keep encountering this kind of factual information that seems to be rather empty of meaning, it prompts me to keep considering these matters in their particularity from time to time, and that might end up being productive somehow. Maybe.