Interview: Carsten Höller

Belgian-born artist Carsten Höller recalibrates the experience of contemporary art by playing with conventional binaries, such as the flimsy line that divides art from entertainment. Lucy Rees speaks with Höller about his installation Golden Mirror Carousel, currently on show at the NVG International. 

Carsten Höller, Golden mirror carousel, 2014. Photograph: Christian Markel. 

Lucy Rees: Drawing on social spaces outside the museum, your work often re-imagines the mental and physical experience of viewing art. Your installation of Golden Mirror Carousel in the Federation Court has been slowed right down to one rotation every few minutes. What are the reasons behind this? 

Carsten Höller: The first carousel I did in 1998 was more of a ready-made where we only changed the motor, slowing it down to the point where it took 12 hours to make a complete rotation. We changed the speed here once it was installed to best suit the space. The mirror reflects the surroundings and the movement means that what is reflected is constantly changing. If you are sitting inside it you see that it is reflecting itself. It’slike a periscope into different viewpoints you wouldn’t normally have access to. The word ‘reflection’ also has a double meaning because it produces a very meditative state.

Carsten Höller, Test Site, 2007, installation at Tate Modern, London, between October 2006 and April 9, 2007. 

LR: There seems to be such a heightened expectation for interactivity within the museum today. What is your view of art galleries or museums? What role do they play?  

CH: One of the very reasons I do the carousel is to reflect upon the idea that the museum has become an amusement park. Of course contemporary art is a very sensitive thing. You need to have some kind of loneliness with the artwork. A crucial moment for me was when I visited a Mark Rothko show at the Tate and there were all these people trying to look at it with their audio guides – it’s really not the way art should be seen. But as we know, we are mostly interested in looking at other people. Could you call it a ‘mainstreamisation’?

LR: Does it matter that people with no interest in art might come and ride the carousel purely for the spectacle and might not take anything more away from it?

CH: No, the opposite. The only way to deal with this situation now is to make people see the work with the other people. They become the integral part.

LR: You have a doctorate in agricultural entomology specialising in insects' olfactory communication strategies.  Is there a connection between the way you approach your art and the way you conduct experiments?

 CH: 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. There is a much larger world out there than one that we can grasp.

Carsten Höller, Test Site, 2007, installation at Tate Modern, London, between October 2006 and April 9, 2007. 

LR: A lot of your works are ongoing series, such as the slides you have been installing in museums since 1998. Are your artworks ever finished in the way a scientific experiment produces a definitive result?

 CH: Before it was like the artist had to express some kind of vision or a way of looking at the world. Seeing the world and then expressing this through a painting or some kind of representation. We have done this; it’s time to move on. I don’t think there is this artist’s view of the world anymore.

LR: You are part of a generation of artists born in the 1960s including Maurizio Cattelan, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe and Rirkrit Tiravanija, to name a a few. Do you associate yourself with a movement?

CH: We are like a movement without wanting to be one. That’s not my term. We have been called the last avant-garde but nolens volens. We are working in such different ways but it’s still somehow the product of a time, you can feel that. The ‘90s was a time when there were more possibilities than now. Not just in art, but in science. An article was recently published called ‘Scientific Genius is Extinct.’ The gaps are being filled and there are no more discoveries to be made – except maybe quantum physics. When was the last time something truly groundbreaking happened?

Carsten Höller, ‘Golden Mirror Carousel,’ National Gallery of Victoria, 10 October 2014 – 1 March 2015.

This article was published by Art & Australia. 

Interview: Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook

Presenting work from 1994 to today, ‘Storytellers of the Town’ at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, is the first Australian solo exhibition of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, a Thai artist known here for her contribution to the 2008 Biennale of Sydney. The 4A show is curated by Clare Veal and John Clark, and accompanied by a sister exhibition of Rasdjarmrearnsook’s printmaking at the University of Sydney and a follow-up exhibition at Canberra’s Drill Hall Gallery in July.

Lucy Rees: How did you begin to work with video? Your earlier works seen here explore the connection between the living and the dead, between insane and ‘normal’ people, and between humans and animals. Why was video the necessary medium to consider these themes?

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: In 1997 I began to take photos of the corpses but found that it wasn’t enough. I knew that video would solve the problems. For ethical reasons I couldn’t show corpses to audiences directly so I thought that video could be the best way to do it. You can’t take the dead to a public space, but this was a good way to show them to a lot of people.

LR: Was the work originally met with a lot of criticism?

AR: Actually it was more controversial in Thailand than abroad. I had to go through quite difficult procedures to get access to the bodies in the first place. In Thailand they just think about ethics. That’s the difference for the viewer: they need to step across the line and consume the work as art, not under the strong conditions of Thai culture. 

LR: Can you comment on your interest in death?

AR: I think making art is confronting my fear. It’s the unknown. I try to get closer and closer to it, each time challenging myself. I want to look in detail at the relationship to death through song and art.

I once had a solo show in Sweden and a professor of philosophy came up to me afterwards and said ‘Thank you. We had never had the chance to look at dead bodies’. And during my show the prime minister of Sweden was shot. Many people then came to see the show to try to make sense of what had happened. Something strange occurred – art begins and life continues, but at some point they cross over in the middle.

LR: Tell me about the powerful multichannel video work The insane, 2002.

AR: It took me about two years to get the permission to film these women in a mental asylum. They were not allowed to speak to the public so I wanted to tell their stories. Finally, I simply put the camera in front of these women and let them speak as they wished. Some laughed, some cried. And there were so many different voices. Some were slow, some were loud, some were nervous.

LR: You write extensively for magazines and have written a number of books. Does writing inform your artmaking practice?

AR: When I was young I used to write about lovers and it was all about romance. During my stay and study in Germany over twenty years ago, my printmaking brought up many questions about women. I wrote a book at this time about the positioning of Thai women in Germany, and it was the first time I could get close to women like this, who in the past worked as prostitutes and then got married to German men. In Thailand I worked as a university lecturer, but I learnt so much from these women playing cards and chatting. I then made a series of works about these women that were shown at the National Gallery of Thailand in Bangkok in 1995. 

LR: Your work comments on the role of women in Thailand. Could you be labelled a feminist? 

AR: I think that my position as a feminist artist is problematic because there is a strand of feminist art discourse in Thailand and groups of female artists that exhibit together as feminist artists. I have never taken part in these. In lots of my works I see the position of women as one of strength; compassion for dogs or being able to connect with the women in the asylum is actually empowering and comes from being a women. That said the women in the asylum were often traumatised by abuse from men. So I experience the world as a woman but I am aware of the inequalities.

LR: Do you consider yourself part of an art movement? Who are your peers?

AR: I am alone; I work alone. The filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a friend of mine. Our work is not similar at all, but he is similar in that he does not succumb to ‘Thai-ness’ or a prettified idea of what art should look like.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: Storytellers of the Town, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, 14 March – 10 May 2014; Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 4 July – 10 August 2014.

Interview: Christian Boltanski

I caught up with French artist Christian Boltanski when he was in Sydney to install his major installation Chance at Carriageworks. First shown in the French Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, the giant scaffolding installation questions probability and the role of fate. Here Boltanski shares his views on the act of creation, immortality, religion, and the current state of contemporary art. 

 © Lucy Rees. 

LUCY REES: How did art come to you? 

CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI: For me there are very few times in creation in your life. One time is when you become an adult, one time is when your parents die, and the other time is when you are very old. I was very aware of this time – the body changed, the spirit changed. I remember realising when my childhood had finished. I tried like an archaeologist to find some photos or objects from a past time. I wanted to put everything in boxes and try to hold on but I knew I couldn't. 

 LR: Is your work defined or categorised by these moments of creation?

CB: Yes, in a sense, but at the same time I’m always with the same problems.  We’re painting the same people all our life - it’s just the way we look at them that changes.  If you experience trauma, you can speak about it in so many different ways. You can speak about landscape, you can speak about your food; it’s always different. Trauma is the beginning of life as an artist.  I love Louise Bourgeois – she was continually citing the trauma from her childhood (she found out that her English governess was also her father’s mistress). Artists speak about their problems all their life, we just describe it differently at different times.  

LR: You have spoken a lot about the role of an artist, that they need to be a mirror to everybody else. What do you think visitors might take away from Chance? Should we accept our own mortality?

CB: It’s a question I ask myself and one I think everyone can ask: ‘is chance our destiny?’ You are what you are because your parents made love at that exact moment, and if they made love one second after you would be different. The fact that you were born means that there are no other children born because of you – you’ve killed them in a way. Is it destiny? Was it written somewhere that this was to be your life? Is it useful that you are here? Or is it simply by chance?

LR: You’ve said that this work has a more positive and optimistic feeling than other works. When you’ve documented children before, you’ve said that actually they’re dead because they have grown up. In this way, in Chance everybody’s dead. They are dead because they can no longer be that exact age.

CB: Yes, they even look like dead people. Babies are just as close to death. I think it is very important to know that we are going to die. Now we refuse the fact of dying. There was once serenity in dying where you had all your children around you in a ceremony and would utter your last words with something like, ‘I love the sky’.

 LR: In 2009 you sold your life to the gambler and founder of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), David Walsh.  He agreed to pay you a fee as a monthly stipend to film your studio 24 hours a day and transmit the images live to the museum. Should you live longer than 73 years, Walsh will end up paying more than the work is worth and will have lost. If you die within 8 years, Walsh will have purchased the work at less than its agreed upon value, and will have won. Will he win?

CB: I think it’s possible.  It is important for me to know that it’s possible. I am 69 years old. I hope to still be here in 20 years, but I know it’s normal if I die in 3 years.

LR: What’s your relationship like him? He also has a fascination with death.

CB: I think he’s a very clever man, one of the cleverest people I’ve met in my life.  I can’t say he’s a friend.  He did not want that. He believes he is stronger than chance, that he can beat the odds. The one who believes that, and who thinks he is stronger than god is the devil. It’s the tradition of Christianity to fight against the devil. David Walsh is the devil.

LR: You claim that you’re not religious at all, but you often talk about religion.

CB:  I don’t know what exists – I don’t know what God is.  What I am sure of is that there is a lock and everybody’s looking for a key. I’m looking for it too and perhaps one day I shall find it. 

LR: Do you have any unrealised dreams?  You speak about leaving a legacy – is there a last major project?

CB: My project in Tasmania, because that’s the end – it ends when I die.

LR: David Walsh said that it would be great if you died in your studio but that it’s unethical to ask for that. What will you do with your ashes? 

CB: David Walsh can have thousands of hours of my life, but he is never going to have me. What to do with my ashes is a real problem though. David wanted them but I did not agree. You know once a worker in a lost property department told me that she found some ashes that had been left behind from a funeral? The person actually went to the lost property office to reclaim them. There were so many keys there too. Keys are incredibly important to us, but when you see them clumped together they are meaningless objects. These objects exist like people – you look at them when you love them and if you don’t love them they are meaningless. The reason I work with clothes is because of this idea. If you go to a market and take a jacket home, that jacket gets a new life.

 LR: So old clothes markets are like cemeteries?

 CB: Yes, they are cemeteries waiting for lovers.  

 LR: When you were first starting to make art in the 60s, 70s and 80s you said your mentors were Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol. You've also said you love Richard Serra and Anselm Kiefer.  What do you think about the state of contemporary art now? 

CB: I think there are always good new artists – nothing is finished.  What is a little depressing for me is the ‘art market’.  When I began to make work the important people were the curator and the critic, but now the important people are the dealers.  Sometimes art seems like fashion – good for one year and out the next. Just clothes to sell. When I started exhibiting I was 26 at a gallery in Paris but I didn’t sell and I was proud to not sell.  People who sold were stupid.  It's much harder for young artists now. I’m not against selling but what I think is dangerous is when the market becomes more important than the idea. It’s a pity. I remember going to gallery openings and everyone would be there and you could meet and talk. It was a smaller, more intimate world, and now it’s this big thing. You don’t have the same personal conversations anymore. 

LR: Did your dealer Ileana Sonnabend mind you not selling? 

CB: No, not at all! I began to sell at 45 or something like that. Ileana never asked me to sell anything.

LR: You've moved away from galleries now.

CB: It's not the right time in my life for that. I thought perhaps I could make a show every 5 years or something, but it doesn’t interest me. For now I am working on big installations. 

LR: What are you working on next? 

CB: The next will be in São Paulo, next March. After that I’ll do a big piece in Chile in the north where there is a dry hot desert, a place where you can see the sky better than anywhere, and there's a large cemetery. I want to make the piece and then leave it to die by itself – for one year or six months, two years or ten years, I don’t know. 

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Christian Boltanski was born in 1944, Paris. 

 An edited version of this interview appears on the ARTAND Australia website:  www.artandaustralia.com