Carsten Holler, the artist who sent thousands of visitors spiraling down slides at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall two years ago, is now taking them for a spin on the dance floor.
The 47-year-old German has opened a nightspot in London that offers Western and Congolese art, food, drink and music. His Double Club in a Victorian warehouse in north London will stay open for six months and has a revolving DJ podium.
He has also invited visitors to book a night at New York’s Guggenheim Museum (through Jan. 6) in his Revolving Hotel Room — four slow-turning discs on which sleeping and working areas have been placed.
Holler, wearing a banana-yellow scarf and designer frames, joined me in the courtyard bar of his new London installation.
Farah Nayeri: Why have you created this nightspot?
Carsten Holler: I’m interested in the idea of entertainment and fun.
There’s something fishy about it, especially if you are coming from the “serious” art side, because fun and art are slightly incompatible. Fun is considered to be dumb; art is considered to be smart. I think that the whole notion of fun is underestimated.
FN: Some people might look at your work and say, “Carsten Holler is a gimmicky artist.” What do you say to that?
CH: I can say that maybe that’s half-true, but it’s also half-wrong, and that’s what I find very interesting.
When I did the slides, in Germany or even in the Nordic countries where I live, it was really seen in a different way. It was all about, how can this be art? Still this old, very strange question: It’s fun, but is it art? In England, it was a very different response.
FN: Many people using the slides didn’t think of them as art, because to them art is boring. Doesn’t this bother you?
CH: Probably it would bother me if I could be there, because I’m not so much a fun seeker. I’m more interested in taking fun out of where it’s growing inside.
FN: There’s this very big trend in experiential art in the museum world right now.
CH: Yeah, but here we’re not in a museum anymore.
I’m trying to get away from the representational by doing these kinds of things, because I don’t believe in it anymore.
Art — I mean its representational function — is in my opinion very exhausted. Art should be experience more than representation. You make your own representation of it. You don’t go through somebody else.
In all this [he points to the Double Club we are sitting in], we have an art show. I have my own museum in it. I’m not in the museum: The museum is in me, or in the work.
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