Carsten Höller
[2] He holds a doctorate in agricultural science, specializing in the area of insects' olfactory[3] communication strategies, from University of Kiel;[4] the title of his dissertation is "Efficiency Analysis of the Parasitoids of Cereal Aphids".
[6] Höller came to prominence in the 1990s, alongside a group of artists including Maurizio Cattelan, Douglas Gordon,[1] Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Andrea Zittel who worked across disciplines to reimagine the experience and the space of art.
[7] In his work, Höller creates situations which question familiar forms of perception and allow exhibition visitors to experiment on themselves, often inviting the public's active participation in so-called "influential environments".
[4] His work since the early 1990s has encompassed buildings, vehicles, slides, toys, games, narcotics, animals, performances, lectures, 3D films, flashing lights, mirrors, eyewear and sensory deprivation tanks.
[11] Höller's artistic practice reflects the interaction between work and public in various ways, sometimes chemically analyzing the nature of human emotions.
His avid interest in the double harks back to the start of his career, when Höller designed a series of works with his then girlfriend,[1] artist Rosemarie Trockel.
[14] At his 2010 show at the Hamburger Bahnhof, visitors could pay 1,000 euros ($1,370) for a night on an exposed circular platform perched above 12 castrated reindeer, 24 canaries, eight mice and two flies.
Included in this exhibition were giant mushrooms in a circular formation not unlike a planetary orbit, and a large dice with black holes in that participants were able to crawl inside.
[22] The work, "Reason", which the exhibition was titled after, was constructed from five mirrored revolving doors and was designed to make participants feel dizzy on entry.
"[26] In an essay about Test Site, Dorothea von Hantelmann compares Höller's slides to Nietzsche's ideas regarding art and science as two different powers that inform culture in distinct ways.
[28] The project House for Pigs and People, for documenta X in Kassel in 1997, was one of several collaborations realized by Höller in cooperation with the artist Rosemarie Trockel.
[29] In a book produced for the project, Höller and Trockel contribute a text that consists of a series of questions involving the relationship between humans and animals.
[31][32][33] Höller's interaction with the culture of the Congo began when he started making regular visits to Kinshasa since 2001, interested in the role of music on public opinion and in turn in effecting politics.
"[34] The phi phenomenon was explored earlier in Höller's Flicker Films, (2004 and 2005) which took footage from Congolese musicians and dancers presented on overlapping projections, which created a sculptural, quasi-holographic effect.
[35] A second edition of Double Club took place at Miami Art Basel this year where the artist exposes his on going concept on duality and oppositions in the shape of two installations where one side is monochromatic and other, full of neon colours.
Half of the reindeer were fed the fly agaric mushrooms in their food, which are part of their customary diet in the wild, and turn their urine into a hallucinogen.
[38] Höller's carousels (sometimes spelled carrousel, with two R's, intentionally like the original word in French) and amusement park works, are some of his most well-known projects.
But two age-old ploys do not add up to a new one…The title of the carrousel, R B Ride, doesn’t get us anywhere, because R B merely stands for Robles Bouso, the name of the now-defunct Spanish company that made the fairground device.
He goes further to say that "the carrousel resembles a huge clock—that is, a time-measuring device rather than a time-diverting machine…"[39] For Höller's exhibition in 2011 at MACRO, he showed Double Carousel with Zöllner Stripes (2011).
Each panel holds a grid of light bulbs flickering at a frequency of between seven and twelve hertz, combined with a clicking stereo signal that continues back and forth between two audio speakers.
This induces optic and acoustic hallucinations: viewers experience modulating fields of color with their eyes open or shut, or perceive themselves or what is said by others around them in altered ways.
