I’m not sure I’ve ever written fewer notes on an exhibition I was reviewing than I did for Carsten Höller’s retrospective, “Decision.” Scheduled during the Hayward Gallery’s summertime crowd-pulling slot, its big, hands-on installations simply aren’t very conducive to note taking. Instead, the funfair vibe is all about interactivity — from choosing at the start between which of the darkened, twisting metal entrance corridors to gropingly navigate, to selecting which of his two corkscrewing Isomeric Slides, 2015, you’ll finally exit down. Along the way, there are virtual-reality headsets and inverted-vision goggles to try on, suspended harnesses that swing you out above the Hayward’s balcony, a rotating mobile of giant plastic mushrooms for you to turn — all requiring constant audience participation, instructions from attendants, and, needless to say, an awful lot of queuing.But the lack of note taking also points to a deeper, more problematic issue, which is that for all the immersive exuberance of Höller’s pieces, they generally don’t leave you with very much to actually think about. As the most populist of the artists associated with relational aesthetics, his work is about locating meaning in the social realm, expanding artistic experience beyond traditional person-object encounters — and yet it sometimes feels that even the most everyday social situation would be more thought provoking, more nuanced and ambiguous, than the majority of pieces here.Supposedly, of course, ambiguity is hardwired into the show’s structure. As the title indicates, the central theme is decision making, usually between two parallel routes to take — either literally or, in the case of the virtual headset, between diverging left- and right-eye pathways through a pine forest. Other works, though, involve a decision of whether to engage at all: whether to take one of the red-and-white pills that fall to the floor every three seconds; whether to take part in a proprioception experiment in which a vibrating hammer makes your nose feel elongated. Still, none of these experiences is truly ambiguous. At best, they suggest ambivalence, a choice between two wholly discrete options whose outcomes are largely predictable. And rather than providing a sense of empowerment or possibility, the exhibition leads you from madcap piece to piece, in a way that feels, ironically, tightly regimented.Perhaps, indeed, the show’s emphasis on social relations is misconceived. Certainly, the most successful pieces take an opposite tack: the almost paralyzingly discombobulating Upside Down Goggles, 1994/2009, for instance, or the disconcerting corner of his Half Mirror Room, 2008/15, where the reflection of your reflection is thus uncannily opposite to what you’re used to. These are pieces that address you precisely as an individual, and that threaten to overwhelm you not through social immersion but through your own, powerfully reoriented subjectivity.A version of this story appears in the October 2015 issue of Modern Painters.
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