Carsten Höller: Decision

venue: Southbank Centre

Hayward Gallery presents Carsten Höller: Decision, an ambitious new exhibition that playfully engages our perceptual and decision-making habits. After choosing between two separate ways of entering the exhibition, visitors navigate their way through a labyrinthine installation of disorienting objects, videos and devices, from robotic mobile beds to a clock that marks time in red-and-white pills. Inviting reflection and uncertainty as well as participation, Decision culminates in a choice of exits, including a trip through the Hayward’s roof and down one of Höller’s spiralling Isomeric Slides, designed to produce an emotional state "between delight and madness."

Curated by Hayward Gallery Director Ralph Rugoff.

Ralph Rugoff: Carsten, you decided to call this exhibition Decision yet your work often seems to encourage visitors to embrace a position of uncertainty—to inhabit a mental space in between decisions.

Carsten Höller: There’s really a common theme in all of the works in this exhibition. They are all methods for taking away what we take for granted, in order to make the ground a bit more loose, to destabilise you or free you from this dictatorship of the predictable. Which I think is also a means of introducing a strong notion of freedom.

RR: Is the freedom you are referring to, a freedom from having to make decisions?

CH: Yes. For me, freedom from taking decisions would be the ultimate spiritual luxury.

RR: Given that so much of your work deals with subjective experiences, it poses a challenge in terms of how it can be discussed "objectively." Are there some aspects of the work that you feel really can’t be put into words?

CH: I’m very happy that you mentioned this. These works in Decision are very much against language, against the hegemony of the written and spoken word as a way for us not only to communicate, but also to understand. I think we all agree on the fact that language has a structure, and that’s how it works. It’s linear to some extent. It cannot deal with a certain level of complexity if it is not allowed to explore it over a certain amount of time. With art, on the other hand, you can deal with complexity in a more immediate way. So we must be clear about the fact that what we discuss here is only what you can speak about, but that there’s also something else. It’s not that we don’t have the words for it, but that the words will never make it there, because they’re organised in a different way. This is something that we all know from the moment that we are conscious, but we become so used to language that we sometimes forget about its limitations and how it makes us see the world in a certain way.

RR: Do you think words can convey at least something of what we experience in art?

CH: In the end, it’s probably impossible to really describe anything that has to do with experience. It’s what in science is called "the hard problem." Consciousness, for instance, cannot be explained. You can say, "There are all these neurons firing together and that means there’s a certain state of alertness," but that has nothing to do with what we experience when we are conscious. So there is an explanatory deficit, which is created not because the models, or ideas, or explanations that we have are lacking in some way, but because of language itself. But through art we have another approach...

Decision is accompanied by a catalogue comprising two books. One features new short stories by Ali Smith, Naomi Alderman, Deborah Levy, Jonathan Lethem, Helen Oyeyemi and Jenni Fagan responding to the theme of decision-making. The other contains two competing photographic records of Höller’s exhibition and an interview with the artist by Ralph Rugoff, Hayward Gallery Director.