Carsten Höller
With the re-conceptualization of older downtown as “fun zones”, the amusement park is now being commissioned as permanent and temporary public art. What does it mean? Are visual arts the new circus parade and acts? Are we street vendors of murals and inflatables. Are the visual artists inventing the new global, country, city and community events will be as romantic as Woodstock in 30 years? ( Burning Man ?) How is the shaping of activities like dancing, sliding, swinging and climbing an intellectual aesthetic activity? Or has thoughtfulness lost all purpose in the new civic realm, the placemaking, the entertainment?
This summer will have amusement structures paid for with ART FUNDS. Carsten Höller has installed his slide at the Haywood Gallery, London. Good BBC video here. Baptiste Debombourg has used the form of a rollercoaster in Nantes and Montreal is installing a $1,000,000 non-usable small ferris wheel by BGL. But the big guy in this game is Slide the City by Taylor TR Gourley. Gourley is a film producer with a side business a water slides moving to a new city each weekend. $10 to $15 a ride.
Carsten Höller at Haywood Gallery, London, Summer 2015
“Rollercoaster”, Baptiste Debombourg Nantes, France, Summer 2015
Baptiste Debombourg Nantes 2015
La Vélocité des lieux by de BGL, Model, 2013
La Vélocité des lieux by de BGL. Model 2013
Installation, La Vélocité des lieux by de BGL (Jasmin Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère, Nicolas Laverdière), Montreal, 2015
Slide the City, Summer 2015
Artists have always been into re-interpreting pop culture, from Andy Warhol’s products to Oldenburg’s Ray Gun Store.
Red Grooms Carousel, in Nashville, dates to 1998. So he was early into this particular fad. Of course, his piece was more artist generated, but its function as a publicly accessible hybrid between art and entertainment is the same as the pieces you show here.
How is this different from the Church using art as entertainment and spectacle in the middle ages?
Art has always been employed by the powers that be for its own uses.
Public art, be it a cathedral window or sculpture at the Haywood Gallery, always balances between serving esthetic versus commercial masters, and this stuff is no different.
Reis,
Thanks for writing again. I don’t disagree with you.
Glenn