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The Week in Germany: Culture October 13, 2006 German Artist Turns Tate Modern Turbine Hall Into Supersized Slide Playground For most adults, that exhilarating sensation of freedom tinged with fear while rushing down a playground slide is merely a distant memory tucked away in the deepest recesses of the subconscious mind. Carsten Höller can bring back that cherished childhood feeling in the blink of an eye. The German conceptual artist has created an installation of five giant silvery cylindrical slides in the outsize turbine hall of London's Tate Modern art gallery that invites visitors to do what is usually forbidden with art - touch it, and even "use" it. Aptly called Test Site, the installation opened on Tuesday and can be admired and tried out through April 2007. The largest of the slides is 55.5 meters (182 feet) long and drops 26.5 meters (87 feet) from the fifth floor of the former power station on the banks of the Thames river. A state of delight and anxiety For Höller, the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a "voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind", the Tate Modern website states. He is interested, it adds, "in both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the 'inner spectacle' experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend". Höller moreoer suggests the slides can help reduce stress and alleviate depression. The inspiration for them came from his childhood: Every day on his way to school, he walked past a retirement home which had a fire escape slide outside. "The slide should be a more banal means of transportation, not necessarily linked to children or some kind of emergency. It should be used every day to get from one point to another," Höller said on Monday as reported by dpa. A new wave in urban transport? To date Höller has installed six smaller slides in other galleries and museums, including in Berlin, New York, Helsinki, Milan and Boston. His Milan creation was for the Prada building, where it connects Miuccia Prada's personal office to her car, according to UK website 24 Hour Museum. In his view the Tate slide series could serve as a prototype for an even larger enterprise, in which slides could be introduced across entire cities as a means of transport, the Tate website states. Höller, who was born in Brussels in 1961 to German parents and now makes his home in Sweden, is the seventh artist to undertake the challenge of creating an artwork to fill the museum's vast turbine hall. His predecessors opted for steel towers, a giant red PVC trumpet, a radiant indoor sun, sounds and thousands of plastic boxes. Höller has created many other projects that invite visitor interaction,
such as Flying Machine (1996), that hoists the user through the
air, Upside-Down Goggles (1994/2001) that modify vision, and Frisbee
House (2000) - a room full of Frisbees. Links:
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