Johan Berggren talks to Carsten Höller

Carsten Höller, Rhinoceros, 2005; mixed media. Courtesy Esther Schipper. Photograph by Carsten Eisfeld.

 

Johan Berggren: Right now we are sitting in an amazing house about 20 minutes away from inner city Stockholm. This is where you and Miriam Bäckström, also an artist, live. It’s a bit secluded but it must be very relaxing out here. How long have you lived here?

Carsten Höller: About five years. We lived in the city before, but we needed more space and moved out when we saw the house and it was free. It suits us fine. We both have our desks upstairs. I don’t really need an actual studio space. Out here I also have room for my birds, which is a hobby of mine.

JB: But you are originally from Belgium?

CH: I grew up in Brussels, Belgium and stayed there until I finished school at 17. I then moved to Germany. I am German-speaking and I wanted to find out more about the culture from living there. I also went there to study and later started working.

JB: Is there anything in your work that relates to growing up in Belgium? I ask because I myself lived in Brussels for a couple of years. Came to visit friends for a month or two but stayed much longer. The city truly effects you. There is a flux. Something undefined. I sense this in your practice as well.

CH: Yes, growing up in Brussels truly affects you. Just hanging around you link into a tradition of applied surrealism. There is something of a lack of identity and segregation that fascinates. The city’s urban planning is totally out of control. Nowhere else can you find clashes like these between cultures. Around the corner from Louis Vuitton and all the other fancy shops you find some of the more vibrant African communities. And then you have Schaarbeck with it’s predominantly Arabic population right in the city center. It really is undefined. There is this french word, sacrilège, that sums it all up. The city has a force that creates a fertile ground. The nonlinear prevails. The eruption. There are no fixed rules. It becomes a state of mind. An undefined one.

JB: What artists have affected you?

CH: Ensor. Magritte of course. But also Broadthers and Panamarenko. And the surrealist heritage: to observe the possibilities, to see and recieve input, to really question simple ways of doing things.

JB: The first time I saw your work was in 1995 at Galleri Ynglingagatan when they did SmArt Show in Stockholm. On the floor was, among other works, a cord that you could plug in the wall both ends. It was plugged in one way and around the other end you had placed bonbons in colored glossy paper. What was a piece like this about?

CH: You saw a piece from the Killing Children series. Those were a series of works constructed as traps. They have a lot to do with my training as an evolutionary biologist and scientist. The pieces deal with various issues. They have less to do with the freedom of making them than more profound issues about reproduction. Being human, to a large extent, is about the fact that we carry genes. To a certain extent we accept and are aware of this. But when it comes to our biological offspring, children, I often find that we operate in irrational ways and create curious systems. The pieces communicate a certain lack of self-criticism.

JB: Did you go to art school?

CH: No, I studied agriculture in Germany and was trained as a scientist. I studied the communication between plants and the environment, and my research developed along the line of evolutionary theory. I was very influenced by the thoughts of Dawkins as presented in the book The Selfish Gene. The role and meaning of atheism engaged the open battle between religious and nonreligious interests in the discussion of the spreading of evil.

JB: How did you become engaged in the arts?

CH: Gradually. It was a process that lasted for from the late 80s to 1993, when I stopped conducting scientific work. The worlds of science and art are fundamentally different in the sense that as a scientist it is the result that counts, separated from me as an agent. It should be possible to form an experiment again with a similar outcome. As an artist, most of the time, it is the artist that is important.

JB: Do you still feel that you somehow relate to your experience as a scientist?

CH: Maybe in the sense that in my art making processes I try to erase the trace of authorship. It’s less representational, less descriptive and more analytical. It’s like a vessel. What stimulates my mind, really. It’s often really about a process of coming to terms with what makes good art, good art. There’s a range of possibilities in the sense that I don’t stick to one medium. I cultivate ideas, make decisions, and crystallize the piece.

JB: Can we talk about this in relation to a recent piece? Also a bit how collectors respond to your pieces. For example Test Site, shown at Tate Modern in 2006?

CH: That piece is to be understood in sculptural terms and really in terms of the readymade. I always say to collectors that you can have a Carsten Höller slide or you can send an e-mail to the company producing them and ask if you can have one made for you at a fraction of the cost. It can be understood with a range of possibilities—i.e. slope, diameter, safety. It pinpoints an inherent irrationality. It has an undefined-ness in a number of negations: cost/benefit, better/worse, involved/uninvolved, expensive/cheap. It really shows anti-utilitarian processes at work.

JB: Any superheroes?

CH: As a scientist I used to travel a lot, and whenever I had finished my day I had the chance to go and see exhibitions. In school, back in Belgium, I had a very ambitious teacher whom I had close contact with. He showed me the odd paintings by Delvaux. And then there was of course Magritte. But overall I can’t say I had any of those all-capturing moments when everything changed you for life.

JB: How do you feel about the current art market? Do you produce for a market?

CH: Sometimes I think of myself as not entrepreneurial enough. That I’m lacking that side. I have a resistance to it; I sometimes feel I work in an inefficient way, as opposed to my experience as a scientist. I have no assistants and it’s all very time-consuming. But it’s also a luxury. I sell what I do. And from time to time I do works that fit in a commercial context. At Frieze, for example, I showed one of those soft animals. A half-conscious pink rhino resting on the floor. But in general I’m against art as a commodity.

JB: Are you still a scientist?

CH: Maybe.

JB: What do you have coming up next?

CH: I’m involved in a film project with Måns Månsson. I used to organize concerts. At Färgfabriken, at Berns. One of the most expensive hobbies in the world. This is now turning into a film on Congolese music—a sort of artistic documentary. We’ll start filming soon in Kinshasa.