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Unilever Series
Turbine Hall
TATE Modern
London
Slides are a device for experiencing an emotional state that is a unique condition somewhere between delight and madness. It was described in the fifties by the French writer Roger Caillois as ‘a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’.
The slide is an object that we associate with playgrounds, amusement parks and emergency exits. I’d like to extend the use of the slide: I don’t see any reason why slides should only be used by children and in the case of an emergency. The Turbine Hall installation is called Test Site because it enables visitors to test the functions of differently shaped slides, mainly to see how they are affected by them, to test what it really means to slide. Again, this applies both for those who actively engage in the process of sliding, and those who watch. People coming down the slides have a particular expression on their faces, they’re affected and to some degree ‘changed’. This aspect of my installation is very spectacular, as you said, because the performers become spectators (of their own inner spectacle) while going down the slides, and are being watched at the same time by those outside the slides. I’d like to suggest that using slides on an everyday basis could change us, just as other commodities are changing us. For instance, I’m convinced that the use of cars has changed our perception of time. I could imagine slides having an impact too. The state of mind that you enter when sliding, of simultaneous delight, madness and ‘voluptuous panic’, can’t simply disappear without trace afterwards. In this sense the ‘test site’ isn’t just in the Turbine Hall, but is also, to an extent, in the slider or person watching who’s stimulated by the slides: a site within.
Carsten Holler
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