Talk Art · Russell Tovey and Robert Diament

Carsten Höller (New Year's Day Special Episode)

·59 min·4 clips

Höller built a slide in Miuccia Prada's minimalist office that goes through the floor, makes a turn in the courtyard, and deposits her exactly where her driver is standing with the car.

1. Talk Art hosts Russell Tovey and Robert Diament interview artist Carsten Höller on a New Year's Day Special, following his London Book of Games launch at the ICA with Hans-Ulrich Obrist and a two-foot Polaroid camera previously used by Andy Warhol. 2. Höller is a Belgian-Swedish artist known for large-scale interactive installations including slides at Tate Modern, upside-down mushroom rooms at Fondazione Prada, and a rotating Congolese-western double club in London. 3. The episode's central thread is the relationship between doubt, experiment, and the deliberate disruption of predictability—both as an artistic strategy and as a broader philosophy of life. 4. The Book of Games, published by Taschen, collects games Höller has been developing since 1992; an early pocket version was co-made with Hans-Ulrich Obrist in 1998 and contained roughly 70 games including Das Haufen, a game about as many people as possible laying on top of each other. 5. Höller connects the book's games to surrealism, noting that Salvador Dali appears twice: once in a game based on an image of Dali standing uncomfortably close to Gloria Vanderbilt, and once in a description of the hypnagogic technique Dali shared with Thomas Edison—falling asleep holding an object to access semi-conscious thought. 6. Höller articulates his guiding concept as 'doubt is beautiful if you can afford it,' arguing that modern society's drive to predict everything—now exemplified by AI weather forecasting 15 days ahead—has gone far enough that humans can allow themselves 'some time off from the predictability obsession.' 7. Before art, Höller studied phytopathology (plant diseases) and worked in chemical ecology, studying how aphids, parasitoids, and hyperparasitoids communicate within a four-level trophic food chain. 8. A landmark 1980s Science paper on South African acacia trees—which emit chemical warnings to downwind plants when giraffes eat them, causing those plants to produce bitter phenolic compounds—was a significant part of his research context; he notes giraffes had learned to move upwind to avoid the defense while antelopes had not. 9. Höller describes leaving science for art as natural and easy, analogous to moving country: 'You want your life not to be just one thing—if you have a possibility, why don't you?' 10. His Stockholm restaurant Brutalisten grew from a failed attempt to create a monthly Congolese music night at a nearby club that then came up for sale during the pandemic; he now eats there most nights when in Stockholm. 11. The Brutalist Kitchen Manifesto, written in one sitting in March 2018, states that every dish must be made from only one product: a duck is cooked in multiple ways using its own fat, intestines, and flesh, but no other ingredient is added. 12. Höller describes challenges under the manifesto—a salad without vinaigrette requires extracting oil from the seeds themselves—and identifies existing brutalist dishes in Japanese cuisine, including cuttlefish marinated in its own extracted gland contents. 13. Brutalisten occasionally serves beaver, sourced from a hunter friend who culls beavers damaging boat clubs in Sweden; Höller describes the taste as unlike chicken, rabbit, or hare, and says public reaction ranges from skeptical to very positive. 14. The restaurant contains a Dan Flavin fluorescent light (too bright for evenings, used only in daylight), a Carl André typewriter poem, and a ceiling mural by Congolese-inspired painter Anna Benaroy commissioned by Höller—a maximalist contrast of large naked women eating, smoking, and kissing, lit by a slowly rotating lamp on the ceiling. 15. Höller built a slide in Miuccia Prada's minimalist office that passes through the floor below, includes viewing windows so she can see staff at work, makes a turn through a courtyard, and deposits her exactly at her waiting car; he believes she uses it every day. 16. The Double Club, which Höller built in London in November 2008 during the financial crash, set a western copper bar back-to-back with a Congolese bar from Kinshasa, with a discotheque whose dance floor rotated once per hour—placing the DJ alternately in a western or Congolese section, theoretically triggering music changes that the DJs refused to execute. 17. Höller dislikes the word 'immersive' as a descriptor, preferring 'influential environment': 'It has an influence on you—it's putting you under the influence, like psychedelic drugs or a book that you read.' 18. He describes slides as simultaneously a temporary loss of middle-ground consciousness—producing only joy or fear—and a serious architectural proposition: 'Why do architects always build stairs and elevators? Why not put slides in buildings?' 19. The upside-down fly agaric mushroom room at Fondazione Prada, made in 2000, has become a destination in itself: visitors arrive at Prada exhibitions specifically asking for the mushrooms rather than the art. 20. Listeners interested in conceptual art, experimental food, the relationship between science and artistic practice, and the philosophy of doubt and disruption will find the conversation substantive; those expecting studio-process or medium-specific discussions will find neither here.

As heard by us

Carsten Holler turns games, slides, desserts, and perception into a lively Talk Art conversation about changing how the body pays attention.

Talk Art opens the year with Carsten Holler, using The Book of Games as a way into an art practice built on risk, altered perception, and the body's sudden wakefulness.

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Press play for an art conversation that turns perception into a physical dare.

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