76 77 – tells me that, as part of the celebrations for their first twenty years, Carma invited Carsten Höller, together with Armin Linke and Norma Jeane, to craft exclusive works of art, the entire proceeds of which were pledged to NGOs engaged in the protection of the earth. The proceeds from Carsten Höller's division paintings - Division Square Small (White Lines on Cobalt Green Background), 2020, ed. of 20 + 3 AP - have been entirely allocated by the artist for the preservation of the Nyambe Bepo forest, nestled in Ghana. Small artworks, 30 x 30 cm squares, capable of enacting a revolution, akin to that small oeuvre that became the root of Carsten Höller's fertile imagery. «The massive thing with art is that it can shock you, and you can see something that makes you think like: “Wow, you can do something like that? That’s unbelievable”. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be majestic. It can also be extremely simple. I was a scientist until 1993; nevertheless, I desired to become an artist already in 1985, coinciding with my academic degree season, but I knew it would have taken several years to do my own training, for I had never traversed the halls of an art school. Thus, the declaration of my status as an artist would have verged on the ludicrous. But I needed to know what it was about, so I went to see as many exhibitions as possible. It was on one such pilgrimage that I stood before a painting by Sigmar Polke. It was not a typical Polke painting. It was not very big, you know, approximately 60 centimeters wide. It was a pink surface and one corner was painted black. And you think, “Okay”. But the title was: Higher Beings commanded: paint the lower left corner black! That's it. And then you also think: “What does he mean by that? What impelled this directive for a blackened corner, and where it came from?”. It appears to be utterly nonsensical, and it gives you a possibility of imaging something else, something out of the ordinary, out of what our mind can do. Because we always think that our mind is all encompassing, but it's very anthropocentric to think like this. The mind is just a tool, it only allows you to do certain things, to perform certain functions. I think, for us, it is a taboo to understand that there is a whole other universe out there, which our mind cannot comprehend despite all its philosophical, scientifical and whatever else apparatus. The mind has its limits, and that is the main thing for us to understand». Contemporary art beckons us to reckon with our limits, and it goes further: it ignites within us a doubt, a salvific doubt. Carsten Höller, whose studio has often been defined as the "laboratory of doubt" (notably, in 2016, his impressive solo show at the Pirelli HangarBicocca was christened Doubt, akin to a declarative manifesto), responds to this call by setting up experiences of altered perception through a living, playful, colorful, ultra-saturated, ultra-pop, and otherworldly aesthetic journey, all rooted in the very ground that he has scientifically studied, enabling us to waver, to question ourselves as one species among species. Acknowledging our limits requires a paradigm that can no longer be postponed: from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism. From human to land. Simply, brutally, for so far it is clear that we have failed, and I believe this is the supreme taboo to be admitted for those of us – the vast majority, I dare say, sniffing the world air – who have thought fit to build churches on their navels. Hence, within our path on the defense of universal rights made by contemporary art, where the violated and vulnerable body is none other than the earth, the vocabulary of rights should be enriched: not merely the right to the earth but, with equal urgency, the right of the earth. That florilegium of urgencies encapsulated within the UN 2030 Agenda states, in its Goal 15: “Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation, and halt biodiversity loss”. Consequently, there is another precise, enormous taboo. Carsten Höller has confronted it several times (Killing Children, 1990-1994) in the way he best masters, that of thematization through the salvific shock of art. «We are but one species among countless others, yet we have succeeded in propagating and colonizing all kind of habitats all over the earth, basically everywhere, with the methods we have developed. This is the main reason why we are the root cause of our own problems. We persist in functioning according to the logic of species reproduction alone, mechanically adhering to our acquired evolutionary traits without being able to overcome them. We find ourselves ensnared in a dilemma situation: we know that we are in a problematic time because of our problematic behavior but, at the same time, we remain oblivious, persisting in doing what we have been shaped for, kind of unconsciously. We should seriously think about the damaging effect every human being has in terms of consumption of resources, particularly in the Western world. I mean, you have to get a driver’s license if you drive a car, and this is imperative, because you need to be able to drive amidst other people, obeying to the same traffic rules as the others, else chaos and danger would ensue. I think the same applies to making children. It was Terence McKenna who surmised the idea that in the consuming world – in the Western world, in parts of Asia – if we would just agree on a one-child per family policy, we would halve not only the number of people, but also the use of resources within twenty years. Believe me, that's a pretty dramatic thing. We're still like tumbling around, like half blind because of our evolutionary heritage, but at the same time our conscious mind says “We can't go on like this”». «This is causing real problems for us, today, but also for many other species, organisms that live on this earth. You spoke about the loss of biodiversity for future generations of human beings. We need to speak about it. It's an evolutionary taboo, but we need to speak about it». This is the moment when, raptured by an ardent fervor, I tell him about the infamous policies of our current government, which sets birth rate growth as one of its paramount goals decreed for our hapless country. And here is also when Carsten Höller is neither surprised nor outraged; instead, he prefers to tell me what he has concretely done to unveil this deeply ingrained taboo. «They all do, because they think economy has to grow, and then people have money in their pockets, they maintain their popularity, and everybody’s happy. But it’s not like this. You can maybe make economy grow, but you don’t need to have a certain percentage of increase in the number of children being born. There are other ways to do it». (Ed.’s Note: see Pier Paolo Pasolini and his distinction between progress and blind development; and, in recent times, see Kate Raworth's pioneering scheme of Doughnut Economy, which contrasts prosperity with mere growth) «It cannot be – Carsten Höller proceeds – that you have to increase the number of people being born for the sole reason that they are consumers. If we are talking about reduction of consumption, we also need to speak about reduction of consumers. But almost nobody speaks about it. So, in the early 1990s, my first artworks actually were kind of traps for children. The idea was to introduce this concept in that shocking language of art I told you about, in order to speak about the false necessity of procreation and if this could have been treated from an alternative viewpoint. I know these traps – much like a subsequent film detailing ten distinct methods on how we can catch children (Jenny, 1992) – were very dark humour, but I did it in order to raise this issue. And also to think about it from another perspective, the one of you as a child, when you start to understand that you exist, that you are in the world, and the world is so big and so difficult to understand that you get very dark thoughts too. I’m pretty sure we all went through this». «It’s brutal», some might say. It’s contemporary art, it has the duty to be as such, because «To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric» (Theodor W. Adorno, Critique of Culture and Society, 1949), because the move of contemporary art matches the tug of one who must awaken you, because the work of contemporary art is fearless, brutal, graceless and disgraced, but precisely by virtue of this ungraceful being it contains its constructive reason of being: to make us open our eyes and consciences wide. At the root of the word “brutal” applied to contemporary art lies the Art Brut movement, baptised in 1945 by Jean Dubuffet and enlivened by «works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses – where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere» (Jean Dubuffet, Place à l’incivisme, 1967). The art of individuals who have never been subjected to the constraints of academic indoctrination, born of the fringes, the margins, the convicts in prison, the madmen in asylums, instinctive and fierce, aesthetics devoid of any anaesthetic. From Art Brut will come Brutalism as the architectural movement that made its material the béton brut, Le Corbusier’s exposed concrete. And from Brutalist architecture the Brutalist cuisine will rise, making its material the in-purity products of the soil. Carsten Höller, a man of exquisitely gentle disposition, has made Brutalism one of his artistic features since his first project, Killing Children, conceived to raise awareness about the soil's overconsumption of resources. (Ed.’s Note: Brutal + Concrete: in English, “concrete” means both cement – the material of Brutalist architecture – and practical) Today there is a venue called Brutalisten, located in Stockholm, that Carsten Höller has opened in collaboration with chef Stefan Eriksson just over a year ago, in proximity to the cinema where Ingmar Bergman’s films once premiered. It straddles the line between a restaurant and a work of art: a restaurant, because it fully adheres to the conventions of such locations; a work of art «because it takes you into an unexplored terrain, defined by a set of restrictive rules, which can evoke kind of a primal discomfort, leading then to an intense and specific pleasure, such as I often find in good art». Indeed, in the thirteen-point Brutalist Kitchen Manifesto (available at www.brutalisten.com/manifesto), the first point states that «Brutalist kitchen is a dogma kitchen where certain rules apply»: Brutalisten in fact serves “orthodox brutalist” dishes, made with just one ingredient; “brutalist” dishes, composed of one ingredient along with salt and water; “semi-brutalist” dishes, created with two ingredients. Further reading from the Manifesto: «We are born as Brutalist eaters, as mother’s milk is essentially Brutalist». «Decoration on the plate is avoided». «Brutalist Cuisine is […] a commitment to purity».
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