84 85 Psychedelic counterculture, from music – with the Velvet Underground, the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Mario Schifano's Le Stelle, the early Beatles, the Pink Floyd, The Doors – to cinema (with masterpieces like Sergej Paradžanov's The Color of Pomegranates in 1969, Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point in 1970, Carmelo Bene's Salomé in 1972, or Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain in 1973), has been able to produce aesthetically powerful images, being one of the most involved in restoring centrality to the soil, to the point that today we speak of a Psychedelic Renaissance for the capacity, evoking Donna Haraway's Chthulucene (2016) and Bruno Latour's Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (2020), to imagine new ecosystems, founded on ecocentrism and necessary for survival on a planet we have culpably infected. Carsten Höller, along with other artists like Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno with their hallucinated, vivid and ecocentric aesthetics, are certainly cornerstones of this movement; perhaps, however, the Psychedelic Renaissance brings a new awareness with it, born of disillusionment with the presumed human omnipotence. As if to say, we can and must imagine alternative worlds, but mind has its limits, indeed. «Psychedelia is very interesting – Höller tells me – because it shows you how expansion of the mind acts in a peculiar way and how much you can do with it. But I also think about the other thing I told you before: it is even more interesting when you realize that you can go so far with psychedelics, but then you can't go any further. When you know this, you will get the feeling of your own limitations. Psychedelia questions with limits as much as with mind extension, but the limitation part is very interesting because it shows you that your mind is nothing but a tool, and it is absolutely sure there is so much more out there that we cannot figure, that we cannot even think about. Do you know what I mean?». I know, indeed. Concreteness. Power to the imagination, all right, but with feet firmly grounded, especially at a juncture when the crucial matter pertains to the defense of the earth's rights through the medium of art. After all, we are talking about Carsten Höller, a figure in whom two dispositions coexist (they coexist, they do not hybridize, and this distinction is pivotal, just as – talking about the preservation of biodiversity on earth – coexistence, rather than hybridization, is vital): the disposition of the scientist coexisting with that of the artist. Making our own the parable of Galileo, who pondered the earth's position and shape, thereby triggering an epoch-defining revolution, ecocentric in nuce, science is duty-bound to raise cultural revolutions capable of investing humankind in its presumption of omnipotence. Exactly like art. Both domains share the collective responsibility of nurturing the doubt. In the initial phases of his journey, Carsten Höller delved into the intricacies of the terrestrial landscape as a scientist, dissecting the behavioral intricacies of insects within their ambient milieu; now he does so through the lens of an artist, examining the human being amongst an array of coexisting equal living beings inhabiting the earth. And while Höller's practice as a scientist was rooted in the methodology of the experiment, his practice as an artist is based on the creation of an experience. (Ed.’s Note: Even at Brutalisten experience is essential, but what sets it apart from experiment is another fundamental trait. �uoting again from its Manifesto: «The different dishes may be served at the same time. The eater may combine the tastes of different ingredients while eating. Instead of a chef imposing what should go together and which amount for a given serving, the eater takes these decision». Here: beyond the shared etymological root, experiment and experience differ in their diverse degrees of freedom) Carsten Höller sets up his experiences according to a strict synchronic system: observation / interpretation / interaction, developed between the artwork and those who partake in it. I am thinking above all of his imposing installations in open spaces, mammoth slides such as The Slide (2016) at the ArcelorMittal Orbit at the invitation of Anish Kapoor, or carrousels slowed down to the extreme like RB Ride (2007) in San Severino Lucano, within the Pollino Park. Artworks freely accessible, able to give the Land Art movement – the most explicit in the history of art in making land protagonist, but which originally, in the 1960s, in my view remained rather inward-looking – a brand new breath, finally alive and livable, finally ecocentric. In Carsten Höller’s experiences the playful component is intense; yet, as the polished and elegant intellectual he is, Höller knows, drawing from Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) to Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner and Maria Montessori, that the momentum of play holds a fundamental role in cognitive advancement. Art as a carousel, allowing the playful experience to evolve into conscious awareness, for aesthetics to rejoin ethics by defusing cosmetics. Art as experience, as if Carsten Höller's scientific background acts as a source code, in a sort of osmotic process between earth and art. Nevertheless, Höller explains to me, commonalities between the laboratory and the atelier end here. «I have often been asked – or rather, it has been asserted quite like a statement – if there is a similarity between art and science: “In both cases it’s about creativity”, and so on. I think this is completely wrong. What we call contemporary art is a very specific language, not based on something trying to find out about the world as a scientist would. When I was a scientist, I was always surprised by how we get results: through exclusion. Basically we are surrounded by noise, noise everywhere, so you need to go in the laboratory in order to get rid of the noise – in a way, the laboratory is similar to the exhibition's white cube. But then scientists go further, because they want to study the influence of a certain factor. You know, when you are conducting a clinical study –wanting to know, for instance, whether temperature is affecting the outcome of an experiment – you keep everything the same except for one factor, temperature, because then you can better measure its effects. And that’s a process necessarily based on exclusion, because at the end you won't even know if your results are fully effective. By the time you go and put them out in the world again, with all its noise, and temperature may be affected by other factors you have not investigated, and then there can be crosseffects too. Also, there is the fact that you, as a researcher, always try to stay outside, as objective as you can, but interesting results emerged when some experiments with mice were looked at, focusing on procedures whether done by men or by women, because there actually were consistent differences in the outcome. So, interestingly, the scientific method is a great way to understand because it tends to simplify, but it's also very difficult to relate it to the world. The effect of the temperature on one side, or a painting on the wall of a white cube on the other side, are not that significant, because they show more the limitations of the mind, again, because they pertain to what you can still understand. But noise is out of our reach». I then ask him if it is noise, the terrain of art: «Yes, I think so. Noise turned into music, even intentionally distorted music. And even for music, as well as for science, literature, art, architecture, and so on, we can say it’s like sport. You have rules for the game, they are all very different coming from different domains, but then it’s all in how you play. But the real question to me is: what else could we play? What we have not even come up with? Because art is undoubtedly interesting, but its better thing is that in principle it could be the territory for another form, not evolved yet. So we have our conventional forms of cultural expression, each with its own language, as I call it. But could there be other forms that we still don’t know? Why confine ourselves solely to creating art, science, sports, or forms of worship, following predetermined patterns? Maybe there is something else. That’s what is interesting about art: you can use it as a model situation, testing how it works with people who come to see an exhibition, for example. They can try things out, like an experiment, except there are no scientists taking data. It’s more like a proposition for society. So, I am a proposition maker. As an artist I make propositions, but I no longer want to go like a scientist into one small, controlled space like I did before in my life. I’m more interested in the proposition making, and the language of art – let me use this term again – is quite a powerful thing, so I’m actually working on the language as well as I’m working on the proposition, aside of something that can be done with the language. But we need to stop to make all these paintings, sculptures, and so on. It’s terrible what is going on there. I have a real problem with it. It’s so reactionary». Thus, with respect to the worldwide attention that there seems to be at the moment towards African contemporary art – going from the recent Venice Architecture Biennale curated by Scottish-Ghanaian architect Lesley Lokko, to the numerous exhibitions featuring African artists of the caliber of Pascale Marthine Tayou, Zanele Muholi, Yinka Shonibare – Carsten Höller opens my eyes to yet another Western-centric attitude dressed up to the nines: «When we speak about contemporary art, it also means a certain way of exhibiting it, of making it accessible, and once more it is something like we impose one form onto the whole world, again in a Western perspective. I still can’t see African forms in this portion of the world, but only big Western containers holding smaller African containers. And that’s not how it should be. We need to embrace the beauty of the differences in contents, for sure, but also in containers». So: concrete, constructive, in formulating practical and useful propositions in the language of art for the defense of the earth. Brutal, disturbing, in an attempt to awaken us to issues urgent for the soil, but silenced as taboos. There is another trait that, in conversing with Carsten Höller, now becomes evident to me: extravagant, extra-vagans, the one who moves beyond imposed boundaries. Extravagant as his aesthetics, absolutely eccentric and immediately recognizable, and extra-vagans as his ethics too, always on the move, always in search of new lands to explore, always aimed at unmasking a limit, be it a territorial boundary or a mental taboo. Sublime, sub limen, on the threshold, devoted to nomadism, and being nomadic means being open to belonging to each land and to no possession, mirroring in each visited
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