Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Carsten Höller can’t be found. I linger in the restaurant of Hotel Costes in Paris, where I have arranged to meet the German entomologist turned conceptual artist, while his publicist investigates. I half expect to be stood up. Höller is a prodigious prankster: his work, shown in London’s Tate, New York’s Guggenheim and, most recently, Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland, has tinkered with magic mushrooms, helter-skelter slides and dream machines. I can imagine him hiding behind the maître d’hôtel. Observing, smirking, perhaps taking notes. But he arrives, apologising profusely, and we settle into a nook to discuss his latest project, Book of Games, a compendium of 336 diversions that gleefully instil discomfort in the participant or their audience. Has he tried them all? “In my head, for sure,” he says, adding, rather improbably: “I’m not really such a big game player.” One of them demands the use of toes for everyday procedures — opening a door, buttering bread — while “Olfacto-Tinder” involves sniffing and following tantalisingly scented strangers. Some games can be played on your own, others in groups and none of them require materials — “No dice, no paper, no scissors.” They are illustrated with artworks by Wolfgang Tillmans, Salvador Dalí, Nan Goldin and others. The book is an open invitation to anarchy, says Höller. “We have a whole culture of avoiding being ridiculous. So that’s something that many of the games have: a moment of ridicule. They play with insecurities.” The book has been three decades in the making. Its origins lie in a “tedious supper” in Marseille in 1992 following the opening of one of his early exhibitions. To liven up the evening, Höller and two friends invented “Questions, Questions, Questions”, a pact that their conversation would consist solely of inquiries. “The whole atmosphere tilted,” Höller says. He has been collecting ideas for games ever since (a small selection was published in a limited-edition book in 1998). The humour and unease created by the games comes from their disruption of societal norms. Players act weird and risk being judged accordingly. One scenario requires that you repeatedly insist a friend is being odd. “Some people will then begin to behave oddly. Or they will think you are odd,” writes Höller. “Alternatively, you can play ‘You Smell Odd’.” It is not, perhaps, what one might expect from someone with a PhD in agricultural sciences. “Science is based on reason. I’m exploring the unreasonable,” he explains. “I think I have a good pedigree, coming from Belgium.”Höller was born in Brussels in 1961 to German parents working for the European Economic Community. He went to an international school in the city where, he recalls, Hergé lived next door. “There was a little way out of the school between hedges. And I walked out every day and saw him sitting there drawing Tintin.”Following his studies at the University of Kiel — where he specialised in insect communication — Höller worked as a research entomologist. His interest in conceptual art took over in the early 1990s, just as other emerging artists, such as Maurizio Cattelan, Pierre Huyghe and Olafur Eliasson, were also looking to reframe the audience experience. He entreats journalists not to describe his work as “immersive art”. It’s “not immersive in the sense that you’re just drowning in sensory information”, he explains. “If it’s just meant to overwhelm you with mirror effects and lights and stuff, I think it’s not very interesting.” His focus lies instead on the intersection of emotions and the exploration of perception. This is evident in the more awkward interactions found in Book of Games, just as it was in 2006, when he installed a huge slide in Tate Modern that sent visitors barrelling through the Turbine Hall. “For the person who slides, it’s about living in two extremes at the same time,” he says. “One is being very joyful and the other being some kind of fear. But the place in the middle, where we normally are, is gone.” He delighted in seeing that uneasy sensation on the faces of the people shooting down his slide. “So instead of making a painting of an expression or a sculpture, like Edvard Munch would have done, you see this in real life,” he says. “It’s not immersive. It’s audience exploitation.” Today, Höller lives in Stockholm. “I live in a humourless country,” he says, laughing. “They can’t play what the French call charades.” Swedes, he says, “talk for the purpose of exchanging information. They don’t talk to have fun with each other.” Testing this hypothesis, during the pandemic Höller opened a restaurant, Brutalisten, in central Stockholm with the twist being that each dish is constructed from a single ingredient (you can get a starter of beetroot followed by a main of chanterelles). He still visits Belgium regularly to “refresh my sense of the surreal. Brussels is a wild city.” Höller’s work tends to highlight, whimsically but without a clear endgame, behaviours that defy the norm. “There are many other forms of existence,” he says. “That’s why I’m so interested in mushrooms. Because they’re extraordinary, different and strange.” The fly agaric mushroom — a cartoon-red psychoactive genus — regularly features in his work. For the Art Basel Paris public programme, Höller has installed one of his giant mushroom sculptures in Place Vendôme, a fusion of three species of fungi that stands incongruously outside the Gucci store. The question of how art is consumed — location, timing, delivery — is a recurring theme. For a Guggenheim show in 2008, he invited visitors to spend the night in a revolving hotel room situated in the galleries so they could enjoy the museum at dawn. “This hypnagogia [a transitional state between sleep and wakefulness] in the morning, when you wake up, I like this moment very much. This is my productive time of the day. If I see a nice Caspar David Friedrich, this is the moment that I can really take it in.”On one level, Book of Games is a rough guide to mischief. The amusements involve various bodily contortions, insulting behaviour and nudity: playing “High Butt Cheeks” in public will get you arrested. A few are distinctly dangerous. “Some are definitely suicidal. You shouldn’t play them,” he acknowledges. “I should put in a disclaimer.”Höller’s irreverent and meddling approach to situations extends to our conversation. When two rather imperious looking women begin gossiping loudly in the corridor, he gets up and shoos them along, breezily ignoring their froideur. Later, just as I am suggesting that what is funny to one person could be frightening to another, a tray of cutlery crashes to the floor in the next room. He laughs and says that he set that up. “I have a little button under the table.” I’m not entirely certain if he is joking.‘Book of Games’ is published by Taschen
