Super-Slides and Power Stations

By Hazel Last edited 209 months ago
Super-Slides and Power Stations
TateSlidesCarstenHoller.jpg

Slides! Bloody huge, towering, twisty-turny slides! In sexy glass and steel so pretentious types who only allow themselves to have fun in the guise of "art" and "post-modern ironic comment on the politics of the playground" can have a go!

The latest in the Unilever series of Really Big Art In A Really Big Space for the Tate Modern Turbine Hall is Carsten Holler's installation of tall, twisting, glass covered slides that look like half-organic ventilation shafts growing and unfurling across the enormous Turbine Hall's empty space.

The slides are there to be looked at as spectacle, but a spectacle that the viewer can become part of as well: once the viewer enters the slide and starts to slip down the turns and coils towards the bottom, the viewer becomes the viewed... and yet remains a viewer even while in the very heart of the slide itself, maintaining an objectivity by observing the gallery space and the static ground-level viewers through the glass cover of the slide. Who is watching who? Who is the spectacle?

And... who cares? It's a big, tall, twisting slide and you can have a go on it from today until April next year. For free, with all your mates. All together now: Wheeeeeeeeeeeee!

The Unilever Series: Carsten Holler, Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, from today until April 2007. Entry is free but tickets need to be obtained for some of the slides. For more information and more images, go to the website here.

Picture by Marcus Leith and Andrew Dunkley for Tate Photography

Last Updated 10 October 2006