The line for the slide can wrap completely around the carousel at New Museum’s Carsten Höller retrospective (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Wednesday – Sunday through January 15, $12-$16 (free Thursdays 7:00 – 9:00 pm)
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org
experience slideshow

Just because Carsten Höller’s first-ever New York City retrospective, “Experience,” includes the optional “Upside-Down Goggles,” an optical device that flips everything you see, doesn’t mean the German artist is trying to turn the art world upside down. A former scientist who was born in Brussels and lives and works in Stockholm, Höller has transformed the New Museum into a laboratory / amusement park, complete with merry-go-round, slide, aviary, and wave pool, each with a sly twist. Examining doubt and duality, disorientation and displacement, confusion and confrontation, and, perhaps most critically, perception and participation, Höller has created a mind-bending interactive, experimental journey that requires viewer involvement in order to be successful. If you’re just interested in looking at weird things, then this show might not be quite what you expect. “Höller has provided stimulus to erotic encounters and to hallucinatory or intoxicating experiments,” Lynne Cooke writes in “Amanita Blue,” her essay in the exhibition catalog. “Bliss, ecstasy, and transport are equally subject to his curiosity and appreciation, and, ultimately, come to seem less altruistic than necessary.” Gary Carrion-Murayari puts it even more succinctly in his catalog contribution, “Entertainment”: “Carsten Höller creates works that can provide joy or terror in equal measure,” while in “Panic” Massimiliano Gioni explains, “Carsten Höller’s work brings on attacks of the heebie-jeebies and moments of panic.” But don’t worry; there’s really no need to be frightened of Höller. “Experience” turns out to be a helluva lot of fun.

Slide zooms past “Psycho Tank” at interactive exhibit at New Museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The survey begins just past the lobby with “Giant Triple Mushrooms,” a series of colorful large-scale fungi that reference both Alice in Wonderland as well as psychedelic shrooms, especially since some of them have already had bites taken out of them, hinting toward an oncoming acid trip. You’ll want to continue your journey on the fourth floor, where you might have to wait as long as an hour and a half to go through “Untitled (Slide),” a stainless-steel pneumatic tube that will send you twisting down to the second floor. While waiting on line, take an excruciatingly slow spin on “Mirror Carousel,” a horseless merry-go-round with swings as seats, Höller toying with your expectations since swings usually rise up high and carousels generally move significantly faster. You can also pick up one of the three phones on the wall and make a long-distance call, which will be reused as an answering-machine message as part of “What Is Love, Art, Money?,” and listen to the live birds flitting around in cages dangling from above in “Singing Canaries Mobile.” Stop off in the Shaft Project Space on the stairs between the third and fourth floors for a cup of water and a gelatin capsule from “Pill Clock” as you make your way to “Giant Psycho Tank,” a calming, meditative sensory deprivation tank in which you float on a few inches of heavily salted water and let the slight current carry you away. If you didn’t bring a bathing suit, you’ll have to go in naked, and if you’re extremely shy, you should know that your privacy is not completely guaranteed, despite the presence of a security guard monitoring the proceedings. When we sat down on the bench in the back of the pool, we could clearly see two guys outside staring in at us, and later, while we were floating so beautifully, the woman on line after us started talking to us from the doorway, not seeming to mind that we were in nothing but our birthday suit. “Psycho Tank” was originally meant for more people at one time, but the Board of Health said no; in other countries, as many as six can join in together, so just shed your American Puritan inhibitions and let it all hang out. Also be on the lookout for the two-monitor video “One Minute of Doubt,” the funhouse-mirror-like “Infrared Room,” videos in each elevator, “Aquarium” (in which you lie down and place your head inside a viewing tank), and other works that make “Experience” as entertaining and involving an experience as you want it to be.