Carsten Höller: Test Site

Jessica Morgan

Softcover | 15.24 x 0.95 x 19.37 cm | 144 pp

Tate Publishing | 2006 | 9781854377128

Carsten Höller: Test Site is at once a celebration of the slide as a form of locomotion that induces delight and vertigo and a plea for its wider use beyond the playground and amusement park. The book contains an introduction by Tate curator Jessica Morgan and a perceptive survey of Höller’s career by Dorothea von Hantelmann. It also features photographs of the slide installation in use, a history of the slide written by Roy Kozlovsky, an architectural proposal for a hypothetical slide house commissioned from leading architects ‘Foreign Office Associates’ and a feasibility study for the use of slides in the urban public arena by The General Public Agency.

Höller has stated that Test Site is a kind of open experiment into the reception of slides by the public and the effect they have on those that use them. With its colourful illustrations, informative essays and visionary architectural ideas, this book is at the same time an ideal introduction to Höller’s work, a record of an extraordinary installation and a continuation of that experiment beyond the physical reach of the artwork, out into the world.

Höller’s works range from the purely conceptual to the elaborately architectural and are concerned with human behaviour, communal experiences and altered states of mind. Very often they require the participation of the audience to achieve completion.