- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday October 10 2006 13.57 BST
- The Guardian, Tuesday October 10 2006
Carsten Höller's slides in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. Photograph: Lewis Whyld/PA
Principally, your dignity. And any sense of being an adult. And all control. In the few seconds it takes to whoosh through one of these stainless steel and plastic tubes and re-emerge at the bottom of the Turbine Hall, you have been infantilised into a rumpled, red-faced, giggling tomfool.
And it's brilliant. In those seconds of descent, you enter a science fiction fantasy (these tubes would not look amiss in Tarkovsky's Solaris; is this the route to the escape hatch, anyone?). Or feel what it might be like to spin down Alice's rabbit hole. Or re-experience, wakeful, dreams of falling or flying.
Höller's installation, called Test Site, will transform the museum into a madcap playground for the next six months - and not just for children. As it happens, the very grown-up Miuccia Prada, doyenne of fashion designers, has commissioned a slide from Höller. It ejects her through the window of her Milan office, past several storeys of toiling workforce, and straight to the street below, where her chauffeur awaits.
But is this crowd-pleasing work any more profound than a funfair helter-skelter? "The funfair experience is completely underrated," said Höller. "I don't know why we don't take it more seriously philosophically and artistically. Anyway, with this piece, you have the funfair experience and much more."
What the 45-year-old German is doing with this installation is "dealing with the verticality of the space" (according to Tate Modern director Vicente Todoli). It is also, according to Höller, a serious architectural proposition.
"For some reason that I don't understand slides have not been taken up," he said. In his view, they provide a safe, fast and efficient means of transportation through and between buildings.
The experience of descent also "gives you a moment of relief," he said. "It gives you the possibility to let some of those things go that you carry around as an adult. By letting yourself go you somehow get to the bottom of things."
The Tate has given assurances that the slides, which open to the public today, are perfectly safe. There are no age restrictions, but only those taller than 0.9 metres may slide down the smaller chutes, rising to a minimum of 1.4 metres for the higher ones. An expert from Germany flew in to check the weldings and screws ("He seemed to have a great time for half a day," said Höller).
For the taller slides, entry will be available by free timed ticket, and for the shorter ones, on a first come, first served basis.
