Play that game. Carsten Höller's slides. Play as a participatory tool in institutional contexts
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Copyright (c) 2025 Luca Palermo
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13138/2039-2362/3729Keywords:
contemporary art, game, Participation, Holler, MuseumAbstract
Since the 1960s, an increasing number of exhibitions and artistic interventions have called for the direct participation of the viewer as an integral part of the process of signification of the works of art. Such a methodology, in recent decades, seems to occupy a prominent place in the artistic production and exhibition activities of museums and galleries, initiating a radical rethinking of the relationship between object, artist, audience and institution. Among the various ways of organizing participation, play and entertainment have been chosen by numerous artists who, through their work in institutional spaces, have contributed to the development of what has been called the "ludic museum": Carsten Höller represents, without a doubt, a paradigmatic example of such an approach. The contribution aims to offer, considering the recent critical debate on the issue, a key to interpreting the famous slides that the German artist has been setting up in museums and cultural institutions around the world since the late 1990s.
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