Wednesday, October 11, 2006
LONDON: A touch of the fairground came to the Tate Modern gallery as the latest work trying to fill the cavernous turbine hall of the former power station on the River Thames.
Conceived by Belgian-born German artist Carsten Holler, Test Site consists of five helter-skelter slides – the tallest of which drops 26.5 metres from the top floor of the building and is 55.5 metres long.
"The moment of going down the slide is a moment of release," Holler told a news conference at the opening of the installation. "In my opinion, the fairground experience is completely under-rated.
"But this is not just a fairground experience. It embodies a lot of other things," he added.
This is participation art, said Tate Modern curator Jessica Morgan.
"Holler firmly believes that slides should be far more widely used in public life. The idea is that if we all went down a slide on a daily basis it might profoundly change our lives," she said.
I think Holler is on to something here. see my post on Friday 1st September. Also ties in with some reading. Looking at "The Passionate Church' by Breen and Kallestad (excellent stuff by the way!) - they talk about working from rest rather than what we all seem to do which is resting from work. perhaps there is more of a chance of being productive and fruitful if we resist being a workaholic. The true sign of being godly is pattern our life after God himself. And for God rest is vitally important. Would be interesting if we brought more of a mix of rest and the fairground experience to our discipleship.
Been down a slide recently?!
