Carsten Höller’s largest U.S. exhibition, Experience, promises to alter perception through a series of amusement park-inspired installations. Desaturated, large and devoid of ornament, these attractions fit well within the New Museum’s hermetic gallery spaces, and make the visitors by contrast appear colorful and alive. Yet as visitors watch one another in each arrangement—made congested by the sheer number of attendees—awkwardness, isolation and disorientation become explicit side effects of the altered states that Höller invokes.

Installation view, Carsten Höller: Experience, 2011-2012, New Museum. Photo: Benoit Pailley. Courtesy the New Museum.

The start of Untitled (Slide)—a smaller version of Höller’s 2006 slide installation at the Tate Modern—is a matte-grey metal tube that emerges cartoonishly from the polished concrete floor. Its opening is tended by two ebony-clad docents reciting instructions—place your feet in the sack and wait for my signal—whose transformation to carnival workers makes them contributing vehicles for Höller’s farce on the art institution. Though the immediate sentiment is unprofound, their transformation identifies the contrived and tenuous institutional seriousness that they otherwise personify.

Any revelatory art experience depends on the visitors’ collective agreement that such an experience is possible, a sort of shared hallucination made recognizable through the visitors’ use of Höller’s otherwise innocuous objects. Höller seems to show that any path towards revelatory experience through the act of museum-going is absurdly indirect.

The queue for Untitled (Slide) wraps around Mirror Carousel, in which visitors sit in finely crafted brushed-metal swings and turn slowly around a mirror-bedecked column whose panels reflect the scene of visitors, docents and carousel riders. Like the slide, the carousel is drained of materiality and color, taking on the colors of the visitors who become fleshy and garish objects. The result is a work that cannot be appreciated up close for its elegant craftsmanship. Its spectacle lies in its audience—carousel-ing awkwardly, standing and chatting—so that voyeurism becomes substitute for and parallel to object fetish, a tension that successfully disrupts the visitors’ collective agreement to invest Höller’s museum objects with meaning.

Installation view, Carsten Höller: Experience, 2011-2012, New Museum. Photo: Benoit Pailley. Courtesy the New Museum.

Chirping birds pepper the chatter and occasional scream of the visitors. Kept in seven matte-grey cages hanging from the gallery’s upper reaches, these birds appear in correspondence with the exhibition’s audience. Since the birds are there involuntarily, their presence belies the notion that the audience willingly entered Höller’s assemblage under some promise of artistic revelation. Instead both human and avian audiences are living beings trapped within an idea. Between the birds and Höller’s anti-attractions, a dark self-consciousness of relational aesthetics is made manifest.

The exhibition delivers festivity, voyeurism, isolation and disorientation with admirable choreography. Höller’s achievement may be that his virtuosity can dissuade viewers from looking for a comforting anecdote in what now appears to be a deficient and outmoded realm.