A newly expanded edition of the artist’s antidotes to boredom offers relief from family gatherings and gallery dinners alike
Perhaps you’re bored, waiting at the bus stop. ‘Bring your two outstretched index fingers together in front of your eyes until the fingertips touch. Focus on the background. You will see a sausage between your fingertips. Make the sausage float by moving your fingers apart.’ The sausage does indeed float.
This is the sort of brief – if to others slightly nutty-looking – respite from the tedium of the everyday that this second, expanded edition of Carsten Höller’s Book of Games offers. (The first, a pocket-sized book, was published 25 years ago as a result of the artist having to attend his own gallery dinner, which turned out to be terribly dull.) The compact tome comprises 336 games that are accompanied by images from varying sources including the artist himself and works by other artists such as Rachel Rose, Julien Creuzet and Wolfgang Tillmans. The book is divided into six sections featuring games to play alone and to play with others, games for two to play and two to play with others, and games for multiple players and multiple players to play with others. The ‘others’, here, are the unwitting participants and observers of a series of games that might variously be considered pranks, or ‘sport’, or performance, etc. So, while with one other player you might decide to ‘without touching each other make your shadows interact in sexual positions,’ you may also choose, with that same person, to streak through a crowded public space. And see what happens. You might also read the entire book as a series of social experiments, perhaps guided by the fact that that Höller’s work frequently explores how people think, behave and interact with their surroundings. Book of Games continues this enquiry by inviting players to explore their everyday experiences via sensory and psychological manipulation.
A personal favourite, a game for one, ‘Dead Beetle’ (or, how to escape from an excruciating social interaction or event such as post-Christmas family lunch, once safe topics of conversation have run dry and intrusive questioning begins): ‘Play dead. Don’t move, don’t breathe, don’t blink.’
Book of Games by Carsten Höller. Taschen, £40 (hardcover)
From the November 2024 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
