Riding the Carousel

Golden daze

In an era when public art galleries are part of the entertainment industry, the National Gallery of Victoria is a natural habitat for a carousel. Installed in the gallery’s foyer over the summer of 2015, and now part of the NGV’s permanent collection, the mirrored surfaces of Carsten Höller’s Golden Mirror Carousel reflected riders’ faces as they chatted and held up their smartphones to take selfies.

Attempting to inject gravitas into the glitzy carnivalesque spectacle, the gallery’s program notes characterised Golden Mirror Carousel as meditative, possessing the power to alter our physical and psychological experience of the world. The Belgian artist’s work, we were informed, would cause us to reflect, ‘creating situations through which we can reimagine how we move through the world and reconsider our place in it’. Louise Neri, senior director of the heavyweight Gagosian Gallery, which represents Höller, likened the ostentatious installation to a Renaissance mise en abyme (a technique whereby an image depicts a smaller copy of itself, in a sequence appearing to recur indefinitely). Puncturing the artspeak, Höller has commented that it made sense to install a carousel in a museum as museums are a kind of amusement park.