© Attilio Maranzano

Carsten Höller, "Double Club" (2008). Installation view, Electrowerkz, London.

March 2009 Reviews

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Hans-Peter Feldmann

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I visited Carsten Höller’s Double Club twice: first to view it as an art installation, and then, in the evening, to experience it as a restaurant, bar, and disco. For, like many of the artist’s initiatives, the venue has a dual identity. Intended to be open only for six months, the club is a place where art and life coalesce and Western and Congolese cultures collide. Höller fell in love with Congo when he first visited the capital of the Democratic Republic, Kinshasa, in 2001, and he conceptualized the Double Club as a place where Congolese art, food, and music would enjoy equal billing with their Western counterparts.

The German artist is well known for creating environments in which visitors are invited to lose their inhibitions in immersive experiences. He installed giant slides, for instance, in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. They were a huge success; three million visitors hurtled down. Test Site (2006-07) was also a spectator sport; watching artworld sophisticates trying to regain their composure after abandoning themselves to physical sensation and landing in a heap on the floor was very amusing. A night spent at the Guggenheim, in Höller’s Revolving Hotel Room (installed last fall for the "anyspacewhatever" exhibition), gave access to another kind of liminal space — of sleeping, "perchance to dream." It, too, caught people’s imaginations, and it was completely booked.

The Double Club is a far riskier undertaking. In a museum context, ordinary objects can acquire a surreal aura, but the club has been set up in the real world where such ventures are unexceptional and where art often becomes little more than decor. The venue is a former Victorian warehouse in a scruffy north London back street. The only sign that a new place has opened in this Dickensian setting is the dark-suited doormen (who are actually very friendly). The central space is a cobbled courtyard with a glazed roof; during the day it feels exposed but, after dark, it is warm and welcoming. The dialogue between African and Western cultures begins here; in one corner is a giant reproduction of a self-portrait by Congolese artist Chéri Samba, a paintbrush between his teeth. Lining the opposite corner are blue tiles painted with the visionary towers of a "Flying City" designed by Russian architect Georgi Krutikow in 1928. Each suggests that culture offers a way forward, but similarities end there.

I doubt if anyone at the red and yellow plastic tables ponders the failure of utopian modernism or the chaos of postcolonial Congo. They are more likely nibbling kebabs from the barbecue while wondering whether to order a Primus or Turbo King beer from the Congolese bar, a wooden shack erected beside eye-catching murals advertising the imported tipples. But since the beers cost £9 a bottle, most people opt for cocktails mixed at the gleaming copper counter of the Western bar, beneath a pink neon sign reading "Two Horses Riders Club."

From here you can see into the restaurant. During the press view, it was filled with journalists curious about the decor and dual-identity menu and politely asking "Is it art?" — to which Höller replied it was up to us to decide. At night, no one seemed to care; some may have noticed the Andy Warhol screenprint, Alighiero Boetti embroidery, and Samba painting on the walls, but I doubt if they considered the implications of their having been hung side by side. They were too busy tucking in to familiar favorites like shrimps, burgers, and roast partridge, or sampling Congolese delicacies like goat stew served in large leaves, salted fish topped with onion marmalade, and smoked fish with manioc. The exotic dishes are delicious and, costing a fraction of their Western counterparts, easily win the day. Enter the disco, and you are assaulted by a wall of sound; if you are lucky, the pulsating rhythms of Congolese rumba rock vibrate through your bones and propel you onto the dance floor beneath giant glitter balls and a red LED palm tree; if you are unlucky, your tinnitus is exacerbated by a blast of Western house music.