One Word Movie

Test Site (the slides in Tate Modern)

This is the latest of the big art projects to get installed in the turbine hall of the Tate Modern and unfortunately it's a bit of a clinker. The slides aren't particularly interesting to look at and I would love to tell you what it was like to slide down them, but I can't, because the Tate has adopted a distinctly uncool ticketing policy, and even when you do have a ticket, you still have to queue for half an hour even to go down the rubbish girly ones.

The geezer who put it together, Carsten Höller, says that you can't help but come out with a smile on your face when you go down a slide. Well, when you have a nice raspberry icecream on a hot day that makes you smile as well, but it doesn't mean that raspberry icecream is art. Anyway, Carsten Höller must be a bit of a gufflord because he doesn't even have an entry on Wikipedia! Ha, what a buffoon! Anyway, his art is shit, not as shit as the Nauman sound thing but that's not saying much.

However, if you are in the Tate Modern, your day is not wrecked, you don't have to drown your sorrow under ten pints of mild in the Market Porter. Just invest seven quid in the Fischli and Weiss exhibition (proper artists with a Wikipedia entry, see) and you will have a thoroughly good time. There is the best film I have ever seen in an art gallery in there, The Way Things Go. And there is a series of 80 wee clay sculptures that will make you a) laugh and b) want to have a go at being an artist yourself, because it doesn't look very hard. And there is a load of other stuff that is a bit weird. Anyway it is good, even though you have to pay money to get in.

posted by Chairman Peyote @ 3:27 PM