Carsten Holler's The Double Club
The survival of Carsten Holler's creation The Double Club is an art world success story with an up-to-date subtext. When the club opened in the innards of a Jack-the-Ripper-period warehouse behind the Angel subway station in London last November even drum-beaters were cautious. Yes, Holler's Slides (entitled 'Test Site') had been both a critical and a popular success in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, but that had been in 2006, the zenith of the boom, and this new elaborate project was opening in the teeth of a perfect storm.
The doubleness of the Double Club, which was backed by the Fondazione Prada, was that it paired the culture of the Congo with that of Northern Europe and the Congolese element was neither patronized nor appropriated. Holler has become familiar with the Congo and it seemed horribly to the point that the area was going through a fraught time, even as the club opened.
Work by Warhol, Louise Nevelson, Alighiero & Boetti hung with Cheri Samba and Moke the Painter in the restaurant. A drawing of a Flying City by the Utopian Russian architect of the 1920s, Georgi Iwanowitch Krutikow, reworked and rendered in tiles, was on a wall in the bar and there was a demarcation line between the Congo and the Euros in the disco. So what with one thing and another, the joint was jumping but whether it had the longevity gene was another matter entirely.
'How does this differ from Damien Hirst's Pharmacy?' I asked Mark Francis, a director of Gagosian, Holler's gallery, when we met in the club soon after the opening. 'Well', he said, 'the Pharmacy had been open-ended. Indeed Hirst had hoped that it would run forever. This is more like Andy's Exploding Plastic Inevitable,' he said. Meaning a short-term event that will change the art world. 'He is saying: This is my greatest art work. But you can't have it!'
Germano Celant, the curatorial capo at the Fondazione Prada, sounded ready to brush off failure. If the club didn't work in London, he said, he might move the constituent parts to another city. Quite possibly to Prada's hometown, Milan. "Or maybe Paris," he said.
Carsten Holler
Carsten Holler walked in from the restaurant where he had been at a tableful of Gagosian staffers. He was wearing a black leather jacket and a long narrow white scarf, and looked like a World War I aviator. "For me it's a very big step," he said. "To go from making art objects to this... " He slapped the bar.
Well, The Double Club will soon be in its fifth month and it looks to be settled in until the end of the year. And its survival makes an interesting point; a point prefigured both by the Slides at the Tate and the hotel room for two - with a revolving bed - that he installed, ready for paying guests, last October in the New York Guggenheim. The notion of the artist as a purveyor of expensive objects is (at least temporarily) on hold but the notion of the artist as somebody who creates provocative diversions that are located between art and life is thriving.
Carsten Holler, 'Test Site' (Slides), The Unilever Series, Tate Modern, 2007
I talked recently to Holler and noted that he had described 'Slides' as "a repeatable surprise".
"Yes, yes. Which I find amazing. Because a surprise shouldn't be repeatable. But this one is," he said.
I asked whether the Double Club had been his first venture into what I chose to call "real politics"?
"Yes," he said. "That's a good term. I like it."
But what actual real world impact has the place had?
"When we set up the website we get this compete analysis," Holler said. "How many people are looking at the website but also where they are coming from. We have these incredible statistics so you can see how many people from which African country. You can trace it down to the city and even to the part of the city."
Also, like the Slides, the Double Club can be seen as a public art but a public art in which the public and the "art" elements are barely possible to distinguish. Indeed, I said, the main difference between the Art Bust of the early 90s and the much deeper one of today is that art has come to penetrate the entire culture of many countries so deeply that the rise and fall of auction prices seem irrelevant.
"It has indeed," Holler said. "And I think that is a very important point. It's impossible to open any airline magazine nowadays without having something about contemporary art. Before in the 70s, the 80s or back in the 60s it was really a specialist thing to do. But nowadays it seems so much mainstream culture that you wonder what kind of effect that has.
"It's kind of terrible because it's losing its language in a way. By having it on this mainstream level it's not the same anymore. You cannot make the same statements. It becomes commonplace really. And therefore it's a different thing. So it's time to reinvent part of this language and make it less accessible."
Holler's solution is radical and the Double Club has been part of it.
"And one way to do this, I believe, is to get even more mainstream - to make it like the Slides, or like the Double Club. To make it popular in a way. So that it's successful on one level. But if you want to go into more specialist territory there's the challenge of going into the middle of everything. So the art can be more camouflaged."
Anthony Haden-Guest
The Double Club is at 7 Torrens Street, London EC1, T: +44 207 837 2222.
www.thedoubleclub.co.uk
ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST is a writer, reporter and cartoonist who writes regularly for Saatchi Online's magazine, as well as for Esquire, GQ (UK) the Guardian and Britain's Observer Magazine.
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