No Middle Ground

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In a sprawling warehouse off a nondescript side-street in Downtown Los Angeles, lights flash pink and red, the floor vibrates with a heavy base, and people whirl around in spinning chair swings as beats mixed by Anderson .Paak pulsate. 

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The night at the Double Club—an art project and pop-up club by the artist Carsten Höller and the traveling cultural series Prada Mode—reached a crescendo when Lil Wayne took the stage sporting a black Prada hoodie and overalls with heavy, layered chains, his blonde locs piled atop his head. From a platform within a tower of lights, the iconic rapper powered through his classics as the crowd bounced and screamed along, hands in the air. Following his riotous performance, Travis Scott matched the energy with a DJ set. Outside, the night appeared quiet and still, save for the trickle of Prada-clad guests who made their way from the street into the gated-off entry-way. Unlike New York, where parties await around every corner, and stumbling into one is only a matter of making the right turn or running into the right interesting-looking person on the street: in LA you have to be in the know. 

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“I want you to feel the extremes,” said Höller inside the space. The German artist created the first Double Club for Prada in London in 2008 with the goal of connecting cultures. Its second iteration came in Miami during Art Basel in 2017. Now, for the third spin, he’s taken on LA. Throughout the open room, the floor is divided into nine distinct spaces of various heights. “It has two very different ideas,” he said. “One is rationality, mathematics, division, a system, how we understand the world…” The other, he offered, is entertainment: “something that is strong enough to take you away, to make you feel that you are alive…to make you even dance,” he elaborated, looking around. “Tonight it will be full of people.”

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Another immersive amusement park is around the corner: Luna Luna revived the 1987 artist-created experience of the same name, which had a short-but-memorable run in Hamburg, Germany. On display at Luna Luna is a fun-house by Salvador Dalí, swings by Kenny Scharf, a glass labyrinth Roy Lichtenstein, a ferris wheel by Jean-Michel Basquiat, and a Keith Haring carousel. In fact, a visit to the original fair was a formative experience for a wide-eyed 26-year-old Höller, who went on to chase the thrill in his own works.

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The artist’s kinetic sculptures simulate both out-of-body experiences as well as their inverse. Höller made a splash in the art world in 1998 with his famed site-specific, large-scale slides for the Berlin Biennale. In 2000 he made a slide for  Miuccia Prada’s Milan headquarters that connected her personal office to her car. In 2006, he created Amusement Park for MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts: a carnival with rides that ran at a drastically slowed-down speed. Sarah Watson, the director of Gagosian’s Beverly Hills outpost, describes the artist’s approach as an “emotional state of delight and madness,” one that “you can see this dovetail in the Double Cub.”

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For Höller, the LA event was an extension of these slides. “They give you a feeling of joy and of fear at the same time,” he said of his experimental installations. “It's like the two extremes, and all in the middle is gone, and that's actually quite fantastic.”