You don't need to go to an amusement park to have fun on the slide - Tate Modern has turned sliding into an art, writes Rosita Boland
Getting terrified in an art gallery is definitely a new experience for me. But here I am, in London's Tate Modern, about to slide down a tube so steep that, from where I'm looking at it, on the fifth floor of the gallery, it seems like I'm gazing down the top of a well.
There is a moment, before I take the cotton sack-like object you stick your feet into and then sit on the rest of it, when I don't feel at all like becoming a human plumb line. Arms crossed, legs straight, as instructed by the attendant, face tense ("white", I was cheerfully told later, by the friend I was with), I'm off.
The upper half of the tube is clear plastic, so you can see out into the space as you hurtle downwards to the gallery's ground floor, adrenaline pulsing. Later, I find out the slide is 55 metres long, with a drop of 26.5 metres. Translated, this means for part of the time you're sliding near as bedamned to vertically. There's no time to think while plunging downwards, but later I think that this must be a bit like the way water travels at speed through a pipe. I shoot out at the end, a confusion of limbs, and end up tumbled sideways on the mat. I did it. I participated in art: the latest of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall installations.
But is it art? It sounds like a marvellous joke: five giant tubular slides by German artist Carsten Höller, installed in the vast space that is the Turbine Hall in the old power station. Since Tate Modern opened in May 2000, its huge room - cavernous enough to accommodate a galleon in full sail - has seen six temporary installations to date. The seventh, which opened last week, is Höller's Test Site: five spiralling slides of varying heights, lengths and gradients, coming out from different levels of of the gallery, which the public are invited to use. They have been doing so in their thousands ever since - an estimated 35,000 people came through the doors last weekend.
Big and dramatic as Test Site is, curling and spiralling out from different levels of the five-storey gallery, so huge is the Turbine Hall that, at first sight, the five slides within it look no bigger than shining ringlets or bright apple-peelings. Yet they attract the undivided attention of everyone in the hall. Those people not looking up at the actual silver tubes are looking at the mats which lie at the end of each of the slides. It's here that the hurtling hundreds explode out of the tubes and land, with varying degrees of grace. The mat attracting the most attention is the one at the bottom of Slide 5. It's here that people arrive at 90-second intervals - some screaming - after coming down the longest and steepest slide. The expressions vary from great big grins to frankly stunned. This is where I emerged from, somewhat shocked, but greatly exhilarated, heart pounding. The slides are free, but the three highest operate on timed tickets, and since far more people want to slide than can be accommodated, those without tickets are watching.
THE TATE'S TURBINE Hall series started with the French-born Louise Bourgeois's steel towers with stairways, I Do, I Undo, and I Redo, and a giant spider, Maman. The challenge for each of the invited artists has been to create and install a piece of contemporary art that both utilises and complements the scale of the hall. The most recent installation has been Embankment, British Turner prize-winner Rachel Whiteread's 14,000 white polyethylene boxes stacked in towers, and nicknamed "The Sugarlumps". The installations last for just under a year, and all to date have attracted considerable interest from the public. Höller's is already shaping up to be perhaps the most popular of all.
"The installation is in part an open experiment into the reception of slides by the public . . . the act of going down involves relinquishing control, inducing a particular state of mind related to freedom from constraint . . . He [ Höller] considers subjective experience his main working material," explains the accompanying text to the installation. Höller has made slide installations in Berlin, New York, Boston, Helsinki and, most famously, in Milan in 2000 for the owner of Prada, Miuccia Prada, to slide from her office right to her car.
Yes, yes, yes, but is it art?
"So little contemporary art is designed to induce an emotion of a sense of fun," says Londoner Mark Harrison, who's standing watching at the bottom. "This is an active process of bringing people together in a public space to enjoy extraordinary structures. It takes you to a different place. It's like a football stadium in that way. Whether it's art or not is irrelevant."
"Definitely not art," states Briana MacDermot from Dorset. Her mother Anne disagrees. "It's better than Tracy Emin's bed. It's futuristic art." Sam Fraser-Steele is with some friends at the bottom of one of the smaller slides. "Is it art? It's got people here to look at art, so that has to make it worthwhile. And the Tate doesn't just function as a gallery anyway. For us, it's a meeting place for friends where we all come with our kids."
"It's definitely art, because it's set in an art gallery," his friend, Chris McLellan, states. "Contemporary art can be anything you like."
Corinne Littlestone and her friend Rosalind Harries live nearby and have come to see all the installations. They say they're too old to slide themselves.
"I don't think it's art, but it depends on what you want a gallery to be. Do you want to stimulate people? It's certainly doing that; it's making people happy," Littlestone says, indicating the latest laughing person to get up from the mats. "If you're a purist, and think art is only about painting, you won't like it," Harries adds.
Paul Goode and his nieces, Tamsin (12) and Josephine Jackson (10), have all just come down Slide 5. Goode filmed his descent with a hand-held digital video camera. "It's not art. It's great fun, and it's free, but I can go on a better slide at Alton Towers," Goode says. What did Josephine think of her slide? "Over-rated," she says decisively.
"Maybe this is art," Goode laughs, playing back the film of his slide. "Making something out of something else."
The Unilever Series, Carsten Höller's Test Site is at Tate Modern until April 9th 2007