In the short looping film “One Minute of Doubt,” a Mercedes-Benz wagon drives in circles with loudspeaker spreading doubts, until the tires are stolen. The film is projected on two screens, standing side by side from the 1999 work “Laboratory of Doubt.” “This was this mobile laboratory spreading doubt among the citizens, doubt about what we know, about the world we know,” said associate curator Gary Carrion-Murayari. ”He is using science to make sense about questions we don’t know the answers to.”
Critic Jessica Morgan writes that the piece is key to understanding the artist’s work. “Perhaps this is why we are yet to know what his work is really about. Quite possibly, Höller does not know either, but by embracing this idea of doubt—the most radical and the most impossible to realize—he has para- doxically brought into focus all that came before and all that comes after. As Höller has explained:“I am happy about this perplexity. I used to suppress it for a long time because it is associated with uneasiness, which is a totally wrong approach—one should rather try to disengage one from the other and come to appreciate perplexity for what it is. Doubt and its semantic cousin, perplexity, which are both equally important to me, are unsightly states of mind we’d rather keep under lock and key because we associate them with uneasiness, with a failure of values. But wouldn’t it be more accurate to claim the opposite, that certainty in the sense of brazen, untenable affirmation is much more pathetic? It is sim- ply its association with notions of well-being that gives affirmation its current status. What needs to be done is to sever the association between affirmation and well-being.”