Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

Archive

 

Volume 7 Number 2, August 2006

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Schimmel, Paul, and Lisa Mark, Ecstasy: In and About Altered States. Distributed by The MIT Press for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. £25.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-914357-91-3.  

Reviewed by 

Amy Ione

The Diatrope Institute, State College, PA

 

When done well, exhibition catalogues supplement the theme of a show while translating how the work “feels” when we actively engage with it. Ecstasy: In and About Altered States, the catalogue for an exhibition at The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) from 9 October 2005 through 20 February 2006 exemplifies how this balance is accomplished. Impressive in its handling of a complex topic, the end-result captures the scope of “ecstasy” and the dynamism of the installations that rely on sensory interaction, (although their experiential impact could not be replicated or reproduced in a static publication). It also thoroughly examines the contributions that were more traditionally composed. Coupling the large, often double-page reproductions of the representational and experimental art forms with short statements on each of the 30 artists and specially commissioned essays (by Carolyn Christov-Bakargieu, Chrissie Iles, Midori Matsui, Lars Bang  Larsen and Diedrich Diederichsen) the book magnificently conveys the essence of the installation, painting, sculpture, and new media on display. 

 

MOCA has a long history of presenting innovative, speculative, and controversial exhibitions. Ecstasy builds on this history and further establishes this venue’s reputation as a cutting-edge museum, one that allows artists to challenge museum-goers in terms of form and content. Topically the pieces, which were intended to highlight the relationship between human consciousness and ecstasy, convey where current ideas intersect with a range of contemporary art practices. They succeed technically as well. Perhaps the most note-worthy accomplishment of the show is its ability to touch so many perspectives. Broadly speaking, the projects fell into two groups. On the one hand, some presented representational works, largely capturing metaphysical conditions. These included the wall-scale, resin-suspended pill paintings of Fred Tomaselli; Charles Ray's photographic self portrait, Yes, which depicts the artist on LSD; and Franz Ackermann's recent Mental Maps, abstract paintings that represent cities using his own subjective form of GPS.

 

The second, and more diffuse group was comprised of artists who explored the notion of phenomenological experience and perceptual anomalies that play on disjunctions in scale, or disrupt our means for spatial orientation. These works dismantle us perceptually and propel us to think about the conventions of perception in the process.  Carsten Höller's Upside Down Mushroom Room falls in the second group. It impressed me from the moment I opened the book. Included in a series of full-color plates used to introduce the art before any printed text appears, its scintillating strangeness defies verbal explanation, although many of the contributors tried to explain how the dynamics worked. The artist’s gigantic, fly-agaric mushrooms are illuminated from the floor and hang from the ceiling of a room that is rotating slowly. [Mushrooms were evident in many of the pieces. No doubt this is because the mushroom as a path to altered states of consciousness has a long tradition.] Within the space he creates, the ceiling and floor appear to change places. Gloria Sutton’s essay explains that before entering visitors make their way through a ninety-eight-and-a-half foot long pitch-black hallway. On leaving the darkness of the corridor, the ceiling and floor seem to switch places. The effect is that it seems the nine ten-foot-high mushrooms appear to sprout directly from the ceiling.  I could not quite picture how it works in real time from the essay. Nonetheless, I was impressed to learn that Höller’s installation replicates the upside-down projection of images onto the retina before the brain inverts what one sees. It is also worth noting that this project refers directly to the retinal experiments by George Malcolm Stratton in 1896, for which he wore specially adapted glasses to turn the world upside down using a lens system to return the retinal image to its source. All in all, it was because I could not fully comprehend the piece that I was so taken with it. I will look for in my travels so that I can solve the conceptual mystery and partake of it experientially. Another original and imaginative installation in the second group is Jeppe Hein's Moving Walls, discussed by several commentators. Here the museum walls almost imperceptibly begin to close in on the viewer.

 

Of the five commissioned essays, Lars Bang Larsen’s was particularly thought provoking.  Just as I began to read the book, I saw a clipping of Philippe de Montebello, Director of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, speaking about the many people who visited to the Met in the days following 9/11.  The museum was opened as a service to the city, although the administrators had no idea whether anyone would venture in so close to the tragedy at the opposite end of town. People did come, no doubt drawn to the timeless beauty created over so many centuries. Here, it seemed, they could enter another reality and quietly dialogue with something intangible that art touched. This something lived in this space of silence and beauty and allowed them to engage with a reality that even the felling of the towers could not erase or take away. Larsen’s essay seemed to understand how the two realities co-existed. He speaks of the ambivalence of ecstasy, pointing out that the word means leaving one’s position and going outside one’s self. He pairs it with corruption, writing that they imply each other like two sides of the same coin. Through his comparison he grounds the concept within our world.

 

Diedrich Diederichsen’s essay, “Divided Ecstasy: The Politics of Hallucinogenics,” on the other hand, was a bit of a disappointment. His glorification of drugs as a liberation reminded me of all the artists I know who were compromised by their drug experiences. This primarily historical essay outlined some of the debates and works connected with drugs and the mystical debates, filling in many associations that bring together art, ecstasy and mind-altering experience. Having no images it seemed less developed than the other written contributions. It was a critical commentary rather than a creative engagement with the vast terrain art exposes.

 

Finally, the book was a pleasure on almost every level, although I was disappointed to find myself unable to imagine how some of the interactive projects worked in real time and real space. Nonetheless, the combination of excellent images, general articles and artist specific essays worked well and helped me conceptualize the active viewing experience.  Integrating historical foundations with contemporary views was an important element in the strong presentation. The collection demonstrated that artists define mind-altering realities and ecstatic states in many ways. Establishing ecstasy’s relationship to the artist's state of mind and as an experiential effect created for the viewer was a useful contribution. Selections that pursued drugs, the process of self-observation in literary works; and the "dark side" of altered consciousness rounded out this book that will appeal to all who have probed the questions of altered states of consciousness.