If you're in Los Angeles between now and Feb 20, 2005...
RMJon23
Title: ART REVIEW
Take a mind excursion
No ingestion is required to partake of MOCA's 'Ecstasy: In and About
Altered States.'
Date: October 11, 2005
NEAR the entrance to "Ecstasy," the winning new thematic group
exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art's Little Tokyo warehouse
space, Berlin artist Klaus Weber has installed a three-tiered fountain
made from Victorian cut-glass. Water gaily burbles from the otherwise
rather cheesy-looking fountain, splashing down the crystal tiers into a
square concrete pool surrounded by tempered-glass walls.
According to a signed certificate hanging on a nearby wall, the
fountain's water is laced with LSD. The most potent psychotropic
substance known to science, it was produced for the artist in a British
homeopathy lab. The fountain is a signature piece for a show that
proposes art as a mind-altering substance. Think of it as the drug
culture equivalent of a champagne fountain at a wedding celebration, or
maybe a chocolate fountain at the party after a movie premiere.
Presumably, a visitor could reach over the fountain's surrounding glass
walls, wet his finger and take a taste, launching into an altered state
of consciousness for up to six hours. According to the homeopath's
website, a mere 1/6 milligram of the drug is sufficient to induce and
maintain the trip.
There's just one hitch. Is it true? Is the fountain really spurting
LSD?
We trust what our museums tell us about the art they enshrine. And
great art is itself commonly supposed to contain inherent
transformational properties. Does this one? There's an obvious way to
know for sure, but like Eve with the apple, getting that knowledge
requires a long-term commitment after breaking a museum taboo: Do Not
Touch. Reaching over the glass barrier is verboten.
What predominates here? Does the authority of the museum prevail -- or
the authority of the artist, or the viewer? Does some negotiation take
place among all three?
Over in the corner on a pedestal, Weber has installed a small wooden
model for a pavilion he wants to build in Dresden, Germany, to
permanently house the LSD fountain. His crystal palace is a sleek
Modernist box, meant to be plunked down over an existing urban
landscape. Instantly all the mundane things on the street -- trees,
lampposts, fireplugs, park benches, sidewalks, trashcans -- would be
transformed into artifacts in a virtual museum of modern life. The LSD
fountain gurgles in the center.
Even without drinking from Weber's trippy fountain, the work manages to
nicely alter your consciousness of being inside MOCA. In the 21st
century, old distinctions made between the museum and the street,
between "the art world" and "the real world," have collapsed.
"Ecstasy," whose subtitle is "In and About Altered States," drives the
point home.
The show is not, I should emphasize, a "glorification of drug use" --
as some are certain to complain. There's no reason to keep kids from
seeing it, any more than there is to stop them from reading "Alice in
Wonderland," with its hookah-smoking caterpillar and beguiling magic
mushrooms. Honest conversation, not the hysteria or terrified silence
typified by the costly war on drugs, is a more productive path. It's
good for art too.
Drugs are a metaphor for altered perception in "Ecstasy," and the best
works in the show will alter yours while also articulating the nature
of the alteration. Take Tom Friedman's tiny little pill.
A seemingly ordinary medicinal capsule is enshrined under spotlights on
a pedestal in a display case, like an exemplar of the secular Eucharist
that has sanctified so much of modern pill-popping society. According
to the label, the hundreds of multicolored little granules that fill
the small gel cap are made from Play-Doh. That means Friedman engaged
in the repetitive, acutely focused task of rolling each of these
teeny-tiny clay spheres by hand -- perhaps the most primitive analogy
imaginable to age-old practices of art-making. Suddenly the slow,
thoughtful, transformative rituals basic to art become their own
soulful brand of mind-expanding medication.
Up on the mezzanine, French-born New York artist Pierre Huyghe has
installed "Light Show." A theatrical grid filled with scores of
swiveling lights with colored gels surmounts a low rectangular stage.
Pillows tossed around the floor invite the audience to linger for the
performance -- a Minimalist theater of the absurd.
Music swells, the lights come up and fog rises from the floor of the
small stage. Currents of air in the room gently swirl the fog as the
shifting colored lights turn the vaporous mist into a spellbinding
phantasmagoria.
There is, of course, nothing there but a variation on smoke and mirrors
-- which, in today's spectacle-driven society, is also the sum total of
so much that is abject and debasing. The difference here is that
Huyghe's work pays close attention to revealing the precise
manipulations of "the man behind the curtain." The sculpture is candid,
not deceptive, and beautiful to boot.
The show's tour de force is Belgian artist Carsten Holler's "Upside
Down Mushroom Room," where even the delightful stutter of the
'shroom-room title participates. Holler has constructed a long, zigzag
corridor, which switches back around five corners while rising on a
gentle incline. The uphill journey starts out dark, but light is
glimpsed at the end of the tunnel.
Come around the final turn and the hall explodes into a blinding-white
room -- except it's upside down, with rows of fluorescent lights
beneath your feet and a dozen gigantic mushrooms suspended from the
gray "floor" overhead. The dotted mushrooms, which resemble something
from a fairy tale, slowly rotate at varying speeds. Moving from the
darkness of the journey to a place of revelatory light, you encounter a
magical description of the way a human eye sees: Images are flipped on
the retina, and your brain unscrambles the perception.
Artists have been twisting ordinary perception for a long time. Eighty
years ago the Catalan Surrealist Joan Miro got down in the weeds and
looked up at the looming blades of grass set against a royal blue sky,
in order to put us into a painted "Dialogue of Insects." Most of the
artists in "Ecstasy" start with precedents 40 years later: These are
children of the 1960s. Twenty-four of the 30 artists were born between
1959 and 1974.
"Ecstacy" has some flat spots, as well as a few overly familiar works
by Rodney Graham and Charles Ray, shown before at MOCA.
Disappointingly, the show includes only a single L.A. artist under 40
-- Paul Sietsema, whose exquisitely crafted 16-millimeter film is a
visually absorbing, conceptually resonant meditation on the sculptural
nature of cinematic space. As often happens with MOCA, the majority of
artists are based in New York and Germany, offering too narrow a slice
of the global art-pie.
But mostly it's a blast. Some of the work is made with pharmaceutical
materials, such as Weber's fountain, Friedman's pill or Fred
Tomaselli's elaborately patterned paintings, complete with sedatives
and pot embedded in resin. A lot refers to hallucinogenic states more
loosely, and not only to conditions induced with prescription or
recreational chemicals. Finnish filmmaker Eija-Liisa Ahtila's
compelling three-screen projection evokes the perceptual slippage of
schizophrenia, while Matt Mullican's witty split-screen video shows him
messing around in the studio, presumably under the influence of
hypnosis.
Still, the psychedelic '60s are frequently recalled. Ann Veronica
Janssens' banal, gimmicky projection of intensely colored flashing
lights is the most directly linked to Op art. Interestingly, though,
it's not the failed high art of the era that serves as primary
springboard. Popular culture is more significant.
Tomaselli's intricate patterns are indebted to things like posters for
Bill Graham's Fillmore concert halls. Olafur Eliasson visually suspends
raindrops in space courtesy of strobe lights. Eli Sudbrak -- who goes
by the \o7nom d'artiste\f7 assume vivid astro focus (which he spells
entirely in lowercase letters) -- has turned a bunker-like room into a
Rio carnival-meets-disco, complete with pulsing music and dual themes
of erotic freedom and gay liberation.
Sylvie Fleury's marvelous golden meditation orb, whose walk-in interior
is lined with thousands of rhinestones glued to black felt, plays a
looped soundtrack to the Zsa Zsa Gabor howler "Queen of Outer Space,"
in which women in spike heels and push-up bras rule the planet Venus. A
feminist critique of consumer culture has rarely been wittier.
L.A.'s 1960s Light and Space art -- which differed from New York Op
partly by virtue of being rooted less in the art gallery than in the
aerospace industry, the science lab and the street -- is acknowledged
at every turn. Eliasson's levitating raindrops are unthinkable without
it. Erwin Redl's room-size infinity chamber, built from a
three-dimensional grid of green LED lights, is part sci-fi movie stage
set and part Robert Irwin light installation.
Massimo Bartolini adds an innocuous 1910 painting of the Southwestern
American desert to a wall and a hygrothermograph -- the climate
recording device common in art museum galleries -- on the floor of a
curved, all-white room that is essentially a sensory deprivation
chamber like those of Doug Wheeler. The work is a critique of the art
museum, where modern science is deployed as a bulwark against time and
art becomes arid, but it's undercut by the routine dullness of the
chosen landscape painting. Bad art stacks the critical deck.
Still, the patron saint hovering in the show's background is probably
the great, wickedly mischievous German painter Sigmar Polke. In the
catalog to his magnificent 1990 retrospective in San Francisco, the
late curator John Caldwell astutely noted that by 1969 Polke had become
perhaps the first artist who "succeeded in creating a precise visual
analog of drugged consciousness."
Paul Schimmel, the lead curator who organized "Ecstasy," assembled
MOCA's survey of Polke's photographic work 10 years ago. His lively new
show is a primer on the continuing possibilities for the
pharmaceutically enhanced motif.
*
'Ecstasy: In and About Altered States'
Where: MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., Los
Angeles
When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays and Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; closed Tuesdays and
Wednesdays
Ends: Feb. 20
Price: $5 to $8
Contact: (213) 626-6222; www.moca.org
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
Author: Christopher Knight
Section: Calendar
Page: E-1
RMJon23
Machines Paul Davies wrote about, and you're reading this in Google
Archives sometime "past" 20 Feb, '06.
BS
"RMJon23" <rmj...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1130220278.5...@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> of course, I meant 2006...unless you've built one of those Time
> Machines Paul Davies wrote about, and you're reading this in Google
> Archives sometime "past" 20 Feb, '06.
Actually, the year is 2323 and I'm a 17 year old high school student
assigned to write a paper on the Ancient Americans.
The only significant artifact to survive that time is the archive of
something called alt.fan.rawilson.
This must have been some society...
BS
SF,CA (which fell into the ocean centuries ago)
RMJon23
>Actually, the year is 2323 and I'm a 17 year old high school student assigned to write a paper on the Ancient Americans.
>The only significant artifact to survive that time is the archive of
something called alt.fan.rawilson.
>This must have been some society... <
Thanks for writing in, BS. I'm 318 years ago, and glad you've made
contact. If you want any help on the Ancient Americans, I guess I
qualify as one, so feel free to ask away. By the way, I know the
alt.fan.rawilson archive survived (since you tell us so...and yet...and
yet: Robert Anton Wilson himself cautioned us to remain at least a bit
skeptical about everything, so can you tell us WHY our archive was the
ONLY thing to survive to your time? On second thought nevermind; I
realize you have your high school report to do, which seems work
enough), but for us, it's still going on, so could you let us know a
bit about the history of things like Space Migration, Intelligence
Increase, and Life Extension? For instance: are YOU immortal? And
what's your favorite band? Whatever happened with nuclear weapons? Do
you guys still have intercourse like we did, or do your minds just meld
until someone cums? Where the hell are you? In what was called "the
Milky Way neighborhood"? Is nanotechnology "old hat" to you guys? Throw
me a bone back here in 2005!
Hoping this makes it to you and you do that voodoo that you do so well.
(That's an obscure reference from way way back in the 20th century. Ask
me. I'm here to help ya, son!)
-rmjon23, on what was called "Internet" in 2005 CE