In Terms Of

Tag: Psychedelia

  • The Most Bleed Possible

    This essay was largely written during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Brody Condon
    Tuesday, November 3, 2015
    School of Visual Arts, 133/141 West 21st Street, Room 101C, New York

    Brody Condon in Miami Beach in 2010 (photograph and GIF by David Toro)

    Though the outrageous antics of Jim Jones and Charles Manson reverberate through the American public consciousness, a broad history of less-sensational activities from the 1960s and 1970s probably had a larger if surreptitious impact on US culture. Encounter groups, the human potential movement, large-group awareness training: these cultic approaches to self-actualization came shortly after mind expansion through psychedelic drugs in the sixties and just before business motivational seminars and self-help gurus of the eighties (followed by the deliriums of late-night religious programming and inspirational infomercials). Today, soccer moms practice yoga and mindfulness is all the rage, but once upon a time, New Age ideas were a serious threat to mainstream Judeo-Christian values. The objectors were partly correct, but I digress.

    Born in Mexico, Brody Condon is an American artist working in Berlin who has recently been mining the New Age practices of the Esalen Institute and Erhard Seminars Training, among other groups, cults, and otherwise strange organizations, through an aesthetic lens. Using live action role play (LARP) as an artistic form, Condon creates scenarios of psychic strain through what he calls performance engines, described during a lecture at the School of Visual Arts as “creative performative systems that drive action … that drive social choreography.” Through these events—typically documented on video—he produces not only an “emotional significant group encounter but also a psychologically charged art critique.”

    Brody Condon talks about performance engines (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Crucial to Condon’s practice is gestalt practice, which he described as a conception of the physical body, the environment, and the mental state of the individual as an integrated, organic whole. Conversation gestalt therapy, he said, focuses on an individual’s expression and experience of the present moment—there is neither past nor future. Condon is not interested in actual healing and trauma. Likewise, there is no crossover with drama therapy or art therapy. Participants are supposed to maintain some critical distance when in the moment. The artist emphasized that performance engines are an alternative to, not a replacement for, real political dialogue. He also framed his work as an “experiential essay.”

    Some works come across as simple. For Circles of Focus (2015), one project from a four-year collaboration with the Scottish artist Christine Borland, people were encouraged to free-associate about museum objects they handled. Other pieces are just plain weird. Extracurricular Anatomy (2015) took place at the Laboratory of Human Anatomy at the University of Glasgow, where Condon and Borland devised a performance for five fourth-year anatomy students, three cadavers (two real, one played by a living person), and a carnivorous plant. One participant uttered sounds when touching parts of the cadaver, which the plant positioned above the body’s head “interpreted.” A second person “psychically communicated” with the plant and told a third where to dissect a geometric section from the body. “Yeah … that happened,” Condon said.

    The finished version of Future Gestalt (2012) consists of video of the fifth and final session of a performance that took place under a Tony Smith sculpture Smoke (1967), installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—a building designed by the architect William Pereira that, for Condon, represents an “antiquated version of the future.” Smith’s sculpture embodied the “facilitator,” intended to be an artificial intelligence or “interdimensional entity” that, like a cult leader or psychotherapist, guided the four performers. Wearing colorful, loose-fitting robes and “playing fictional versions of themselves in the future,” the performers spoke to the sculpture, sometimes in shrills, clicks, and whispers; it also talked to them. The audio of Condon’s instructions and commands (such as “focus,” “responsibility,” “empathy,” an “control”) was split, with a clear signal sent to the performers’ earpieces and garbled distorted audio filled the room at LACMA. Watch the clip below for a taste of the work.

    Brody Condon, sample from Future Gestalt (2012) on Vimeo.

    LARP communities throughout the world volunteer to participate in Condon’s works. He also posts open casting calls, which convene both professional actors and regular folks, but the artist’s approach that contrasts the feel-good nature of most audience-involved art. Before screening footage from Zeigarnik Effect (2015), commissioned by Momentum 8: The Nordic Biennial, Condon explained, “I’m not casting, and they’re not performers. I’m providing a service for them. I’m providing an event for them to immerse themselves in, for a day to five days at a time. And often they pay me to participate.” This low “token fee” gives him more power as an artist and “changes the power dynamic of participatory work.” In museums, artists typically treat visitors as material. Condon perceives himself as a service provider. A live feed of Zeigarnik Effect was presented in a split screen. Condon said this was a nod to the psychiatrist Ian Alger, who in the 1970s introduced the two-camera technique in therapy. Alger would simultaneously record both sides of a patient’s face; the patient would choose the preferred side—or something like that.

    Brody Condon, sample from Ziegarnik Effect (2015) on Vimeo.

    The concept and script for Level Five (2010–11), the earliest and most historically grounded work, drew from elements of Erhard Seminars Training, Alcoholics Anonymous, Scientology, and gestalt therapy. Level Five was Condon’s reconceptualization of self-actualization seminars, using two actors with years of LARP experience to keep the psychological flow going (what he called “run-time game management”) during the two-day event. The performers—a mix of LARPers, actors, and volunteers—arrived as characters, emoted as them, and stayed in character for the duration of the piece. Filmed with three cameras, Level Five was streamed live next door, at the Hammer Museum’s theater. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Hammer has been offering weekly Mindful Awareness sessions since 2012.

    “In role playing,” Condon said, “bleed happens when the thoughts and feelings of the character start affecting the player, or vice versa.” Coming from a background in performance art, he wants “the most bleed possible.” Back in the day—Condon played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid—it was off limits for role-playing games to affect your real life. Today there are levels of bleed. “Rather than forgetting the existence of an original self,” the artist said about Level Five participants, “the character becomes a tool for projection, self-exploration, and experimentation.” Sometimes performers intentionally try to puncture the illusion; sometimes they experience a minor schizophrenic break. For each work trained professionals are on hand, Condon revealed, to pull a person aside in either case. “We can’t stop these events,” he said. “Once they start, they run…. If they hate what’s going on, they leave.”

    Brody Condon, sample from Level Five (2010–11) on Vimeo.

    One wonders exactly what Condon gets out of the whole thing—he is the one instructing people to inhabit a fictional character whose personality is subsequently gutted. Getting to the core self of a fictional person is “the funnest part to me, it’s the most twisted part.” He explained: “You’re attending a seminar that’s meant to push you, to get you to the core of your being, to strip layers of your socially constructed personality—but you’re doing that as a fictional personality.” The idea is twisted indeed, and you wouldn’t get the same results with a film or stage play. At the time of conceiving Level Five, Condon said, “I was interested in the genealogy of New Age culture in the United States.” After thriving in the 1970s, he told us, the human-potential movement was depoliticized and sold it back to the masses via motivational seminars for businesspeople, Silicon Valley entrepreneurial philosophy, and life coaching.

    A work looking beyond the West, Four Sessions (2014), was executed in Seoul, South Korea, for the fourth Anyang Public Arts Project. Condon found four traditional craftspeople—an instrument maker, a mother of pearl inlay master, a mudang shaman, and a slack-line performer (a.k.a. a tightrope walker)—that are Intangible Cultural Treasures in Korea and identified by a number. He instructed them to pick an object from their studio or to collaborate with him to make an object. Number 24 (the lacquer craftsman), for example, brought a bowl he was never able to finish because it was tied to a past trauma, and Condon made a drum with Number 30 (the instrument maker). Again borrowing from gestalt therapy, the artist ordered the participants to converse with these objects, which spoke back. What’s more, the Intangible Cultural Treasures pretended to be an inanimate object themselves that their objects, now alive, talked to. The piece of rope that belonged to Number 58 (the slack-line man) chastised him for failing to practice.

    Brody Condon, sample from Intangible Cultural Treasure No. 58: Traditional Slackline Performance (2014) on Vimeo.

    Four Sessions felt like the weakest of the projects Condon presented, but that’s probably because the video clips he showed lacked English subtitles. (The excerpts on Vimeo are now translated.) I also got the impression that Condon struggled to maintain order—the participants seemed to battle with him directly and indirectly. Though they were instructed to come alone, they brought family members and apprentices. One man’s daughter and her friends played with their cell phones while the sessions took place. The stubborn shaman resisted the academically trained mediator for Four Sessions, a Korean psychotherapist who did PhD research on the history of shamanism. The psychotherapist, in turn, did not bow to Condon’s authority. There was also a certain amount of bickering. Common trait among the four Intangible Cultural Treasures, the artist said, were peer jealousy, worries about money, and complaints about corruption within the Intangible Cultural Treasure system. Perhaps the difficulty was that the four participants did not adopt a persona or role. They were playing themselves going through a somewhat experimental therapy session that was too much like garden-variety psychotherapy.

    In Terms Of count: 6.

  • Revealing Mystic Truths

    Mainstreaming Psychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain
    Thursday, August 14, 2014
    Swiss Institute, New York

    brucenaumanstudio
    Bruce Nauman in the doorway of his San Francisco studio in 1966 (photograph by Jack Fulton)

    Is Bruce Nauman psychedelic? Though his early work is generally considered formally and conceptually apolitical, one wonders how much the culture in San Francisco in the mid-1960s—from the Free Speech Movement to the Summer of Love—influenced his mindset at the time. After Nauman graduated from the University of California, Davis, in 1966, he established a studio in a storefront in the Mission District, where he spent several years realizing a now-seminal body of work that drew from the city’s tradition of Funk art as well as Minimalism from New York and Finish Fetish from Los Angeles. Though the artist has only admitted to drinking a lot of coffee in the studio, might have he sweetened his beverage with special sugar cubes?

    “Nauman had a lot of time on his hands,” wrote Constance M. Lewallen in a recent exhibition catalogue, “and very little money.”1 Though the artist taught one class at the San Francisco Art Institute, he didn’t fraternize much with his fellow professors and spent many hours in the studio. In his Mission District space Nauman underwent intense self-examination and self-exploration, as the story goes, and made a monumental shift from making objects to foregrounding process. He contrasted the ephemeral nature of physical senses by casting his body parts—arm, ear, mouth, armpit, knees, hands, back, shoulder, and feet—in solid materials. He also explored language, especially the profound nature of jokes and puns, and documented loosely choreographed, seemingly absurd performances on camera.

    Bruce Nauman, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, 1967, neon, 59 x 55 x 2 in. (artwork © Bruce Nauman)

    Let’s look at a few of these works. One film depicted Nauman, dressed in a light t-shirt and dark jeans, Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1967–68); for another, Art Make-Up (1967–68), he filmed himself covering his face and torso with white, pink, green, and black paint. Nauman also hung a neon sign in his studio’s front window—the well-known The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (1967)—whose words must have both baffled and delighted passersby, which would have included stoned hippies. Another neon sculpture, My Name as Though It Were Written on the Surface of the Moon (1968), spelled out “bbbbbbrrrrrruuuuuucccccceeeeee” in lowercase cursive script, referencing the lower gravity on the Moon’s surface but also the slower sense of time that a drug user purportedly experiences.

    Traditional scholarship on Nauman’s work at this time focuses on his interest in the playwright Samuel Beckett and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as to contemporaneous avant-garde dance groups (Anna Halprin) and underground film (Kenneth Anger) then flourishing in San Francisco. But what about psychedelia? After all, Nauman’s studio was located only three miles from Haight-Ashbury—the heart of American counterculture—and his work at the time was pretty far out, man.

    The art critic Ken Johnson offers a theory of psychedelic art in his book Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art (New York: Prestel, 2011), which considers work that was previously understood as embracing psychedelic characteristics (Fred Tomaselli, Robert Crumb) to those that didn’t (Sol LeWitt and Adrian Piper, Kay Rosen and Kara Walker). It’s fair to ask how the boxes of Donald Judd might look to a stoned viewer? How might the implausible or impossible works of Conceptual art correspond to the root of the word psychedelic, “mind manifesting”? Johnson makes a compelling argument for seeing twentieth- and twenty-first-century art in a new way.

    Rethinking the influence and potential of psychedelics is happening across culture, into business and science. The artist Emily Segal, the host for tonight’s event and a cofounder of a trend-forecasting company named after a drug experience, asked: “Is K-HOLE art influenced by psychedelia in a different way?” While recently browsing the shelves of a bookstore, Segal came across a Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). The book, written by the handsome and youthful-looking Nicolas Langlitz, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the New School, attempts to reconcile mysticism with materialism through a historical, anthropological, and philosophical analysis of his subject. Segal invited Langlitz to give a presentation at the Swiss Institute, in conjunction with its summer exhibition, The St. Petersburg Paradox.

    Nicolas Langlitz and Emily Segal (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    During his talk Langlitz surveyed the history of psychedelic research in Switzerland and the United States and explored how mainstream society and the counterculture have found common ground, especially over the last twenty-five years, since President George H. W. Bush declared the 1990s to be the “Decade of the Brain,” which initiated a federal campaign to raise awareness for neurological research. The history goes back further, though, to the mid-twentieth century. Langlitz reminded us that pharmocological breakthroughs such as antidepressants and antipsychotics were discovered, refined, and produced in the same era as LSD. From Albert Hoffman to Timothy Leary to Richard Nixon, Langlitz traced the decline of scientific research up to the 1970s. (Nixon established the Drug Enforcement Agency [DEA] in 1973.) After that time the occasional rogue scientist operated on the fringes, such as the Californian scientist Alexander Shulgin, who created about two hundred varieties of psychedelic substances and tested them on himself with a government-approved license that was revoked in 1994 after self-publishing what were essentially drug cookbooks. Since then knowledge about psychedelic use has permeated the internet, notably through anecdotes on the website Erowid.

    Today there are two groups advocating psychedelic research. The first is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a group based in Santa Cruz, California, that frames its work to mollify—I mean, appeal to—the establishment by addressing such conditions as posttraumatic stress disorder and end-of-life anxiety for the terminally ill. “Nancy Reagan,” Langlitz joked, “would not say no to a drug that would alleviate anxiety.” The second group is the Heffter Research Institute, an institution based in Zurich, Switzerland, that Langlitz said has a “less activist brouhaha.” Advocates for psychedelic research have come from unusual places, such as the “Silicon Valley gods.” Bob Wallace of Microsoft funded Swiss research in the 1990s, and John Gilmore of Sun Microsystems and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been a longtime activist. Based on his positive recollections of psychedelic experimentation, Steve Jobs was approached for money—directly from Hoffman, it turns out—but the Apple cofounder declined to get involved.

    Nicolas Langlitz, Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain (2012)

    Switzerland has a liberal drug policy that dates to the 1910s, Langlitz stated, perhaps not unrelated to a large chemical and pharmaceutical industry in the famously neutral country. The 1990s saw a loosening of state policy: government-run clinics began supplying heroin to addicts, and scientists were permitted to run a mobile drug-testing lab in a popular Zurich techno club. When people come to find out what their still-illegal purchases are made of, they talk to social workers and take surveys, generating data that helps researchers to determine patterns of drug use and dosage, to monitor black-market products, and to educate club goers about current substances. Scientists also recruit, via the mobile unit, human test subjects for laboratory experiments.

    The lively Q&A session with the audience revolved around three issues: differences and contradictions between physical and spiritual experiences; the authenticity of mystical experiences, hallucinogenic or otherwise; and the aesthetics of psychedelic art. Indignant with the term “spiritual,” one audience member asked Langlitz to produce an objective term. The psychedelic “experience is material through and through,” he responded, calling attention to the chemical nature of all brain activity. Like many, though, Langlitz is curious about what does the subjective experience opens, especially regarding the shared qualities of oneness, loss of ego, and being neither subject nor object that drugs offer. Aldous Huxley believed that all religions are built around “unitative technologies,” Langlitz said, which were achieved through practices such as fasting, meditation, chanting, and flagellation (ouch!).

    Theologians may claim that hallucinogenic drugs provide an inauthentic, valueless experience, Langlitz continued, and prefer prayer and meditation. But Huxley had trouble obtaining elevating experiences the old-fashioned way, he continued. We shouldn’t limit the influence of chemicals on behavior to psychedelics. What does an authentic experience mean, Langlitz wanted to know, for a person taking Prozac? Is he or she experiencing real or false happiness? Similarly, he mentioned that anthropological research on psychedelics—especially in the 1970s—has focused too much on the shamanistic (and presumably authentic) use, in contrast to studies of how everyday people might find transcendence.

    Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent, 1999, Chromogenic color print, 81½ x 132 in. (artwork © Andreas Gursky)

    And what about psychedelic aesthetics, which Langlitz characterized as “the ugly and off-putting art of the 1960s.” You know the type—the wavy lines and bright colors found on posters for acid-rock concerts and in the earnest paintings of Alex Grey. Langlitz acknowledged that modernist abstraction was generally objective and cold, with Pop, ornamental Islamic forms, and East Asian traditions offering alternative formal models. He accepted the physiological aspect of psychedelic tropes—the cobwebs and other patterns—but pleaded, “What exactly does it have to do with psychedelics, anyway?”

    Langlitz finds that large-scale photographs by the German artist Andreas Gursky better represent the psychedelic experience, especially with the simultaneous macro- and microscopic perspectives in his busy images of hotels, stock exchanges, sporting events, raves, and commercial retail stores. As an art student, Gursky was influenced not only by his famous teachers—the straight photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher—but also by his LSD experiences. Today Gursky is too famous or too concerned with his professional image, Langlitz conjectured, to talk openly about psychedelics, like he did early in his career.

    Alex Grey, St. Albert and the LSD Revelation Revolution, 2006, oil on wood panel, 24 x 36 in. (artwork © Alex Grey)

    The art world has embraced the drug-inflected work of painters like Fred Tomaselli, as Ken Johnson has noted, but typically shuns the earnest spiritualism in the work of Alex Grey and others. Yet perceived shame of associating artistic output with drugs wasn’t adopted by everyone in the Swiss Institute audience. At one point a man stood up to describe his incredible personal experience on DMT at great length—cool story, bro—and an aging white-bearded hippie type proselytized the transcendent experiences that art environments by James Turrell and Robert Irwin offer, labeling the swirly stuff as kitsch. “So Alex Grey is the Norman Rockwell of psychedelics?” someone else asked, to much laughter. “Anything can be psychedelic if you take enough drugs,” joked Langlitz. “Everything reminds you of drugs.”

    In Terms Of count: 1 (an audience member broke the seal toward the end of the Q&A).

    1 Constance M. Lewallen, “A Rose Has No Teeth,” A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 45.