Parallel Worlds
Jovana Stokic
A curatorial statement for "Ecstasy: In and About Altered States" states simply that the exhibition explores "altered states and alternative modes of perception featuring painting, sculpture, video, film, installation, photography and new media by some of today’s leading artists as well as the most promising work by the up-and-coming generation." By presenting recent as well as specially commissioned works that "challenge notions of interactivity, while generating a heightened aural and visual experience for the individual," the show’s curators, Paul Schimmel and Gloria Sutton, reveal quite an ambitious agenda. The curators explain historically the existence of images of ecstatic states by tracing them back to ancient Roman times, with depictions of bacchanalia, to baroque scenes of ecstatic visions to contemporary psychedelic imagery, influenced by popular culture.
The show’s opening remarks trace inquiries into the nature of an artistic creation as an attempt to "capture metaphysical states in representational form." At the same time, arts other raison d’etre is to induce altered states in the viewer. What is actually on view are 30 works that offer different insights into the phenomenon of ecstasy.
In this show, which is held in Los Angeles, the present capital of the culture of the spectacle, are at stake; in the words of Keith Sanborn, "the possibilities for ecstasy in the endgame of late capitalism." At Geffen Contemporary, there are at least two distinct approaches to the altered states, those which describe in visual terms ecstatic phenomena, and those whose aim is to compete with ecstatic experience and bring the viewers to a higher sphere of existence.
Art that describes altered states most often deals with contemporary drug culture. Along with rather obvious provocations of Klaus Weber’s Public Fountain LSD Hall and Roxy Paine’s Psilocybe Cubensis Field, Francys Alys’s Narcoturismo represents a real subversive act. The artist took drugs and then he wrote a report, in an almost clinical fashion, about the particular effects that each drug induced. The fact that the artist simply listed all the different drugs he took in course of one week in May 1996, gained its transgressive quality when his work became institutionalized, when became invited by a museum to exhibit his report.
Assume vivid astro focus’s project created an installation that evokes an underground club, in which licentious behaviors defy today’s conservative atmosphere forced upon NYC nightlife by Giuliani-Bloomberg’s restrictive laws. It celebrates dancing, a historically important unifier of gay communities and a right that is being stripped away in New York as the city cracks down on nightspots that do not have official cabaret licenses. The very act of creating a club within a museum could be read as an act of resistance, it creates a kind of altered state in alternative space.
The show’s critical edge is far from the committed utopianist activism of, for example, Andrea Zittel. For Zittel, the desert offered "enough thinking space to re-imagine all sorts of parallel new art worlds." Closest to the idea of an altered state as a sort of parallel world is the magnificent installation by Pierre Huyghe, L’Expédition Scintillante, Act II: Untitled (light show), that addresses alternative modes of representation and communication. For Huyghe, this parallel world is a "kind of counter-place that is outside other places but that also includes them." At the same time, this work provides an intense synesthetic experience, a phenomenon of the mixing of the senses. As in synesthesia, the perception of one stimulus evokes a second perception. Here, Claude Debussy’s impressionist musical palette is filtered through the space as pulsing lights and smoke emanate from the stage-like sculpture. The change of lights follows the synaesthetic logic, but allows every viewer to form an individual experience of the phenomenon.
Fascinating in the way they change one’s perspective by insisting on an individual experiences, are Sylvie Fleury’s 8 which opens the possibility of contemplation within a luxurious environment, as well as Janet Cardiff’s and George Bures Miller’s famous Muriel Lake Incident.
Young Japanese artist Chiho Aoshima shows that technology is not an antithesis to universal spirituality. Rather, it is a way for contemporary man to confront himself with paradise lost and to try to restore harmony with nature. Interpreted in this key, Chiho Aoshima’s spectacularly well made animated work City Glow is a quest for a new hybrid paradise, which offers a possibility of higher sphere of existence. Combining anime characters and skyscrapers, Aoshima follows the ancient Shintoist teachings about unity in nature. Thus, the "real" and altered states are ultimately one.
For the female protagonist of Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s video installation, Talo or The House, reality is dissipating in front of her eyes, not allowing her or the audience to find a coherent world. Pipilotti Rist’s video installation, Related Legs or Yokohama Dandelions, comprises of a two-channel video beamed by two LCD projectors through lace curtains and children’s chairs on the floor.
Nothing is stable in Rist’s representation, the most complex relationship between image and material reality is proposed here. The lace curtains both register the projection and let it pass through, multiplying the number of images. In the video itself, Rist’s own image is presented as pressed onto a window, appropriating an image of her previous work Open My Glade. This video showed her distorted face on a huge screen on Times Square in New York. Pressed against a windowpane, her face suggested an oversaturated viewer of a media spectacle. Here, her face is transposed onto a nondescript windowpane of an apartment building. As the catalogue entry notes, "for a medium designed for perfect reproduction, Rist’s work manages to remain fundamentally variable."
It would be interesting to compare two ways of approaching exuberance and ecstasy in two big recent shows of contemporary art. "Dionysiac: Art in Flux," (Feb. 16-May 9, 2005), at the Centre Pompidou in Paris featured 14 contemporary artists, focusing on the rapport of art with pleasure, desire and excess. The title alluded to the Greek god of wine and ecstasy, also known as Bacchus, and to dionysiaque, a term coined by the German philosopher Neitzsche to describe æsthetic exuberance. None of the Pompidou artists were presented in Los Angeles.
