Ecstasy In and About Los Angeles
Kim Bockus
I am the wheel
I am the yearning
And I will lay my love around you
Brian Eno and John Cale, Lay My Love, 1990
It’s Christmas in Los Angeles and artificial snow spews hourly from plume stacks above the crowd at The Grove, causing upward glances by shoppers wrapped in logo-stitched clothing and weighed down by logo-emblazoned bags. At the corner of Fairfax Avenue and Third Street, mall imagineers have morphed a significant wedge of the landmark Farmer’s Market into a miniature village square reminiscent of Disneyland’s Main Street, with old-fashioned street lamps, full-scale trolley car and a grassy park and pond framed by cobbled walkways. The square’s turn-of-the-century gentility lends gravitas to the unfettered merchandising going on inside the surrounding high-end stores. Soapy-smelling snowflakes fall through the air and linger realistically on the coats of parents and children waiting to see Santa. Inside his Tim Burton-inspired hut Santa looks like the real thing, a kindly, bespectacled folk hero cum slightly apologetic front man to the advertising-driven buying spree that bonds the culture each year in an orgiastic outburst of materialism. The crowds seem transparently buoyed by the eddies of emotional surrogacy so deftly identified and harnessed by French marketing guru Clotaire Rapaille. Chairman of Archetype Discoveries Worldwide, Rapaille helps Fortune 500 companies discover unconscious word-associations for their products. His particular form of marketing magic is based on "cracking the code," or uncovering a specific emotional connection between consumer and product based on early childhood imprinting. This new, improved brand of subliminal selling is designed to bypass the conscious mind of the consumer, making it that much more effective than its predecessors. The inevitability that consumers will, at some point in their purchasing lives, fall under the spell of Rapaille’s persuasion, is a pill that most will simply have to swallow. But some (lost souls) argue that each little ecstasy of acquisition, le petit mort, ameliorates the bitterness of both the pill and the credit card debt that accompanies it.
Thirty minutes across town is Ecstasy: In and About Altered States at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, curated by Paul Schimmel with Gloria Sutton (October 9, 2005 – February 20, 2006). There are no snow flurries here, but the installations of wrap-around, constructed realities ripe with the promise of participatory revelry resonate on a similarly seductive level. The brochure sets out the exhibition’s premise, to present two "distinct but overlapping lines of inquiry. One follows the established tradition of attempting to capture metaphysical states in representational form, while the other seeks to simulate or induce these experiences in the viewer." The show conjures a distinct feeling of 1960’s stylings, commingling opposites in a mix reminiscent of the decade that embraced the sensual and transcendental, personal and political, precocious and prescient. A progression of cloistered rooms and hallways creates a feeling of temporary intimacies, shifting alliances between fellow strangers in a strange land. Several installations deliver immersive experiences that work especially well; Erwin Redl’s MATRIX II, a 40 by 50-foot roomful of LED lights suspended in a three-dimensional grid evocative of a starlit microcosm, Pierre Huyghe’s L’Expédition scintillante, Acte 2 (Light box), a geometric clam-shell emitting multi-hued fog to strains of Erik Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies and Olafur Eliasson’s Your strange certainty still kept, a strobe-lit curtain of falling water that dances between movement and stillness. Less enveloping and more sensory overload, Ann Veronica Janssens’ Donut bombards the viewer with rapidly pulsating lights, short-circuiting neural pathways in a wash of afterimages and perceptual disorientation. Massimo Bartolini’s Head n 8 (museum) is a cove-like white room that echoes mandala design by incorporating a single painting as its focal point. The underlying connective tissue of these works is an exploration of the role of brainwaves in ecstatic pursuit. Traditionally induced by concentration techniques–meditation, fasting, chanting and tantric sex–alpha waves quell the thinking mind and release an experience of present time, a key component of ecstatic experience according to Zen and other time-honored schools of enlightenment. Extreme physical pain through ritual mortification was also used to focus/release the mind in initiation ceremonies and as part of the Sundance vision quest among the North American plains tribes.
In the second category of works, those expressing metaphysical states in representational form, Ecstasy is laced with allusions to the chemical tools humans have used from the early hours of hunting and gathering (if Terrence McKenna’s hypotheses are valid) to dismember reality and loosen the anchors of self. For it is here that ecstasy is born, in the dissolution of ego/self-hood that predicates an experience of universality and ecstatic union. Loss of self is also central to the related 1960’s concept of love, understood by those (from sannyasins to rave-goers) intimate with the experiences of "oneness" as a state of mind wherein the concerns of the multitude become one with those of the individual. Love as an aspect of empathic universality was gradually debased by its equation with the sexual freedoms of the age as it assimilated into wider populations well removed from the urge to enlightenment. In any case hallucinogenic mushrooms, the surviving love-children of 60s pharmacology, are the stuff installation dreams are made of. A number of artists flirt with these allies of the nagual in quirky cross-referencing environments; Carsten Höller’s Upside-Down Mushroom Room is filled with giant-sized rotating mushrooms suspended from the ceiling, while Roxy Paine’s Psilocybe Cubensis Field simulates a mushroom colony on the gallery floor several rooms away. Both engage questions of nature as parent to artifact while evoking Alice’s unsettling shrinking and growing episodes in Wonderland. More mushroom shapes appear in Takashi Murakami’s anime- and manga-influenced Super Nova. Cutely animated on large shoji screen-like panels, they point the way towards Murakami’s metaphor of nuclear apocalypse in the shape of a giant toadstool.
Around the next corner are Tom Friedman’s multitudinous and mind-boggling Play-Doh replicas of pharmaceuticals. Based on models from the Physician’s Desk Reference manual, these uncannily realistic pills are strewn over a patch of floor in galaxy-like clusters suggesting a connection between the artist and the creator. Another Friedman piece, Untitled, is a minimalistic replica of the Twin Towers being hit by tiny airplanes. The sculpture strikes an anomalistic chord in this den of sensuality and self-exploration but finds footing in its allusion to the psychotic tendencies of religious fervor and the sometimes convoluted pathways of human belief. Elsewhere in the exhibition the curtain of simulation is lifted and actual substances/ecstasy-delivery systems take center stage. Klaus Weber’s water fountain is laced with ultra-dilute homeopathic amounts of LSD, handfuls of unidentified pills embedded in resin make pretty patterns in Fred Tomaselli’s mosaic-like images and Francis Alys’ Narcoturisimo texts document his seven-day, seven-substance peripatetic wanderings in Mexico City, clinically listing each day’s drug and its effects. At the other end of the spectrum and emblematic of a range of works touching on para- and ab-normal psychic states is a projected piece by Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Talo/The House, playing out on three large-scale screens coordinated in overlapping rhythms to convey the permeability of time and space. Working from interviews with women who have suffered from mental disorders, Ahtila’s narrative plumbs the borders of sensory perception, tracing a young woman’s slow descent into a world of disembodied voices and disjointed reality. This piece joins with Rodney Graham’s Halcion Sleep and Matt Mullican’s Untitled (Matt Mullican Under Hypnosis: Geneva) to widen the dialog of the exhibition by asserting that schizophrenia’s revelatory highs and the twilight states of sleep and hypnotic trance are all part of the extended family of altered states, neighbors in the long hallway of Huxley-esque doors opening onto experiential realities. Seemingly absent from the show, however, is any reference to John Lilly’s intriguing work on sensory deprivation as a route to numinous hallucination.
A few miles north of the Geffen on a 32-acre swath of unoccupied wasteland adjacent to downtown’s Main Street lies the Not A Cornfield installation by artist Lauren Bon. Fifteen hundred truckloads of earth were brought in to prepare the site for the planting of a million seeds in the historic heart of Los Angeles. Funded by the Annenberg Foundation, the field was planted by volunteers and has seen a full growing season, an annual cycle broken down into "gold, blue and clear" phases. This is harvest time and the native seed has yielded an abundance of fractal-patterned ears of "Indian" corn that visitors can pick and carry home or hang to dry at the site. Walking the field’s inner eye, a spiral path with eight-foot high corn plants rustling overhead, thoughts are subdued and people talk in whispers. Cul-de-sacs along the path are used for events and screenings of films related to the site and urban land use issues. A datura vine with a luminous five-pointed blossom grows along the ground among the stalks; its psychotropic seeds were ritually ingested by Native Americans in a social matrix which supported the honing of supra-conscious navigational skills. The blossom’s appearance on a day of ecstatic musings is a nod from the gods of synchronicity. But datura seeds are dangerously high in alkaloids and can be fatal–that risks of this kind were taken at all is a sign of the compelling human need for ecstatic experience. In the center of the corn spiral is a raised mound with sunken fire pit and blanket-lined earthwork benches, seating for a conglomeration of musicians and drummers playing their instruments. Wafts of earth and chlorophyll freshen the senses while a Tiepolo sunset silhouettes the downtown skyline. The world feels united in a moment of serenity light-years away from malls and museums. The future of the Not a Cornfield site is in the hands of the California Department of Parks and Recreation, who are designing a permanent historical park for the space. For now it is a place of tempered intoxication that allows one to entertain thoughts of ecstatic experience, in itself a kind of paradise. Laurie Anderson said it right: "Paradise is exactly like where you are right now, only much, much better."
