LETTER FROM ZURICH
Nina Zivancevic
Sometimes tracing
the individual artist’s work can be an interesting Enterprise – as I spoke
to several Swiss artists who are supposed to have a show at Lubelski’s New
York gallery in May, they advised me to see their specific work at Zurich’s
Gallery Incontro and the show which has just opened there in the end of April.
The show is housing some 60 international artists who gathered their work around
the Provocative theme: 60 YEARS OF LSD and ALBERT HOFMANN: PSYCHONAUTISCH LANDCARTE
2.
The conceptual set up was provided by the Swiss artist Radovan Hirsl and executed
by Claude Steiner who assembled diverse and numerous pieces of art (sculpture,
painting, graphics, photography, multimedia) in order to illustrate “the
altered states” of mind conditioned by an experience with the psychedelics.
The show has diverse and interesting thematic sub-divisions (laughing stage of
the psychedelic experience, emotional outpurge of an LSD trip. . . vivid visions
of crystal-like changes of the refracturing of light during the psychedelic experience
etc.) There is much more to the show than a psychedelic experience would offer
to many people – the artist’s reality often tends to be visionary and psychedelic
even when he is not on any specific drugs – in other words, one man’s reality
is other man’s visionary world, so we cannot be exactly sure which artists
in the show executed their artwork under the influence of the LSD and who did
not.
The painting and
graphics work by the US artists Alex Gray, Robert Venosa and Martina Hoffmann
tend to take a mystical approach through the experiments with the lights’
texture as they often address the spiritual part of a psychedelic experience
as such. Lilian Hirsl and Nadia Honarchian from Switzerland move through the
lyric and abstract expression of a painting or a photograph get us “to the
other side of the cosmic experience”. Mischa Good, Kirila Faeh, Joachim
Wittke and much respected Gerhard Seyfried take the comic side of ‘the experience’
and create cartoon-like imagery of the world that often does not belong to comedy.
After all, an ‘acid trip ‘could be a fun experience but it is never
a light one: the distorted world of psychedelics brings us to the core of the
psychoanalyses where we encounter ‘the other side of the mirror’ and,
grace to Lacuna, our true and distorted self. The self at its meanest and its
best could be observed in the distorted representations of Radovan Hirsl and
in baked clay sculptures of Hannes
Bossert, in Art
Brut of Henry Meyer; the biologic and molecular self could be observed in the
work of Claude Steiner, Bruno R. Reutimann and Ivano Zanre. The iconology has
found all possible symbols in Walter Wegmuller’s, Radovan Hirsl’s and
H.R.Geiger’s work. The ambiance of a certain psychological state is visible
on the photo of Miladin Jelicic (Yugoslavia) and makes us think: are there people
who always see this everyday world as a part of a psychedelic experience even
when the artist
Was ‘straight’ while creating it? The political and religious self
sprinkled with history is to be found in the art of Milan Mrksic, in sculptures
of Sami Ernst and Pape Macoumba Seck’s work. More contrived but also more
minimalistic is Tartratart Ha San’s site installation where white powder
from the rocks encircles the globe made of wire with different labels from history
glued onto it. Let us believe in global history, was one of the messages of Hofmann’s
