Alice in Wonderland © Jonathan Miller © BBC
Everything is so queer today ...
if I am not the same then the next question is who in the world am I ?
Ho ! That's the big puzzle : who am I ?
says Alice, while sipping at the "drink me" bottle.
Tobacco, tea, coffee, opium, peyote, kava or betel seeds : the cultural differences between what is legal and what is not (cannabis grown in England is illegal but prescribed as medecine in California), and the thin line between drug and medicine somehow allow mind-altering substances to permeate cultural habits and re-define moral ethics.
Governments not only play a part in the drug trade, from the history of opium transport between China and England to the funding of the recent conflict between Afghanistan and the West, the drug trade also shapes the world by building empires (like the british one).
Laudanum #5 © Tracy Moffatt © L. A. Galerie - Lothar Albrecht
Before the 1920's Drugs Act, poppy was legally grown for its medicinal properties, provoking the mingling of drugs' discovery with medical research and the spreading of risky substances in laboratories and pharmacies : children coughing syrup containing opium was sold in pharmacies, along with eye drops and dental kits containing cocaine; Sydenham's Laudanum, a tincture made from morphine and codeine, became popular as pain relief in the 17th and 18th centuries, bringing the hallucinogen experience to victorian homes.
Mescaline drawings © Henri Michaux
Artists self-experimenting with psychedelic drugs and hallucinogens hunt art and literature. Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium eater in 1821 relates an accidental addiction to Laudanum while curing pain. Beaudelaire's Les paradis artificiels or Lewis Carroll's stories under mushroom influence inform what Aldous Huxley calls a new art of seeing the world; an altered spatial experience made visible by Henri Michaux automatic/ seismographic mescaline drawings.
Phonokinetoscope © Rodney Graham © MUDAM
By staging Albert Hofmann cycling through the Tiergarten in Berlin on the day he discovers LSD, Phonokinetoscope re-creates the first trip under chemical hallucinogen, a mixture of vivid colours, distorted sounds and recurring thoughts where senses melt into one another.
Shulgin's Laboratory © Michael Rainer
And then there is Sasha Shulgin, the grandfather of exctasy who spends the 70's and 80's setting up a laboratory in his californian home.
Thanks to a license on the behalf of the Drug Enforcement Administration that gives him the right to possess and synthesise the chemical of MDMA, Shulgin invents and experiments with more than 150 drug compounds.
Research conducted on psychedelic drugs in the sixties is linked to the treatment of depression and post traumatic stress disorder, an aspect of MDMA still invested today by underground therapists like Shulgin.
After trying mescaline, psylocibin and exctasy, Shulgin saw drugs as tools for the mind; a critical thing in his view since our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit.
Ulysses way © Damián Ortega © Barbican Centre/ Photograph © Eliot Wyman
Damián Ortega has created a series of installations for the Curve Gallery at the Barbican centre that answers daily titles over one month of a newspaper's events. He has picked The Independent as paper of choice because, he says, it is the most familiar in terms of ideological position and it reminds him La Jordana, the newspaper where he worked as political cartoonist in Mexico.
Ortega gave himself the task to produce one piece a day, working from nearly nothing, using underrated materials such as concrete, fire bricks, rocks, wooden planks, found, discarded, everyday objects to capture aspects of the news, de-construct and re-contextualise.
The big melt - cities at risk, The Independent, 31st of August 2010
In september, the highlight is on the Chilean miners, the BP oil spill and the flood in Pakistan. The work emphasizes economical and cultural injustice while stressing on climate change and capitalism affecting the welfare of vulnerable communities : a bicycle carries the possessions of a flood survivor in Pakistan; a precarious aggregate of wooden planks and empty water containers resembles an obstacle course, depicting the state of a submerged Pakistan two weeks later, drawing an uncertain future for the fleeing survivors now facing malaria. The installations' visual impact informs the viewers in a way that the fleeting news can't, despite the disposable manner we consume news, the work impacts on the viewers' memory.
No link - 2010 © Damián Ortega © Barbican Centre/ Photograph © Eliot Wyman
The iconic image of the bicycle counterbalances the highlight of another day's title, when Ryanair's boss denials global warming, an assumption questioned by Ortega's plane made of cigarettes. Ortega needs to work fast and that immediacy and experimental spontaneity responds well to the essence of the news.
Immigrant song © Damián Ortega © Barbican Centre/ Photograph © Eliot Wyman
He also find the opportunity to exemplify the global cultural gap of the North-South divide, or as one journalist from The Independent puts it why across the world the poor are kept poor so the rich can be kept rich. At the beginning of the show, a zigzagging brick wall mimicking a graph of statistics that depicts the number of illegal immigrants living in America, acts as a reminder of the mexican borders daily crossed by individuals hoping for a better life.
© Barbican Centre / Photograph © Eliot Wyman
On the other side of the wall, thrown-and-broken eggs shells transcend an incapacity to confront the capitalist machine and recall the fragility of human life in the streets of Mexico.
That image echoes another photograph of dead students caught between local dealers and the drugs war police, from an article that condemns a western need for drug consumption that encourages a war on foreign ground but not on home ground.
Greed and Graft © Damián Ortega © Barbican Centre/ Photograph © Eliot Wyman
At the beginning of the exhibition, the shell of a cemented barrel in which a candle burns slowly is connected to its top by an electric wire, symbolising the suffocating entrapment of the Chilean in a copper and gold mine. The hole with no alternative exit summarizes pretty simply the underlying thread of the show - capitalism versus poverty, greedy profit versus human safety.
Ortega is very much aware of his comfortable position as an artist addressing political issues. Like artists Allora & Calzadilla, while avoiding to be confined within the limits of political art, his work is rooted in political activism.
