Mind-altering spaces

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.

Walking the void

How it is © Miroslaw Balka photo © Getty images


Miroslaw Balka's gigantic box is set-up at the end of the Tate hall. At first, the mind questions the need to reach the ramp that leads to darkness, the positioning of Balka's object creating a spatial threshold. The steel container mimicks the Tate's building so it feels like stepping inside its inside replica, inside a non-space.
The engulfment in darkness announces an experience of the limitless, a fall into the Abyss : once there, we can barely touch ground as if floating in space. Like quantum physicists  observing black holes, spending days studying micro particles of nothingness to the point that their eyes see the void everywhere, our feet believe there is nothing under them, our hands scrutinize the rest of the dark ahead.
Losing track of physical boundaries, we rely on other viewers' fantomatic silhouettes to see further. And this is where the Total experience makes sense, in the humanity the darkness reveals - relying on others as boundary.


photo © Peter Macdiarmid © Getty Images

When we reach the softness of the last wall and realise the cavity has an end, we also feel the need to turn back and escape. The visual metaphor created by the ray of light at the exit mirrors the false reassurance we can now leave the container (the entrance never being an exit).
Beyond phenomenology or metaphysics, the container confronts our own consciousness, humanity's shared darkness, one's responsibility and place in the world as it is revealed at the moment of death maybe.
Balka refers here to Beckett's Pimp as the other encountered in the void : for the economy of mean, the bare simplicity in face of the absurd.
If How it is depicts a Total space, a purgatory, a place of suffering and purification, it is also concerned with a timeless spatiality in relation to the human body and soul. 
When interviewed, Balka stresses how 'insignificant' things - the simple act of sweeping a floor with an ancient broom, the bells that always ring as if to say "this is a special moment in time" or the traces left by his grandmother's praying body on his studio's floor - often carry deep symbolic meaning. 
What is reinforced here is that his work is always concerned with the beauty and fragility of human presence.


Balka's work is charged with the memory of the Jewish ghetto of Otwock, his hometown.

The Drawing room

Drawing 100 © Vong Phaophanit

Drawing can be related to performing when it records a process of external transformation, of self power, of cathartis. In the context of a residency, such as the Centre for Drawing, drawing for the purpose of drawing doesn't respond to a practical demand (like when drawing to keep record or inform) which makes it difficult to know how to start, even more difficult to know how to stop.
Artist Vong Phaophanit stretches the nature of drawing by qualifying it as " the most basic of acts (...) without a specific function ". He compares his position in the isolation of the Drawing room in front of the blank paper, to the one of being like a sponge absorbing external sounds breaking through the walls (sounds of the outside world, coming from the sculpture workshop area behind his room and from a nearby primary school). When looking at his drawings in that perspective it's very affirming of what they encompass, it makes it clearer to the eye that they recall sound vibrations and are " results of an experience of the unconscious (...), moments of vacillation between consciousness and unconsciousness. "