Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness
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present their individual views of Rapo- extensively throughout the Bay Area I have always admired the formal port’s work, I found little repetition. and internationally. Not only is she aspects of Rapoport’s work and her Instead, we get a real feeling for her one of the early innovators who helped drawings on computer printouts in par- diverse and systemic approach to art- establish the San Francisco Bay Area as ticular. Given that these are often long making, her symbolic inclinations, how an international locus for hybrid prac- and large, I would have liked a larger she has brought interactive elements tices; her work has extended far beyond book format. That said, the reproduc- into her works and the humor in her her base. She has been included in tions were nicely done, well placed and art. One element that stood out is her major art and technology exhibitions conveyed the size and details more talent in bringing topical concerns including Ars Electronica (Linz, Aus- effectively than is often the case in (gender, religion, politics, and the tria), and the 2009 Venice Biennale’s trade paperbacks. The integration of role of technology in contemporary Internet Pavilion. the images and text was also effective. life) into her practice. Terri Cohn’s Perhaps the “takeaway” of the book is For example, an essay by Rapoport’s introduction effectively places the art- the degree to which many of Rapoport’s daughter Hava conveys the integrative ist conceptually and in terms of history interactive installations and computer- quality of her art and how her artwork through outlining Rapoport’s artistic based works were ahead of their time. and life worked in tandem. A photo of genesis and shows how her original Not only was she talking about webs Hava and her husband, Elias Fereres ideas were also positioned within the before the World Wide Web was cre- Castiel, which is one of the artifacts in larger framework of contemporary art ated, she was also thinking systemically Objects on My Dresser, 1979–1984, rein- and other systemic artists (e.g. Hans and intent on including interactivity in forces this point. Haacke). Cohn writes: her work when static art was the norm. This ability to integrate while For example, today’s World Wide Web retaining her own voice is evident It is essential to recognize that Rapo- recalls NETWEB, which Rapoport cre- throughout her career. Indeed, many port’s shift from creating autonomous ated at 80 Langton Street in San Fran- of the writers mentioned the influence objects to interactive installation work in real time and space was a consequence cisco in 1980. As she explained (to Judy of her husband’s work as she began to of her immersion in the zeitgeist of the Malloy): pioneer her approach to the art|science 1970s. Her continued exploration of the interface. He was a professor of chem- world of digital media . underscores It was a geometric configuration of a istry at the University of California in Rapoport’s belief that themes, objects, spider web about 14 feet in diameter, Berkeley. Reading his scientific jour- and events is a continuum of intellec- reflected onto the floor from a slide tual and artistic exploration, one which projector attached to the ceiling. Six bi- nals in the mid-1960s inspired her as has led her from Abstract Expressionist secting axes, the tick marks on each axis she began to blaze her own path. Even- painting to interactive webworks. Her and the linear connections from tick tually she was appropriating computer unique attraction to pairing polarities is to tick were projected on a star-shaped printouts from his laboratory, bringing central to her remarkable, decades-long area of white contact paper. The im- the periodic table of elements into her artistic exploration and achievement age cards, now reminding me of today’s (p. 14). provocative home pages, were placed in work and expanding into projects that their positions on numbered ticks along intersect with science more generally. My favorite essay was “A Throw of the their selected theme axes: EYE, HAND, With the artist now in her 80s, it is Dice: Between Structure and Indeter- CHEST, MASKING, THREADING, and exciting to see Rapoport’s contributions MOVING. Everything was intercon- minacy,” by Richard Cándida Smith. He nected by lines crossing the axes and receiving so much recognition. It will met Rapoport while helping to organize joining similar tick positions on other interest all who follow contemporary an oral history project with alumni of themes (p. 43). art and, in particular, those with an the Department of Art at the University interest in the art/science/technology of California, Berkeley. Because of the interface. nature of his project, his interview con- cerned her master’s program and what she learned from her teachers. One of are you experienced? how her professors was Erle Loran, a painter psychedeLic consciousness and the author of Cézanne’s Composition: TransFormed modern arT Analysis of His Form and Diagrams and by Ken Johnson. Prestel, Munich, Photographs of his Motifs (1943). Since London, and New York, 2011. 232 pp., this is one of my favorite expositions, illus. ISBN: 978-3-7913-4498-0. I was interested to learn of the value she placed on the training even as she moved into building her own style and Reviewed by Nicolas Langlitz, The New approach to artmaking. Even more fas- School for Social Research. E-mail: cinating were the ways she incorporated <[email protected]>. several of Loran’s diagrams into her own work and narrative. When I was administered psilocybin in Pairing of Polarities documents a range a neuroscientific experiment in 2005, of Rapoport’s contributions. Her early I felt annoyed by the colorful geomet- drawings and collages often used the ric patterns and spinning fractals that printouts of early computer databases came to surround me as the drug began as a backdrop to ideas in anthropology, to work. It seemed as if my brain could natural sciences, chemistry and other not do any better than imitate the fields. gaudy aesthetics prevailing in psyche- We learn that she has exhibited delic art. Since I found hallucinogenic 102 Leonardo Reviews Most of the time it is not the artists They asked me, “What kind of psychedel- but the art critic who ties their work to ics do you take when you’re painting?” mind-altering substances—by describ- And I said, “I don’t take anything when I’m painting. When I take psychedelics ing a work of pop artist Ed Ruscha as I get very horny, and I start going out appearing “funny-strange the way it can to nightclubs and cruising.” (laughter) seem to stoned consciousness,” imag- So they said, “Well, we can’t put you in ining the paintings of Neo Rauch “as the book.” I freaked out, because I wasn’t in any book yet (laughter), and I said, hallucinations of a dour Communist-era “But I get my ideas when I’m high.” And East German apparatchik,” or speculat- they said, “Alright, we’ll put you in the ing about whether Takashi Murakami’s book.” Next they asked me for the names sculptures of Mr. DOB might have any- of other psychedelic painters, and I gave thing to do with Alexander Shulgin’s them a whole list. I called them all up right away, and I told them, “Tell them synthetic drug of the same acronym that you’re taking psychedelics!” And (pp. 127, 146, 201). But, ultimately, they all got in the book [5]. whether it has doesn’t matter. Johnson argues that psychedelic experiences dif- But if the category of psychedelic art fused from those who really had them grew out of short-lived incentives of into those who did not: “You may never both the art and the book market of the have taken LSD, but America has” 1960s, it might not be the best road to (p. 11). uncovering a unified sensibility alleg- The problem haunting every page edly underlying modern art for the past drugs interesting enough to write a of Are You Experienced? is the fact that 50 years. book about their scientific investigation it puts so much weight on totalizing The contention of Johnson’s Are [1] but never acquired a taste for the concepts such as “America” or Thomas You Experienced? might be better sup- artistic tradition associated with them Kuhn’s notion of paradigms. Given that ported by his material had he argued since the 1960s, I have been looking the existence of such all-encompassing for a profound transformation (but no out for attempts to derive alternative and mutually incommensurable epis- “paradigm shift”) of modern art by the aesthetic forms from experimentation temic frameworks has been called into countercultural upheavals instead of with hallucinogenic substances. question in the history of science itself squeezing too many discrepant artistic To my great delight, art critic Ken [2], it might not be wise to now import positions into American psychedelia. Johnson’s new book Are You Experienced? this idea into art history—as if art were However, his pioneering effort to trace How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed a more unified field than science. the impact of hallucinogenic substances Modern Art provides just that: A broad The book does not provide conclu- beyond album covers of the 1960s and range of artwork not usually considered sive evidence for its claim that psyche- Alex Grey’s contemporary rearticula- psychedelic is presented as a product delic consciousness transformed the tion of visionary art [6] opens up a of psychedelic consciousness. Johnson whole of modern art, because, apart whole new field of research that will, it tries to capture a sensibility underlying from Rauch, Murakami and a few oth- is hoped, be explored further by schol- contemporary art “in almost all of its ers, the large majority of the artists ars following in Johnson’s footsteps.