Ecstasy

This entry was originally posted at Homogenized and later merged into Neckbeard. Images and links may be broken. Sorry.

The Ecstasy exhibit at Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art illustrated perfectly the banality of drug culture.

The exhibit, subtitled "In and About Altered States" features dozens of pieces either representing or created under the influence of so-called "mind-expanding" substances. Or to put in bluntly, it's about drugs. The curators of Ecstasy tried to make a distinction between two themes, the first is what they call "representational" works, and these are easily the most banal pieces in the show.

Imagine the worst sort of doodles that might be scribbled in a burnout's sketchbook and you have a good idea of what this half of the exhibit comprises. Wow, a painting of mushrooms done in crazy colors, man! A bunch of pills spilled all over the ground, bro. Would you please pass me the dutchie, and preferably from the left hand side? One of the few redeeming works from this set was Carsten Höller's Upside Down Mushroom Room, a room-sized installation in which numerous large scale (more than a meter), spinning, psychotropic mushrooms sprout from the ceiling and hang down at eye level, lit from below.

But then again there's Halcyon Sleep by Rodney Graham, an insufferably dull exercise in futility in which the artist filmed himself sleeping in the backseat of a car after taking sleeping pills. If the piece is meant to induce feelings of boredom and lethargy, then I guess one could call it a success, but you really have to wonder what the point is.

Paul Schimmel, curator of Ecstasy, justifies his exhibit from a historical context thusly, in his essay "Live in Your Head":

Among the many artists and writers who explored altered states during [the Romantic] period are William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Caspar David Friedrich, Henry Fuesli, Theodore Gericault, Francisco de Goya and Edgar Allan Poe. For many of these figures, visions, hallucinations, dreams, and nightmares—sometimes induced by mind-altering substances such as laudanum, opium, and hashish—were the inspiration for works of art that took their viewers to places where the rational mind could not go.

Yes, that may well be true, but the works produced by these artists was at least approachable by rational minds. Their art was interesting to those who were not on opium or hash, something that seems to have escaped many of Ecstasy's artists.

I don't want to make it sound like the exhibit was without merit. The second set of pieces, the ones MOCA calls "experimental", and which are meant to create feelings of intoxication in their viewers, are much more successful. There were several pieces that were truly challenging, mind expanding or at least interesting to view. MATRIX II by Erwin Redl was a sublimely trippy experience in which a large, darkened gallery room was filled floor to ceiling, wall to wall, with evenly spaced green LEDs, giving one the sensation of perhaps floating in space.

But, by and large, Ecstasy is full of pieces which are hard to enjoy unless you are in an "altered state" yourself. And that's just not going to cut it.