Sublime spectacle yoko ono disrupting3/19/2023 Or a lengthy essay on the history of social security and the welfare state, which was part of Learning Site’s specially commissioned work, House of Welfare (2013). There was more monochrome than might have been expected: Pramod Pati’s Trip/Udan (1970), comprising black and white time-lapse footage of Mumbai, wrong-footing Western hippie conceptions of a languorous, polychromatic India. Visitors needed to ‘drop’ this essay before viewing the show, which, on the whole felt spare, orderly and – smoke and drug-addled firefighting notwithstanding – intent on resisting received notions of the psychedelic. Larsen may have been at pains to define this show as other than psychedelic, but his accompanying essay, ‘One Proton at a Time’ – a vivid, dense piece of writing – was gloriously psychedelic. In its attempt to go beyond a West Coast countercultural context for psychedelia, ‘Reflections from Damaged Life’ included work from Scandinavia and Japan, as well as India and Latin America. Whilst the focus was on work from the 1960s and ’70s, the exhibition spanned from the ’50s to today. Instead, the show proposed an art that, through its experimental and conceptual excesses, engaged with the psychedelic, rather than claiming for itself psychedelic status. This wasn’t about art inspired by or resulting from the effects of experiences with psychoactive drugs (though such works did feature). ‘Reflections from Damaged Life’ was billed as an exhibition on – rather than of or about – psychedelia. In his essay accompanying the show, curator Lars Bang Larsen pointed out the significance of LSD’s popularity at the time of the Vietnam War: ‘A way of fighting fire with fire and pitting one kind of delirium against another.’ Venom is the best anti-venom, at the right dose: fight fire with fire by all means, but don’t lose control of the weapon. Meanwhile, in a claustrophobic space next door, Willoughby Sharp was struggling to put out a fire in his ‘videoperformance’ Cough Up (1975). But the sublime, disconcertingly mechanized spectacle of it gave way to something more discomfiting: first the piece, and then the darkened room, became gradually obscured by dense dry ice. Adorno’s assertion that the ‘teaching of the good life’ is a ‘melancholy science’ came to mind when I considered Pierre Huyghe’s installation L’Expédition Scintillante, Act II: Untitled (light show) (2002), a display of coloured lights choreographed to Erik Satie’s exquisitely melancholy Gymnopédies (1888). The title of ‘Reflections from Damaged Life’ was borrowed from the subtitle of Minima Moralia (1951), Theodor Adorno’s prismatic (read: kaleidoscopic) response to the question of how to negotiate life under late-stage capitalism in the West, written in Los Angeles while in exile from fascist Germany. 'Reflections from Damaged Life', 2013, Installation view, Raven Row, London
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