PSychedelic art has a problem with the image. Picture it and you can see the fabrics of the fabric, Jimi Hendrix’s muzzy pictures, endless magenta Vistas. By the end of the 1960s, the wave of drug experiment began with Aldous Huxley and the beat generation has been inspired by many great music – but very little good art.
Writer and artist Henri Michaux has many benefits that have helped him go beyond all mediocrity. He was born in Belgium – not California – in 1899 and lived a living garde life in Paris where in the 1920s he was taken with a picture of Claude Cahun and bored out of surrealists. He inherited a tradition of the Bohemian Drug Experimentation that returned to the poet Charles Baudelaire and his fellow members of the Hashish Eaters Club, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas.
So in 1955, when Michaux tested Mescaline, who came from the Peyote Cactus, he approached it as a surrealist creative method, not a search for self -expansion. He closed himself, ate a special diet, then let the medicine tired before he tried to capture the drawings of what he had experienced.
The results, in the show in the courttaould gallery, where you usually expect to see old master sketches, are addictive wonders of abstract art. Graphically accurate but sublimely suggesting, these works were first released in a 1956 book called the miserable miracle. They have Jackson Pollock intensity, but in smaller sizes. You can also save money and protect your health and sanity – for Michaux provides such a convincing visual account of what Mescaline did to her brain that you can feel it works with you. Artistic miracles don’t just describe a drug experience. They conclude a fizzing delirium in the eyes of your own mind.
It starts gently. The soft horizontal black line walks on a sheet of paper, interrupted by heavier ink -like eye shapes, almost like musical notation. This fine drawing is beautifully suggesting an oscillating chord or an underwater wrist. Michaux said he was announcing the tingling state that the medicine had left him. It’s like haunted like Ping at the start of Pink Floyd’s echoes.
Of course, you do not create a work of art as poetic like this just because of taking medicine. Michaux has a long life behind him with the use of surrealist methods to release voluntary images. From this he graduated, like other artists after World War II, towards abstraction, with the high priests becoming rationalist and geometric Mondrian and Kandinsky. But in the 50s abstraction it has become wild, improvisatory, expressive, and its hero is the alcoholic American Pollock. What Mescaline gave Michaux was the freedom of becoming a French pollock.
His lines lead you to the knotty forests, throbbing mazes. He does not lose a sense of perspective but is used to give his visions to the space in space. In a drawing, a shimmering network of surprising lines retreats to the distance to resemble a picnic picture of a giant ancient -time ground work. In another, the whole paper is covered with entwined tubular forms in black and red ink, their surfaces with dot and flecked to create a texture such as elephant hide.
What is this wood of symbols? It can be plants, or artery, or neural network of the brain. As a surrealist Michaux is accustomed to seeing images in random marks. This is a process that touches on how the brain works – and Mscaline probably intensified it. As you look at these drawings, they seem to be shaping themselves in images, just for images to disappear, just phantoms of the mind.
I think I see a spine and a skeleton hand and sometimes Michaux sees them and sometimes he doesn’t. In a drawing, an owl or ghost may peek, but any scenery I hold in the battle of the great nearby sketch is obviously an illusion. Dark, coarse surfaces aren’t anything one thing even if you can see you a lot of things.
Michaux will take you to the depths of your own thinking where truth and fantasy are in contact. But the more you look, the more intriguing the violence is. The images become gory – this includes the cultivated bodies and, in my eyes still, a rattlenake. Did the Mexican Peyote wake up the main memories of Aztec’s sacrifices? It is more likely that these cultural associations attract his thoughts – and mine. I’m the lizard king, I can do something.
Michaux’s illustrations are convincing a picture of the holbein. He believes he drew the truth, even if it could not be explained. This is what makes them worthless. And like all the most memorable records of psychedelic experiences, they have a disturbing, disturbed edge. After all the michaux they were drawn after the mescaline disappeared. In a drawing, a monster at sea with squid like tenthearts floats in the clarity of the crystal. Did he really see it? Do you want to? Michaux broke the doors of understanding so you didn’t need to. Be thankful.
