Out of Body

Perhaps it began with Dave Hickey's successful attempt to make beauty an "issue", but it seems that the thing underlying most contemporary exhibitions now is a desire on the part of curators to present art as overwhelming, even ravishing, to the viewer. The beauty debate returned sensualism to the table, giving it some long-overdue new vocabulary.

As a result, it's not enough now to look at work or think about it, one must be staggered by it. Consider the complexity-theme in the Fabric Workshop's "Swarm" exhibit. It exists to create the impression that art is just too much to understand intellectually, that at some point, the information passing through your eyes will be too much for your brain, that overload is inevitable and your flight instinct ought to be kicking in soon lest you face a dangerous neurological episode brought on by too much looking.

This ideas followed me to Ecstasy: In and About Altered States at the LA MoCA. The show is at times like a flashback to early teenage parties – complete with the boredom of watching stoned people fascinated by themselves. Matt Mullican’s entranced video, in which the artist plays with pens, rolls of tape and trash cans in a hypnotized state - is a chore, and Paul Sietsema’s Untitled (Beautiful Place) is nineteen minutes of starting at a houseplant. That’s more than I could do even under the influence of some passport to an Altered State.

But thankfully, there’s more to the show than ruminations on drug culture, though these references are abundant (more on that in a minute). One of the exhibit’s announced agendas is to “simulate or induce” metaphysical states in the viewer. Here is where the show’s most successful works can be found. Olafur Eiasson’s Your strange certainty still kept (1996) employs economical means to extraordinary ends. In a darkened room, four strobe lights pulse and appear to freeze tiny droplets of water in midair. As you and other viewers walk around the room at normal speed, the droplets hover and hop around as if they’re in another part of the time/space continuum.

Erwin Redl’s Matrix II is similarly low-tech (which matters in a town where special effects are a big deal). Hundreds of tiny green LEDs hang in straight lines from the ceiling, creating rows of pale blips that call to mind the torrents of computer code in the Wachowski bothers’ movies. The piece, which at first seemed underwhelming, is saved by its enormity. At first, it’s hard to believe one isn’t looking at house-of-mirrors trick, but when you walk into the illuminated field and see the various tricks simple geometry can play, it’s hard not to be stunned into a pleasurable numbness.

The show also includes strong works by Pipilotti Rist (whose video installation of dreamy projections and ethereal music suggests a ride at some future conglomerate of Disney and MTV) and Eija-Liisa Ahtila (whose multi channel video, Talo/The House gives one hope that artists might in fact be able to produce compelling cinematic works). And of course there are some pleasant standbys as well, like Tom Friedman’s Play-Doh placebos Sylvie Fleury's glam space orb, 8.

But too often the show is a parody of itself. I overheard people walking the galleries peeking into rooms and asking one another, “have we done this room yet?” At one point, a visitor asked the guard about the work upstairs. “Is there anything worth seeing up there?” One can’t fault a show for the visitors it attracts, God knows museums should be happy enough to see anything with a pulse walk in the door these days. But exhibitions can be faulted for the way arrange art works and create experience. To that end, one wants to laugh at Peter Huyghe’s L’expedition scintillant: a musical Acte 2: Lightbox in which tiny curls of smoke drift toward miniature theater lights, suggesting fantastic images. It’s not the object that is so ridiculous, but the artist’s use of music by Eric Satie and the arrangement of work itself, which suggests nothing so much as a banal 1970s living room where hip parents aspire to aesthetic transcendence while their children are upstairs raiding the medicine cabinet.

The whole drug thing goes horribly overboard with the repetitious mushroom imagery. Come now. Do were really need three different artists mushroom images? One looks to curators for choices – select the best image for the show. Shrooms from Roxy Paine and Takashi Murakami and Carsten Holler (whose Upside-Down Mushroom Room is in the picture above, by the way) make it look like you’re covering your bases, not like we’re getting insight into nuances of a subject.

On the whole, Ecstasy’s greatest strength is its articulation of visual experiences so exciting they defy judgment. When looking at the best works in the show, it simply seems irrelevant to ask about their importance as art; they’re too busy delivering a charge. Those pieces that “simulate or induce” perceptual phenomena from sci-fi to schizophrenia are magical in ways that conventional representation cannot be. Painting suffers horribly in Ecstasy. It’s too abstract, too pictorial

Perhaps all this is a reflection of ongoing tensions over the split between the mind and the body. Perhaps it's a feverish attempt to relocate the mind inside the body, to make art less intellectually forceful and more, well, forceful. I’m not sure I think it’s a good thing for art to enter a realm where criticism is irrelevant, but it makes for a good trip.