Pubdate: Thu, 07 Oct 2004
Source: Georgia Straight, The (CN BC)
Copyright: 2004 The Georgia Straight
Contact:  http://www.straight.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1084
Author: Robin Laurence

DMT SUBJECTS SEEK BLISS, FIND GUMMY WORMS

Jack Goldstein Under Water Sea Fantasy, Jeremy Shaw DMT at Presentation 
House Gallery Until October 24

The entrance to DMT, Jeremy Shaw's eight-monitor DVD installation, is so 
dark that it is disorienting. It's even more disorienting coming out than 
going in--appropriate enough, given the psychic and perceptual dislocations 
that are represented here.

Simultaneously broadcast from eye-level monitors in the installation's 
black-walled, low-ceilinged, octagonal room, eight young men and women 
(including the artist) trip on the synthetic hallucinogen DMT 
(dimethyltryptamine) while the unmoving video camera records their 
experiences. Eyes closed, eyelids fluttering, heads rolling back and forth, 
they undertake brief, ecstatic journeys into the beyond.

Subtitles on each screen counterpose the subjects' post-trip attempts to 
describe their essentially nonverbal experiences. "I was sorta, like, 
whoah...like, what's going on..." "It is like melting...like this buzzing 
is kind of in you..." "I don't even know how to describe it....Holy 
shit....It was all gummy worms and the most vibrant colours..." Sighs, 
groans, hyperventilation, and each subject's chosen background music 
contribute to the textured sound environment within this cocoon of altered 
perception and near-terminal inarticulateness.

Shaw, aka March 21, is a fast-ascending Vancouver media artist and 
electronic musician with a standing interest in representing youth 
subcultures. Here, he has assumed the academically trendy model of 
artist-as-researcher, and his project suggests a pseudoclinical or 
mock-anthropological study of recreational drug use among a particular 
subgroup. (There's an implication of privilege: DMT is expensive; six of 
the eight subjects are white; all look preppily fresh-faced and well-groomed.)

In the exhibition brochure, curator Helga Pakasaar describes DMT as the 
synthetic version of ayahuasca, which, "in its natural form, is used as a 
spiritual device by shamans in South America for coming of age rituals". 
Pakasaar's observations about the deep differences between the uses of 
ayahuasca and DMT are absolutely germane: although Shaw's subjects may 
experiment with the drug recreationally, they cannot duplicate its original 
cultural significance. In traditional tribal societies, as religious 
historian Mircea Eliade observed, initiation rituals employ the ecstatic 
trance to enact a symbolic journey of suffering, death, and resurrection. 
The journey is made in the company of a spirit guide, helper, or guardian 
and culminates in the entrance of the initiate into either adult society or 
the shamanic vocation.

In Shaw's "study", there is no social or religious context to hook the 
experience onto, no supernatural animals and beings to coalesce as guides 
out of the trippers' formless hallucinations. Thus, the trivial analogies 
to, say, gummy worms, and the inability to meaningfully describe inchoate 
perception and sensation. The profane never transforms into the 
sacred--although one of Shaw's subjects, a woman who thrashes, howls, and 
drops out of view of the camera, later attempts to align her drug 
experience with a book she's read about ecstatic trances and visions.

What DMT conveys is not only the inadequacy of verbal language but also a 
sad sense of disconnection from community and belief. Still, this woman 
brings off the work's best line: "You're on these Web sites and you're, 
like, wow, you make shitty art....You really can't distinguish between 
trend and archetype."

Although it is presented here as a separate and distinct exhibition, Jack 
Goldstein's experimental film Under Water Sea Fantasy enters into an 
inevitable dialogue with Shaw's installation. With its brilliant and 
bleached-out colours, shifting forms, fluid movement, and otherworldly 
sounds, Goldstein's continuously looping, six-and-a-half minute film can 
itself be read as an ecstatic journey. Instead of the archetypal cycle of 
birth, death, and rebirth, however, we seem to be watching a vast, 
primordial round of creation, destruction, and oblivion, inspiring both awe 
and existential dread.

Unfortunately, we're experiencing the film at a remove from its context, 
too--from Goldstein's life, times, and multidisciplinary career. During the 
1970s and '80s, he produced sound recordings, still photography, 
performances, and paintings as well as film. However, the local viewer 
can't draw immediate comparisons between the present film and his other 
works, nor place it within the ambit of his avant-garde themes and 
strategies. Goldstein was born in Montreal in 1945; his art education and 
tumultuous career took place in and near Los Angeles and New York, where he 
cycled in and out of acclaim, obscurity, and despair. Despite a recent 
revival, his work is infrequently shown in this country.

Goldstein began Under Water Sea Fantasy in 1983, set it aside, and finally 
finished it in 2003, shortly before his death. Montaging and altering found 
footage of erupting volcanoes, underwater life, and a much-accelerated 
lunar eclipse, Goldstein gives a knowing nod to Hollywood and the notion of 
the spectacle. But he also, Pakasaar argues, employs a small scale and a 
gallery setting to explore the pictorial rather than theatrical aspects of 
his medium.

Much more eloquently than Shaw's stoned subjects, Goldstein seems to be 
describing the ineffable, from primordial cataclysm to the oblivious void. 
Except for that weirdly concrete title, he does so without the obstacle or 
compromise of verbal language.
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