High Art

One of the collateral victims of the U.S. government's criminal and moronic War on Drugs has been public awareness of the degree to which American culture has been shaped by the widespread use of powerful psychoactive substances by its creative minds, particularly since the 1960s. Music, literature and film have been transformed, to greater or lesser degrees, in order to correspond to the unspoken and otherwise undocumented frontiers of consciousness whose ongoing exploration has fundamentally restructured our society's individual and collective understandings of reality, not to mention attention spans.

For various reasons, visual art has had an even more pronounced association with pharmacologically induced altered states of consciousness. The history of modern art could easily be re-framed in terms of what poisons were being ingested by artists in each period: Cubism = Absinthism, Pop = Amphetaminism, etc. Further, many pioneering researchers in LSD and other major psychedelic drugs — Aldous Huxley, Stanislav Grof, Oscar Janiger, Masters and Houston — were particularly attentive to the responses of visual artists, who seemed to have a vocabulary more capable of describing the visionary realms into which they found themselves transported. Of course, all that went deep underground in 1966, when acid became suddenly and extremely illegal. Through the early '70s, it was possible to openly acknowledge the influence of drugs on art, but with each subsequent decade, the need to be pharmacologically closeted grew and grew.While gossipy cautionary tales like Jean-Michel Basquiat's received wide play for their reinforcement of the party line, the overwhelming mass of positive drug-related artistic experiences, as well as the even deeper and broader social, psychological and spiritual issues they pointed up, have remained basically taboo. With its latest major exhibit, "Ecstasy: In and About Altered States," MOCA has courageously confronted this taboo in a funny, celebratory manner, creating what amounts to a theme park on the topic of intoxication.
Chino Aoshima's City Glow (2005)