Review: Henri Michaux's Mescaline Engendered Drawings (and their
diagrammatic relevance to RHIZOME's "STARRYNIGHT" programming)
by Joseph Nechvatal

Henri Michaux (1899-1984): "le regard des autres"
May 5th - July 10th, 1999
Galerie Thessa Herold
7, Rue de Thorigny
Paris 75003

Catalogue available
Published by Thessa Herold, Paris

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On the occasion of the poet/artist Henri Michaux's one hundredth
birthday, the Parisian Galerie Thessa Herold has mounted a generous
display of his phantasmagorical drawings; the majority of which are
mescaline engendered. That the work was electrified by congesting
mescaline (the active ingredient of the peyote cactus) is well known
through Michaux's own books "Miserable Miracle: Mescaline" (originally
published in French in 1956 and first translated into English in 1967),
"Turbulent Infinity" (1957) and "Paix dans les brisements" (1959). But
that the exhibition offers an opportunity for better understanding
electronic-based art today through refocusing our attention on the
electrified phantasmagorical may astonish some. However, I found that
Michaux does offer such an occasion for awareness if we consider only
Michaux's self-transcended drawings "Dessin Mescalinien" from 1956/1957
- shimmering drawings done during various phases of neurological
excitement induced by mescaline (*1) - and decidedly not his far better
known Chinese ink drawings titled "Sans Titre" (Untitled). Because with
the "Dessin Mescalinien" drawings, we see the hand become cyborg, taking
on the systematic (but out-of-control vibrational qualities) of the
robo-seismograph. Here vibratory energy is made manifest.

Henri Michaux's mescaline engendered drawings, particularly those he
executed under the full, direct influence of mescaline - the series
"Dessin Mescalinien" from 1956/1957 (and less so the flash-back
influenced 1963/1969 "Dessin Post-Mescalinien" drawings and the drawings
"Dessin de Reagregation" from 1962/1963) - are relevant to RHIZOME's
STARRYNIGHT agenda (see: http://www.rhizome.org/starrynight/) today
diagrammaticly in that I would maintain that the primary premise behind
most all of electronic-based art today, either representational or
abstract, is the Michaux-like exploration of the introspective
rhizomatic world of the imagination under the influence of today's
boundless, high-frequency, rhizomatic, electronic/computerized vibratory
environment. Indeed, rhizomatic thinking itself - particularly when
manifested as art - must be boundless in its branching, crossing wide
chasms of mental space as the most disparate elements may be linked. In
this sense rhizomatic thinking is facilitated by the boundless web and
one can say that the web is rhizomatic.

Since it is difficult making sense of today's swirling (essentially
phantasmagorical) electronic-based society, the general proposition
behind electronic-based art may best be to look for a paradoxical
summation (in terms of electrified energy) of this uncertainty, thereby
taking advantage of today's jam-packed environment of information
saturation - as STARRYNIGHT's programming attempts. But by STARRYNIGHT's
diagrammatic choice of displaying/representing active information as
discrete stars, STARRYNIGHT, in my opinion, obscures the more
interesting truth that this boundless informational saturation - in its
totality on the net - is so dense and active and changing that it fails
to communicate anything particular at all upon which we can concur
except perhaps its overall incomprehensible sense of ripe delirium as
the reproduction system pulses with higher and higher, faster and faster
flows of digital data to the point of near hysteria. This electrified
hysteria is the basis of formulating a diagrammatic relevance between
electronic-based art today and Michaux's mescaline engendered drawings,
as the tremendous load of imagery/sound/text information digitally
produced and reproduced all round us today ultimately seems to make
less, not more, conventional sense. Thus efforts to formulate a
conventional understanding in terms of popularity - such as RHIZOME's
STARRYNIGHT software program - strike me as diagrammaticly stimulating
only in the narrow sense, and ultimately unsustainable in terms of the
ripe delirium of the net when considered as a chimerical, rhizomatic
aggregate.

If accepted, this general presupposition for STARRYNIGHT, it seems to
me, plays better into the basis of Michaux's mescaline engendered
semi-abstract art than STARRYNIGHT does in its present form because
Michaux elucidates for us again that art may refuse to recognize all
thought as existing in the form of representation, and that by scanning
the spread of representation art may formulate an understanding of the
laws that provide representation with its basis: the
electronic/phantasmagoric. As a result, in my view, it is
rhizomatic-based art's onus to see what unconventional, paradoxical,
hyper-summational sense (one might say its almost Michauxian/mescalinian
spiritual/imaginative sense (*2)) art might make of all this virtual
information based on an appropriately decadent reading of our
electronically activated social media environment.

Perhaps such a basically abstract summational fancy would begin with the
presumption that Michaux's mescaline engendered drawings have
psychically exploded on the net, showering us with bits of inescapable
information bytes, drastically changing the way in which we perceive and
act even in our private, subconscious, reveries. (*3) It is this
internal, subconscious, paradoxical operation - this subconscious
contradictory tension - which I find potentially interesting in relating
Michaux's mescaline engendered drawings to today's electronic-based art
as it must be remembered that electronic-based art resides in a field of
perception (at once seamless and fragmented) which itself is made up of
electronic/phantasmagoric energies corresponding to a new (and
paradoxical) combination of space and time which one may be tempted to
term "mystical" in character (*4); an immersive, phantasmagoric
perspective without horizon.

Like mescaline engendered thought (*5), electronic-based art, by virtue
of its distinctive electron constitution and networked fluidity, floats
in an extensive stratosphere of virtuality. Habitual values and
expectations of solidity no longer are capable of existing ipso facto in
technological virtuality. Indeed, like STARRYNIGHT's endeavor, they must
be reimposed if desired. Consequently, the particular constitution of
electronic-based art is best seen, perhaps like Michaux's mescaline
engendered drawings, as an osmotic membrane; a blotter of instantaneous
ubiquity/proliferation/thought (*6), and not as discrete
representations. Such a summational view of electronic activity then
results in the atomization and disintegration of what once was
considered coherent normality into disoriented immateriality as this
delirious disintegration/merging yields up to art's scrutiny a ghostly
conceptual panorama based on circulation - again along the lines of
Michaux's mescaline spawned drawings.

Consequently, electronic-based art - like STARRYNIGHT might become -
reflects (and works with) de-centered prior logocentric social hegemony.
But STARRYNIGHT must first, when viewed as shaped by de-centered
electronic overload, be understood as a flustered code-field of
vibratory energy; a confused collective representation which
bewilderingly continues to mutate the ideology of its own production.

Since prevailing representation is made up of conventional, rigid,
social signs (and art typically of unconventional irresponsible signs -
the mode that represents the real arbitrary nature of all signs as it
subverts the socially controlled system of meaning) - STARRYNIGHT may
offer us then the opportunity for the creation of relevant, anti-social,
phantasmagorical signs (hence semi-abstract, ecstatic, anti-signs) which
may continue to mentally move and multiply; as Michaux's mescaline
engendered drawings tend to do.

Like Michaux under mescaline in the mid-1950s, we know through
electronics that symbolic codes are positively phantasmagorical, so when
STARRYNIGHT produces them as discrete star-forms in deep space, it feels
inappropriate to me (a rhizome is continually dynamic and is ceaselessly
actualized by the arousal its dynamism produces and thus it is never in
accord with some preestablished strategy or imposed configuration). If
STARRYNIGHT were to take the anti-sign track, then perhaps a
digitally-based ecstatic potentiality might be revealed. Then
electronic-based art's abstract potential may prove useful in
questioning received notions of representation when viewed against
assumptions of utility versus pleasure.

On the complimentary side, STARRYNIGHT, unlike Michaux's work, already
address previous analog art as an institution and transgresses
conventional art's basic assumptions of uniqueness as it opens itself up
to new spaces of malleable and combinatory sites - hence to a perpetual
multiplication of significance/inference. Digital compositions like
STARRYNIGHT open up a territory of signification, then, towards the
creation of mongrel, decoded and deterritorialized phantasmagorical
meanings. Meaning in art and in life then advances by seeing more
clearly into its own underlying phantasmagorical assumptions of excess,
by facing up to the radical implications of those assumptions, and by
purging itself from conventional ways of thinking. Thus, perhaps
STARRYNIGHT's unconscious intention is to achieve an ultimate phantasmal
integration by dissolving recorded information into its original
vibrational/dynamic foundation in that the rhizome is regularly swarming
itself into being as micro and macro factors attract. One cannot declare
in advance what its limiting confines are or where it will or will not
operate - nor what may become connected and tangled up in the rhizome's
multiple dimensions, because the connections do not inevitably plait
common types together.

Such a dynamic sense of aesthetic electronica as contemplative vision
might suggest the potential for STARRYNIGHT as it subsumes our previous
world of simulation/representation into a phantasmagorical nexus of
over-lapping linked hybrid observations of the outer world with precise
extractions of post-human mentality. Encounters, then, with computer
simulations like STARRYNIGHT, one may assume, might create an
opportunity for social image transgression - and for a vertiginous
ecstasy of thought. Surely such a hybrid electronica/phantasmal impetus
can help release pent up ecstatic energies (*7) in that the more
overwhelming and restrictive the social mechanism, the more exaggerated
are the resulting effects - and hence excel the assumed determinism of
the technological-based phenomenon inherent (supposedly) in our
post-industrial information society. Therefore, like Michaux's mescaline
engendered drawings, STARRYNIGHT may serve as an ecstatic
impulse/phenomena which prolif-erates in proportion to the
technicization of society - as such an electronica-ecstasy may occur as
a result of the technological society's obsession with the phantasmal
character of electronic proliferation and speed. In terms of design
ideas for STARRYNIGHT, it is salient to note that according to Robert
Hunter in "The Acid Queen" (*8) the mescaline molecule resembles
adrenaline. When mescaline is introduced into the body, enzymes,
mistaking the mescaline molecules for adrenaline, begins to dissolve
them. While its attention is focused on the mescaline, however, the
adrenaline begins to accumulate elsewhere - the enzymes can't handle
both.

Actually, the longer I looked upon one of Michaux's shimmering "Dessin
Mescalinien" from 1956, and hypothesized STARRYNIGHT, the more I seemed
to perceive him calculating that the more human psychic energies are
stifled and/or bypassed by certain controlling aspects of mass
technology, the more a churlish ecstatic/fearful phenomena will
increasingly break out in forms of electron-based art. Too, simulation
technology (when used in the creation of electronica-based art) will, he
seems to imply, promote an indispensable alienation from the socially
constructed self necessary for the outburst of such ecstatic
experiences/acts.

Inversely, Michaux seems to indicate that electronic technology will
enable the contemporary artist to express ecstatic reactions in ways
never before possible. Thus, this ecstatic counteraction can provide a
phantasmal defiance through transport aimed against the controlling
world's sedate blandness.

In Michaux's "Dessin Mescalinien", phantasmal thought detaches itself
from the order and authority of the old sign and topples down into the
realm of imagination, of fantasy, and into non-knowledge - towards
imagining questions rather than pat assigned answers. Yet Michaux's
fancied, aesthetic non-knowledge is certainly the most erudite, the most
aware, the most conscious area of our current identity, as it is also
the phantasmal depths from which all digital representation emerges in
its precarious, but glittering, existence.

Henri Michaux's pre-electronic electrified art then helps us to
understand that the "real world" of computing is just made up of
phantasmal images of non-materiality - composed and rececomposed via
virtuality. With this in mind, STARRYNIGHT, like Michaux's visually
vibrating "Dessin Mescalinien", may be capable of composing an
unaccustomed, non-logocentric, rhizomatic art from the broad spread of
digital signs found scattered throughout the space of computer memory.
But first we must remember that a rhizome's multiple dimensions
instigate cross-overs between both the highest synthetic level and the
slightest, most minute, discrete distinctions. The rhizome is a snarl of
vicissitudes so intertwined that it must give birth to different scopes
of thought and perception and art. Through this articulation, digital
grammar may appear as phantasmal semi-abstraction, because in
electronic-based art the sign no longer consists only of representations
but of inner codes that in turn may represent other representations, and
so on, as the links of phantasmal thought require.

Such an aesthetic cyber theory based on Michaux's rhizomatizing
experiments with his consciousness might provide a fundamental
antithesis to the authoritarian, mechanical, simulated rigidities of the
controlling technical world; rigidities which RHIZOME's STARRYNIGHT
agenda mostly maintain at present.

Like in "Dessin Mescalinien", STARRYNIGHT might develope vibrating
articulations which may consist of phantasmal digital elements now
grouped into spreading systems which possess characters which the eye
can scan and identify only because they have a structure that is, in a
way, the chimerical, concave, inner-side of visibility - the vibratory.
The conditions of these links reside outside of representation however,
and inside of phantasmal, semi-abstract knowledge (beyond STARRYNIGHT
current representation's immediate visibility) in a sort of
behind-the-scenes vibrating phantasmal world deep and dense enough that
representation finds itself digitally joined together in the
rhizomatizing suppossitious.

STARRYNIGHT, like Michaux's "Dessin Mescalinien" drawings, can perhaps
then help direct us towards that rhizomatizing zone, that necessary but
always inaccessible arena, which dives down, beyond our gaze, towards
the very aerial heart of things. Indeed it is this quivering,
chimerical, semi-cohesion (which one clearly sees in Michaux's "Dessin
Mescalinien" of 1956) that maintains the sovereign and secret sway over
each and every sign - this phantasmal vibrating - which I find
interestingly beyond reductive abstraction or glib representation (thus
into an excessive, hybrid, semi-abstraction) when scrutinizing the
potential for electronic-based art in general - and STARRYNIGHT in
particular.

The current representational order of STARRYNIGHT should, in my opinion,
not reify the phantasmal, but rather further atomized digital
information into byte phantasmality where only its occult, chimerical
links become useful in constructing informational formations. Thereby,
STARRYNIGHT becomes a vibratory inventiveness which is, in its
theoretical radically, opposed to the tabular space laid out by
classical thought.

May I just say that this phantasmal flee from the play of
popularity-based representation has the most urgent political/social
ramifications in our media saturated society. This, I think,
well-founded but ambiguous phantasmal model for STARRYNIGHT, based upon
Michaux's "Dessin Mescalinien", indicates the capacity for electronic
art's worth as it provides the explication of the phantasmal links that
abet electronic communications by expressing the laws of shimmering
distribution that rule it. Such excessive semi-abstractions can be, in a
sense, the representation of all electronic representation then when
they are seen to represent the unlimited field of electronic
representation which non-utilitarian phantasmal ideology attempts to
scrutinize in accordance with a non-discursive method which now appears
as a semi-abstract digital metaphysics; an electronic metaphysics which
excessive semi-abstraction helps to step outside of itself so as to
posit itself outside of the mechanics of uniform dogmatism.

So, Michaux's "Dessin Mescalinien" suggest an inventing of an electronic
art in which what matters is no longer identities, or logos, or
distinctive characters (like those reiterated in RHIZOME's STARRYNIGHT
software agenda) but rather dense hidden phantasmagorical forces
developed on the basis of inclusion - where from now on things will be
represented only from the depths of this inclusive energetic density
withdrawn into itself, perhaps adumbrated and darkened by its obscurity,
but bound tightly together and inescapably grouped by the vigor that is
hidden down below in its programmed digital depth. Such dynamic,
semi-abstract forms (with their rhizomatizing connections) and the
non-blank space that never isolates them but rather surrounds their
outline with excess - all these might be presented to our gaze in a
STARRYNIGHT matrix where only an already vivacious state is articulated
in an insinuated nether darkness that is reprogramming them towards a
phantasmagorical visual discourse which is both capricious and,
paradoxically, informationally honest.

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notes:

(*1) For more on the neurological excitement induced by mescaline as it
may effect the creative artist see Aldous Huxley's 1954 publication "The
Doors of Perception" (a well-known account Huxley wrote after taking
mescaline under the guidance of the Canadian psychiatrist and researcher
Humphrey Osmond in 1953), Stanley Krippner's essay "Mescaline,
Psilocybin, and Creative Artists" in the 1969 publication "Altered
States of Consciousness", edited by Charles T. Tart and "The Psychedelic
State", a 1992 essay by the Fluxus-related artist/non-artist/philosopher
Henry Flynt. Flynt's 1961 text "Concept Art", first published in book
form in La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low's 1963 publication "An
Anthology of Chance Operations", outlined the genre which later became
known as Conceptual Art. According to Flynt, Conceptual Art is "an art
of which the material is 'concepts'".

(*2) The dried heads of the peyote cactus, whose chief active ingredient
is mescaline, were used by the Aztecs at least as early as 300 BC. and
are currently being employed by over fifty thousand Indians of the
Native American Church as a vital part of their religious ceremonies.
The peyote cactus has long been used by the Indians of the Southwest and
Mexico as a means of communion with the divine world, and today the
eating of the dried buttons of the plant is the principal sacrament of
the Native American Church of the United States.

(*3) Some artists I have talked to who have experimented with mescaline
have remarked upon the similarity between mescaline-induced and
spontaneous mystical experiences - and have used mystical and
quasi-religious language to describe their experiences and artwork.

(*4) Mescaline, according to Walter N. Pahnke in his paper "Drugs and
Mysticism" published in "The International Journal of Parapsychology",
Vol. VIII, No. 2, Spring 1966, pp. 295-313 is an important tools for the
study of the "mystical state of consciousness".

(*5) Simone de Beauvoir reports in "The Prime of Life", pp. 169-170,
that Jean-Paul Sartre (master of French phenomenological philosophy and
subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize) had a medically supervised
mescaline injection in 1935 along with an intern. Sartre reported seeing
lobsters, orangutans, and houses gnashing their jaws - and the intern
reported virtually romping through a meadow full of nymphs.

(*6) see: Heinrich Kl