Jeremy Shaw's DMT

Abstract

This article examines DMT by Jeremy Shaw, a Berlin-based Canadian artist whose oeuvre has investigated altered states. For this 2004 video work, Shaw administered the hallucinogen dimethyltryptamine to a group of friends and videotaped their experiences. I am interested in how Shaw curates the psychedelic session as a performance of the drug’s agency and aesthetic power. A powerful entheogen similar to psilocybin and ayahuaska, DMT induces intense feelings of euphoria and hallucinations that have been used for divinatory and healing purposes. Beyond its recreational uses, DMT has been found to be effective in the therapeutic treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, substance addiction and in palliative care. Since their pioneering experiments of the 1960s, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner’s determinant of ‘setting’ -- the context of the psychedelic session -- has remained a critical factor. In current psychopharmacological research, the aesthetics of setting are now understood to be crucial in shaping the psychedelic experience. The affective contexts of Shaw’s psychedelic sessions provide a striking contrast to the institutional approximations of domestic interiors used in clinical trials. Shaw curates the psychedelic experience in several registers. First, Shaw’s role as session guide or care-taker for participants undergoing extraordinary states sustains the etymological meaning of ‘curating’ which originally described a catalytic encounter of one tasked with the care of souls (usually a priest). Second, Shaw configures the atmosphere of the setting with the neutral atmosphere of a ‘white cube’ gallery. Framed against a white background, close headshots of the person undergoing the psychedelic enable intimate examination of their euphoric facial expressions and intoxicated comportment. While the conceptual formality and white performance field are almost clinical, subtitles flashing at the bottom of the screen, drawn from trip reports by the artist, reveal his collaborators’ struggles to verbalize their hallucinations.

Notes

1 The word ‘entheogen’ stems from the Greek, theo for ‘god’, to describe states of ‘becoming divine within’.

2 The ‘god-releasing’ entheogenic components of DMT that induce ecstatic trance states also have been activated for millennia through the practices of fasting and sensory deprivation (Huxley 1954: 88).

3 DMT can be found in trace amounts in plant life and mammals, including humans. It acts as a ‘partial agonist for several serotonergic receptors’. Online drug blogs theorize that it is produced by the pineal gland during REM sleep and when undergoing the process of dying. Some also speculate that states under the influence of DMT align with those produced during deep states of meditation by the ajna chakra, or brow point, in yogic subtle anatomy (Anonymous 2012).

4 DMT became known as the ‘businessman's trip’ by the 1960s counterculture because its effects were so immediate and short-lived one could imbibe the drug at lunch and return to work in the afternoon.

5 For over forty years Richard Alpert has been known as Ram Dass, the name given him by his spiritual teacher Neem Karoli Baba.

6 See Shortall (2014:188). Until the recent rediscovery of psychedelics by psychopharmacology researchers, rogue studies on psychotropic substances continued in online venues such as The Vaults of Erowid (Pinchbeck 1992: xvii).

7 On the use of psilocybin for reducing psychological distress, see Hendricks et al. (2015); on its use for stopping smoking and alcohol addiction, see Bogenschutz et al. (2015).

8 Ryan LeCompte (2015), a third-generation US marine, was not only healed of PTSD by using DMT, but is actively lobbying for therapeutic psychedelic sessions to support military populations suffering with the disorder.

9 The impact of setting is also central to studies of psychedelic drugs on human creativity. Neuroscientist Ben Sessa argues that set and setting must be considered essential components of the psychedelic experience that together maximize positive response: ‘studies that … disregard these … factors and report negative outcomes ought not to be used as evidence to dispute the positive potential of these drugs’ (2008: 826).

10 Within the art world, the whiteness of the modernist gallery space (the paradigmatic white cube) is more than just a neutral space – it confers aesthetic significance to objects and frees them from their originary context (O’Doherty 1981).

11 Wearing white can be required for an ayahuasca ceremony.

12 Like Shaw's video works that were to follow – notably those on snake-handling Christian cults and trans-dancers – DMT enquires into the kinaesthetic enactments of a particular subculture.

13 Joe-Laider, Hunt and Moloney articulate how the preference for ecstasy in San Francisco to intensify communal feeling as an antidote to social alienation contrasts to the preference for ketamine in Hong Kong to provide a euphoric escape from the routine of everyday life (2014: 65–80).

14 The shift could also be charted in the music scene as the grass roots activism of Ken Kesey's acid tests, which involved collectively dropping LSD during psychedelic light shows in the 1960s, was usurped by the mass spectacle and commercialism of stadium rock shows in the 1970s and 80s.

15 While researching this text, I attended a meditation retreat with Ram Dass (Richard Alpert). The mood of the gathering of Americans engaged with contemplative practice resonated with shock and anxiety resulting from the election of Donald Trump just weeks before. In one of his most arresting statements Ram Dass spoke of the emancipatory soul force within human beings that has been expressed by such visionary leaders as Martin Luther King. This soul force is the capacity of communion with others and is knowable through intuition. Ram Dass asserted that an antidote to the current political predicament involves the cultivation of intuition to access this universal soul force.

16 In themselves, the videos are highly affecting. I viewed them with the artist's permission through his online portal.

17 Shaw's DMT was created and installed in Vancouver, a city where a preponderance of drug subcultures and omnipresent overdose crises inflected the tenor of the installation.

18 Artists featured included Victor Vassarely, Bridget Riley, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist and Roy Lichtenstein.

19 Installation works included those by Robert Irwin, Maria Nordman and James Turrell, op art by Larry Poons, Bridget Riley and Victor Vassarely, and sensory environments by Yayoi Kusama and Andy Warhol.

20 Likewise, the ‘Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and The Counterculture in the 1960s’ (2005), curated by Christopher Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris, concentrated primarily on the visual culture of the psychedelic era.

21 Shaw selected eight psychedelic sessions from the original thirty that he recorded.

22 Their expression is shown as an extended reaction shot to an invisible stimulus, which recalls the framing found in Andy Warhol's Blow Job (1964), where audiences see only the tightly framed face of a man receiving fellatio. While the ecstasy presented by Warhol is sexual, that portrayed by Shaw is entheogenic.

23 Leary, Metzner and Alpert assert that the follow-up to the trip can be ‘soul-shaking’, arguing that attempts to rationalize, explain or intellectually understand what occurred during a session too soon afterwards are to be avoided. They propose that the most revealing insights come from the comparisons between trips (1992:93). Whereas Leary's governing controls entailed psychological experimentation, the discourse governing Shaw was that of art's visionary aesthetics, which involved using hallucinogens to push the limits of what Monika Szewczyk (2004) has termed a ‘latterday sublime’.

24 For women, the ‘set’ and ‘setting’ of the 1960s psychedelic movement were determined by prevailing patriarchal attitudes. The wives of leading advocates, among others Laura Huxley and Rosemary Leary, participated in the shadow of their husbands’ fame. Poet Diane di Prima has noted how the gender politics at Leary's research and retreat center in Millbrook in upstate New York expected female guests to cook and care for the children while the men experimented with drugs (Shortall 2014: 202).

25 The cycle of transcendence-beyond-words, subjective hallucination and return to self was conceived by Leary after Laura Huxley's suggestion to consult the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol) as a manual for the hallucinogenic experience (Leary et al. 1992).

26 Huxley's recounting of his mescaline experience (under the supervision of psychiatrist Humphry F. Osmond) notes that the perception of space determined by location, distance, proximity and juxtaposition gave way to another order of perceptual categories where objects appeared to glow with preternatural light and intensified colour, and pattern that became ‘all the more interesting for not being interpreted in terms of spatial relationship’ (1954: 20–1, 99).

27 Shaw has documented a range of subcultures including skateboarders, graffiti artists, ravers, goths and punks (Pakasaar 2004: 13).