Subject: Michaux's Bon Délire Mescaline Engendered Drawings (and their viral diagrammatic
Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2000 11:25:09 CDT






In lieu of the opening of the Henri Michaux drawing show at the Drawing 
Center (NYC) today (there is a panel at 3pm today there), I thought I would 
re-distribute the piece below which I wrote during the crises in Yugoslavia. 
It has been web published at:  Perforations 20, LAST STORIES 
http://www.pd.org/topos/theory/perf-frame.html and at 
http://www.blast.org/voti

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Henri Michaux's Bon Délire Mescaline Engendered Drawings (and their viral 
diagrammatic relevance to war) : Data only becomes information if it changes 
something.
By
Joseph Nechvatal


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 war and art today through refocusing our attention on 
the electrified phantasmagorical and the viral 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 mind/hand become cyborg, taking on the 
systematic (but out-of-control vibrational qualities) of the 
robo-seismograph. Here vibratory war-machine energy is made manifest in a 
succinct, diagrammatic, and viral manner (viral because, according to Robert 
Hunter in "The Acid Queen", the mescaline molecule resembles adrenaline. 
When mescaline is introduced into the body, enzymes, mistaking the mescaline 
molecules for adrenaline, begin to dissolve them. While the enzyme's 
attention is focused on the mescaline, however, the adrenaline reproduces 
and finds a hosting zone elsewhere in the brain - the enzymes can't handle 
both.) (*2)

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 war and art diagrammaticly today, I think, 
in that I would maintain that the premise behind the art of war is the 
disturbance of the rhizomatic world by antirhizomatic, 
electronic/computerized procedures. Indeed the art of war needs to 
accomplish this disturbance because rhizomatic thinking/art is 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. This opposes 
the art of war's hierarchical mentality.

Moreover, rhizomatic thinking opposes the hierarchical 
displaying/representing of war information and reveals the more interesting 
truth that the crises in Yugoslavia - in its totality - was so dense and 
active and changing that it failed to communicate anything particular at all 
upon which we can concur except perhaps its overall incomprehensible sense 
of stupid delirium as the war system pulsed with higher and higher, faster 
and faster flows of war information to the point of near hysteria. This 
electrified hysteria is the basis of formulating a diagrammatic relevance 
between the electronic-based art of war 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, hierarchical sense.

If accepted, this general presupposition for inspecting the hierarchical art 
of war and rhizomatic art's anti-war response to it, plays into the basis of 
Michaux's mescaline engendered semi-abstract art, it seems to me, because 
Michaux elucidates for us again that art may refuse to recognize all thought 
as existing in the form of hierarchical representation, and that by scanning 
the spread of hierarchical representation art may formulate a rhizomatic 
understanding of the laws that provide hierarchical representation with its 
basis: the electronic/phantasmagoric. As a result, in my view, it is 
rhizomatic-based anti-war art's onus to see what unconventional, 
anti-hierarchical sense electronic-based anti-war art might make of the 
hierarchical art of war based on an appropriately eloquent reading of our 
electronically activated social media environment. And this is what I find 
potentially interesting in relating Michaux's mescaline engendered drawings 
to today's electronic-based art of war, as it must be remembered that 
electronic-based war ideology resides in a field of perception (at once 
seamless and fragmented) which itself is made up of 
electronic/phantasmagoric energies corresponding to a new, immersive, 
phantasmagoric perspective without horizon.

Like mescaline engendered thought (*3), electronic-based war ideology, 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 the 
free-flowing art of war. Indeed, they must be reimposed if desired. 
Consequently, the particular constitution of an electronic-based art which 
addresses the war mentality is best seen, perhaps like Michaux's mescaline 
engendered drawings, as an osmotic membrane; a blotter of instantaneous 
ubiquity/proliferation/thought, and not as discrete representation. Such a 
summational view of electronic war 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.

Consequently, electronic-based art which addresses the art of war's ideology 
reflects (and works with) de-centered prior logocentric social hegemony. But 
it must first, when viewed as shaped by de-centered electronic overload, be 
understood as a viral code-field of vibratory energy; an infected collective 
representation which bewilderingly continues to mutate the ideology of its 
own production in viral fashion.

Since prevailing ideological representations of war are 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) - 
electronic-based art which addresses war ideology may offer us then the 
opportunity for the creation of relevant, anti-social, phantasmagorical, 
viral signs (hence semi-abstract, ecstatic, anti-signs) which may continue 
to move and multiply.

Like Michaux under mescaline in the mid-1950s, the art of war knows today 
through electronics that symbolic codes are positively phantasmagorical, so 
when war ideology produces them as discrete facts, and we accept them as so, 
it feels unrhizomically 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 pre-established strategy or imposed 
configuration). If an electronic-based art which addresses the art of war 
ideology were to take the anti-sign viral track, then perhaps a 
digitally-based viral potentiality might be revealed. Then electronic-based 
art's viral potential may prove useful in questioning received notions of 
the art of war's ideology when viewed against assumptions of utility versus 
pleasure, as well as host/parasite separation.

An electronic-based viral art which addresses the art of war's ideology 
should open up a territory of non-signification towards the creation of 
mongrel, decoded and deterritorialized phantasmagorical meanings. The 
deconstructed meaning of the art of war then advances by seeing more clearly 
into its underlying viral assumptions of excess, by facing up to the radical 
implications of those assumptions, and by purging the art of war's ideology 
from conventional ways of thinking. Thus, an electronic-based, rhizomatic, 
viral art which addresses the art of war's ideology achieves an ultimate 
phantasmal integration by dissolving distributed war 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/viral electronica as anti-war ideology 
might suggest the potential for an electronic-based anti-war art which 
addresses the art of war's ideology as it subsumes our previous world of 
simulation/representation into a phantasmagorical nexus of over-lapping 
linked hybrid observations of the outer warring world with precise 
extractions of post-human mentality. Encounters, then, with a viral 
electronic-based art which addresses the art of war's ideology, 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 
(*4) 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 
post-industrial war. Therefore, like Michaux's mescaline engendered 
drawings, an anti-war viral electronic art may serve as a euphoric 
impulse/phenomena which prolif-erates in proportion to the technicization of 
war. As such, a viral electronica-ecstasy may occur as a result of the 
technological society's obsession with the phantasmal characteristics of 
electronic proliferation and speed.

Actually, the longer I looked upon one of Michaux's shimmering "Dessin 
Mescalinien" from 1956, and hypothesized an electronic anti-war art, the 
more I seemed to perceive Michaux calculating that the more human psychic 
energies are stifled and/or bypassed by certain controlling aspects of 
electronic war technology, the more a churlish ecstatic/fearful phenomena 
will increasingly break out in forms of electron-based anti-war art. Too, 
simulation technology (when used in the creation of electronica-based 
anti-war ideology/art) will, he seems to imply, promote an indispensable 
alienation from the socially constructed self necessary for the outburst of 
such viral/ecstatic experiences/acts. Inversely, Michaux seems to indicate 
that electronic technology will enable the contemporary artist to express 
anti-war viral/ecstatic reactions in ways never before possible. Thus, this 
anti-war virtuoso counteraction can provide a phantasmal viral defiance 
through transport aimed against controlling war.

In Michaux's "Dessin Mescalinien", phantasmal thought detaches itself from 
the order and authority of war (in his case W.W.II) 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 anti-war consistency, 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 war is established upon phantasmal images - rank 
non-materiality. With this in mind, anti-war ideology/art, like Michaux's 
visually vibrating "Dessin Mescalinien", may be capable of composing an 
unaccustomed, non-logocentric, rhizomatic, viral art from the broad spread 
of digital codes found scattered throughout the space of computer memory. 
Here 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. Such an aesthetic anti-war cyber theory based on 
Michaux's rhizomatizing experiments with his consciousness might provide a 
fundamental antithesis to the authoritarian, mechanical, simulated 
rigidities of the warring world.

Like in "Dessin Mescalinien", anti-war rhizomatizing ideology/art might 
develop vibrating articulations which consist of phantasmal digital elements 
now grouped into spreading systems which possess viral host/parasite 
characteristics which the eye can scan and identify only because they have a 
structure that is, in a way, the chimerical, concave, inner-side of war - 
the excitedly vibratory. The conditions of this excitement reside outside of 
war's representations however, and inside of phantasmal/viral knowledge 
(beyond the art of war's immediate visibility) in a sort of 
behind-the-scenes chimerical world of code, deep and dense enough that 
representation finds itself digitally joined together in the rhizomatizing 
viral suppossitious.

The art of a viral anti-war ideology can perhaps then help direct us towards 
that rhizomatizing zone, that necessary but always inaccessible virulent 
arena, which dives down, beyond our gaze, towards the delicate heart of 
consciousness (when it comes to war). Indeed it is the viral quivering 
conducted between the host and the parasite that maintains the sovereign but 
secret sway over each and every war which I find interestingly beyond 
reductive abstraction or glib representation (thus into an excessive, 
hybrid, semi-abstraction) when scrutinizing the potential for a viral art in 
general as it concerns the art of war and its miasmic ideology.

Such a viral anti-war art should, in my opinion, not reify the phantasmal 
qualities of war's tenets, but rather further atomized the ideology of war 
into byte phantasmality where only its occult, chimerical, viral tendencies 
become useful in constructing anti-warring formations. Thereby, anti-war 
ideology/art  becomes a vibratory inventiveness which is, in its theoretical 
radically, opposed to the tabular space laid out by classical war.

May I just say that this phantasmal flee from the play of war's current 
representational givens has the most urgent political/social ramifications 
in our media saturated society. This, I think, well-founded but ambiguous 
viral model for an electronic anti-war art indicates the capacity for 
electronic art's worth as it provides the explication of the phantasmal 
codes that abet electronic communications by expressing the laws of 
shimmering reproduction that rule it. Such an electronic viral art can be, 
in a sense, the undoing of all war ideology then when it is seen to 
symbolically undermine the field of electronic quantity which 
non-utilitarian viral ideology attempts to scrutinize in accordance with a 
non-discursive method which now appears as an anti-war virus. This places 
art, in relationship to war, well outside of the mechanics of uniform 
dogmatism.

So, Michaux's "Dessin Mescalinien" suggests an inventing of a viral anti-war 
art in which what matters is no longer identities, or logos, or distinctive 
characters but rather dense, hidden, phantasmagorical, viral forces 
developed on the basis of host entitlement - where war is represented only 
from the depths of this viral energy - 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 
depth. Such dynamic, viral forms of anti-war ideology/art (with their 
rhizomatizing connections) and the non-blank space that never isolates them 
but rather surrounds their outline with viral excess - all these might be 
presented to our gaze in an anti-war viral matrix where only an already 
energetic, virulent state of the parasitic is insinuated.



Joseph Nechvatal
email: ecsatyricon-AT-hotmail.com
home page: http://www.dom.de/groebel/jnech/




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

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'". 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.

(*2) Robert Hunter, Chapter 7 of "The Storming of the Mind", 1971, 
McClelland and Stewart Ltd.

(*3) 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. Also see: Heinrich 
Klüver's "Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucinations" for examples, originally 
published in 1928.

(*4) See, for example: Alan Watts's 1962 book "The Joyous Cosmology", New 
York: Pantheon Books









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