Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art (review)

When I was administered psilocybin in a neuroscientific experiment in 2005, I felt annoyed by the colorful geometric patterns and spinning fractals that came to surround me as the drug began to work. It seemed as if my brain could not do any better than imitate the gaudy aesthetics prevailing in psychedelic art. Since I found hallucinogenic drugs interesting enough to write a book about their scientific investigation 1 but never acquired a taste for the artistic tradition associated with them since the 1960s, I have been looking out for attempts to derive alternative aesthetic forms from experimentation with hallucinogenic substances.

To my great delight, art critic Ken Johnson’s new book Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art provides just that: A broad range of artwork not usually considered psychedelic is presented as a product of psychedelic consciousness. Johnson tries to capture a sensibility underlying contemporary art “in almost all of its various stylistic manifestations” (p. 10), from minimalism to op art and from feminist positions to Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle films. Drawing from personal acquaintance and interviews with many of the discussed artists, he shows how hallucinogen experiences inspired contemporary work in the tradition of abstract expressionism emphasizing the materiality of paint over illusionistic visual languages or how conceptual artist Adrian Piper relates her work on racism and xenophobia to her LSD-induced insights into “how much of ‘ordinary’ reality is nothing more than a subjective mental construct” (pp. 22–24, p. 138). The thesis of Johnson’s book is that, since the mass consumption of lysergic acid diethylamide beginning in the mid-1960s, hallucinogenic drugs have altered the minds of so many people that practically all contemporary art has come to conform with a “psychedelic paradigm” (p. 218).

However, Johnson does not claim that all artists presented in his book have actually taken psychedelic drugs. Most of the time it is not the artists but the art critic who ties their work to mind-altering substances—by describing a work of pop artist Ed Ruscha as appearing “funny-strange the way it can seem to stoned consciousness,” imagining the paintings of Neo Rauch “as hallucinations of a dour Communist-era East German apparatchik,” or speculating about whether Takashi Murakami’s sculptures of Mr. DOB might have anything to do with Alexander Shulgin’s synthetic drug of the same acronym (pp. 127, 146, 201). But, ultimately, whether it has doesn’t matter. Johnson argues that psychedelic experiences diffused from those who really had them into those who did not: “You may never have taken LSD, but America has” (p. 11).

The problem haunting every page of Are You Experienced? is the fact that it puts so much weight on totalizing concepts such as “America” or Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigms. Given that the existence of such all-encompassing and mutually incommensurable epistemic frameworks has been called into question in the history of science itself 2, it might not be wise to now import this idea into art history—as if art were a more unified field than science.

The book does not provide conclusive evidence for its claim that psychedelic consciousness transformed the whole of modern art, because, apart from Rauch, Murakami and a few others, the large majority of the artists discussed are American. In Europe, however, psychedelic drugs played a much smaller and also a different role during the 1960s. Embracing Marxist materialism, many students rejected the mysticism of Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary so popular among U.S. hippies as yet another “opium of the people” and used hallucinogenic drugs for hedonistic rather than spiritual purposes 3. And Japan might be a more different story yet. Moreover, America was divided, not just between the so-called establishment and the counter-culture; and even the counterculture itself split up into different factions, not all of which aspired to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.”

Johnson’s spiral...