Plinth

Haroon, thanks so much for sitting with me today. You’re showing at Zabludowicz Collection until December 17th, with a programme of short residencies running in the space at the same time. Let’s talk about the first room of the exhibition – the piece there (The System, 2014) was shown at IMMA [Irish Museum of Modern Art], just after their retrospective of Eileen Gray’s work... Am I right in thinking that you’re using the informational material from that exhibition in your own?

Yes – I’m using all the exhibition and resource material. As you say, there was a huge Eileen Gray show, which spanned two of IMMA’s spaces, before my show there. IMMA’s building is laid out is like an old military hospital – a square building with a courtyard in the centre – and two of the wings were dedicated to the Gray show. One wing was full of her work, and the other was full of resource material – which is where my exhibition (Are Jee Bee?) was slated to be installed. So, when I went to do a site visit, I decided to ask them to leave all that resource material in place. I wanted to work with it, manipulate it and overlay my installation on top. So that’s the story of how the Eileen Gray piece came to be, and obviously it was a very site-specific project. I was interested in the idea of an exhibition itself becoming a ready-made.

Can you tell me more about how you employ the philosophy of that term in your practice?

Well, there’s two sides of the ready-made. There’s the ready-made object, which involves recontextualising something so that it’s looked at like an artwork. However, Duchamp also talked about the ‘reverse ready-made’, which is the idea of taking an artwork and giving it a utility. To me, that’s maybe even more fascinating, somehow.

I’d agree – it’s something I’ve not encountered before but it’s a really compelling line of enquiry. I’d be interested to hear how you term your practice, in the light of these ideas. One could argue that what you’ve done at the Zabludowicz Collection is on the edge of curating – taking other people’s work and deciding how we should look at it. Does that term come into your understanding of your own practice?

In some ways, yes. As an artist, though, I am able to do things that a curator can’t necessarily do, and I’m still not sure why that might be. After all, curators are able to do what I do, if they have the right conversation and dialogue with artists, but they tend not to… The difference, I think, is that I literally work with [these pieces] as ready-mades, or reverse ready-mades. Everything is reduced to material, no matter what it is or what status it has. From that starting point, I can work with it on my own terms – and, of course, once it’s presented again it gets its status back, in a different configuration.

Yes, there’s a poetry in this exercise of retracting and reapplying status… The status of the ‘art object’ is an endlessly interesting subject, and a troubling one.

Absolutely. And it’s hard to question that equation as a curator, because the object’s status always remains. More than that, it’s the curator’s responsibility to ensure that it does.

Whether you’re the curator or the artist, though, there’s something very brave about what you’re doing – it’s still transgressive to take this ‘sacred’ art object and mess with it, to reduce it to something purely material...

Well, there are more explicitly transgressive examples of the same idea at work. Duchamp’s original illustration of the reverse ready-made is really extreme: he says it’s like taking a Rembrandt off the wall and using it as an ironing board. In fact, Jake and Dinos Chapman are showing at the moment [at Blain Southern, The Disasters of Everyday Life] and they’re using Goya works in a way which is closer to Duchamp’s example. So my interpretation isn’t so extreme!

Sure. The title of your exhibition at Zabludowicz is For a Partnership Society. Can you tell me where that came from?

It comes from Raine Eisler, a feminist systems theorist and writer – a very interesting woman. It was later picked up by Terence McKenna, who’s a philosopher and a champion of psychedelics. He has this idea – more like an idealism – of returning to a partnership society through the use of psychedelics. My use of the term is more an homage to Eisler than it is to McKenna; then again, there is a lot of reference to plants and psychedelic experience in the show, reference to compounds in these plants which are actually in all animals. The exhibition is talking about a potential to have that kind of culture, of partnership rather than opposition.

There’s a very literal nod to ‘partnership’ in the show, of course, with your use of work by other artists and the series of residencies. I’ve read about the idea of a partnership society standing in opposition to – or as antidote to – a dominant model, i.e., the matriarchy or patriarchy. I wonder, what is this exhibition standing in opposition to – if anything?

Well, it’s not standing in opposition to anything. Then again, the name ‘For a Partnership Society’, of course, suggests that we live in a dominator culture. Without being ideological about it, mainstream culture is about domination. It is changing now, but that’s something we’ve seen for the last few hundred years. Male dominance over women, white supremacy, humans over nature – all these things are part of a dominator culture. They come from monotheism, landownership, agriculture, capitalism... The capitalist idea is about top-down, triangular structures. I wouldn’t say the show is in explicit opposition to that, although it’s definitely implied. It’s hard to get the balance right in exhibitions infused with ideology, because I don’t think ideologies should come into it. Rather, For a Partnership Society is about the idea that there’s multiple ideologies, meaning you can’t ever favour one over the other. The word ‘multiple’ doesn’t do it justice – there are as many ideologies as there are people in the world. Not one ideology is the same as another– even if you’re, say, a Catholic person who does yoga, that doesn’t mean you’re the same as another Catholic person who does yoga, for instance.

What about this individualism which remains, even in the context of the co-operation we’re talking about?

Well, there’s nothing wrong with individualism. That’s the point, in a way, but individualism is progressive and functional when one individual can work with another. When it becomes about opposition, then it’s non-productive.

There’s a new commission on the top floor [Chamber for Endogenous DMT (Collapsing the Wave Function), 2017] – which takes the form of a sensory deprivation chamber. All the way through this show there’s a super-interdisciplinary thread, but am I right in thinking that that space is going to be used in quite a practical way, i.e., for research? If so, how do you see science and art coming together in that work?

Well, science and art are almost the same thing – they just come in different guises. I think myself and the scientists are asking the same questions. The scientists are from Imperial College and the University of Greenwich, and they’re researching psychedelics. They’re neuroscientists and psychopharmacologists. We share a hypothesis – or, an interest in the possibility – that human beings create or formulate DMT in their bodies somewhere, and that leads to hallucinations and to mystical, spiritual experiences, related to birth, death and so on. We share that idea, but I don’t know how to get to the information and they do!

So, is DMT the only psychedelic substance we produce ourselves?

Well, it depends how you think about it. There are lots of different hormones and neurotransmitters which make you change states of consciousness, like adrenaline, or melatonin (which is the neurotransmitter which makes you fall asleep). All of these chemicals bring on an altered state of consciousness – but in most cases, we understand their purpose. We know that adrenaline is produced in stressful situations to keep you safe, melatonin makes you sleep, serotonin keeps your mood stable. But no one really knows what DMT is for, why it’s there, or why it has the effects it does. As far as I understand, it’s released in huge amounts – along with other neurotransmitters – at the point of death, when you’re born, and when you dream. Scientists don’t know for sure where it’s produced, although they think it’s either in the lungs or the pineal gland, which is where serotonin and melatonin come from. Its function, though, is still a mystery. One idea is that it could be the chemical responsible for religious, mystical or near-death experiences.

And the sensory deprivation chamber is supposed to provoke the release of DMT?

Yes, the idea is that DMT is released when the body is in extreme states – like sensory deprivation, or starvation… Human beings have discovered lots of ways to induce it. For instance, the San people of South Africa have rituals where they run in circles for 24 hours, until their noses start to bleed and they stop, sit down and have visions. They’ve been doing this for thousands of years – maybe around 50,000. They’re one of the longest surviving tribes which have kept indigenous traditions. Fasting, too – you can have altered states of consciousness that way. And then there’s sensory deprivation. Think of cave art. The earliest examples of art exist in caves, where there’s no light or sound…

I guess every society has discovered it, in one way or another?

That’s right. The interesting thing is that these cave paintings are the first records of culture, and it’s a respected idea within archaeology that they’re depictions of altered states of consciousness.

Really?

Yes, that’s what they are – depictions of altered states and shamanic ritual. There are very tell-tale signs – geometric patterns, particular forms and dots, depictions of things like people becoming beasts, going down into the underworld or into the sky, of transformations. More than that, though, these drawings are the first signs of ritual, which is the basis of religion, of language, our relationship to death and so on. These are found, it seems, from around 50,000 years ago. We know that humans have been anatomically the same for 200,000 years, which would mean that – for around 150,000 years – humans were just like apes. We were hunter gatherers with no language, only very simple tools – and then, overnight, you have art, language, music, religion. Over the course of about 30,000 years, consciousness emerges – and nobody really knows why.

How fascinating! In the space’s middle room, there’s three video screens – one with a man drumming on his chest, and another with a woman chanting. Do those two pieces of footage come from the same place, geographically speaking? Are they connected to shamanic tradition?

Yes – the woman singing is a shaman. It’s called Icaro, which is a kind of chanting performed during ayahuasca rituals. The man is a Brazilian musician – more avant garde than shamanic! – but he has engaged with shamanic practice, too. She’s from Peru and he’s from Brazil, and in those countries that part of life is more mainstream that it is over here. The traditions are more established.

Yes, it doesn’t feel familiar to a Western audience. Of course, we had our own ways to induce altered states, in the Christian tradition. I’m thinking of monastic practice – asceticism, fasting and chanting. But there’s no tradition of ingesting psychedelics, is there?

Well, the molecule in psychedelic mushrooms is almost identical to DMT. There is the potential for making it all over the world, and perhaps it was consumed ritually in Europe but, if so, we’ve dropped it. There’s been some kind of collective amnesia around it, which is probably down to the Church because there are traces of pre-Christian practices using psychedelic substances in ritual. There’s lots of suggestions, which I’ve come across in my research, about how pagan practices have been adopted by Christianity and then evolved. I can’t necessarily vouch for their truth, but I think they’re pretty compelling as possibilities. For instance, the classic toadstool (amanita muscaria, red with white spots) is psychedelic if it’s processed in a certain way, and shamans in Siberia still use it. In August, they go around birch and pine trees where it grows, pick the mushrooms and put the caps in the trees to dry for a few months. And then, in December – around the winter solstice, the 21st – the dry caps are edible, psychedelic, and they’re collected and distributed to the community for ritual use. The other interesting thing is that these mushrooms are a staple part of the diet for reindeers. When they go through a body, that process metabolises the toxin into a hallucinogen, just like drying them. So, once it’s been digested, you have a clean psychoactive substance and people drink the reindeer’s urine to get it.

I’m sensing a theme…!

Well, exactly. Someone, somewhere, put all these ideas together and suggested that this is where the notion of Santa Claus comes from. Think of the tradition of Christmas decorations, too, and of those round red mushroom caps, drying in pine trees.

But absolutely. I’ve often wondered where our Christmas motifs come from, because they have no discernible origins in the Christian story. There are no pine trees or reindeer in Bethlehem.

The suggestion is that, because this was happening around the Winter Solstice, people were already accustomed to rituals at that time of year. Those existing rituals may have been absorbed by Christianity, transcribed from old pagan traditions to the new religion. We have this idea of an ultimate truth; but in the end, there’s no such thing as truth: only belief. One can subscribe to a particular belief, or not. That happens now, with social media – you can choose to believe that Obama is a Muslim terrorist, or the antichrist, or you can opt out. There is no ultimate truth – even in maths or science, we reach a certain point and can’t explain what’s going on. At Zabludowicz there’s an experiment set up which shows very clearly that we don’t understand how quantum mechanics works. We can work around it, but we don’t know why particles behave as waves, or why things can be both particles and waves simultaneously. It’s called the wave-particle duality, and we don’t get it. In the end, as far as we know – mathematically and scientifically – there is no ultimate truth. That’s what I’m talking about, and thinking through, with For a Partnership Society.