A beer, a glass of wine, some betel nuts, an opium pipe, a bong, a syringe, a bottle of Amyl nitrate, a handful of magic mushrooms and a cigarette for afters. This is not Hunter S Thompson’s famous list describing the trunk-full of illicits that begins his insane road trip, ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, but just some of the drug accoutrements found in the first cabinet at a new exhibition, ‘High Society’. We all live in one of those, dude, goes this show’s stoner refrain, even if we’re only partial to the occasional slug of coffee, sugar or booze. The next object – a star chart by American psychedelic painter Fred Tomaselli of one man’s inventory of everything mood-altering he’s ever ingested, from Alka Seltzer and Sudafed to chocolate and nutmeg – reveals that the softer stuff can indeed add up to a lifelong chain of one buzz or another.
On the next wall, a NASA experiment testing a spider’s ability to spin a web under the influence makes clear that it’s caffeine, more so than cannabis or Benzedrine, which really messes with your head.
However, aside from over-the-counter drugs and some infrequent examples of collective intoxication – such as the shamanic use of hallucinogens within tribes or mass pill popping at ecstasy-fuelled raves – getting high is generally a solitary affair. Perhaps this is why artists have so often turned their visionary, troubled minds to recreational or mind-altering substances and why this show is full of their insightful, if occasionally squiffy responses.
Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping’s installation of a giant opium pipe next to a statue of Lord Palmerston flat on his back, for example, sums up the duplicitous British attitude to the lucrative trafficking of the drug in one fell swoop (although the nearby lithographs of the Patna processing factories in India, run by our very own East India Company, are even more astonishing in the industrial scale they depict). Tracey Moffatt’s photographic series ‘Laudanum’ captures a crazed Jekyll-and-Hyde episode brought on by this Victorian cure-all, although not as succinctly as a heartbreaking, blissed-out portrait of Lizzie Siddall, drawn just before her laudanum overdose by Pre-Raph lover Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1860.
The Wellcome Collection, itself no stranger to drugs – having been founded on the fortune and collecting habits of a successful pharmaceuticals salesmen – usually employs art chiefly as illustration for its medical-themed shows, rather than as any fundamental font of knowledge. Not so here, where art gets top billing for a change, with Rodney Graham’s charming ‘Phonokinetoscope’ installation forming the centrepiece of a trippy triptych of hallucinogenic art works. Graham took roughly the same whacked-out bicycle ride through Berlin’s leafy Tiergarten as LSD-pioneering scientist Albert Hoffman, who first got high off his own supply in 1943. A short film captures the artist’s bemused look as he briskly pedals around in a daze, accompanied by one of his own records, the chorus of one track going something like, ‘I feel fucking awful today’.
They could at least turn the music up in the galleries, the squares, because it’s hard to hear nearby psych-rock classics by Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix and friends, all of whom performed, at one time, in front one of Joshua White’s mad-cap liquid light shows. Here we get to look behind the wizard’s screen to see the whirring slides and paraphernalia needed to create his flashback-inducing projections. If this all sounds a bit gratuitous, then it is. I blame the artists, especially Keith Coventry, whose noticeably ambivalent documentation of London crack dens is shot through with the faded heroin-chic glamour beloved of youth culture and style magazines in the ’90s, or else commemorated heroically in bronze casts of makeshift pipes.
Elsewhere, the inevitable comedown from all this excess is explored through educational posters from the Temperance Movement, the days of Prohibition and that classic tale of the evils of weed consumption from 1938, ‘Reefer Madness’, in addition to more recent leaflets of the ‘Just Say No!’ variety. ‘High Society’ is also cleverly rounded out and backed up by a book of the same name authored by Mike Jay, a historical primer on drug usage that reminds us that ‘twas ever thus: whether in the traditional consumption of coca leaves in the Andean mountains, the marijuana fields harvested in Afghanistan or the tea grown in China. Despite the thought-provoking epilogue, in which you walk through Mustafa Hulusi’s video-screen fields of legal poppies, now grown in Turkey for medicinal purposes only, this show should come with a health warning. Tune in and drop out for a while, by all means, but you might just end up coming back for more.