The mandala is one of the oldest spiritual symbols and an image which attempts to both represent the universe schematically – with the individual subject occupying the central position – whilst also operating as an active meditation device, a gateway enabling transformative states of consciousness. They are common to various traditions of eastern and western mysticism, but they have also been created by a number of contemporary and modern artists.

The popularised fractal or spiral geometries associated with the art and images of psychedelia, appear not only in the morphology of plants but in the visions induced by mind-manifesting plant medicines, like Psilocybin found naturally in certain mushrooms, Mescaline arising in the Peyote cactus or Dimethyltryptamine, a substance secreted naturally in the brain, and activated when drinking Ayahuasca. The mystical experiences invoked by psychoactive plants, as well as encounters with Eastern mysticism, became central to the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s, exemplified in art, music and literature by figures like Bruce Conner, William Burroughs, Aldous Huxley and Brion Gysin.

Scholars have also speculated on the role of entheogenic plants in the evolution of consciousness and language, as well as the development of global religions, including that the mystical substance Soma in the ancient Indian Vedas was a psychoactive mushroom, and that the ritualistic use of psychedelic plants played a part in the development of Christianity.

Bruce Conner

Bruce Conner (1933-2008) was born in Kansas, in the American Mid-west, and became an important figure in post-war art and the west-coast counter-cultural movement through the 1960s and ‘70s. Well known for his landmark experimental films, his disciplines also spanned assemblage, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography. Motivated by mysticism, spirituality and psychedelia, his visionary works were often filled with dark subject matter, symbolic and religious imagery.

“A genius of the recondite and the banal, of occult disciplines and popular culture, he possessed the third or inner eye, meaning he was capable of microscopic and macroscopic vision, of delving into the visceral while attaining a state of illumination”. John Yau, An Artist Who Possessed a Third Eye, Hyperallergic, July 9, 2016.

LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS, 1959–67/1996

One of Conner’s first departures from the found material that constituted his earlier works, LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS is a visionary travelogue including footage of journeys Conner and his wife Jean made in Mexico, as well as scenes of their life in San Francisco. Between 1961 – 62 while he and Jean were living in Mexico City, they ventured into the rural landscapes to look for psychedelic mushrooms, on at least one occasion accompanied by Timothy Leary who appears on camera. The original version was shown as a loop, with a soundtrack by the Beatles. Conner revisited it in 1996, repeating each frame five times, stretching the footage out to fourteen-and-a-half minutes and accompanying it with a soundtrack composed and performed by experimental musician Terry Riley. The, at-times dark, subject matter combined with rapid rhythm, multiple-exposure sequences and strobe effects, evokes an atmosphere of meditation or perhaps even a psychedelic experience, in which subliminal images are allowed space to arise within the mind.

Between 22 - 29 June, in collaboration with Paula Cooper Gallery, Camden Art Centre presented a week-long viewing of Conner’s seminal film LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959-67/1996).

Inkblot drawings

Conner’s inkblot drawings are one of his most expansive series, and were exhibited in the 1997 Whitney Biennial. Begun in 1975 he continued making them throughout his career, adopting the method as his main artistic output in the last decades of his life. His meticulous process involved marking and scoring a page, folding it along parallel vertical lines, then applying ink before folding the paper – a moment in which, for Conner, ‘a miracle occurs’. For him, the parallel lines created series that had relations to one another, through which variation and chance became apparent. He compared this formal device to the medium of film - a succession of images that engages the faculty of memory and the mind’s awareness of change: ‘The goal is to create objects that continually renew themselves, to always change, to have the potential for the process of change’. In the inkblots, intricate patterns proliferate through symmetrical mirroring and chance effects, generating seemingly infinite permutations that have an affinity with the self-generative behaviour and symmetrical bifurcation of plant forms. Reflecting on the significance of symmetry, Conner said ‘The awareness of symmetry is probably ingrained into our consciousness. And as soon as you see symmetry, it is interpreted. It is part of the balance and patterns of nature; minerals, animals, plants, planets… It appears in Renaissance paintings and other art forms through all of the centuries. It’s in textiles and rugs.’

All citations taken from an interview between Bruce Conner and Jack Rasmussen in After Bruce Conner: Anonymous. Anonymouse, and Emily Feather, published by the American University Museum, Anaconda Press, 2005

Joachim Koester

My Frontier Is an Endless Wall of Points (After the Mescaline Drawings of Henri Michaux), 2007
16mm film animation [10:24]

Joachim Koester (b. 1962)’s conceptual practice in film, photography and sound could be seen as a persistent enquiry into apparent reality and a quest to uncover hidden aspects of perception. The narratives in his work reveal a fascination with mysticism and the occult, the more surreal moments from our cultural and social histories, leading us into strange and unfamiliar territories.

In the nineteenth century exploration was geographic - journeys made into impenetrable jungles or the ice deserts of the Arctic in an attempt to map the last “white” spots on the globe. But in the twentieth century this notion of the “unknown” changed. Exploration turned inward. The new realms to be discovered were the molecule (Niels Bohr), the unconscious (Sigmund Freud), language (Gertrude Stein) or the outskirts of the mind (Henri Michaux).

My Frontier Is an Endless Wall of Points is a film animation created from the mescaline drawings of Henri Michaux. Of all Michaux’s work, these drawings are most frequently described as “a venture into foreign territory.” Koester’s film is an exploration of a vast world on the borderline of words, a journey into a plant alkoloid to explore an interior territory (of plant and mind) in the forms of Michaux’s rapidly moving images.

My work is an attempt to literally animate this idea. I examine the traces of this journey in a series of rapidly moving images, making what could be termed a “psychedelic documentary.”

Joachim Koester 

Joachim Koester and Stefan A. Pedersen
Insect Silver Noir 2018, sound piece, 18 minutes

The meditation Insect Silver Noir is a trance-like tour of changing embodiments and perspectives. It will take you to a dissident memory palace of plants, an insect, things that shine and things that are dark.

It is recommended that you use headphones and find a relaxing place free of disturbances, preferably where you can lie down, before listening to the sound piece. The file must not be played while driving a car, or similar activities that demand your full attention. 

Stefan A. Pedersen (b. 1979) is an artist, musician and teacher working from Copenhagen, Denmark. In his work he seeks-out unstable relations between past and present moments, with the conviction that history is not causal or already given. His practice covers photography, moving image, sound, writing and some more performative forms within the group Ectoplasmic Materialism. 

Terrence McKenna

Terence McKenna (1946 – 2000) was an American writer, philosopher, ethnobotanist and psychonaut. He grew up in a Colorado cattle and coal town, Paonia. In 1965 he found his way to San Francisco, enrolling in the University of California at Berkeley where he completed a self-tailored degree in ecology, resource recovery and shamanism. McKenna went on to study the ontological foundations of shamanism and the ethnopharmacology of spiritual transformation for a quarter century, advocating paths of shamanism and the use of hallucinogenic substances (primarily plant-based psychedelics) as a means of increasing many forms of human awareness. An innovative theoretician and spellbinding orator, McKenna emerged as a powerful voice for the psychedelic movement and the emergent societal tendency he called the Archaic Revival.  

Jordan Belson

“I’m trying to focus on something, bring it back alive from the uncharted areas of the inner image, inner space. Intuition is the basis of my aesthetic judgement. The more you allow intuition to speak to you, the closer you are to the truth, and the origins of the universe. “

Jordan Belson

Jordan Belson (1926 - 2011) made paintings from a young age and later became known as one of the most important artists in 20th century avant-garde cinema and visual music.  He was interested in expansive states of consciousness, devoting himself to a meditation practice and experimenting with hallucinogens. His films and paintings convey the inner images of his mind’s eye, of altered psychic states. He sought universal truths by voyaging inwardly, through meditation, to discover primary forms – circles, spheres, squares, pentagrams, hexagons - that also appear in sacred art, in Tibetan mandalas and tantric paintings.

Belson was a mystic who combined the spiritual with the scientific, with geometry and physics. His paintings and films are filled with dynamic and abstract forms that could equally emerge in the nebulous forms of deep space phenomena, the celestial, as well as in the sub-atomic realm or the immaterial expanses of the mind.

Music of the Spheres, 1977 

In this film, Jordan Belson has based his imagery on the ancient Greek conception of the solar system as one vast musical instrument, “the seven stringed lyre of Apollo”. The abstract, cosmic images produced by the order of mathematics and space connect with the earthly world we know. Flowing, hypnotic movements of form and colour create a mesmerising visual experience – another level of reality in which the music fuses with the images to become an integral whole. 

“There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacing of the spheres”.

Pythagoras, 5th C. BC

 From a Pyramid Films educational resource, 1977. Collection Center for Visual Music.

Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater

In the early 20th century, Theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater developed an “Occult Chemistry” in which they intuited the constituent shapes of matter at the atomic level by concentrating the mind in meditation.

Excerpts from Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation, 1901

“Let us turn now to the second effect of thought, the creation of a definite form. All students of the occult are acquainted with the idea of the elemental essence, that strange half-intelligent life which surrounds us in all directions, vivifying the matter of the mental and astral planes. This matter thus animated responds very readily to the influence of human thought, and every impulse sent out, either from the mental body or from the astral body of man, immediately clothes itself in a temporary vehicle of this vitalised matter. Such a thought or impulse becomes for the time a kind of living creature, the thought-force being the soul, and the vivified matter the body. Instead of using the somewhat clumsy paraphrase, “astral or mental matter ensouled by the monadic essence at the stage of one of the elemental kingdoms”, theosophical writers often, for brevity's sake, call this quickened matter simply elemental essence; and sometimes they speak of the thought-form as an elemental." There may be infinite variety in the colour and shape of such elementals or thought-forms, for each thought draws round it the matter which is appropriate for its expression, and sets that matter into vibration in harmony with its own; so that the character of the thought decides its colour, and the study of its variations and combinations is an exceedingly interesting one.”

General Principals

Three general principles underlie the production of all thought-forms:

Quality of thought determines colour

Nature of thought determines form

Definiteness of thought determines clearness of outline

Forms Built by Music

… Many people are aware that sound is always associated with colour - that when, for example, a musical note is sounded, a flash of colour corresponding to it may be seen by those whose finer senses are already to some extent developed. It seems not to be so generally known that sound produces form as well as colour, and that every piece of music leaves behind it an impression of this nature, which persists for some considerable time, and is clearly visible and intelligible to those who have eyes to see. Such a shape is perhaps not technically a thought-form – unless indeed we take it, as we well may, as the result of the thought of the composer expressed by means of the skill of the musician through his instrument.