Kandinsky at the Guggenheim
Enforced Vertigo: I always feel like I am going to fall to my death whenever I go to the Guggenheim. The knee-wall railings are too short and I, being tall, fear that I will topple over the side in the crush of tourists at the weird bottlenecks by the bathrooms. Any normal architect would have designed these passageways wider. As it stands I have serious bouts of vertigo in between floors. Was Frank Lloyd Wright a sadist? I stood well away from the multi-story chasm and googled this: Yes, according to the artist Deb Sokolow, Frank Lloyd Wright was a sadist because he designed a 3 legged chair meant to force secretaries into correct posture; if you sat in the chair wrong you fell over.
Inner Necessity: Vertigo, of course, is the desire to fall. Based on how often I am falling in my dreams, this interpretation seems sound. Why I desire to fall is a question more difficult to answer; I’ll ask my analyst. But so anyhow the Guggenheim’s cheeky obsession with spirals, circles, vortices, falling, dizziness and screws gets full expression with Kandinsky on view; the show is called (ha ha) Around the Circle. It’s like having vertigo and falling into a trance. The experience is, for lack of a better word, hair raising; these are paintings that desire you to fall into them. I was, despite the vertigo (or because of it?) astonished. I had always passed over Kandinsky in silence. Forced to write about him in college, I complained. What changed? What changed is that I did a lot of psychoactive drugs (I was not “on drugs” at the Guggenheim; that would be terrible. What I mean is that the cumulative effect of the drugs that I have taken over the course of years has changed how I see). It is clear now, to my drug-tuned brain, that Kandinsky, whose express motive was to “follow inner necessity,” is a psychonaut and the work is psychedelic in every sense of that word. Each painting, with its scenes of organized catastrophe and high-color hurricanes-in-a-teacup, feels like tripping, complete with moments of terror followed by flights of bliss. It is as if Kandinsky were inventing the psychedelic aesthetic right before our eyes; the syntax of expression from the limits of experience.
Chromatic Mysticism: Though critics accused him of being a “madman” and of “being under the influence of opium or hashish” the question as to whether or not Kandinsky did the hard drugs is moot: the work alone is proof that there are many paths into the interior cosmos. One such path is synesthesia. Synesthesia, a neurological “disorder,” is a condition in which senses are conflated; one hears a color, or a color produces a tone. This is a common psychoactive experience. And yet for Kandinsky this phenomena occurred without chemical prompting; his body produced an endogenous psychedelic experience. Likewise one might conclude that color itself is a drug. “Color provokes a psychic vibration,” Kandinsky claims. “Color hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body.”
Traveling to Another Planet: The psychoactive substance, however, was not without significant influence in Kandinsky’s life, albeit from a remove. In the summer of 1889 Kandinsky, age 23, was sent as chief ethnographer from the Moscow imperial society into Siberia to study the natives. Traveling by rail to the Vologda province, then by steamer for several days up the Suchona river, finally changing to horse and carriage Kandinsky followed the primitive roads ever deeper into the boreal forests of Siberia; he felt as if he were “traveling to another planet.” One goal of this trip was the study of the “pagan” customs of the dwindling indigenous Zyrian population. The Zyrians maintained the traditions of Siberian Shamanism: these are complex and very old mystical practices of transformation and healing revolving around the psychoactive mushroom Amanita Muscaria3. One such outcome of this psychedelic mysticism was a highly abstracted and exuberant aesthetic style. The Zyrians loved colors. They carved and painted everything. Kandinsky is unequivocal about his experience here: “It was a miracle;” he would remember it the rest of his life. In a 1937 interview he explains: “There I saw farmhouses completely covered with painting—nonrepresentational—inside. Ornaments, furniture, crockery everything painted. I had the impression of stepping into a painting, that ‘narrated’ nothing.”
But Seriously Kandinsky Probably did Mushrooms: Amanita muscaria was available in these regions, it was venerated by the natives: could he have been offered the experience? History is mute on this point. But there is a clue: after his journey into the boreal forests Kandinsky published a book of poems; one of the poems is called In the Woods. It is a fair description of a psychedelic trip. Here it is in its entirety:
In the Woods
The woods grew deeper and deeper. The red trunks bigger and bigger. The green crowns heavier and heavier. The air darker and darker. The bushes lusher and lusher. The mushrooms thicker and thicker. Until there was nothing but mushrooms to walk on. It was harder and harder for the man to walk, to force his way through without slipping. But on he went anyway, repeating faster and faster and over and over the same sentence: — —
The scars that mend.
Colors that blend.
To his left and slightly behind him walked a woman. Every time the man finished his sentence, she said with great assurance and rolling her r’s vigorously:
verrry cleverrr.
Primordial Fantasies: And yet at the end of the day the paintings speak for themselves. The show is arranged chronologically and if you take the elevators to the top then you can note his progression from post-impressionist landscapes that slowly evolve into abstraction and non-representation as you walk downwards; clearly he was on to something. What is curious is that the paintings oscillate from pure abstraction to “representations” of what may otherwise be un-representable. Kandinsky had read his Freud and was involved in the surrealist movement and so one may well describe the work as surreal, that is as dispatches from the terra-incognita of the interior cosmos. The work makes two basic assumptions about this realm: 1. It is not dark, but rather replete with the full spectrum of color. And 2. It is not void, or empty, but filled rather with form, action and strange entities. At its most oblique angle Kandinsky’s work produces the sense of primordial fantasies; ancient memories that predate our crawling out of the ocean. In the last instance the work is, for me, reassuring. Kandinsky (and the surrealists) affirm that I am no mere psychoactive-drug-user lost in wonderland, but rather a member of an obscure witness to a phenomena the discovery of which humanity is still recoiling from.
This phenomena is otherwise known as the unconscious.
