Jekyll and Hyde Revisited: Paradoxes in the Appreciation of Drug Experiences and Their Effects on Creativity

This commentary article (2002) imagines the two sides of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as two parts of a psychedelic experience. This is applied to artists in this somewhat esoteric article.

Abstract

“Historically, states of intoxication—like dreams and madness—are seen in either one of two opposed ways. The intoxicated are either “possessed” or “under the influence” of an external agency, or revealing hidden feelings or truths (in vino veritas). Along the same lines, artists who worked during LSD, mescalin or psilocybin intoxication often refer to feelings of either being “possessed” or “liberated,” a difference that can be explained partly by their expectations and partly by their evaluations, which both tend to conform to the cultural dichotomy in interpreting the irrational. Both interpretations, however, tend to obscure not only the other, but also—it is posited—the paradoxical nature of the drug experience itself. Analysis of a protocol shows that intoxication might comprise feelings of “possession” as well as “liberation” almost simultaneously, and mediumistic and some psychedelic art shows stylistic traits that can be seen as the visual expressions of both these feelings. It seems that the “demoniacal” and “psychedelic” mode come together in experiential reality, only to be divided in the cultural sphere.“

Author: Jos ten Berge

Summary

Drug experiences seem to differ little from other irrational experiences such as dreams or madness, and are usually interpreted in one of two diametrically opposed ways.

The same holds true for madness: some people’s weird pronouncements are thought to reveal prophetic truths, while other people are ridiculed, placed under medical care and/or removed from society as clinically insane.

Alcohol often makes us say things we wouldn’t say in other circumstances, but at other times our audience takes our utterances very seriously. Drunks speak the truth, as popular wisdom has it.

CULTURAL RELATIVISM

It doesn’t seem very likely that science will prove one interpretation of dreams true or another, but cultural historians will point out that there are two kinds of dreams, madness and intoxication.

Different cultures and periods within one culture can be divided along the lines of dream-lovers and dream-haters, with the two posi­ tions keeping on shifting throughout history.

The cultural historian’s approach to dreams, madness and drug experiences is ultimately not very satisfying, because it argues that they are culturally conditioned, and that their nature remains irrational. As an art historian, I am studying the history of drug use in nineteenth and twentieth century Western art. I have found that there are two groups of artists who used drugs, those who claimed to find truth in irrational states, and those who claimed to find only nonsense and deformation.

Magical Painting

Drugs like mescalin and LSD were referred to as “hallucinogenic”, “psychotogenic” or “psychotomimetic” until the late 1950’s, when they were seen as transforming the user from a conscientious Dr. Jekyll into a demonically driven Mr. Hyde.

In 1940, psychiatrists Walter Maclay and Erich Guttmann asked several artists to work under the influence of the hallucinogenic drug mescalin. They found that the artist’s drawings were dominated by wavy lines.

Richard Hartmann recorded many artists’ statements about taking LSD and going to work. He distinguished three levels of intensity in this process.

Jose’s drawings show that he typically becomes obsessed with drawing details that often fester on interminably. He lost sight of his original con­ cept and started filling in the space within the leg’s outlines with ornamental doodles.

At the second, more intense level of “fusion”, artists felt their hand being driven by some kind of external force. At the third, most intense level, artists lost all reflection and became completely absorbed by what they were doing.

Mediumistic Doodling

The comparison with mediumistic art, which is made by people who work in a trance-like state, is quite appropriate here. Mediumistic art typically presents networks and aggrega­ tions of simple repeating shapes, resulting in densely patterned textures, which sometimes have a flat and deco­ rative effect, but sometimes suggest unfathomable depths.

Mediumistic art typically combines impulses of compulsive in-filling and free gesture, and the result is a kind of elastic, undulating space with, in places, more dense and rigid decorative patterns suggesting faces or Gothic structures offering glimpses into infinite universes.

Drug users often start doodling, and an LSD trip makes for many “mega-doodles”. The Amsterdam artist Jan Kervezee would start with a few lines and let the composition develop itself, just like doodling.

Cardinal (1989) saw mediumistic art as a harmonious blend of structuring and delirious tendencies, characterized by symmetry and chaos, cool austerity and impassioned freedom, fixed struc­ tures and fluid arabesques, though the balance can be seen shifting to one or the other extreme.

A new generation of users of drugs like LSD abandoned the psychiatric approach and instead used the adjective “psychedel ic” to describe them. This view was an updated version of the old in vino veritas lore.

Artists found the alternate picture of the operation of drugs much more attractive, and their work changed according to the results of experiments.

Janiger’s subjects seemed happy with the results, and many thought the experience had produced “a desirable lasting change” in their work. Another large-scale research project was conducted by Robert Volmat and Rene Robert, who observed that after 20 to 30 minutes the artists lost all their experience with colors, drawing and spatial composition.

When the artist accepted the new circumstances in which he had to work, he would discover his “elementary expressive faculties” and work faster than usual, sometimes leaving his brushes behind to work directly with his hands or even throwing his paint.

Volmat and Robert’s subjects believed the drug effected disinhibition and the disclosure of something true and basic, and their work often showed a lasting change of character.

SET AND SETTING

Hartmann used LSD, Volmat and Robert psilocybin, and the setting in which they were taken was instrumental in determining the conclusions reached by each artist.

The German artists were less interested in the experiment than the French artists, possibly because Hartmann offered them a “model psychosis” and because he was a prominent gallery owner.

All of Hartmann’s subjects were established artists who had worked for many years to find and develop their own personal style. They were anxious about their artistic credibil ity and decided to resist the drug’s effects, believing that those who were least affected by the drug were the greatest.

The French artists may have been expecting more of an artistic breakthrough than their German counterparts. They may have also been more open to experimentation and less anxious about having their style changed or their artistic credibilty questioned.

The experience of being “demoniac” or “liberating” is largely dependent on the user’s expectations, and evaluations tend to conform to either side of the cultural dichotomy that categorizes such experiences as either misleading and deforming or liberating and reveal­ ing.

Evaluations of drug experiences tend to stress some aspects at the expense of others, and researchers have to balance between stressing the liberating aspects of the experience and downplaying the demoniac aspects.

The censoring of drug experiments obscures the paradoxical nature of drug experiences, and it is not uncommon to find references to both feelings of being possessed and being liberated in the same protocol.

A physician and amateur painter experimented with LSD and mescalin in Basle, Switzerland, and then drew a series of portraits of a present supervisor before, during and every hour during intoxication. This would provide him with “objective” visual protocols for each drug to be diagnosed later on.

Matefi’s experience with LSD was both “possession” and “liberation”, as he felt both “frustrated” and “furious” after his drawings were “dragged along by the dynamics of some ‘system of coordinates’”.

Matefi’s experience corresponds with the idea of being possessed by an outside force, as can be observed in his visual protocol, dislocation of the ear and legs of the glasses, and increasing lack of motor control.

Matefi decided to give up on his attempts to create a realistic portrait and instead let himself go, creating a drawing in which all the features of his model seem to be lost in one explosive configuration.

Matefi felt possessed and free almost simultaneously while taking LSD. He drew lines “as they are given to me”, combining the seemingly incom­ patible phenomena of possession and liberation.

Matefi’s paintings became slower and more rhythmical, resembling straight or curly, repetitious hatchings, after the effects of LSD had subsided and he felt very tired.

PSYCHEDELIC ART

Matefi’s experience illustrates that feelings of possession and liberation do not automatically exclude each other. At the peak of intoxication, demon and muse fused into one and the same experience of “inspiration”.

Several good examples of this alternation in working method can be found in Psychedelic Art, a mono­ graph published by the psychologists Robert Masters and Jean Houston ( 1968). Isaac Abrams, a salesman in daily life, became an artist in 1965 during his first experience with LSD. Abrams’ paintings were a natural expression of his innermost feelings, painted by a brush that he experienced as an extension of his hand.

Abrams’ art illustrates the combination of two extremes described above, outgoing fluidity and mechanic doodling, and is characterized by bold, Art Nouveau-like lines, followed by hatchings, decorative patterns and doodles, sometimes flat, deco­ rative patterns and sometimes three-dimensional spaces with figurative forms.

Abrams’ early drawings are still dominated by the expansive impulse, and are filled with doodles. His later works are more elaborated, and are filled with bold lines that create a dynamic perspective space.

A JANUS FACE

The division of irrational experiences into deforming and revealing ones is a cultural construction, and artists’ feelings of being either possessed or liberated can be shown in artworks.

The two opposed interpretations of states of intoxication only tell us half of the story, obscuring the true nature of such experiences. This schism has been present throughout cultural history.

Still, it is strange to take a drunk man’s utterings for honest truths at one time and for complete gibberish at another. We might try to deal with the paradoxical nature of these states themselves.