Contemp and the wall

One of the good things about flying so often is that I get the chance to quickly go through the magazine offered by the Airline company. 

The very good thing about these magazines is that they offer details about nice places to visit or events that are happening in the city you are heading to, from concerts to exhibitions, from modern to classical, etc. When I have business trips I don't even bother to waste my already poor sight with that, since I usually have 0% time to actually visit anything, apart from the hotel, the meeting spaces and the sightseeing taxi-tour to and from the airport.

But for Vienna it is quite useful, as here you can always find something to do, so I started a list in which I wrote down from the magazine, about things to do and see while in Vienna. Every time I get the chance, I go and cross something from the list.

A nice name that draw my attention was the so called Salon der Angst, an exhibition held al Kunsthalle Wien, where I eventually went last week. According to the booklet, "Angst" is a German word, which in English could be translated as Fear-Anxiety-Worries. I used the 3 words altogether, since the English booklet I took from the exhibition tried to sell "Angst" as the very German word that cannot be translated into English as just one of them.

Now, I am merely a freshy in this contemporary art thingy, so I will avoid making comments on the exhibition. All I can tell you is that it was worth the time and more information & pictures can be found here. But I will focus on a simple piece, that draw my attention more than others, especially after I read the text, which made me think about this Angst in a very diversified way. I couldn't say it better than the author of the Wall, so you can read below the description of what the artist wanted to express through such a simple idea as a Lichen Wall.

The proposal of a surface - Lichen Wall (Zin Taylor, 2013) 

"The spots that collect on a stone, these things know when they arrived. They're thousands of years old, remembering what came next, and next, and next. It's their job, it's what they do - they're lichen.

Foundationally, Lichen is a four-layer organism. The first and last layers are identical fungal hosts, the middle two a paired algae. Composed similar to a sandwich made of two elements, ham and cheese or peanut butter and jelly, the planar units of bread (fungus) contain a dialogue (algae) within its form (lichen). The forms can be small and repetitive, oblong or circular. they can be pools of colour, like a stain referencing the action that made it so, or cauliflower patterns traversing a surface with colourful growth, blanketing the host with a field of their thoughts.

Red, pink, rose, orange, yellow, lavender, blue, green, black, grey, darker grey, white, whatever happened, whatever that organism "saw" was absorbed, producing these colours. A field of spotted colour shifts hues according to the events, actions, gestures and forms, passing before it. Sometimes these spots are turned into paint, a memory-paste rubbed onto a surface to depict a person's impression of something. These are subjects that exist only in the mind, that can't be photographed. What exists in your mind? What secret thoughts control your actions? What have you painted today?

Photographic examples of lichen, in particular the scattered patterns produced through centuries of build-up, strike a fortuitous relationship to visual representations of 1960's LSD culture. Projected light shows, presented by Liquid Light Groups, were one of many aesthetic elements employed to visually define psychedelic culture of the 1960s. Light companies, specializing in live performances utilizing liquid inks and overhead projectors, routinely lent a visual complement to the progressive/psychedelic bands playing at the time. San Francisco's Brotherhood of Light performed at San Francisco's legendary music venues Fillmore West and Winterland Ballroom. Other groups of the area, with equally enigmatic names were The Single Wing Turquoise Bird Lightshow Troupe, Little Princess 109 and Light Sound Dimension (LSD).

This cultural activity of the late 1960's marked a period in history when, both institutionally and recreationally, investigations of the unconscious were actively facilitated through the exploratory use of psychotropic drugs. During the 1969 music festival Woodstock a now infamous public announcement was made to a collected crowd of a half million people urging them to "avoid the brown acid" as the effects weren't as expected. A mixture of chemicals, designed to produce elated psychological investigations, had been mixed wrong - the brown acid was the harbinger of the nefarious bad trip. The effect enabled a seemingly negative experience for those who had ingested this particular item of hallucinogenic facilitation. Stanislov Grof, a Czechoslovakian psychiatrist, has conducted extensive research into the bad trip phenomenon. This form of LSD induced psychosis, or psychedelic crisis, produces disturbing hallucinogenic experiences for the recipient. The manifestations can range from feelings of vague anxiety and alienation to profoundly disturbing states of unrelieved terror, ultimate entrapment, or cosmic annihilation - cerebral effects descriptive of elemental angst. Grof, as a founder of The Faculty of Transpersonal Psychology, believed an analysis of this state would lead to generative breakthroughs in the treatment of an individual 's psychosis, in particular the unresolved psychological tensions triggered during the course of the experience: bad trips generate positive material.

The bad trip philosophy predicates that the imaginative results of angst are generative towards analytical thinking. What does a bad trip look like? Let the mosaic field of lichen be a background of alternative possibility. The portrait of a slow-growing micro-biotic organism, never dying, always watching, absorbing, reflecting these thoughts as a colour palette scattered along a surface - a wall playing host to a myriad of thought."

So what does your lichen wall look like?