Paul Schimmel

Ecstasy acts as an intersection in which structures of human consciousness meet a range of contemporary art practices. Each work in Ecstasy, which accompanies an exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, enacts its own particular intervention into human consciousness -- surprising us, questioning familiar realities, and suggesting alternative ways of ordering experience -- through installation, painting, sculpture, and new media.Ecstasy traces two lines of contemporary show more inquiry into surrealism's fixation with altered states of consciousness. One follows the tradition of artists attempting to capture metaphysical conditions in representational form -- as seen in the wall-scale, resin-suspended pill paintings of Fred Tomaselli; Charles Ray's photographic self portrait, Yes, which depicts the artist on LSD; and Franz Ackermann's recent Mental Maps, abstract paintings that represent cities using his own subjective form of GPS. The other trajectory explores the notion of phenomenological experience through works that play on disjunctions in scale, or disrupt our means for spatial orientation. In Carsten Holler's Upside Down Mushroom Room, for example, the ceiling and floor appear to change places, while in Jeppe Hein's Moving Walls, museum walls begin to close in on the viewer. The 2,200 hand-painted polymer psilocybin mushrooms of Roxy Paine's Psilocybe Cubensis Field, meanwhile, suggests other possibilities for altering our sense of reality.These and the other bold and imaginative works in Ecstasy challenge conventional notions of interactivity while creating a heightened sensory experience for the viewer. Six essays accompany the artworks, considering such topics as the relationship of altered states to art-making, both as the manifestation of the artist's state of mind and as an experiential effect created for the viewer; drugs and the process of self-observation in literary works; and the "dark side" of altered consciousness.Distributed for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. show less

The rise of performance art, and its merging with more traditional forms like painting and sculpture, is the great revolution of postwar art. Its links to theater, photography, music, dance, politics, and popular culture have made it especially appealing to contemporary artists in remote areas; more than any other movement in recent art, performance has found a place throughout the world. Covering three decades of significant and original art, this book features work by more than one hundred show more artists from the United States, South America, Eastern and Western Europe, and Japan who have had a profound impact on the relationship between visual and performance art in the postwar era. Among the artists included are Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, John Cage, Lygia Clark, Yves Klein, Marta Minujin, Bruce Nauman, Helio Oiticica, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg, Niki de Saint Phalle, Atsuko Tanaka, and Jean Tinguely. Their work encompasses performative objects such as sculpture, artists' publications, drawings, photographs, and ephemera that come from performances, as well as documentary film and video stills. Published in conjunction with a major exhibition, organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Out of Actions illuminates the unique relationship between action, destruction, performance, and the creative process. Covering an unprecedented range of material, both nationally and temporally, the book offers the first critical comparisons of work that has previously been viewed as distinctly regional and unrelated. show less

Los Angeles, The Geffen Contemporary at The Museum of Contemporary Art

Accompanies the exhibition "Robert Gober" organized by Paul Schimmel and held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Sept. 7-Dec. 14, 1997