Exkursion
A couple of days before the opening of Carsten Höller exhibition’s Soma, there was already a buzz in Berlin about it. Comments over the for me at the time unknown artist were pumping out from different directions, mostly because of the subject of his latest work: the ritualist substance supposed to connect one with the whole(first alluded for many thru adolescent readings of Huxley).
Among speculations of what could this piece be, one thing announced the sensationalist aspect of it: the possibility of overnighting in Hamburguer Bahnhof for a ridiculous amount of money (I guess people were saying something around a thousand Euros). This price included the possibility of drinking the so called Soma – as well as having a very privileged spot in an artistic experience.
Despite the hints that it would be a shallow contemporary art fever, I ended up – lead by curiosity – visiting the exhibition right after its beginning.
From the ticket office, one can see pretty much everything that there is to see (although one expects that there will be more to it) – live deer in captivity and birds in gigantic cages; austere observation points and a holy bed in black sheets dividing the symmetric room; mushrooms in zip-lock plastic bags inside of refrigerators, along with other laboratory instruments; fractioned large scale models of the same mushrooms and not much more.
The introductory text on the entrance walls began with Hindu quotes about the achieved enlightenment after drinking Soma, and continues by describing in an anthropologic/historical/transcendental/fictional/scientific/art critic/ museum-like language the artist’s academic background, research on the topic, and results from his creative translation of it. After reading, I was left with a feeling that I didn’t understand what was attempted to be explained. Somehow, even that well written and using all this references we know from heart, the information seemed disconnected. I blamed my own ignorance or laziness and went ahead to check out on the very mentioned aesthetic interpretation of the author.
Only another source of guidance was there to be read: descriptions of the pieces mixing standard art gallery nomenclature with biology taxonomy and methodology (leaving suspicions of fiction).
Accompanied by my friend Silvia Noronha, an open-minded calm person who happens to be an artist herself, we walked around looking for something more until we realized there wasn’t, and I must say, I never saw her so angry before. We promised each other we wouldn’t tell our friends who had spoken about the exhibition that we went there, and later we would check on what did they have to talk about it. It would be a test to see what possibly could be said about this art work and if they would be honest enough to disattach from the current art world tendentious reasoning and affirm that it was all baloney.
For my surprise, I kept for long, flashes of this moment somewhere in my mind, and caught me mentioning it more often than I imagined I would after leaving the museum so disappointed.
And through one of this lucubrations it hit me that all this confusion, discommodity, dryness and frivolity contained in Soma represented a strong dilema of my own – the search for an interpretation of life, in its most heterologic sense. Whether by trying to fit in a scientific, artistic or spiritual aproach, or worse, by an agnostic Frankenstein combination of them all, we (at least I) swing in anxiety between perceptions trying to built a personal truth, coherent principles, connections between our experiences that shall be defended with the use of petrificated tools like the linguistic ones. And the weird feeling got from the exhibition portrayed the stupidity of this looping non-sense construction that I find myself in all the time, and that because of it Idon’tknowwhy should define who I am. It gaped how from a starting point those analysis don’t proceed in the real world, even if taken as sacred by many and for long.
The spiritual ones with their sense of superiority for believing they walk towards illumination. Scientists standing straight over their block made of reason and systems. The gift of talent and sensitivity from artists and art lovers. (Not even starting with the role of money in this scenario). Arrogance and denial walk around, specially nowadays that the basis for those beliefs are each time more falling apart.
At the end of the day, being in this exhibition denounced how those approaches just separate me from reaching a higher level of communication, or from this connection with the whole believed to be possible but never achieved. (Maybe it’s naive on my side, but this is a quest of my own too).
This insight marked for me the importance of the Carsten Höller and his art work. It’s good that someone did it, still I am glad it wasn’t me…
* Deeper analysis about Exhibition Design didn’t come in question, considering that the most important in the object of analysis is to wonder if such project should exist, instead of the details of how it was fullfilled.
