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Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in Easy Rider.Credit: The Kobal Collection/Columbia |
A new and fascinating exhibition, High Society, at the Wellcome Trust in London, explores the history of mind-altering substances from a historical and cultural perspective.
The rituals of drug use are universal and stretch back through centuries, and the visitor is immediately plunged into the dark and somewhat seedy side of an addict's life with a comprehensive cabinet display of paraphernalia – from crack-pipes made from plastic bottles and Coke cans, various tobacco and opium pipes, amyl nitrite capsules, snuff boxes to a Starbucks’ Styrofoam cup.
The evidence suggests that substance abuse is far from a modern disease, and High Society leads no stone unturned in its pursuit of the scientific facts.
Exhibition co-curator Mike Jay says: "The drug experience has been as widely documented by artists and writers as by scientists and medics, often inspired by their personal experiences. We've been able to draw on a wide range of material from across disciplines, creating an exhibition that invites the visitor to question our modern attitudes in the light of other times and cultures."
Media Hysteria Surrounding Drugs
In Weimar Germany, cocaine snorting in salons was all the rage; these days the internet has facilitated the rise of so called 'legal highs' such as mephedrone, a synthetic stimulant more commonly known as a 'Meow Meow'. The substance is now illegal in Britain after media hysteria put pressure on the government to force through a Parliamentary ban.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' manuscript, supposedly written after an opium dream, is featured in the 200 exhibits on display. The exhibition also includes NASA experiments with intoxicated spiders; a 17th-century account by Captain Thomas Bowrey describing his crew's experiments with bhang – a cannabis drink; an 11th-century manuscript with poppy remedies written by monks in Suffolk; and a hallucinogenic snuff set collected in the Amazon by the Victorian explorer Richard Spruce.
Visitors can see the influence of LSD and psychedelia with a recreation of artist Joshua White's original light show that was used as backdrop for gigs by Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa and Janis Joplin in the 1960s.
Contemporary art pieces exploring drug culture, include Tracy Moffat's 'Laudanum' portrait series and an installation work by Huang Yong Ping.
Clare Matterson, director of the Wellcome Collection and co-curator of the exhibition, says: "The Wellcome Collection is uniquely placed to encourage debate about the connections between medical science, the arts and our everyday lives. High Society draws together a rich collection of material which makes us look afresh at an enduringly addictive subject."
As the debate continues on the classification of marijuana, both in the UK and in some states in America, latest figures from the UN estimate the illicit drug trade is worth $320 billion (£236.6bn) a year.
Although it may appear that we are indeed in a 'the grip of an unprecedented addiction', the use of psychoactive drugs is nothing new, as the exhibition demonstrates, and indeed our most familiar ones – alcohol, coffee, tobacco – have all been illegal in the past.
Drugs: A Modern Disease
In an illustrated book of the same name to accompany the exhibition and written by Jay, he writes: “The public perception is that drugs are this terrible thing that appeared with hippies in the 60s; that they’re a modern disease. The historicality has been lost.”
Through paintings, artefacts, documents, sculpture and video, High Society explores how drugs and the impulse to delve into our sub-conscious 'simultaneously became fetishised and demonised in today's culture'.
‘Self Experimentation' follows both scientists' and artists' first hand experience of drugs as they looked to expand their horizons. Figures such as Mordecai Cooke (writer of the celebrated 1860 drug classic ‘The Seven Sisters of Sleep'), Sigmund Freud and 18th-century chemist Humphry Davy’s experiments with laughing gas are given prominence.
While Thomas De Quincey (author of 'Confessions of an English Opium Eater') and Charles Baudelaire ('On Wine and Hashish'), unite in a desire to push the boundaries of reality.
‘Collective Intoxication' explores communal drug rites from tribal ritual to hippy love-ins and the ecstasy-fuelled rave culture of more recent times.
'The Drugs Trade' looks at the British Empire's not so glorious role following the Opium Wars of 1839-60 when the British traded opium brought from India and smuggled into China to pay for commodities such as tea, silk and porcelain.
'From Apothecary to Laboratory' traces the roots of illicit drugs such as cannabis, cocaine and heroin and their role as medicines in many ancient cultures to the laboratories of the early 19th century when the coca leaf was first synthesised. Alexander Shulgin is also named checked as it was in his Californian garden shed where the compound MDMA (ecstasy) was first developed.
Are drugs a 'a sin, a crime, a vice or a disease?', asked British physician Norman Kerr in 1884. As successive governments have struggled to control drugs within three broad categorizations – education, medicalization and criminalization – the topic is still as contentious as ever.
To conclude, High Society catalogues in a thought-provoking way how the consumption of drugs has changed throughout the years but people’s need, or sometimes craving, for them has been constant.
As the British punk poet John Cooper Clarke said on BBC news: “Drugs won’t make anybody into an artist.” True perhaps, but that won’t stop us trying – so it seems.
High Society runs until 27 February 2011.
