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PCP: POP/conceptual/psychedelic: Berlin-based Vancouver artist Jeremy Shaw talks to Lars Bang Larsen about his practice and the politics of psychedelica.

Article Excerpt
LARS BANG LARSEN I'd like to begin by asking you a general question, because I am curious about your motivation for working with the psychedelic as one of your main subject matters. Psychedelia is rife with paradox. On the one hand it is over-identified because it lends itself to certain easy fascinations and to cliches about style and behaviour. On the other hand, it is strangely mercurial and difficult to grasp because the whole subversive 60s ethos is still with us in contemporary capitalism, but now in new, affirmative guises. On another level, once one approaches psychedelia with analytic intentions, it has a way of immersing your discursive tools and abolishing the distance they usually need to function. So for an artist it must be quite a bag of fleas, and difficult to excavate critical and artistic tropes from such a paradigm that is at the same time banal and recognizable, and complex from the point of view of both its cultural history and its philosophical construction.

JEREMY SHAW I think that my motivation for working with the psychedelic can be traced back to being a teenager and taking LSD for the first time. I was so incredibly re-enthralled with the world after this experience that the desire of getting to the bottom of it seemingly never left me. I also watched Pink Floyd's The Wall (1982) and Altered States (1980) at a very young age, both of which, in equal parts, scared the hell out of me and made me want to explore the hallucinogenic side of things.

The paradoxes that stigmatize the psychedelic are some of its main attractions to me. I am still totally enthralled by the possibility of the psychedelic, as well as the tropes, baggage and irreverence that theoretical opinion often carries towards it. There's a huge grey area that exists when a mapping/ representing/recollecting of altered states/ of the psychedelic is attempted. On one side, you have advanced scientific studies that probe to identify and represent what is happening chemically and physically during a psychedelic experience and, on the other, [you have] populist recollections (representations) that attempt to convey what was happening within the psychedelic experience itself--oddly enough, the scientific images are often very similar in aesthetic to what is generally referred to as "psychedelic" So, you end up with a meeting of high science--generally regarded as fact--and kitsch, which is rarely given a second glance. I find this incredibly exciting as an artist, though, because, factually, neither side can claim complete confidence in their rationale, the validity of either is always in question--which, to me, puts them on a level platform for critique. I've started working with these ideas in my series Representative Measurements of Altered States (To Aid in Further Alterations) (2005), which posits neuroscientific imaging against the kitsch-psychedelic staple of the black-light poster. I really think there needs to be re-investigation into areas of psychedelia that have been cast to the side as kitsch--and, thus, [viewed as] irrelevant.

It is also amazing to me that a period in history (the 60s) was able to...

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