'We Are All On Drugs' - so sang Weezer, and the Wellcome Collection suggests they may well have been right. Tom Jeffreys is fascinated.
With the recent publication of proposals by Professor David Nutt's Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs for the radical reclassification of alcohol, tobacco and narcotics, the Wellcome Collection's current exhibition could hardly be better timed. High Society examines the uses of mind-altering substances throughout history and, as is generally the way with exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection, it's rather brilliant. High Society features some amazing pieces, exhibited together with the kind of light touch and dynamic curatorial flair that we've all come to expect from London's most consistently wonderful institution.
The very first display case sets the tone, as a crude homemade crack-pipe is exhibited alongside Chilean trays for halucinagenic snuff dating back as far as 400AD. Later, there's a 19th century opium ball about the size of a baby's head; Mervyn Peake's illustration of the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland; four bronze crack-pipes sculptures by Keith Coventry; old syringes, pamphlets, laudanum bottles, a work by Dante Gabriel Rosetti; the original manuscripts of Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan; elsewhere, a framed series of LSD blotter paper, coyly labelled 'Private Collection'.
Splicing art with artefacts, archival documents with immersive installation pieces, High Society tells the kind of loose, vaguely left-leaning, Foucauldian-style history generally favoured at the Wellcome Collection. The exhibition's initial suggestion is that the desire to alter one's mental state is a “universal impulse” – drugs are in some ways natural, and it's only 'culture' or 'society' that suggests otherwise. The exhibition then traces the movement by (predominantly Western) culture to understand, appropriate and control these various substances.
High Society zips deftly from the Opium Wars (where drugs act as a tool for empire-building – alongside economic ruthlessness and 'gunboat diplmacy') to a series of maverick self-medicating scientists (like Sir Humphry Davy). Through them drugs were brought under the control of Science: no longer spiritual aids, but medication – even for babies, in the form of the opium-containing 'Gripe Cordial'. From here to the Temperance movement, through the 1960s, and right up to America's 'War on Drugs' today.
The exhibition has many highlights: Tracey Moffat's 'Laudanum' series of photographs – haunting, bleak and beautiful; Rodney Graham's acid-trip bike ride through the park to the sound of Pink Floyd; Brion Gysin's psychedelic 'Dreamachine'; Eugene Grasset's 1897 lithograph of a woman injecting her thigh – tension and pain etched across her face; and the beguilingly bonkers 'Joshua Light Show', nearly missable at the end of the exhibition. But for me the most amazing aspect is a short film clip of then MP (later Baron) Christopher Mayhew taking part in a filmed mescaline experiment. Not only is the footage hilarious but the fact that the BBC then refused to air it seems highly insightful.
Wellcome Collection exhibitions are characteristically light on text – they don't bully visitors into an opinion, but that doesn't mean that there isn't an agenda here. What High Society largely avoids is detailed scientific or sociological analysis. Yes, there's images of NASA's benzedrine, caffeine and marijuana experiments on spiders, but here these only really serve an aesthetic purpose. More of a clue to the exhibition's aims comes from a Prohibition-era cigar case designed to conceal flasks for illegal alcohol. It shows not only the ineffectualness of Prohibition (as repression always creates desire for the thing repressed) but also its arbitrariness: why alcohol but not, say, cigarettes or coffee? Similarly instructive is a 19th century goache depicting two rich opium addicts reclining serenely alongside two poor ones looking grim and emaciated. The drug gets the blame for what is at root an econmic issue.
High Society is not about what drugs are or do, so much as what they mean. The aim here is to explore the construction of a discourse of drugs, through Science as one institution among others – Education, the Law, Art, Religion, Politics... It is through these systems that drugs come to signify; but it is such systems that also corrupt, coerce and obscure meaning. In 1884 British doctor Norman Kerr pondered the notion of addiction, asking, “Is it a sin, a crime, a vice or a disease?” We still don't know. High Society suggests that, perhaps, we never will.
High Society is at the Wellcome Collection from 11th November 2010 to 27th February 2011.
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