“I don’t do drugs, I am drugs” – Salvador Dali
Every single piece of art is born in a specific, edgy state of mind… like in some severe mood swings. Recently, I’ve been arguing with a friend of mine about ways of fueling creativity among painters. As a historian of art, she was tending to nullify my theory.
Avoiding flirting with stereotypes, I’m just trying to point out that you are an artist or you are not. But a sort of drug pops up as a nursing bottle of genius. Syncope. Twilight. Unconsciousness. “It tends to reveal our shadow side, it can be useful in fueling creativity” as John Callahan said. The drug of choice inevitably seems to be alcohol. It appears as the only drug that Western Society not only legalized but also glorified in a sophisticated way from Apollo, Dionysus and Bacchus.
It just seems like alcohol goes with the most innovative ideas providing powerful wings of desire and making an artist become defiant and free. Takashi Murakami’s eyes would then see them as an army of mushrooms.
Unfortunately, mushrooms don’t live long. As Hegel predetermined, we’re all approaching the end of art. Nursing bottle nourishes them slowly leading them in a tragically romantic self-destruction.
Vincent Van Gogh was very fond of absinthe. Some theories explain his obsession with yellow color with the fact that absinthe contains a neurotoxin called thujone whose overdose can cause xanthopsia (=seeing objects in yellow). His coeval Paul Gauguin didn’t hide his fondness of alcohol.
Soon after his graduation, Toulouse Lautrec gave himself up fully to the bohemian side of life drinking and sketching at the same time every night in cabarets and brothels.
Pablo Picasso, Amadeo Modigliani and Jean Cocteau were well known for their excessive use of alcohol. Modigliani died at the age of 35 of tubercular meningitis but bad drinking habits had certainly redoubled the pain.
There was a so-called New York School, artists’ club on East 39th St in NYC led by Elaine de Kooning, wife of Williem de Kooning. During the 1940s and 50s artists and intellectuals like Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock were gathering there for some intellectual conversations and drinks… The second one appeared to be preferable. And the place got its name – De Kooning Party Headquarters. Rothko happened to become a victim of that environment. Pollock preferred a working class place called Cedar Tavern where he used to drink/sit/whatever with Andy Warhol and Franz Kline. It would be needless to mention Warhol’s Factory in 47th St E where crack and absinthe were part of daily routine.
Quite the same place existed (and still does) in London’s Soho. The Colony Room Club, founded by Muriel Belcher, has attracted bunch of English artists from Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud at the beginning, to Damian Hirst, Tracey Emin, Abigail Lane, Tim Noble, Sue Webster, Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume, Jane & Louise Wilson, Gavin Turk… Francis Bacon even had a weekly “salary” consisted of free drinks in exchange for bringing in new artist-customers. Michael Andrews eternized the atmosphere on his painting with Bacon, Freud and Belcher.
In the early 1980s, along with German new wave, young artists Kippenberger, Albert and Markus Oehlen, Werner Büttner, Georg Herold and Günther Förg, refused to be dictated to or to show respect. Claimed to be hard-drinking personas, they continued assimilating their hollow and sensational alcoholic shows.
Marina Abramovic made a drug experiment testing whether a state of unconsciousness could be incorporated into a performance. Her body did react violently but her mind was lucid. The goal was reached.
Sam Crees and Peter Teraberry came up with an idea to devote a whole museum to this artist’s bed habit. So now we have MODA, The Museum of Drunken Art in New York City founded in honor to love of artist and alcohol. Cheers!
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