Abraham Lincoln, America’s second greatest president, according to the new president-elect, would perhaps have enjoyed the extraordinary event that has arrived at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich. According to persistent rumours circulating in the digital ether, Lincoln once said that two of his favourite things were “sitting on my front porch smoking a pipe of sweet hemp and playing my Hohner harmonica”.
It might be true. It might not. What’s telling is that the harmonica playing feels less likely than smoking the hemp. When it comes to puffing maryjane, the presidents of America have a persistent record of inhaling. Even Richard Nixon called for the decriminalisation of possessing marijuana. For personal use, of course.
The Sainsbury Centre mentions none of this in its sprawling examination of the links between drugs and art. Entitled Why Do We Take Drugs?, this carnival of getting high is more interested in international anthropology than it is in American politics. But Lincoln’s porch behaviour is worth remembering because it presents the smoking of hemp as a leisurely pursuit, a retreat from reality. That’s the opposite of what the Sainsbury Centre is saying in its show. The big point being made here is that we’re hardwired as a species to toke, smoke, chew, drink, rub, inject, inhale and swallow with a cup of water. And to do it all for critical reasons.
Set across the entire building in adventurous pockets of action, this multipart examination doesn’t really have a beginning. It happens everywhere at once in what is already a difficult collection to pin down. With its unique mix of art by famous artists (Bacon, Modigliani), objects from important cultures (Cycladic sculpture, Gabon masks), fascinating knick-knacks from distant regions (the icy north, the hot red south), sprinkled intermittently with contemporary work, the Sainsbury Centre is already a destination like no other in British art. Add drugs to the mix and you have a museum journey that is wickedly wacky.
I began downstairs in the basement with what appeared to be the most legible of the exhibition sections: a brief introduction to Power Plants: Intoxicants, Stimulants and Narcotics.
First up is tobacco, used tribally in the Americas in traditional medicine and religious rituals, then spread across the globe by the invading Spaniards. In its various forms tobacco prompted beautiful moments of international art: hand-carved pipes of delicate woods; inventive little containers for carrying snuff; an eerie video by the South African Sethembile Msezane showing the hands of her ancestors rising out of the sand to hand out alluring pinches of nicotine.
The three most popular global narcotics — alcohol, tobacco and coffee — are dealt with lightly. The fourth most popular, betel nuts, chewed enthusiastically across the entire Asian east, gets deeper attention. Even your daily cuppa gets a reference in an unlikely vignette devoted to the Japanese tea ceremony. The point keeps being made, and it’s a good one, that the label “drug” is as slippery as it is recent.
Having branded us as tea-drinking, coffee-swilling, alcohol-imbibing, tobacco-smoking, betel nut-chewing dope enthusiasts who recurrently make beautiful art that reflects our narcotic tastes, the show plunges into deeper and wilder territory when it begins investigating psychedelic substances.
Things get swirly with peyote, a mind-scrambling extract of Mexican cacti that Aldous Huxley insisted could open the doors of perception. The Huichol people of western Mexico collect it from the eastern deserts on arduous annual pilgrimages. Huichol artists produce complex “yarn paintings” in which their ancestral gods are seen interacting busily with a notably bendy nature. A typical Huichol yarn painting is so frantically packed with psychedelic details that it makes the art of Hieronymus Bosch look minimalist and staid.
So if I tell you that ayahuasca, the preferred psychedelic of the Amazon, makes peyote look like a cup of English breakfast tea when it comes to the bending of minds, you will get an immediate sense of how wildly strong ayahuasca can be. A large chunk of the Sainsbury basement is given over to an in-depth study of its influence on art — pots, animal sculptures, wall hangings, costumes — while a genuinely terrifying virtual reality experience created by Jan Koenen, called Kosmik Journey, plunges you into a vertiginous descent through a mass of swirling anacondas that apparently mimics the effects of this Indiana Jones of a narcotic.
All this is fascinating. But it also feels a mite too much like the “shamanic tourism” being complained about in the wall texts. Travelling to the Amazon to take native drugs has become unfortunately popular, it seems. The ayahuasca-imbibers of Peru and the peyote-chewers of Mexico manage to feel a little too much like the native dancers you find entertaining the tourists in restaurants in Tahiti. Their job is to supply western culture with tasty titbits of exotic experience. After the third slug of Pacific kava their contribution here feels like a colourful stop on a curatorial cruise.
Fortunately the show changes both tone and gear (geddit?) when it concentrates upstairs on less picturesque narcotics. Heroin Falls is a gruelling double bill featuring the photographers Graham MacIndoe and Lindokuhle Sobekwa, one from New York the other from Johannesburg. Both have recorded the effects of heroin addiction, MacIndoe on himself and Sobekwe on the street kids who inject themselves with nyaope, a mix of heroin and cannabis extract that is devastating the black urban classes in South Africa.
MacIndoe in colour, Sobekwa in black-and-white, confront us with scenes of squalor set in a different universe from the anaconda-rich village life of the Amazon. By photographing his own addiction with enough grubby glamour to tiptoe to the edges of “heroin chic”, MacIndoe feels like something of a day-tripper to the world of degradation. Sobekwa’s victims, in contrast, form a sad and eternally cursed cast for whom, you feel, there is no salvation. And somewhere along the line it’s our fault.
So far all the shows in this galaxy of drug investigation feel weighty and well meaning. So the arrival at the event of Lindsey Mendick with her crazy ceramic orgies featuring hungover rats hungry for a kebab, popping antidepressants while sprawled in heaps of alley dirt, strike a note that feels immediately more realistic. Goodbye, shamanic Amazon; hello, Britain today.
Why Do We Take Drugs? at the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, until April 27
