Latest news with #Michaux
The Guardian
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Henri Michaux review – the delirious artist who took mescaline so you don't have to
Psychedelic art has an image problem. Picture it and you may see tie-dyed fabrics, muzzy portraits of Jimi Hendrix, endless vistas of magenta. By the end of the 1960s, the wave of drug experimentation that started with Aldous Huxley and the beat generation had inspired a lot of great music – but very little good art. The writer and artist Henri Michaux had several advantages that helped him transcend all that mediocrity. He was born in Belgium – not California – in 1899 and lived an avant garde life in Paris where in the 1920s he was photographed by Claude Cahun and hung out with the surrealists. He inherited a tradition of bohemian drug experimentation that went right back to poet Charles Baudelaire and his fellow members of the Hashish Eaters Club, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. So in 1955, when Michaux tried mescaline, derived from the Peyote cactus, he approached it as a surrealist creative technique, not a search for self-expansion. He shut himself up, ate a special diet, then let the drug wear off before he tried to capture in drawings what he had experienced. The results, on show in the Courtauld's drawings gallery, where you'd normally expect to see Old Master sketches, are addictive wonders of abstract art. Graphically precise yet sublimely suggestive, these works were first unveiled in a 1956 book called Miserable Miracle. They have the intensity of Jackson Pollock, but on a much smaller scale. They can also save you money and protect your health and sanity – for Michaux gives such a convincing visual account of what mescaline did to his brain that you can feel it work on yours. These artistic miracles don't just describe a drug experience. They set off a fizzing delirium in your own mind's eye. It starts gently. Soft horizontal black lines hover on a sheet of paper, interrupted by more heavily inked eye-like shapes, almost like musical notation. This delicate drawing beautifully suggests an oscillating chord or an underwater pulse. Michaux said he was expressing the tingling state the drug left him in. It's as haunting as the ping at the start of Pink Floyd's Echoes. Of course, you don't create a work of art as poetic as this just because you took a drug. Michaux had a long artistic life behind him that included using surrealist techniques to release spontaneous images. From these he graduated, like other artists after the second world war, towards abstraction, whose high priests had been the rationalist and geometric Mondrian and Kandinsky. But in the 50s abstraction went wild, improvisatory, expressive, and its hero was the alcoholic American Pollock. What mescaline gave Michaux is the freedom to be a French Pollock. His lines lead you into knotty forests, throbbing mazes. He never loses a sense of perspective but uses it to give his visions a reality in space. In one drawing, a shimmering network of reverberating lines recedes into the distance to resemble an aerial photograph of a giant prehistoric earthwork. In another, the entire paper is covered with entwined tubular forms in black and red ink, their surfaces dotted and flecked to create a texture like elephant hide. What is this wood of symbols? It could be vegetation, or arteries, or the brain's neural network. As a surrealist Michaux was accustomed to seeing images in random marks. It's a process that touches on how the brain works – and maybe mescaline intensifies it. As you gaze into these drawings, they seem to shape themselves into images, only for the images to slip away, mere phantoms of the mind. I think I see a spine and a skeletal hand and sometimes Michaux sees them too and sometimes he doesn't. In one drawing, an owl or a ghost might be peeking out, but any landscape I grope for in the mayhem of its great neighbouring sketch is obviously an illusion. This dark, rough surface is not any one thing even if it can make you see many things. Michaux takes you to the depths of your own mind where reality and fantasy interbreed. But the more you look, the more violence intrudes. Images turn gory – these include dismembered bodies and, in my eyes anyway, a rattlesnake. Has the Mexican Peyote awakened primal memories of Aztec sacrifices? It's more likely these cultural associations are hovering in his thoughts – and mine. I am the lizard king, I can do anything. Michaux's drawings have the conviction of a Holbein portrait. He believes he is drawing the truth, even if it is inexplicable. This is what makes them uncanny. And like all the most memorable records of psychedelic experiences, they have a disturbing, disillusioned edge. After all Michaux drew them after the mescaline had worn off. In one drawing, a sea monster with squid-like tentacles floats in crystal clarity. Did he really see this? Would you want to? Michaux broke through the doors of perception so you don't have to. Be grateful. Henri Michaux: The Mescaline Drawings is at the Courtauld Gallery, London, 12 February to 4 June
Yahoo
06-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Former state Rep. Mickey Michaux: Trump critics must take fight to the streets
Former North Carolina State Rep. Mickey Michaux says protests like the one that took place in Raleigh and several other state capitals on Wednesday, February 5 must become commonplace if progressives are to successfully resist the Trump administration's conservative agenda. (Photo: Brandon Kingdollar/NC Newsline) A return to the strategies of the Civil Rights Movement is needed to turn back Trump administration policies that threaten to erase hard-won progressive victories that led to economic, racial and social advancements for all Americans, former state Rep. H.M. 'Mickey' Michaux said this week. The 94-year-old Durham Democrat added that President Donald Trump's policies will be felt broadly, negatively impacting Americans of all economic classes and political stripes, and not just those in minority communities. 'If enough people get out there and start marching in the streets and showing disgruntlement and disfavor with Trump's program, either one or two things will happen; somebody's going to try to impeach Trump again or those who have been elected to office will begin to recognize that they're under fire too,' said Michaux, who formed a personal friendship with Martin Luther King Jr., in the 1950s. Trump was impeached twice during his first term but eventually acquitted of all counts by the U.S. Senate. On Wednesday, a day after NC Newsline's interview with Michaux, U.S. Rep. Al Green, a Texas Democrat, announced that he is introducing new impeachment articles against Trump in the wake of the president's comment that the U.S. would 'take over' Gaza. Michaux emphasized the need for leadership from both parties to work together to develop a unified strategy to protect the American people from Trump policies they believe are harmful. 'It's going to take a combination of leadership coming from both sides of the tent, all angles of defense to get together and work out and do the same thing,' he said. Michaux pointed to lawsuits filed against the Department of Justice by FBI agents who participated in investigations related to Trump as an example of how to push back against unpopular Trump actions and policies. The agents want to block the collection and release of names of investigators who participated in the probes of the Jan 6, 2021 U.S. capitol insurrection because they fear retaliation from the Trump administration. 'To me, that's the way to go,' Michaux said. 'Trump is pushing things like he's going to be a dictator.' In a wide-ranging interview, Michaux, who has a long history of successful legislative negotiations, particularly in securing funding for historically Black colleges and universities, drew parallels to the Civil Rights era, emphasizing the need for a united front across racial and political lines. 'I don't know why they [Trump supporters] thought Trump would change if they gave him a second term,' Michaux said. 'It's upsetting to the point where if we don't watch ourselves, we're going to be right back where we were [before the racial and social advancements brought on by the struggle for civil rights].' I'm like Martin, though, I might not get there with you but we're going to get there.' – Former State Rep. Mickey Michaux Voters must hold elected officials accountable, Michaux said, warning that middle class whites will likely be affected more by some of Trump's policies, particularly those the president contends are designed to streamline the federal bureaucracy. 'They put them into office and they're going to have to make up their minds now about whether to raise enough fuss about it to make them [GOP leaders] back off of what they're doing,' Michaux said. 'That's the only way that we can go at this point.' A lot is at stake, said Michaux, who was the longest tenured member of the North Carolina General Assembly when he retired in 2018. Public education as we know it is at risk if Trump gets his way and dismantles the U.S. Department of Education, he said. 'North Carolina and other states have agreed to allow the United States government to help us make a free and fair education available to our kids,' Michaux said. 'You take that federal money away and the only way you're going to be able to maintain programs to provide free and fair education is to raise taxes on the state level.' Trump and other critics complain that the department mismanages taxpayer money and inserts the federal government into local education issues. Michaux said he and King had many discussions about social and racial issues and strategies to address them. Remarkably, he said, what's happening under Trump's leadership feels eerily familiar. Michaux expressed disappointment in the racial attitude some leaders still hold. Like a piano with its black and white keys, both of which are needed to create melodic music, Michaux said, Americans must come together in the spirit of unity and cooperation. 'I'm disappointed that there are still some folks living who are in positions of power and don't realize that it takes everybody to work towards success,' Michaux said. North Carolina is in a good position with a Democratic governor who can operate without threat of a veto, Michaux said. 'I think once folks begin to realize that once they're in danger from a federal government knocking out all the programs that help the state, things might take a change for the better. I'm like Martin [Luther King], though, I might not get there with you but we're going to get there.'
