An ever-growing collection of scripts, ideas and works by: Julieta Aranda, Olivier Babin, Francisco Camacho, Derick Carner, Asli Cavusoglu, Etienne Chambaud, Audrey Cottin, Torreya Cummings, Gintaras Didziapetris, Cerith Wyn Evans, Michael Fliri, Mark Geffriaud, Fabien Giraud, Loris Gréaud, Graham Gussin, Will Holder, Pierre Huyghe, Joachim Koester, Gabriel Lester, Jennifer Di Marco, Patrizio Di Massimo, Nicholas Matranga & Francesca Bennet, Piero Passacantando, Cesare Pietroiusti, Matthew Shannon, Snowden Snowden, Gareth Spor, Maryelizabeth Yarbrough, Carey Young

HYPNOTIC SHOW FAQ:

Q: What is Hypnotic Show?
A: A temporary social structure of engaging into creative cognitive acts through shared practices of art and hypnosis.

Q: What is the relationship between art and hypnosis?
A: The Hypnotic power of artworks has always been a favorite trope of people looking for transformative potential of art. However instead of seeing “hypnotic power” as a rhetorical figure, Hypnotic Show aims at reducing art practice to the method of pure hypnosis. According to biometrics it connects to the brain faster.

Q: Why brain?
A: It is the ultimate destination of neuro-social engineering as well as subjectivities of yet-to-be-invented. From the perspective of ceaseless production and total transparency, the brain is seen as a final frontier to be colonised, from the perspective of individual subjectivity – as a last resort of things not-to-be-known. Hypnotic Show positions itself on both ends of the perspective.

Q: How does Hypnotic Show work?
A: When all spaces undergo gentrification and you think that your very inner subjectivity will remain a space of a strictly personal order your brain-waves are being measured against you.

Q: No, no, but how does it work technically?
A: A number of invited artists have submitted proposals for Marcos Lutyens to be performed on the audience through a session of hypnosis.

Q: Can my girlfriend attend the séance?
A: Of course, please tell her to RSVP at office/at/kunstverein.nl or contact/at/kadist.org to sign up for a séance that will take place on the 13th of November at 19.30 Kunstverein Amsterdam and on the 14th of November at 19.30 at Kadist Art Foundation in Paris

Q: Is it true that hypnosis can convince of the value of certain artwork against my will?
A: Multiple techniques are used in promoting art’s value, hypnosis is just one of them.

Q: What remains after this show?
A: Reconfiguration of principles about workings or art and mind implied by the artists’ proposals.

Q: Where can I find the artists’ proposals?
A: They will be available at www.rye.tw on – please feel free to download it.

Q: What is the relation of Hypnotic Show to The Man Who Taught Blake to Paint in His Dreams drawing by William Blake?
A: It is not clear in this painting whether the Man was teaching painting in his dreams and Blake had access to that knowledge telematically or whether Blake was taught how to make paintings in his dreams. Or both.

Q: Will there be any works of artists made under the influence of Hypnosis?
A: No, Hypnotic Show aims at inducing trance rather than show its static records.

Q: Is it an empty show?
A: A show in your head will never be empty. There will be possibly a dream-machine of Burroughs and Gysin installed in the gallery.

Q: Did it take place anywhere before?
A: Yes, at Jessica Silverman gallery in San Francisco in 2008 and Artists Space in NYC in 2009.

Q: What are the inspirations of Hypnotic Show?
A: Works of many artists including Graham Gussin, Matt Mullican, Ann Lislegaard, Pedro Reyes, Warren Neidich, Cerith Wyn Evans; conversations with Fernando Delmar, Pascal Rousseau as well as the work of all the artists participating in Hypnotic Show with proposals.

Q: Is Hypnotic Show about collaboration?
A: Not really, but the relationship between hypnotist and the audience should be be described as collaboration.

Q: Can I buy I a hypnotic artwork?
A: Not at this moment. However soon you will be able not only to buy, but to commission a hypnotic artwork created especially for you or to be able to induce your own hypnotic artwork on your friend out of pure love. Or both.

HYPNOTIC SHOW

, April 22-28, 2008, Silverman Gallery (San Francisco)

At the door of the Silverman Gallery you had to sign two releases before being allowed entry.  “Basically this one says you waive liability in case you get possessed by a demon while within these walls,” explains the gallery girl, “and this one’s stating you won’t sue if the dream machine gives you an epileptic seizure.”  Possessed?  Dream machine?  We were positively fibrillating by the time we took seats in the dimly lit gallery space on Sutter Street.  Job Piston and I sat warily, cameras in our laps, ready to snap any sign of ectoplasm or wrathful spirits, but apparently this was just part of curator Raimundas Malasauskas’ Barnum-like showmanship, and when he promised a “séance of hypnosis,” he was using “séance” as a metaphor, as one might say, “a whole bunch of hypnosis,” or, a “quiet evening of hypnosis.”  I don’t know how they say it in Lithuanian, but the philosophy of the studio heads of Hollywood’s golden age was, get those asses into the seats by any means necessary.  Malasauskas might well be the William Castle of modern curatorial projects.

I never felt that I was actually going to be possessed by an incubus, but artist slash hypnotist Marcos Lutyens certainly had us all going pit a pat as he entered and prowled through the space, dividing the audience into two groups, those who were volunteering, and those like myself afraid to participate, who wanted merely to watch.  Malasauskas had commissioned hypnosis scripts from a group of international artists, and Lutyens had worked four of them into a running spiel.  The ring of chairs was soon deep in a trance, the sitters nodding and blinking like rabbits, while he spoke on in a velvety, Michael Ondaatje baritone redolent of summer, with a poignant tang of autumn surprising some of his labial consonants.  Like I say, he worked the space, reaching out here and there to clasp shut a pair of hands a –trembling on a knee, to touch a supplicant’s forehead with his thumb, all the while counting us down, five, four, three, two, one.  At one we were in the deepest possible trance state, and then he’d have us count down yet again, from ten to one, deeper still.  One girl wound up so out of it her hair touched the ground in front of her, I’ve never seen anything like it, not even back in college when we took massive doses of animal tranquillizers to get over the outrage of having Nixon as president..

Meanwhile Lutyens was droning on in that intimate, simpatico way, walking us into Joachin Koester’s script about a park, a sidewalk, a civic building called the “Department of Abandoned Futures,” after which we crossed the threshold and descended a stairway, entered a hall, found a box filled with—with what?  We each were invited to imagine what lay within.  Deric Carner’s script was more ominous, I thought, a dark, cloudy horizon along which an unimaginable object began to evince itself—in a color we could not name, as it was not a color we had ever seen before—and the name of the large object came to us little by little as its Lovecraftian shape began to struggle in shadows and gleams across the sky.  I called my object “Zephyr.”  I don’t know why.  You’ll gather that my status as a spectator did not prevent me from joining into the general trance; Marcos Lutyens’ voice is so seductive that, were you in that room that night, you too would be dreaming these dark visions.  He leaned on some catchphrases that, perhaps, judged objectively, he used too often (“went back to the well one too many times,” as my dad used to say), but I never got tired of hearing him say, “And you’re drifting and dreaming—drifting and dreaming.”  Indeed I’m now engaged to Marcos Lutyens and cheerfully I am bearing his children without anesthesia.  I’ll just be drifting and dreaming in a bower of erotic bliss somewhere, bent to the floor, my hair soapy and washing his high-instepped feet.

Before I knew it we were waking up, one, two, three, four, five.  Kylie Minogue had that song on her LP, Body Language, which I should have listened to before exposing myself to Hypnotic Show.

Count backwards 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

Before you get too heated and turned on (and turned on)

You should've learned your lesson all in times before

You've been bruised, you've been broken


And there’s my mind saying think before you go

Through that door that takes me to nowhere (yes boy)

I stopped you all romantic crazy in your head

You think I listen, no I don't care . . . .

The truth is, I do care, and when Raimundas Malasauskas proposed hypnotism as an avenue of total interaction, a room full of mirrors in which objects create themselves from the swept floorboards of the Silverman Gallery—the birthplace of the golem—I went there.  You know how Susan Sontag coined that expression, “Don’t go there.”  Well, I went there, ignoring Sontag, thrusting myself in a post-Sontag space of risk, interpellation, and impending childbirth, drifting and dreaming, drifting and dreaming, in the Alterjinga of the Australian aboriginal people—the dreamtime.

By Kevin Killian