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Nothing Personal
Live through this Saturday night
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Column
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Nothing Personal
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[10/27/99]

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Despite their potency, the datura, ephedra and belladonna all look like dull desiccated weeds. Not so with the thousands of brightly colored pills that are neatly divided into boxes of white rounds, colored rounds, white capsules and colored capsules. The sheer abundance is mesmerizing and raises the question: Where did you get all this stuff? From outdated samples, friends' old prescriptions, anonymous donations in the mail and bulk orders of nonprescription drugs from a wholesaler. It is a virtual waterfall of free drugs.

In the early days of his drug paintings, Tomaselli used all kinds of illegal substances in his work, but today he is leery of the black market for fear of having his paintings seized in customs as they travel to shows around the world. Besides, most street drugs, no matter how powerful, aren't nearly as pretty as the ones manufactured by pharmaceutical companies, which design their product in sophisticated, ravishing color combinations unique to each brand.

Fred points out that the soothing sea-foam green and beige of a Prozac capsule matches its soothing "prosaic" name and function. He demonstrates the way "Zoloft" rolls off your tongue on an onomatopoetic cloud of good feeling. Someday he'd like to meet one of these drug designers and have a heart-to-heart about color, form and the suggestive power of names.

Despite the quantity of drugs in his work, it is not entirely about drugs. Rather, it is about our quest for the sublime in a mediated reality that seduces us with beauty while masking the shadow side of terror and death. The obvious reason for the enchanting appearance of each gorgeous pill is that they are meant to be swallowed (and, as in "Alice in Wonderland," the right one must be swallowed for the desired effect). The not-so-obvious reason is so that a paramedic on the scene or a frantic 911 caller can diagnose an overdose based on the description of a pill.

Tomaselli likens his work to a Proustian experience -- drugs are his generation's madeleine. Even without a deep hallucinogenic drug backlog to draw upon, the jewel-like quality of pharmaceutical drugs elicits the stimulating and subduing effects of the many substances, legal and illegal, that alter one's ordinary waking consciousness.

But all drugs are not created equal. Historically, they don't even produce the same kind of art work. Despite the reputation of the '60s for wild, drug-ridden abandon, the art of the time was highly regimented and detailed. Op art, pop art and the obsessive detail and overall patterning of hallucinogenic art, macramé and even cheap imported tapestries matched the introspective pothead predisposition for obsessing on tiny details. This was definitely not the art of the bohemian '50s, when the disinhibiting properties of alcohol fueled the aggressive gestures of abstract expressionism. Just try to imagine Jackson Pollock sitting still long enough to look for a universe in the head of a pin.

Tomaselli is from another generation altogether. He is well-versed in how the hippie dream crashed and burned on the shoals of disco and cocaine (much the same way that modernism fell apart in the face of postmodernism). Tomaselli began picking through the rubble from a punk rock perspective, redeeming aspects of both, and exploring the toxic nature of beauty. He is not a crusader for political change in drug policy, despite some of its obvious absurdities. He is an artist tackling issues art can carry.

But hallucinogens do not great painters make. Even though the work is a direct result of his quest for the sublime through the hallucinogenic experience, there is no way he could create anything of lasting beauty on peyote or acid. Coffee and cigarettes are the dominant drugs of choice for this kind of work. Hallucinogens just take too damn much time, and render the user too dysfunctional, which is why alcohol, tobacco and stimulants are the drugs of capitalism.

Tomaselli sees no irony -- or better yet, an irony too obvious to point out -- in exhibiting his work in a space sponsored by Philip Morris. Ten years ago, before the tobacco industry settlement, it was considered a mark of bad faith in the art world to accept funds from the tobacco giants. Times have changed and nanny culture has moved on to gun manufacturers and elephant dung. The anti-smoking campaign has once again made cigarettes a medium for teenage rebellion.

Next page | The jewel-like promise of a pill