After a few months in my parents’ basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things is dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.

- David Sedaris (from Me Talk Pretty One Day)

This month, the newest addition to the luxury boutiques and condominiums of SoHo is a meth lab. Tucked inconspicuously between Apple, Prada and Trump SoHo, the lab (or more accurately the depiction of a meth lab) is the central room of Black Acid Co-op, an immersive multi-room art installation that marks the return of counterculture to the shopping mall formerly known as SoHo. Black Acid Co-op is the third incarnation of Meth Lab in the Sun, a work by New York artists Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe. Deitch Projects reconstructs the work inside its massive Wooster Street warehouse where viewers are free to wander unmonitored through rooms depicting disparate environments of clandestine subculture, as if characters through a tripped-out Kubrick or Lynch film. Black Acid Co-op is essential viewing this summer, and even if we have the recession to thank, Deitch should be lauded for suspending commercial activities this month to present such a significant work. Site-specific in the purest of senses, Black Acid Co-op is culturally significant not only to art but to the city and neighborhood as well, a walking tour through dioramas of SoHo’s grittier past: the Chinatown bazaar, the bohemian den, the warehouse rave and even the contemporary art gallery.

Black Acid Co-op follows a long tradition of encompassing art happenings. Most recently, many New Yorkers will remember Mike Nelson’s Psychic Vacuum presented in 2007 by Creative Time, and indeed, the two works are closely related. Foremost, both share an aesthetic that falls somewhere between rotting ranch house and festering urban decay; and structurally both literalize the cinematic experience of moving between edits or jump cuts. However, despite some surface similarities, the two are remarkably different works. Nelson’s Psychic Vacuum was a presentation of non-specific archetypal space, a psychological experience of mood, emotion, memory and dream. Black Acid Co-op, meanwhile, is an aggregation of specific cultural referents, thus operating in the philosophical and analytic, more than the emotive or psychological. Meaning in simpler terms, Black Acid Co-op is about something specific. It is not about the abstract interiority of an individual’s mind; it is not timeless and spaceless like a dream or feeling; instead it is located in a specific time and context, about culture more than the individual, and as such, Black Acid Co-op explores specific subjects: Methamphetamine and the Metropolis.

METH
First things first: though it is maybe a taboo or distasteful topic (and this may be why most of its press has ignored or glossed over the subject all together) Black Acid Co-op is a piece about meth. In the first incarnation of the piece, Hello Meth Lab in the Sun, the work explored the production, use, logic, dysfunction and aesthetic of methamphetamine and its subcultures. In this current incarnation, Black Acid Co-op, meth has been dropped from the title, rooms added and rearranged, and its referents expanded to encompass the metropolis, yet the drug is no less potent in the work. Architecturally, the meth lab is still at the nexus of the environment. The lab is the central control room for the work, with its tubes and wires running throughout the installation, unifying the entire space. Further, the aesthetic of meth, the logic of the tweaker, is the conceptual unifying force of Black Acid Co-op.

Illicit methamphetamine production began largely in San Diego, making its way east in a reverse Manifest Destiny. The drug only recently crossed the borders of the original 13 colonies, and accordingly in New York its characteristics are still wildly unknown outside of myth and media. As a longtime resident on the West Coast, I can say to anyone who has never lived in a town ravaged by meth that you know a tweaker den when you see one. Slang for behavior most closely compared to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, tweaking is a primary symptom of Amphetamine Psychosis. It is the act of presumed productivity; the building and un-building of machines; the scavenging and rummaging through endless heaps of treasures and trash; the collecting, organizing and archiving of files, papers and junk; a tinkering marked by an undeniable fascination with tubes, cables, wires, lights and cords; the exposing of innards; the rigging of surveillance equipment; the ensuing paranoia; and the clawing, ripping, biting, decaying, lightless, timeless nature of a nonstop-24-hour existence. These, the hallmarks of methamphetamine use, are the forms and structures that unite every room of Black Acid Co-op. Spines manically ripped off books, jars of junk preserved as precious collectables, paint and carpeting picked and peeled with the ferocity of nail-biting and face-scratching. Make no mistake, this is a tweaker den.

Thus, Black Acid Co-op takes meth as its subject, exploring its cultural relevance, but more radical is that the work takes its forms from the chemical effects of methamphetamine on the user. As such, the piece can be viewed along a continuum of seminal and important works both about and derived from the drugs that are their subjects (i.e. psychedelic art relative to the hallucinatory effects of LSD). What is significant about this connection is that despite its prevalence (meth is now third only to marijuana and alcohol in many Midwestern states), unlike every other drug, meth has until very recently been largely unrepresented in popular culture. Black Acid Co-op marks in visual art what is just starting to happen in music, literature, film and television in recent works like Spun, Cookers, Methland, Tweak and Breaking Bad.

The longtime absence of meth from artistic production is as fascinating as it is puzzling. Countless significant artworks have been made about every other prevalent drug, and each has had its decade. In the 50’s (and 90’s) there was the heroin chic of Burroughs, The Man with the Golden Arm, Charlie Parker, Trainspotting and Kurt Cobain; in the 60’s and 70’s, psychedelic art pervaded the entire global explosion of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll with Zap Comix, Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and my personal favorite Hypgnosis (please Google the best album cover of all time—Yes’ Going for the One); and in the 80’s, coke had its decade with New Jack City, Miami Vice, Scarface and White Lines. Yet, though meth has been around since before WWII it has remained almost completely invisible in both dominant and subcultural production. In a very unscientific count, from the webpage “the 300 most classic drug movies of all time” only five films involve meth use, and all of those were made after 2001. (No need to even mention how many weed movies made the list, culminating of course with the 2009 sleeper hit – Evil Bong 2).

Such a blatant omission in a culture that loves to tell drug stories begs the question why. And moreover, why are people suddenly penning meth’s stories now? What’s changed? Research revealed two common explanations, which both seem scant and suspect. One explanation for the drug’s longtime invisibility is that there is just nothing cool about meth. Clearly, this is a flimsy chicken-and-egg argument, as I sincerely don’t think there is anything inherently cool about heroin prior to or outside of its storied victims, novels, movies and songs. Another explanation is that meth is so caustic that there was never any room for romanticism. Again, heroin? If we can romanticize the death and decline of nearly every rock star, actor, or beautiful junkie, no doubt there is room for a tweaker or two.

More likely, the explanation for the artistic hush around meth is subtler, something inherent in the drug and its subculture that has kept it off the cultural landscape for so long. Perhaps there is something about meth’s high that discourages users from forging the mythology of their subculture, an inherent lack of productivity, or an output with a bent toward the technological rather than the artistic (computer programming, engineering, mechanics). Maybe to be spun is to be inherently paranoid or secretive, a drug that pushes its users into clandestine societies, undesiring to parade their subculture before the exploitation of the mainstream, remaining instead in covert dens like those of Black Acid Co-op. Or maybe there is a profound shame in the high, contrasted with the megalomania induced by cocaine so obvious in the music of the 80’s, much of which reeks of too many lines off the soundboard and for which one wishes someone had felt some amount of healthy shame. And just as likely the demographics of race, class, and geography have played a major roll in its longtime cultural exclusion, as the drug has never been the choice of the cultural elite.

I posit no answers, but the fact remains undeniable that until very recently meth was the dirty backwoods Midwestern cousin who carries the reputation of being the one controlled substance (along with crack) generally agreed upon as taboo, trashy, destructive, and just plain bad. Why it breaks into the mainstream now is as yet unknown, perhaps the epidemic finally reached undeniable proportions, or Hollywood ran out of material, or it was just its time. Regardless, meth has begun its spread through popular culture, and Black Acid Co-op marks its appearance in visual art. This arrival is especially timely for two reasons. First, the exponential rise of meth’s use means that it will continue to be a clear and enduring fixture of American life for some years to come. Second, and more subtly, with over 20 stories in the New Yorker and The New York Times this year alone about the growing use and acceptance of Aderall and other mind-enhancing legal amphetamines (yes New York, Aderall is amphetamine), no matter what transpires with meth itself, the aesthetic of amphetamine courses through the veins of American culture already. For example, given the prevalence of Aderall among New York artists already, I realize that it is possible that the visual logic of of meth (concretized in Black Acid Coop) subtly structures the city’s artwork already. This may already be the century of Tweaker Art.

METROPOLIS
Rem Koolhaas, renowned urban theorist and architect, penned the ultimate “retrospective manifesto” on the Metropolis and Manhattan: Delirious New York. So appropriately, right around the corner from Koolhaas’ Prada store, the rooms of Black Acid Co-op mirror the zones of Koolhaas’ Manhattan, and to pass through them is to experience passage through New York just as Koolhaas described it. Commercial to residential, interior to exterior, crossing the liminal and interstitial zones of hallway, stairway and corridor, the entirety fused by the infrastructures of light, heat and plumbing. Black Acid Co-op is allegory of New York, but as it also stands as an equal and accurate representation of meth as well, the work posits meth and the metropolis as metaphoric. As Koolhaas wrote, “the Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires. The metropolis is an addictive machine from which there is no escape, unless it offers that too…” Koolhaas puts apt words to the metaphor of the city as drug and as user, built on the spun logic of a junkie. It’s not really so far fetched if one extends the metaphor. The hustle, the rat race, the long hours, the OCD stacking of its architecture, the partying, the sex-crazed-drug-induced-late-night-all-hours promiscuous underbelly of the city — the logic of the city is the logic of the tweaker.

This connection of city as drug, city as addict, and the strategy to view New York as the aggregation of a multitude of separate illicit dens of subculture is the central tenet of one of my favorite works about counter culture in the city, Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (which screens this Saturday and Sunday at the Anthology Film Archives). Black Acid Co-op and Chelsea Girls make for a perfect complement and viewing both together would be an epic New York date night. Chelsea Girls is an agglomeration of scantly scripted scenes, ostensibly recorded in different rooms of the Chelsea Hotel (though historically some were shot off-site). As with Black Acid Co-op, each room in the film presents a different sub-culture, a different peek into the underworld of the city. When they are compiled side-by-side (the film is dual-projected) these scenes aggregate into an experience of counterculture and a feeling of urbanity, just as with Black Acid Co-op. Yet, the truly great thing about the paring is that Black Acid Co-op is unpopulated, an environment without its freaks and miscreants, while Chelsea Girls is largely about the people who might subsist in its strange subterranean dens. (If you do go, stay for the credits to enjoy the single best piece of outro music ever recorded, vintage unreleased Velvet Underground).

I would say go see it now for two reasons (beyond that it’s a great pairing with Black Acid Co-op). First, Chelsea Girls is still requisite viewing for any New Yorker or art lover, especially anyone who thinks they totally understand Warhol. If you haven’t seen Chelsea Girls yet, then you are probably missing the whole picture (though really anyone who thinks they totally understand Warhol is probably missing the whole picture anyway). Second, this weekend is a rare chance to see the film at home, downtown where it belongs. Just as the rooms of Black Acid Co-op nod to the seedy side of SoHo’s past, so too Chelsea Girls revives the gritty downtown of yore. The last time I saw Chelsea Girls on screen, it was uptown at the MoMA. True to the neighborhood, most of the elderly MoMA members left displeased at the content or length before the end of the first hour. Those who remained were the dedicated soldiers of film history (think the Simpsons’ comic clerk) who shushed both my laughter and covert clinking booze (forgive me; it was Chelsea Girls after all). And I kid you not, when I say that the man three rows back asked me after I giggled at some line (it’s a funny movie sometimes, I swear), “Where do you think you are? Downtown?” Where am I, indeed?

So let’s face it, Chelsea Girls is a downtown film. And for now, while New York still has some vestiges of its downtown, seeing Chelsea Girls at the Anthology seems an obligatory New York activity. Really, it’s fitting to watch the film that marked the exact moment when counterculture had its own fifteen minutes from inside the old stomping grounds of its lowlifes. Yet sad too, because writing this, when I imagine actually walking out of the film, given how much the neighborhood around the Anthology has changed, I imagine that I might feel loss. I might wonder, where did all the freaks go? What happened to the Bowery, to the Lower East Side, to SoHo, to Greenwich Village, and to Chelsea? Walking the tidy and gentrified streets of Manhattan these days is like wandering through the unpopulated rooms of Black Acid Co-op. Tweaker den without the tweakers. It’s an emptiness that almost feels post-apocalyptic, except that neither Manhattan nor Black Acid Co-op is actually empty yet. As I watch the average New Yorker, somewhere on a break between brunch and Barney’s, ogling the increasingly foreign environments of slum and transgression, the city, like the artwork, reads as urban history museum, showcasing dioramas of humans no longer seen, civilizations lost to the Visigoths of real estate, I-banking, hedge funds and greed-thirsty mayors. This ain’t rock’n’roll – this is genocide!

Given the systematic gentrification of downtown Manhattan and the undeniable eradication of counterculture from its streets, there is something mournful about watching Chelsea Girls, as if watching field footage of a civilization extinct. This loss of Manhattan’s subculture is identified and decried all too often of late. So the question is not did it go, but where did it go? Let me extend the metaphor of New York’s counterculture as an indigenous jungle population for a moment. When the colonizers came and discovered the tribe on land they wanted for their own real estate plans, what then? Were the natives pushed further into the jungle, across borders north and east (Brooklyn, Berlin)? Were they interned in camps, reservations, human zoos or freak shows (again, Brooklyn)? Are they still here, wandering itinerant, homeless, displaced refugees who lost their Palestine to the conquests of NYU or Wall Street? Was there a sudden disaster, instantaneous and unexplained extinction as with the Mayans or dinosaurs? Or maybe extinction came in the slow and subtle death of enculturation, as when Sitting Bull or Tarzan donned the suit and disappeared into the polite society of the cubicle forever. Or more broadly, maybe the very notion of subculture itself is extinct, as the maw of dominant society finally swallowed even the possibility of a counterculture in the homogeny of boundless heterogeneity.

Maybe I am a nostalgic of the worst kind. Definitely really – the kind who whines about the city that was. So, take this with a grain of salt, when I say that walking out of Black Acid Co-op, I found myself hoping that David Sedaris was right – that maybe the congruence of meth and conceptual art truly is the magic alchemy needed to take down polite civilization, at least a little. To tussle the prim and priss of SoHo just enough to make room for a freak or two again. Or perhaps, as with all meth labs, common household and agricultural bi-products might turn so unstable as to explode in a stunning mushroom cloud of scattering pseudoephedrine that annihilates all of SoHo (or at least the transformation of Manhattan it represents) in its scalding radiation and light.

So, make it a date. Whether to claim one more night for the underground or just to toast its extinction, see Black Acid Co-op. Walk across the city past the Bowery to the Anthology. Watch Warhol’s Chelsea Girls. Nico is still as beautiful as ever, and the Velvet Underground are still in their prime. Then pound a whiskey, just for old times sake. Put the Ramones or Blondie on a jukebox. But stick to the side streets, since a walk down the Bowery or Saint Mark’s might destroy the momentary illusion that downtown New York is still there, just as it ever was. And wander aimlessly through a city that for many feels increasingly tame and unfamiliar. Then at last, in the sweltering muffling darkness of New York’s summer, look up at its glowing starless sky and say, at least I am still here.

I’ll be there too, perhaps right behind you, two rows back, one block over or maybe even holding your hand, pulling you forward. Bohemian, artist, and erstwhile reprobate myself, I will walk across the span of downtown, 14th to the Battery, Hudson River to the east, declaring at every block for all who care to listen or not, that though Stanley Bard has been ousted from the Chelsea Hotel, though the grindhouses long left Hell’s Kitchen, though there are women of polite society sunbathing in Tompkins Square Park, and luxury clothes being sold out of the bathroom of CBGBs, we are still here.

“Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe: Black Acid Co-op” is on view through Aug. 15, Tuesday – Saturday 12:00 – 6:00, at Deitch Projects, 18 Wooster Street, SoHo; (212) 343-7300, deitch.com.

“Chelsea Girls” by Andy Warhol screens Saturday August 1st at 7:00 and Sunday August 2nd at 6:00, at the Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd ave, East Village; (212) 505-5181, www.anthologyfilmarchives.org.

Cynthia Daignault is the art critic for Last Exit Magazine. An independent painter, writer and curator, she lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her works can be viewed online at CynthiaDaignault.com. She dedicates her free time to cupcakes, the banjo and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. She pledges as New York is her witness that Cynthia is to Felix as Joan of Arc was to France. Her most recent reviews looked at Dan Graham: Beyond, Picasso Mosqueteros and The Generational: Younger than Jesus.

Copyright Last Exit 2009