Mediators of Trance: María Sabina – Gordon Wasson – Bruce Conner
Essay by Ilka Becker
In: Ehler Voss (ed.): Mediality on Trial: Testing and Contesting Trance and other Media Techniques, Berlin: De Gruyter 2020, pp. 339-369
The psychedelic complex of the 1950s and 60s has so far been too little examined under the aspect of aesthetic and pop cultural appropriation. Starting from the thesis that the psychedelic turn to the Other implicitly perpetuates Orientalist and colonial visual aesthetics and gaze regimes, this essay analyzes Gordon Wasson's famous reportage in LIFE Magazine (1957) on the mushroom rituals of the Mexican shaman María Sabina with regard to the image politics in photo spread and mushroom drawings. In a second step, Bruce Conner's Looking for Mushrooms (1959-67/1996) is discussed as an attempt to establish experimental film as a medium of trance.