Set and Setting: The Mind Manifesting Possibilities of Las Pozas by George Charman

West Dean Collection and Archives

Posted on

By Fine Art & Art and Contemporary Craft subject tutor, George Charman

 

The term ‘set and setting’ was made popular by the American psychologist, author and researcher, Dr Timothy Leary in the Harvard Psilocybin Project. The Psilocybin Project, which began in the early 1960’s, was a series of experiments in psychology utilising psilocybin, the psychoactive compound found naturally in more that 200 spices of fungi, commonly known as magic mushrooms. The project sort to induce psychedelic experiences, the term ‘psychedelic’ deriving from the Greek etymology (psyche, meaning mind, and deloun, meaning to manifest) , originally coined in 1957 by the psychiatrists Humphry Osmond. These mind-manifesting experiences were brought on, in part, through the consumption of Psilocybin. The projects aim was to question how different administration modes, (the set and setting), lead to different experiences. The term ‘set and setting’ is used to describe the content of a psychedelic experience. The ‘set’, referring to the internal state of one experience (mood, expectation, fears and wishes), and the ‘setting’, referring to the external conditions (the physical and emotional climate of the space). 

The western concept of ‘set and setting’ was born from a conversation Leary had with author and psychedelic advocate Aldous Huxley in 1960 as Leary and others were just beginning their research into psilocybin. The conversation referred to an excerpt from an essay by Théophile Gautier, one of the original members of the Club de Hashischins, (a Parisian group active between 1844-1849 dedicated to the exploration of drug-induced experiences, whose members also included Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire and Alexandre Dumas). In his essay “Le Club des Hachichins", published in the The Review of Two Worlds in 1846, Gautier stressed the necessary preparation of mind, body, and environment. Although popularised by Leary and widely accepted and practiced by scientists currently working in the field of psychedelic research, the basis of ‘set and setting’ as a methodology, originally derives from cross-cultural shamanic ritual practices. These practices utilise song, incense, dance, light, and modular thought structures, in addition to psychoactive substances to design and induce encounters with internal and external spiritual entities and alternate perceptual realms for purposes of healing, spiritual growth and connection with nature through Animism – a belief that objects, places and creatures all posses’ sentient qualities and a distinct spiritual essence. 

The Harvard Psilocybin Project was mired in controversy relating to abuses of power over students, and Leary’s legitimacy as a researched questioned due to his co-consumption of psychedelics during experiments, which contributed to President Richard Nixon decision in 1970 to reclassify Psilocybin and LSD as ‘schedule 1 substances’ (a drug with no currently accepted medical use), effectively outlawing until as recently as 2006, all research into psychedelic substances. This aside, Leary’s popularising of ‘set and setting’ as a methodology for the design and construction of mind-manifesting sites of experience, offers a critical lens through which set and setting can inform alternative spatial relationships with our constructed environment. 

Contextualised through developing PhD research into Edward James and his investigations into experimental architecture (evidenced both through the monumental concrete pavilions of Las Pozas in Mexico and James’ earlier unrealised architectural propositions), this text explores the notion of ‘set and setting’ as a methodology for the design and construction of mind-manifesting sites, connected with space and time, with structure and history. It considers how one might use methods of ‘set and setting’ to better understand and recognise the mind manifesting possibilities of the built environment, its relationship to nature and alternate planes of perception. 

 

Edward James’ investigations into experimental architecture began in the mid 1930’s, evidenced through several unrealised proposals for the gardens of West Dean, drawing influence, in part from 18th century folly architecture. A key example of this is Artichoke House (Fig 1), designed in 1936 in collaboration with Architect Christopher Nicholson as an exhibition space to display a growing number of paintings James had been acquiring through the patronage of a group of young artists who became central to the Surrealist movement. The fiberglass petals that formed Artichoke House were intended to recede into the base of the pavilion, revealing a faceted glass inner shell from which James’ collection of paintings would be hung. When viewed from within the pavilion, the paintings would appear to float within the surrounding landscape – the illusory vanishing point of the picture plane merging into the landscaped vistas of the 19th century-designed gardens. Although ostensibly Artichoke House might be interpreted merely as an extravagant surrealist folly, I would argue that the tenets of its design, that being a disruption of our sense of fantasy and reality, manifests through what Stanislav Grof, describes in Realms of the Human Unconscious, as a transpositional experience, quote: (the identification of multiple vantage points resulting in simultaneous, yet remote, first-person experiences). This transposition of the body (viewer), the object (painting) and the environment, speaks to the potentiality of the structure as a mind manifesting space of perception, stimulating a multiplicity of viewpoints, an extension in all dimensions of associative thought, common to the psychedelic experience.

Just prior to the design of Artichoke House, James experienced what could be interpreted as a transpositional hallucinatory vision while sitting alone for dinner in the family dining room at West Dean. He describes a vast translucent sphere of light forming above his head, turning faster and faster as the last movement of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony began to fill the room. Within this sphere of light were all the plants and trees spread out according to their geneses and all the animals ordered according to their species, rotating around the sphere’s axis. Running from the dining room clutching his head, James collapsed to the floor and was found moments later in a semi-conscious state of confusion. Although this hallucination, commencing as it did with an aura of light around the head, was most likely suggestive of a classical migraine which can induce vivid hallucinations, where sufferers may see human figures, animals, faces, objects or landscapes–often multiplied and distorted in size and shape, the hallucination, as well as forming the basis for James 1937 novel, The Gardener who Saw God (Fig 2), also seems to offer a transpositional register or ambiance for the set and setting of Artichoke House.

A later iteration of the potential transpositional nature of James’ architectural investigations, which bares close associations with the design of Artichoke House, is his 1976 unrealised proposal, The Globular Gallery (Fig 3), designed in collaboration with architect John Warren, also intended for the gardens of West Dean. This seven-story glass sphere was intended to be positioned in the centre of a lake with a central spiral staircase and revolving floors. On each level glass screens would provide the surface for paintings to be positioned, continually reorientating themselves within their revolving environment around the rotational axis of the sphere. Given the kinetic nature of the gallery, it is conceivable that the paintings and by extension the proposed structure, is suggestive what architect FreelandBuck terms an ‘objective perspective’, describing complex interior volumes as seen through the lens of discrete objects, creating a continually changing perspective that is unique to the object “seeing” the space, as opposed to the human subject as the only one doing the seeing. Drawing reference to ‘object orientated ontology’, a 21st century Heidegger-influenced school of thought that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of non-human objects, the proposed interior space of the Globular Gallery is formed through the perspective of each object occupying the space. The human body’s relationship to the interior becomes part of a multiplicity of re-forming object experiences, challenging the role of the human as the only subjective participant in the build environment.

 

    •
    Fig 2: Edward James: The Gardener Who Saw God (1937) London, Duckworth and Co. Cover illustration produced by Pavel Tchelitchew
    Fig 3: The Globular Gallery (circa 1970) Drawings by architect John Warren

    Both Artichoke House and The Globular Gallery suggest a programming, through design, of a psychedelic experience in which the sequencing of patterning of stimuli are not left to chance but are arranged in a predetermined manor through set and setting, to occasion mind-manifesting experiences.

    In 1944 James left West Dean, spending the rest of life, moving between Mexico, North America, and Europe periodically designing and remodelling houses. But it was in Mexico where James’ experimental architectural visions took route just outside the small town of Xilitla in the Sierra Madre Mountains. In 1947 James purchased a 17-acre plot of tropical jungle occasioned by an experience James witness of his traveling companion emerging from the Santa Maria River and immediately being engulfed by a cloud of blue and yellow butterflies. This suitably surrealist vision affected James profoundly, confirming his desire to settle in the Huasteca region of Mexico. Originally intending to use the land to cultivate orchids, after a surprise frost kills off most of his collection, James moved his attentions to building, viewing Mexico as a more congenial location for the investigation and reception of experimental approaches to architecture.

    The 17-acre plot of jungle named Las Pozas, given the site’s proximity to a series of cascading pools, become, over a period of 20 odd years, beginning in the early 1960’s till James’ death in 1984, the setting for over thirty monumental structures, built in collaboration with José Aguilar, Plutarco Gastelum, Carmelo Muñoz and some 30 local craftsmen.

    The structures of Las Pozas (Fig 4), some five storeys high were cast in concrete from hand-made wooden formwork moulds that come together as fragments to form a multi-dimensional concrete collage, combing architectural styles from Greek to Gothic to Romanesque with the shapes and forms of the surrounding jungle.

    In the early stages of the construction of Las Pozas, while living between Mexico City and Xilitla, James experimented with Teonanacatli mushrooms, a psychoactive mushroom which grows wild throughout Mexico and has been used in Meso-America by indigenous people for thousands of years for ritual and medicinal practices.

    Although first Introduced to the West by botanists including Richard Evans Schultes through pioneering studies in the late 1930’s of shamanistic mushroom use by the Indians in the state of Oaxaca Mexico, it was most likely that James’ introduction to psychedelics came through his friend Aldous Huxley, the author of The Doors of Perception which accounts Huxley’s experiences of taking Mescalin, the naturally occurring psychedelic found in several species of cacti.  Huxley was also associated with R Gordon Wasson, the American author, ethnomycologist and vice president of J.P Morgan who first introduced to a mass Western audience, the uses and effects of psychoactive mushrooms in the May 1957 Life magazine article titled “Seeking the Magic Mushroom”. The article documents Gordon and his wife Valentina’s first-hand account of participating in a Mezatec mushroom ritual, facilitated by Maria Sabina, a Mezatec healer and shaman from the state of Oaxaca in Mexico.

    James first took psychedelic mushrooms alone at the Hotel Francis in Mexico City in August 1957, the same year that Wasson’s article in Life Magazine was published. He consumed what American author, ethnobotanist and mystic Terrance McKenna coined as a ‘heroic dose’, ruffly 5 grams of dried mushrooms which allows, in theory, for the consumer to travel to different dimensions and explore new depth of their subconscious mind. James’ initial experience was described in the October 1962 edition of Surrealist Magazine Snob, which also included a series of staged photographs, composed in collaboration with Kati Horna, the Hungarian-born Mexican photographer, which attempted to capture the visual register of James mushroom journey. He put this initial unpleasant experience down to a combination of the high altitude of Mexico City and the distracting sound of his Macaw parrot grinding its beak, which happen to be sharing the hotel room with James. Two weeks later he travelled to Las Pozas and consumed a second and more pleasurable dose of mushrooms in a small cabin above the waterfall which runs through the site.

    Initially, James recalls the overwhelming perfume of the Brugmansia (or Angel Trumpet) flower, a psychoactive plant which grows abundantly wild throughout the Sierra Mardre Jungle. Anecdotal evidence in the Edward James Archive, describe how the craftsmen of Las Pozas would sleep beneath these flowers. The pollen, falling from the flower would be inhaled by the resting workers, inducing psychedelic dreams. How these dreams might have impacted their approach to the construction of Las Pozas opens interesting possibilities of how new forms emerging from the psychedelic mind might have manifest, not only through James experiences with psychedelics, but also through the many craftsmen who collaborated in the construction of Las Pozas.

    James goes on to recall his mushroom experience at Las Pozas. Walking into his cabin, he found his room filled with thick tree trunks which disappeared through the ceiling. After a 20 min walk through the jungle, James returned to the cabin to find the trees in exactly the same position. Reflecting on this encounter, James hypothesised that, quote: “perhaps they had always been there, rooted in some other dimension of space, but in a world of anti-matter super-imposed on or within our own?” James further reflected that instead of provoking subjective illusions upon the senses, culled from the subliminal world of one’s pre-conscious existence, perhaps the mushrooms, quote: “actually revealed the presence of certain existences alien to our daily world, yet invisibly present at other times, even when we could not see them?”.

    The differing intensity and revelatory insight of James’ experiences between Mexico City and Las Pozas, reveal the underlying importance of set and setting as a channel through which the psychedelic experience manifests. Indeed, Timothy Leary went so far as to claim that 99% of the specific responses to psychedelics is determined by the set and setting. If this statement is to be accepted, then mind-manifesting experiences are predominantly discernible through the arrangement of objects or forms in space and the context or situation in which ones encounter these arrangements of objects.

    As Leary and his research partner Ralph Metzner describe in the 1976 essay Notes on Programming Psychedelic Experiences, the Gothic cathedral provides, quote: instructive examples of the conscious use of artistic media – space, form, light, sound, smell – to provide religious-mystical, i.e. psychedelic, experiences. You enter the church, the darkness dilates your pupils; the souring arches draw your gaze upwards, the stained-glass windows bathe your visual field in kaleidoscopic colour, the rose-window-mandala makes your visual awareness one-pointed. The sounds of the organ, the choir and the priest’s bells, as well as the incense, are all designed to lead your attention away from the worldly everyday concerns into higher levels of contemplation and ecstatic worship. In essence the space is programmed to induce psychedelic mind-manifesting experiences, all be it, couched in religious symbolism.

    This programming of architectural space is suggestive of architect and academic, Emily Pellicano’s idea of ‘deep formlessness’ outlined in her 2021 essay Psychedelic Strategies, where experiences are defined by the integration of the self with the built and natural environment, affording multidimensional dynamic perceptions from the nano scalar to the extraplanetary, dissolving the sense of the self as something separate from nature. The spatial-perceptual experience of Las Pozas draws parallels with Pellicano’s notion of deep formlessness.

    Through the multi-dimensional perspectival meanderings made available to the individual through both the original structuring of the space and its’ continual reforming through entropic processes of growth and decay, one indicates a loosening of dimensionality, what Merleau-Ponty describes as ‘enmeshed experience’ which emerges from the continuous unfolding of overlapping spaces, material, and detail, where elements begin to lose their clarity and merge within the field, suggestive of a dissolution of the self as an entity separate from the environment.

    Using Las Pozas as a critical lens, what emerges, is a working definition of psychedelic architecture. The enmeshing of the setting (the physical architectonic and emotional climate of a place), with the set (the internal self, dissolved of its distinctive separateness from the environment it inhabits). Psychedelic architecture then offers the set and setting through which to re-consider the integration of not only the built environment, but by extension, the self, with nature. From this point of deep formlessness, the rudiments of architecture become a prevailing and transformative energy; a mind-manifesting vessel for insight, wonder and connection that draws us more deeply into our enmeshed relationship with the natural world.

    More like this

    Schools

    Categories