An Artist's Guide to Psychedelic Mushrooms

10:11Ryan McGinness:The simplest is the corniest. And that's like love is all that matters. And we kind of all already know that. But that's a through line, definitely.

10:21The Art Angle Hosts:Like it's a positive experience.

10:23Ryan McGinness:But that depends on your mood, I guess. Not necessarily. Not necessarily. But that's a constant message.

10:30The Art Angle Hosts:Love is all you need.

10:31Ryan McGinness:We all know that, right? There's no real revelation there. But to feel it is something very different. and to have that kind of that knowledge imbued in you during the psychedelic experiences it feels profound but it really is kind of a simple message and we kind of already know it but beyond that some of the other kind of through lines are that everything is going to be okay it's very reassuring everything is alive everything is vibrations you know and that reality actually is infinitely richer and more vast than we perceive it or that we can perceive it to be okay so you're

11:05The Art Angle Hosts:talking about the feelings you come back with. You also talk about the clowns. I mean, tell me about that.

11:10Ryan McGinness:Oh, right. Well, so this is more of a superficial hallucination, but I've seen a lot of clowns with triangle heads and a lot of symbols that I've come out and drawn. So I have a lot of psychedelic influence symbol drawings in my work.

11:24The Art Angle Hosts:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting that you focus on the feelings because I think there's a visual aesthetic of psychedelia. And I think it has affected, as you say, like there's a certain, when you focus in on a psychedelic aesthetic to some of your art, but then it's really more mood and feeling, which is a lot harder to communicate to the outside when you experience it on the inside.

11:49Ryan McGinness:Mood, feeling, certainly the experience of the color. So I use a lot of fluorescence that can only be fully appreciated in person, You can't reproduce fluorescent paint. And then furthermore, they come alive under black light. And that's an expression of the psychedelic experience too. And even the way I layer and build the picture plane. So you're actually, you have to see through multiple dimensions in order to get the full picture.

12:17The Art Angle Hosts:Your ultimate takeaways in the book are about the sort of positive feelings of connection and love. I was interested in a sentiment you expressed in the book, you said, the fear expressed about my mind folding in on itself has been a major influence on my work. What did you mean by that?

12:35Ryan McGinness:In the simplest aesthetic terms, I have drawings and symbols that reflect that fear with quite literally one's head or mind going in on itself. But also there's a lot of recursive imagery in my pictures. I make paintings of paintings of paintings of paintings. And so that's a reflection of that fear as well. And that's what the that worlds within worlds exhibition was all about the world kind of reflecting in on itself. And that's a fear. That's scary.

13:04The Art Angle Hosts:The fear of getting sort of lost in the layers of reality. Yeah, exactly. As you go down. And that's something that comes back up with you that becomes productive to confront that fear. Is that kind of how you feel about it? I don't know if it's productive so much.

13:21Ryan McGinness:I think it's productive in that the best use of the psychedelic experience is to learn about yourself, right? Simultaneously learning about the universe is kind of one in the same. But that's the most productive use and reason to confront what might seem like something fearful, like falling and slipping between dimensions and the world floating in on itself forever. But you're really just confronting yourself. Yeah.

13:49The Art Angle Hosts:Well, that's interesting to talk about it with an artist to me because obviously psychedelic stuff is very interesting. This is an art book. It's very interesting and engaging to look at. But at the same time, one of the things about these experiences and one of the reasons why sometimes they're not that interesting to hear about, right? It's because it's like hearing someone else's dream. I know, exactly. And you talk about this in the diaries. The big thing is the feeling of having experience that's not going to be able to be communicated. But nevertheless, or you're nodding, so go ahead and...

14:22Ryan McGinness:Yeah, no, that's definitely the case. I mean, and that's true of all art, right? Nothing was ever going to accurately reflect where it comes from, right? Which we learn, or I've learned in the psychedelic experience, it all comes from this one source, right? And so I'm trying to tap into that source and share it, knowing that it is nothing that you could ever know.

15:05The Art Angle Hosts:I feel like a lot of the danger of the psychedelic stuff for art is that art does happen in this space of going into your own mind and then going beyond what's expected of you socially or the images you have, trying to invent something new in your own mind, but then also figure out how to express it to others. So I think sometimes when people talk about the bad odor that psychedelia

15:29Ryan McGinness:has, it's that it's like too deep in someone's mind, right? Like the translation back to reality has not happened. Yeah, I guess that's the real challenge, right?

15:36The Art Angle Hosts:You talk in the book about specific revelations about art that have come out of this. You write, I saw iconic drawings I had already made as well as future to be drawings. It was as if the drawings had already existed and my role was simply to materialize them.

15:50Ryan McGinness:That sounds a little nutty, right? But it's true. I have had this feeling and often do have this feeling of seeing through time and seeing future drawings that I've made and seeing past drawings. And it's just really up to me to materialize them. That's the feeling and the sensation when in fact, it's just imagining new drawings, really. I mean, it might just be as simple as that, but the sensation is real and sincere. And so it's bizarre to have those kinds of visions.

16:21The Art Angle Hosts:Do you think about it as a creative tool now? You said you started sort of more as just wanting to explore it as a freestanding thing, but you've become more conscious about it as a creative experience over time.

16:32Ryan McGinness:Well, I think that's where like microdosing comes in when you want to use...

16:36The Art Angle Hosts:Which you're kind of critical of. Microdosing is very trendy right now.

16:39Ryan McGinness:Yeah, and I've been microdosing for years, but I haven't microdosed probably for a few years. I think that's if you want to add some utility to psilocybin or the psychedelic experience, that's obviously a good way. But within the microdosing community, there's this phrase, sub-perceptible. You want to take a sub-perceptible amount, which is like 0.1, 0.2 grams every day in a capsule or whatever. and that never appealed to me. I thought, why would I not want to perceive it? So in my microdosing experience, I bumped it up to 0.6 grams. I do feel it's low grade, but it's super functional. And that's when I've taken psilocybin with a purpose, like a utility to make it functional.

17:23Ryan McGinness:And in some very specific cases, I've been working on like a drawing problem. That's more of a geometry problem. I just can't figure out how to do it. And I've tackled it successfully while microdosing. And I don't know if there's any real correlation there or it's more of a coincidence.

17:40The Art Angle Hosts:They almost seem like just totally different purposes. And, and I mean, I guess it's the two sides of being an artist too. Like one is you're trying to expand the world of images, you know, break things, do really far out things, shock people, whatever, you know, do new stuff with images. The other one is it is a job. You've got to like be in the studio, get from point A to point B, get something in on time. And it seems like, yeah, in the difference between these heroic trips and then the microdosing, it's almost like two different directions. You're going, right? Like one is going deep and one is -

18:15Ryan McGinness:Yeah, one's for dealing with this world and one's for exploring another world. Yeah.

18:19The Art Angle Hosts:What's your wife's take on all this? I mean, she is a presence in the book. You have her notes sometimes where you get a sense of the outside as opposed to the inside. Yeah, exactly.

18:27Ryan McGinness:So she was a great note taker and sometimes she would take audio recordings so we could transcribe those later, sometimes video, and was the best trip sitter anyone could ever have.

18:38The Art Angle Hosts:In terms of observing this and distilling meaning from these experiences, her documentation of it, do you get anything out of hearing your experience from an outside perspective?

18:49Ryan McGinness:First and foremost, she's a very well-adjusted and grounded person. So she provides that objective kind of third-person viewpoint. And I can ask her, did this really happen? Was I doing that? Again, she has allowed me to kind of really disappear and just be in these other worlds, knowing that she's there or she could pull me back out if needed. I would never, ever be able to take these heroic doses alone or with anyone else.

19:16The Art Angle Hosts:What is the dosing?

19:17Ryan McGinness:Like a normal solid dose would be three to five grams. And I usually try to take like six grams. And then on the most heroic dose that's chronicled in the book, I think it's 12 grams, which is just nuts. I remember researching, okay, what's the most anyone's ever taken? And you can only find reports from clinical trials, right? And I think it was like 10 grams. I was like, okay, I'm going to do that then. I mean, that's certainly not recommended. That was a special occasion. I think that was for my birthday one year. And I was like, that's what I'm going to do.

19:46The Art Angle Hosts:Yeah. Was that fearful experience for you?

19:48Ryan McGinness:Yeah, absolutely. That was super dark. On the lower dose, let's call it like four to six grams. People usually have this similar kind of experience. You kind of feel the connectedness of the universe and you kind of like see how the sausage is made. And right. This is the true nature of reality.

20:07The Art Angle Hosts:Yeah.

20:07Ryan McGinness:The sausage of the universe. And you kind of like, you get a sense of like seeing, you know, behind a curtain and like, okay, this is what it's really all about. But on a higher dosage, you come to realize, oh, there's no sausage factory. There's nothing. Like it's all a construction of your mind. Like even what you thought was the psychedelic experience before was just a construction. In fact, there's just nothingness.

20:32The Art Angle Hosts:There is some notes about your career in the book. You know, you talk about different moments in your career. You know, you're working on the Pace Prince show and there's some career insecurity stuff in there about how I could be doing so much better. That's always the case. Yeah. So that stuff comes out when you're in those kinds of emotions?

20:51Ryan McGinness:If it comes out and it manifests in any way, it's very abstract, but it's usually addressed at the very... Whenever I talk, it just sounds super silly, but it's a real sensation. And for all intents and purposes, I'm telling you out of the truth, Ben. So at the beginning of most of these more heroic trips, I'm talking to or confronted with some sense of an other, right? And for different people, they look like different things. And it's never any one visual for me, but it's more of a sense, right? And so at that point, there's a bit of an evaluation. Of course, maybe this is just ourselves looking at ourselves and evaluating ourselves and telling ourselves now's a good time or now's not a good time.

21:35Ryan McGinness:So my point is on a couple of occasions, I've been told, now's not your time to come in. And then I usually go vomit up the rest of the mushrooms and that's kind of an automatic and it's not scary.

21:48The Art Angle Hosts:Now's not your time for insight. Yeah, exactly. Now's not your time to come in.

21:51Ryan McGinness:Yeah. Now's not your time. And that's happened a couple of times when I have been allowed in, there's a flood of insights and it's kind of like super download of data for lack of a better word.

22:03The Art Angle Hosts:So why did you want to make an art book about it? it is an art book, I'd say. It's not like a utility in a way. It's more like an artistic collection of thoughts.

22:12Ryan McGinness:It's absolutely an artist's book in the same spirit as any other artist's book. And I love making artist's books. I love making books in general. These journal entries, I never made them with a book in mind until maybe toward the last few years. And then it became too self-conscious, my note-taking. So I had to end it. And 25 is a great number to end and it was probably at year 23 or whatever. So why make a book? Well, I made the book first and foremost for myself for psychological reasons. Like I've kind of quite literally closed the book on it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And I'm done with this project.

22:46Ryan McGinness:And that's primarily why I make books for my own psychological satisfaction. So then why share it with anyone else then, right? Just keep it a private book.

22:55The Art Angle Hosts:It's quite vulnerable. You talk and it's like embarrassing. I mean, you say that. It's embarrassing.

22:59Ryan McGinness:Oh yeah, it's absolutely. Your own notes on having a mind-expanding journey. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of corny stuff in there. I felt like the conversations about psychedelics now is kind of part of the zeitgeist, and so the timing was good. And so there might be an audience for this book beyond just me, my friends, and people who might appreciate my work, like is usually the case with artist book I make. So try to bring it to a broader audience now, as opposed to usually audiences are coming to my artist books.

23:31The Art Angle Hosts:So you said that this book sort of closes one period of that sort of experiment. It has mutated into another thing, I noted. Tell me about Cosmosis. What is that?

23:43Ryan McGinness:Sure. So Cosmosis was born out of a casual conversation I had with a friend of mine. We're both champions of psychedelics and are interested in consciousness and exploring our minds. And we said, you know, we should start a religion so that we can claim psilocybin as our sacrament. The Church of Psilocybin. Right. You know, it's like one of those things, conversations you have with your friends over beer. And you're like, yeah, we should do that. We should totally do that. And the next day, it's like— Sounds like a good conversation you have when you're on drugs. It's like, we should definitely do that.

24:19Ryan McGinness:And so she looked into it and came back and said, you know what? It's actually not that difficult to start a bona fide nonprofit religious corporation that's recognized by the government. And that's what we did. And jumped through all the hoops. We had to do that. And in the course of doing that, we realized, oh, you know what? This has to be real. For me, I was inspired to proceed with this idea because I love Church of the Subgenius and Discordianism and other parody religions that were essentially art projects. And so for me, it was like, oh, that's exciting. Let's do the 21st version of Church of the Subgenius.

25:00Ryan McGinness:And then we came to realize it can't be a joke. It has to be sincere, you know, in the eyes of the government, of course. And so we decided, okay, so let's do it for real, which really means you have to have articles of faith and a mission and just some formalities. And so ours are - Real is a legal definition, it turns out, when you go to the deepest level of reality. Right. So we came up with our own, which are not that radical, and I think certainly reasonable. And now we're at a point where, okay, we've been doing this for a couple years. We've had some events. We just finished writing a book that's going to come out in the spring and we're going to expand into like a THC infused drink later this year.

25:38Ryan McGinness:But the one thing that we haven't quite resolved, and that's where we are now, well, how do I position this in my art practice? Is this really a project as I want it to be? And if it is an artistic expression, there must be this element of criticism and it must be a little more profound than just some kind of like superficial religion. And so I'm trying to define what that is for Cosmosis. And we're trying to figure out what the kind of brand profile looks like for Cosmosis. Because up till now, it's been very sterile and authoritative and black and white and simple. There's no character to it.

26:14Ryan McGinness:It doesn't sound very psychedelic. And it's not. In fact, it's quite the opposite. When we started to look at, okay, what do other mushroom churches look like? They kind of default to these kind of cliches and it's very colorful. So I said, okay, we're going to do the exact opposite of that. And that's how we're going to differentiate ourselves.

26:31The Art Angle Hosts:And that's also how we feel about it, right? It's not solo is what it's not. I mean, the book is about your solo experiences for the most part. There's some social aspects of the encounters explored in the book, but generally kind of poo-poo them in favor of the going inward part of these experiences. So this is you taking the step into shared experiences? Yeah, I guess so.

26:56Ryan McGinness:And just trying to turn as many people on to not, you know, Scylla Simon specifically, but to themselves, right?

27:04The Art Angle Hosts:At the end of the book, you do come to a conclusion. You say what you think the punchline of the cosmic joke is. What is it?

27:12Ryan McGinness:Okay, so there is the joke, which is consciousness and all the different things we do with it in this world. Then there is the punchline, which is that nothing matters, right?

27:27The Art Angle Hosts:You talk about happiness a lot in the first part of this. That sounds very bleak.

27:31Ryan McGinness:It is bleak. It is bleak. And it sounds super nihilistic, right? But then where do you go from there? And that means you have to create your own meaning. And you can only do things that are meaningful that you enjoy. So do what you love. And then that's the laughter of the joke is kind of living this laughter.

27:51The Art Angle Hosts:Right, right. It's sort of like you realize there's no meaning, which means you have to make your own meaning.

28:00Ryan McGinness:Yeah, exactly. Which brings you back to art making, right? Exactly. That's exactly it.

28:03The Art Angle Hosts:Well, on the meaning of life, I think is a good place to leave it, Ryan.

28:08Ryan McGinness:Thank you very much for talking to me. Thank you, Ben. I appreciate it.

28:12The Art Angle Hosts:The Art Angle is produced by Sonia Manalili with contributions from Kate Brown, Ben Davis, Caroline Goldstein, and Naomi Rae. Thanks for listening, and see you next week.