Bad Trip
In Unsupervised, everything comes to you from the giant LED screen and aiming straight for your eyeballs. Call it blunt force psychedelia.
Robert Gerhardt/Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art
Unsupervised: Machine Hallucination by Refik Anadol is installed in a lobby of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised is a bad trip. It reminded me of my first bad trip, a Saturday morning in 1989 when I met my friends for breakfast, dropped acid, and went to the Art Institute of Chicago. You know that opening paragraph from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where Hunter S. Thompson lets you know when and where he could feel the drugs kicking in near Barstow? I could tell you that on that brisk fall morning in Chicago in a pre-internet world, I knew something was up when I emerged from the El station, walked into a Walgreens, and thought I had entered some kind of nineteenth-century phantasmagoria. I saw men with pointy beards and stovepipe hats! I saw corseted, straight-backed women with hair done up in twists, buns, and braids—but with no faces! Even scarier: lamps with goosenecked arms covered in fur! I only wanted a bottle of water. Once out of this sepia-toned nightmare, I ran away screaming—to a museum.
Towering…
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