Under the Influence: Hypnosis as a New Medium

<p>From the “Hypnotic Shows” organized by Raimundas Malašauskas to Matt Mullican’s performances, from Joris Lacoste’s Vrai spectacle (True Spectacle) to the acoustic odysseys of Loris Gréaud, hypnotic induction is now being unabashedly used in a wide variety of works with diverse ambitions (performance, creativity and the unconscious, authority and subjugation, hallucination and delegation, role-playing games and simulation, etc.). Far from unprecedented, this hypnotic paradigm of art is actually heir to a long tradition that accompanies the entire history of modernity, a history not just of forms but of manipulations of the mind and systems of influence (empathy, attraction, stupefaction, etc.) whose references, languages, and taboos contemporary artists seem to be altering in various ways. Observing this resurgence of interest in hypnosis is another manner of exploring artists’ close relationship with a (long) history of the psyche and the plastic powers of “the creative imagination.”</p> <p>Since the nineteenth century, when the term “hypnotism” was coined (by James Braid in 1843), hypnosis has sought to understand the dark continent of interiority and the irrational but also—and this is less often noted—the relationship between reality, creation, and the psyche. Initially, the word used was “hypnotism,” which was replaced by “hypnosis” in the mid-nineteenth century as if to focus on a “state” (suggestibility) rather than a full-fledged science that would articulate not just its practice but also its knowledge and modes of interpretation…</p>