This lifeless box may be full of energy
By
GARRY ARTHUR
In the latest exhibition at the McDougall Art Gallery, with an entire room to itself, is a large plain box standing on castors. It is quite undecorated, and might be mistaken for part of the furniture.
But it is not only part of a larger art show, it is an energy accumulator — a sort of battery for the storage of orgone energy, a biological force which the psychiatrist, Wilhelm Reich, claimed to have discovered in the 19305.
Made of alternating layers of steel and jute, it is the work of Paul Johns and his collaborator, Nicholas Register, both of whom are so interested in Reich's work that they have made it the main subject of their exhibition.
The show is described as an autobiographical statement (the artists declined having their own pictures taken on the grounds that the exhibition was a self-por-trait). It has a retrospective element — screen prints of photographic work Paul Johns had done up to now — but concentrates mostly on elements of Wilhelm Reich's work. Their dominant theme is “the emotional plague” — a term which Reich coined for the psychic illness which he believed infects the whole of society. It is caused, he said, by a conflict between the longing for freedom and the actual fear of freedom.
The major human problem. according to Reich, is that sexual energy is denied spontaneous release in most
civilised people. The consequences of this energy being dammed are widespread and darken social life like a plague. A former pupil of Freud, Reich had a vision of the unity of life, and believed that he had discovered the unifying principle — a cosmic energy pervading the atmosphere and charging the cells of all living things. He called it orgone. Reich held that the energy discharged by both partners in the sex act is orgone. a substance "functionally identical" with love. In other words, love was not all in the mind — it was a real, measurable force.
He said that organic material attracts orgone energy and absorbs it, while metal attracts and repels it. He built large energy accumulators on that principle — boxes big enough for a human to get inside, made of alternating layers of various organic and metallic substances, and with an open window in the door to permit circulation of air.
As he predicted, the box caused a rise in temperature. Reich discussed his experiments with Albert Einstein, who at first showed interest in investigating the phenomena that Reich described. Later, Einstein wrote that he had confirmed Reich's findings. but gave a different interpretation of the temperature difference. Reich
wrote a refutation, but Ein stein never responded.
Reich’s wife, in her biography of him, explains that in the accumulator cabinet the concentrated orgone energy “interacts with the biological energy of the organism, strengthening it and thus enabling it to fight any disturbance in energy flow." It was a means of strengthening the body in its fight against disease. Reich developed the science of “orgonomy," based on the belief that space was filled with this basic primordial moving energy — a nonelectromagnetic force which could be stored in accumulators and used to-strengthen the body against disease. He treated cancer patients in his cabinets, which were said to be charged with orgone, and made small boxes for use at home to speed up the healing of wounds.
Reich also believed that orgone energy was an antidote to the nuclear bomb, and that it would save the world from a nuclear holocaust. He experimented along those lines, with disastrous results — everyone concerned suffered radiation sickness.
One of the pictures in the McDougall exhibition shows a “flying saucer’’ hovering over a box. This refers to Reich's idea that unidentified flying objects got their power from orgone energy. In 1954, the American
Food and Drug Administration obtained an injunction restraining the distribution of orgone accumulators and associated publications. Reich defied the court order, was arrested, and sentenced to two years in jail. He died in jail in 1957. While he was there the F.D.A. seized and burned all of his books and writings they could find.
Long considered a crank and a Freudian deviationist, Reich was taken up by the student protest movement during the Vietnam war and was championed as a revolutionary, thinker, an early advocate ot sexual freedom, and one of the first to urge the world to "Make love, not war." -
“Wilhelm Reich blazed the trail which led, after his tragic death, to what is now known as the Permissive Society," wrote Eustace Chesser, author of "Love Without Fear,” in a study of Reich. A. S. Neill, of Summerhill School, considered him the greatest psychologist since Freud.
The two Christchurch artists did plan to conduct some personal experiments with their orgone accumulator, but say they did not leave themselves enough time. They will start when the show is over, hoping to absorb orgone energy for their own advantage, increasing their physical energy.
The orgone accumulator at the gallery is roped off — the public are not invited to try it.
Log in