An extended assessment of Richard Tarnas’s Cosmos and Psyche, published on Reality Sandwich in May 2007. Pinchbeck reads Tarnas’s thirty-year case for archetypal astrology as a serious challenge to the modern cosmology of accident, and values it less as a crystal ball than as a way of reconceiving the relation between psyche and cosmos.
A Conscious Choice column from May 2007. Pinchbeck sets the projections on species extinction, tropical forest loss and fishery collapse against a culture that seeks its drama at the cinema, and argues that the real thriller is whether humanity wakes from its trance of material progress in time.
Published on Reality Sandwich in February 2007. Pinchbeck describes losing his appetite for the novel and finding the same charge in Rudolf Steiner, Jung, Edward Edinger, Jean Gebser, Teilhard de Chardin and Gerald Heard, and takes up Heard’s argument that evolutionary pressure may push the species past individuation into a collaborative mind.
The first of Pinchbeck’s monthly columns for Conscious Choice, from February 2007. Writing from a New York where spring flowers bloomed before Christmas, he argues that the ecological and psychic disturbances of the moment are one disturbance, and that defining the zeitgeist has become harder precisely as it has become more urgent.
Reported for The Guardian in 2003. The piece follows ibogaine from Howard Lotsof’s 1962 discovery of its anti-addictive effect through its US criminalization to treatment clinics run by Martin Polanco in Rosarito, Mexico and Marc Emery in Vancouver, and recounts Pinchbeck’s own Bwiti initiation with iboga in Gabon.
Written for Artforum in 2003. The essay traces Burning Man from Larry Harvey’s 1986 effigy on San Francisco’s Baker Beach to a thirty-thousand-person city in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, and argues that its gift economy and deliberately destroyed artworks, such as David Best’s Temple of Tears, place it outside official art-world judgment.
A survey of recent books written for Artforum in 2003. Pinchbeck sets Alain Joxe’s Empire of Disorder, Paul Virilio’s Crepuscular Dawn, and Andrew Kimbrell’s Fatal Harvest against Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, arguing that American consumption rests on manufactured false needs and that, per Hardt and Negri, cultural producers form a potentially revolutionary class.
Artforum, 2002. Pinchbeck writes about his father, the abstract painter Peter Pinchbeck, who died in 2000 leaving hundreds of unsold works in a Greene Street loft. The memoir covers the London Blitz, his father’s arrival in New York in 1960, his inclusion in the Jewish Museum’s 1966 Primary Structures exhibition, and SoHo’s gentrification.
A Wired dispatch from August 2002 on crop circles. It surveys the croppie subculture in Wiltshire, Gerald Hawkins’s geometric analysis, Colin Andrews’s magnetic-field claims, and Michael Glickman’s theory of a 2012 dimensional shift, and quotes SETI astronomer Seth Shostak dismissing the Chilbolton glyph that appeared to answer the 1974 Arecibo message.
An on-the-ground look at Berlin’s post-wall art scene, published in Harper’s Bazaar in 2001. It reports from Art Forum Berlin, the galleries Klosterfelde and Neugerriemschneider, and the Kunst-Werke space in Mitte, profiling artists Kirsten Pieroth, Monica Bonvicini, and Elmgreen and Dragset, whose cheap rents and club life Pinchbeck likens to 1960s New York.