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.
Originally published in Artforum in 2002. A review of Julius Evola’s books newly translated by Inner Traditions, including The Hermetic Tradition and Revolt Against the Modern World, tracing the Italian baron’s path from Dada alongside Tristan Tzara to the UR occult group. Pinchbeck links Evola’s account of alchemical dream states to Rick Strassman’s DMT: The Spirit Molecule.
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.
Rolling Stone sent Pinchbeck to Burning Man in 2000. The dispatch describes the dust storms that nearly broke the festival, the Microsoft-staffed Church of Mez camp, John Perry Barlow at Spiral Oasis, and Larry Harvey’s grant-giving organization, showing how Silicon Valley money reshaped an event that began as a beach effigy burning.