Megan Bickel
Orgonon
June 14 – July 27, 2024
Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich arrived in New York in 1939, after several tumultuous decades in Europe spent surviving a brutally repressive childhood, fighting in the first world war, studying under Sigmund Freud, being kicked out of the Communist Parties of Austria, Germany, and Denmark for his radical views on sex, and weathering public disgrace in Norway after he claimed to have documented the spontaneous generation of a primitive form of microscopic life. While his reputation as a political and social theorist would, largely unbeknownst to him, continue to grow in the European political underground, in America he would begin his work on the orgone, a life force energy he claimed to have discovered flowing through all living things, and the machinery to manipulate it which would become his most public legacy — the “orgone accumulator” boxes and a weather-controlling energy cannon he called a “cloudbuster”. Decamping to Maine, Reich would carry out his remaining life’s research on the farm he called Orgonon.
In 1976, the musician Kate Bush was perusing Watkins Books, an occult bookstore she frequented in London, when a copy of a memoir by Reich’s son Peter, Book of Dreams, called out to her. In the book, Peter sorts through the memories of life at Orgonon, especially the period of the mid-1950s leading up to his father’s imprisonment and death after a legal battle with the FDA. Over the years, Wilhelm had developed a manic theory that environmental and social problems worldwide were being exacerbated by alien invaders, who sprayed sickening clouds of “deadly orgone radiation” out of UFOs crisscrossing the globe. So Peter’s youth was spent traveling the country with his father, using the accumulators and the cloudbusters in attempts to protect or heal individuals and landscapes, or even to shoot the offending UFOs out of the sky. Bush’s experience with the book led to the song Cloudbusting, off the landmark 1985 album Hounds of Love. She was attracted to the way Peter’s innocent, intense longing for his jailed father, and the trauma of his loss, blurred the chronology of his childhood memories in a way that sidelined the bizarreness of his father’s research.
Firmly situated in this nexus of the incredible and the banal are the paintings of Megan Bickel. Layers upon layers of paint, digital prints, cement, natural landscapes, pencil, cutting-edge textiles, photographic representations, and virtual reality experiments combine to produce a depth so extensive it begins to appear irremediably flat. It’s hard to escape the thought that with just a bit closer of a look, just a bit longer tracing the marks on the canvas, you’ll break through to the truth buried under the artifice. But that resolution is constantly interrupted. A thick dollop of neon paint calls to mind the topographical renderings of satellite data, until you realize that the background it’s situated upon is a receding plane of magnified grass—or is it the printed fabric of a military uniform? The process of delineating the haptic and the illusory, the digital and material, friend and foe, nourishment and poison, savior and threat, all feels at once joyfully seductive to begin and menacingly impossible to complete.
Unknowable experiences are thrust upon each of us all the time, and the only path forward is to sort through them as best we can. The strong hand of a trusted guide can render the unimaginable coherent, but the loss of such a guiding force can make the everyday unbearably inscrutable. As poorly understood algorithms continue to worm their way through the fabric of the institutions and apparatuses governing our lives, as the earth’s natural rhythms seem to oscillate more wildly with each passing day, as any reasonable expectation of political problem solving seems more and more doubtful, who amongst us has not felt those same nervous urges that call into question every facet of your reality? Who amongst us has not wished for a guide to lead us through? The political, social, and environmental futures on offer for us and our world are more and more defined by a discursive openness that is nonetheless experienced as an essential lack of positive, materially grounded visions for change. The paintings on offer in Orgonon are a chance to work through this paradoxical position. They do not allow us to retreat into fantasy through false simplification, nor do they offer misleading promises about a fantastical one true path just waiting to be discovered. Through play and rigorous attention combined, they help us delve into the maze of the real.
He looked at me hard. “You are a good little soldier, Peeps. You are very brave, and you must be strong for the battle that may come.” He looked at me very hard and his eyes made mine water.
“All right, son.” Nodding at the cloudbuster and looking to the mountains, he gave the gentle order, “Now, catch the wind.”
-Peter Reich, Book of Dreams
Megan Bickel, "“The moment carried itself. Even the most seasoned star tramp can’t help but shiver at the spectacular drama of a sunrise seen from space.”", 2024, Acrylic and graphite on inkjet print on canvas, 18 ¼ x 15 ¾ x 1 ½ inches
Megan Bickel, "“I write because I cannot paint.”", 2024, Acrylic on inkjet print on canvas, 16 ¼ x 21 ¼ x 1 ½ inches
Megan Bickel, "“Toolmaking is of little consequence unless it is coupled with great cooperation from others.”", 2024, Acrylic and Oil paint, hydraulic cement, on inkjet print on canvas mounted on hardboard, 10 x 13 x 2 inches
Megan Bickel, “Fishbrain, what do you think about, when your kitchen’s on fire.”, 2024, Graphite, Micacious Iron Oxide on inkjet print on canvas mounted on hardboard, 18 ¼ x 13 ½ x 1 ½ inches
Megan Bickel, "“Open, shut, click, aim. And the people out to get Daddy. Krang.”", 2024, Acrylic on inkjet print on canvas, 29 ½ x 21 ¼ x 1 ½ inches
Megan Bickel, "“The main thing is that it is an empathetic response to violence.”", 2023, Inkjet print on transparency sheet on stretched holographic cellophane, 10 x 8 inches
Megan Bickel, "“I’ve followed you as far as I can. To this ribbon of silver plastic, fluttering from a tree: innards of a tape you gave me: madrigals, etc., I threw it out the window last winter, at night, when the bone stars were rising in the trees.”", 2023, Holographic cellophane on inkjet print on canvas, acrylic paint, 10 x 8 inches
Megan Bickel, "“I took my shirt off in the yard; no one saw that my skin on my shoulders was golden. Now it’s not, my shirt’s back on. I forgot my songs; the Glow is gone.”", 2024, Acrylic and Oil paint, hydraulic cement, on inkjet print on canvas mounted on hardboard, 9 ½ x 12 x 1 ½ inches
Megan Bickel, "“Orgonon.”", 2024, Acrylic on inkjet print on canvas, 42 ¼ x 32 x 1 ½
Megan Bickel, "Gravity wells/-/In this system, planets are not solids. Space is solid, and planets are holes.", 2024, Acrylic on inkjet print on canvas, 21 ¾ x 16 ½ x 1 ½ inches
Megan Bickel, "I dream in HTML. The page shifts, doubles over, multiplies, and vanishes. I think about writing in the ruled margins of my notebook, leaving the page blank as the centers of Hildegard’s mandalas.", 2023, Graphite, Micacious Iron Oxide on inkjet print on canvas mounted on hardboard, 13 x 10 ¼ x 1 ½ inches