Like a magazine article come to life, this exhibition, enticingly subtitled “Coming Out into Outer Space—Homofuturism, Applied Psychedelia & Magic Connectivity,” existed primarily as illustrative accompaniment to a thought-provoking essay. In lieu of a press release, Berlin-based scholar and critic Diedrich Diederichsen—who organized the show in collaboration with Galerie Buchholz codirector Christopher Müller—provided a feature-length work of art-historical exposition drawing comparisons among historically and geographically disparate cultural phenomena, fleshed out by loosely schematic displays of pertinent art and ephemera. The common denominator binding the show’s many thematic threads seemed to be a cultic defection from heteronormativity in concert with a quest for cosmic truths, thought to be accessible via astronomical, musical, or mathematical systems or principles.

The show began with consideration of the George Circle, a monastic congregation of German poets surrounding Stefan George (1868–1933), and of the quasi-religious group Ugrino, founded by Hamburg playwright, novelist, and organ builder Hans Henny Jahnn (1894–1959). Exclusively male, both groups conceived of a more just and enriching world order attainable through a set of reformative artistic, social, and sexual practices that, the essay argues, sowed the seeds for certain future aesthetic and political formations. Proto-queer communities, these collectives broke with social convention in an effort to reinvent art and interpersonal relationships in line with theories of cosmological harmony. Diederichsen goes on to map plausible, if at times eccentric, vectors of influence connecting such figures (Germans, all) as Hans Kayser (1891–1964), a theorist of Pythagorean harmonics; novelist Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), whose Glass Bead Game (1943) conjured a futuristic, homosocial republic of scholars engaged in an abstract synthesis of artistic form and scientific theory; and visionary composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), who sought a divine order through aleatory and spatial musical architectures, among other innovations.

The narrative then leaps to America with the appearance of The Urantia Book, a metaphysical manual of mysterious origins and unspecified authorship that was hatched in Chicago in the early twentieth century and finally published in 1955. The book consists of numerous papers—presented as though channeling the wisdom of celestial beings—that attempt to reconcile science, religion, and philosophy as a holistic totality. Stockhausen was introduced to the book in 1971, as was Alabama-born, Chicago-based jazz experimentalist Sun Ra (1914–1993). Both artists drew inspiration from its pages, embracing its freewheeling, integrative cosmology, while placing themselves at the center of sect-like ensembles of fellow musical and existential seekers. Minimalist art and music make an appearance at this point, too, most forcefully with consideration of guru-esque drone composer La Monte Young’s abnegation of Western musical scales and structures. But from here on, the story line shifts toward a more individualistic, Pop co-opted questing, propelled by psychedelia and “magical” connectivity.

The transhistorical ripple effect of cultural corollary stemming from the show’s initial focus on remedial, secessionist communalism petered out in the near past and present with an assortment of nostalgic invocations and utopian fantasies (e.g., a floor bound display of organ pipes by Lutz Bacher that summoned the ghost of Ugrino, and a series of pencil-and-acrylic-on-paper works by Kai Althoff imagining a ritualistic coming-out initiation), melancholic echoes of formerly radical, emancipatory activities. Once the article’s through line of beneficent cosmic recalibration comes to rest in delusional hippiedom, the impetus is lost and the thesis goes begging. And, to be clear, the curators aren’t buying it, either. In his essay, Diederichsen characterizes one of their keystone sect’s belief systems as “religious lunacy,” and, what’s more, he and Müller have enlisted Rainer Fassbinder and Tony Conrad to skewer and debunk the George Circle creed and (La Monte) Youngian theology, respectively. The proof here is not so much in the pudding (an over-egged custard of mystical romanticism—tasty, but hard to swallow) as it is in the advocacy entailed in its making—that of an alternate modernist history of applied aesthetics, proffered as a corrective to Americentric artistic autonomy.

—Jeff Gibson