In the Intoxication of the Line

When we think of trance, certain images usually arise: we think of shamanic rituals, the rhythm of a drum, someone communicating with spirits. Or—since the 1960s—we associate trance with the consciousness-expanding states induced by substances such as LSD, mushrooms, or ayahuasca. These notions shape what we understand as an »altered state of consciousness« — something exotic, extraordinary, and often irrational. The term trance, derived from the Latin transire, meaning »to cross over« or »to pass beyond,« serves as a general designation for altered states of consciousness characterized by intense mental experience. In contrast to ordinary waking consciousness, such states are marked by pronounced concentration combined with deep relaxation, and by a bypassing of the logical, reflective mind.

My personal engagement with the topic of trance began during my studies in media culture and art theory. At the time, we watched ethnographic films and grappled with fundamental questions: How is otherness represented? How can states such as trance and ecstasy be shown on film—how can something that essentially resists documentation be made visible?

A central figure for me in the context of art, ritual, and trance is the filmmaker Maya Deren. As an artist of the New York avant-garde, she developed—after her experimental films of the 1940s such as Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), At Land (1944), and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)—a growing interest in movement, ritual, and the perception of time. In 1947, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship that took her to Haiti, where she studied Vodou over the span of several years. Deren did not approach this practice as an exotic phenomenon but as a living, complex system. She took part in ceremonies, filmed rituals, and reflected theoretically on the relationship between art, the body, and ecstasy. Her planned film project on Haitian trance remained unfinished and was published only posthumously in 1985 under the title Divine Horsemen. Deren understood trance as an aesthetic practice—a threshold between movement, spiritual permeability, and cinematic form. The body appears here as a medium of an energy that both exceeds and permeates the individual.

Neuroscientifically, this state can be described as a temporary deactivation of the so-called Default Mode Network (DMN)—the neural system responsible for self-referential thinking and inner narration. In moments of intense concentration or creative immersion, this network powers down, allowing the boundaries of the self to dissolve as perception, action, and thought collapse into one another. This feeling of unity with what is happening is also central to the research of French composer and author Corine Sombrun, who spent fifteen years learning Mongolian-shamanic trance and studying it in collaboration with neuroscientists and psychiatrists. Sombrun speaks of an »inner technology« of the body—the ability to induce trance states without substances. Her studies show that this capacity exists fundamentally in every human being and can be learned under safe conditions. She currently works with researchers in medicine and psychology to explore self-induced trance as a complementary method in therapy, healing, and personal development. During trance, she reports, one’s sense of time and pain recedes, the senses sharpen, and the sense of self undergoes a transformation—a phenomenon that, from both scientific and artistic perspectives, can be understood as a state of heightened perception.

In the history of art, trance has repeatedly been sought, provoked, and reflected upon—understood as a threshold between control and surrender. Drawing plays a special role in this context, as it functions as an immediate extension of the “body” and creates a direct connection between thought and movement. Artists have used this immediacy to gain access to unconscious, spiritual, or bodily forces—long before neuroscience described such states as shifts within neural networks. The surrealist automatists such as André Masson, Joan Miró, and Roberto Matta already regarded drawing as an instrument of the unconscious. Through free, often blind or trance-like mark-making, they attempted to bypass consciousness and activate the body as a medium of imagination. Masson, for instance, drew with his eyes closed to silence the mind. These practices aimed at a state in which self-reflection is subdued and perception enters rhythmic coherence with action.

Parallel to them, artists such as Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz developed spiritual drawing methods in which trance was understood as a form of permeability: the hand was not seen as a tool of will but as a channel for energetic or spiritual currents. Kunz, for example, drew in meditative states with the help of a pendulum that functioned as a translator of invisible forces—a method that resonates with Corine Sombrun’s research on self-induced trance and its embodied experience. Cy Twombly translated this principle into modernism by understanding the line as a bodily flow of thought. Twombly spoke of »letting the hand think«—a form of embodied cognition that arises in a state of intense presence, when the self dissolves into movement. In Art Brut, too—such as in the work of Augustin Lesage or Adolf Wölfli—drawing appears as a trance-like, often obsessive process. Many of these artists did not perceive themselves as creators but as »instruments« of higher powers or inner voices. Their often minutely detailed, repetitive structures recall the obsessive concentration associated with trance, ecstasy, or psychological threshold experiences.

Contemporary artists such as Susan Hiller, Julie Mehretu, and Carolee Schneemann carry this tradition forward by reflecting on trance as an aesthetic, bodily, or political experience. Mehretu’s »energetic mapping,« for instance, transforms movement and perception into cartographic rhythms that fuse energy and space. In a similar way, my own interest in drawing concerns less the representational than the moment in which movement, perception, and bodily rhythm overlap.

Across all these practices, trance emerges not as an exceptional state but as a method of perceptual shift—a condition in which consciousness and body synchronize and the self temporarily recedes. Line, rhythm, and gesture become media of a processual form of thinking that derives knowledge from movement.

Horst Janssen, too, stands within this tradition. Like Maya Deren, who attempted to capture trance through film, he moves in his drawing practice at the threshold of what can be represented. Deren sought to place the film itself into a state of trance, to transform it into a rhythmic organism that makes experience palpable. But whereas the cinematic medium remains external and fixed, Janssen works in immediate intertwinement of hand and body. His drawings arise from focus, repetition, and self-forgetful immersion—they do not depict trance; they enact it.

Janssen’s lines twist and overlap as if searching for something that eludes capture. His work Die alte Siemers (1962) reveals this characteristic movement between control and dissolution, observation and imagination. The lines flicker continuously, tangling into dense layers from which a face only hazily emerges—only to sink back into them. The figure does not arise through contour but through accumulation; the sheet remains a vibrating web sustained by an inner rhythm. This drawing can be read as the expression of a trance-like process in which the line itself seems to think—each stroke an impulse, a thought, a flicker of perception. The result is not a portrait in the classical sense but a psychic topography: an attempt to grasp memory and seeing simultaneously.

Horst Janssen’s works emerge from obsessive dedication and inward concentration, from states of intense absorption that recall artistic flow—that moment of complete dissolution into the act, when the hand appears to act on its own. His portraits and self-portraits in particular reveal a pronounced psychological depth. They are often distorted, marked by serial overlays that resemble visual recordings of inner movements and altered states of consciousness. Added to this is Janssen’s preoccupation with intoxication and ecstasy—topics that also appear biographically. His works oscillate between precise control and eruptive gesture, creating a tension that recalls trance-like states.

The questions that interest me are these: How do phenomena of trance manifest in Horst Janssen’s work—as image structure, as artistic practice, and as aesthetic experience?