Poet, scholar, and teacher John G. Neihardt (1881–1973) is best known for Black Elk Speaks (1932), a widely read text that was highly influential among various American countercultures of the twentieth century—including the Beat and New Age movements—whose participants were searching for different avenues to spiritual and intellectual enlightenment. The book details the life and otherworldly visions of Black Elk, the Oglala Lakota healer and shaman who bore witness to the horrors of white settler colonialism firsthand, including at the battles of Little Big Horn (1876) and Wounded Knee (1890). The two men forged a deep bond through shared encounters with near-death experiences and altered states, deepening Neihardt’s conviction that consciousness could exist beyond the physical plane. Indeed, Neihardt believed in the afterlife. But after accidentally causing the death of his wife, Mona, he likely may have needed proof. Thus began the Society for Research on Rapport and Telekinesis (SORRAT), a vast psychic experiment born of the author’s most celebrated work and most devastating heartbreak.
A look at the group’s archive reveals SORRAT—long dismissed as an embarrassing footnote to Neihardt’s career—as a mythopoetic extension of his literary cosmos. Collapsing art, science, paranormal phenomena, and ritual, SORRAT expands Neihardt’s search for visionary truth via poetry and experimentation. As an inadvertent art collective, the group both mirrors and anticipates many vanguard, cross-disciplinary approaches throughout the twentieth century: Consider Marcel Duchamp’s recontextualizations of common objects and experiences, John Cage’s aleatoric methodologies, and various forms of radical play (à la Cage, neo-Dada, and Fluxus) embraced by artists such as Alison Knowles and Yoko Ono. SORRAT’s central preoccupations with invisible transmission and amalgamated authorship connect to fundamental questions regarding distributed agency and who—or what—it is that creates.
I first encountered the work of SORRAT in “The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult,” a major survey of psychic photography at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005. Amid the black-and-white portraits of Civil War mourners, stiffly seated beside ghostly doubles and half-dressed Victorian women exhaling ectoplasmic goo, were four small Instamatic prints that stopped me cold: snaps of a levitating TV tray and a kitschy clown doll floating before a Beethoven record album in someone’s living room. They were unlike any of the other pictures on view, sending me straight into a haunted suburbia circa 1970. SORRAT offered up a unique vision of enchantment in domestic settings—colorful, crisp, postwar, and distinctly American. The art historian Susan Aberth characterized these images beautifully: “It’s like Poltergeist meets Stephen Shore.”