“The Barricade and the Dance Floor: Aesthetic Radicalism and the Counterculture” is republished from Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (Walker Art Center, 2015; Andrew Blauvelt, ed.). On view at the Walker October 24, 2015 through February 28, 2015, the exhibition travels to the Cranbrook Art Museum and University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
In Hjorvardur Harvard Arnason’s sweeping survey History of Modern Art, first published in 1968, a brief entry on psychedelic art completes his six-hundred-page tome. It seems a fitting way to conclude the book’s march through modernism, focusing as it does on the au courant style of the moment. As Arnason explains, “The recent appearance of psychedelic art may be accounted for in several ways: the easy availability and enormously increased use of psychedelic drugs; the mixture and confusion of appeals to several senses simultaneously in the so-called mixed media performances; the ethos of the hippies and flower-children; and the prevalent atmosphere of rebellion against ‘the establishment,’ whether in society in general or in art specifically.”1 Arnason does not elaborate on these causalities, which, nevertheless, are instructive in their range of positions. The use of mind-altering and consciousness-expanding drugs such as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin on the part of artists would seem to be an expected foundational definition of a psychedelic art.
This “art under the influence” approach applied not only to some artists whose work was produced during drug-induced sessions but also for the many more who drew upon such episodes and experiences more symbolically or referentially, giving psychedelic art currency as both a form of process and representational art. Interestingly, Arnason does not parse the difference between the artist and the audience undergoing an altered state of consciousness, rendering psychedelic art also possible in the mind’s-eye of the beholder. This inclusive reading is alluded to in his second cause, the “mixed” and “confusing” sensory experiences of mixed-media performance—choreographies that often intentionally blurred the roles of audience and performer as easily as it melded the aural, visual, and tactile realms into one experiential whole. In fact, although he introduces this final section with a focus on the psychedelic artist, the trajectory of psychedelic art clearly exceeds such conventional limits and must embrace the culture and society at large. Thus, the appearance of such an art would be the consequence of its newly created audience of “hippies and flower children”—presumably as both spectators and co-creators—in a socially antiestablishment “atmosphere of rebellion.” Arnason understood that such an art is not limited to representing conditions of social rebellion “in general,” but also posed a challenge to “art specifically.”
Arnason had neither the space nor the historical distance to expand on this provocative thought, although he closes this section, and thus the book, with the following: “There could be no more striking demonstration of the variety of recent art than the contrast between the rigors and discipline of color-field, systemic, or minimal art on the one hand, and on the other hand, the surprise images of cosmic or mythic events induced by ‘mind-liberating’ drugs.” 2 One could argue that it was precisely this contrast or difference that would dispel psychedelic art, including nearly all related forms of countercultural production, from art history proper following the waning of the movement itself.
Although Arnason concedes in his postscript to the book that the history of modern art was “primarily a revolution in perception,” albeit led by artists and followed by viewers, the drug-induced hallucinations of psychedelic art were perhaps a bridge too far. 3 The skepticism is already in the air in his closing sentence, whereby more established 1960s art movements exhibit rigor and discipline—understood as control and definition—while psychedelia is a byproduct of serendipitous and thus uncontrollable effect. The teleology of successive artistic movements established by Arnason and repeated by others—Pop, Color Field, Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, Conceptualism—creates a powerful canonical narrative that tends to exclude anomalous episodes that clash with its storyline. By the time the revised second edition of History of Modern Art was published in 1977, the section on psychedelic art was eliminated.
It is possible, however, to understand and situate psychedelia into a continuum or continuity of art-historical thinking, as Adrian Piper, who began her artistic career in her teenage years with psychedelic paintings and drawings, relates to her own evolution: “Realism depicts the objects of ordinary conventional reality; Impressionism depicts the perceptual qualities of those objects broken up into light and color; Pointillism depicts the perceptual and formal qualities of those objects broken up even further into color and minutely small forms; Psychedelia depicts the cracking open of all of those perceptual and formal qualities; Minimalism expresses the underlying geometric essences behind those objects and their qualities; Pop Art depicts those objects shorn of the conventional conceptual schemes that give them meaning; Conceptual Art expresses the breaking up and reconstitution of those conventional conceptual schemes and the objects (and subjects) embedded in them.”4
In this lineage, psychedelia follows Impressionism, not chronologically but philosophically, as the artist depicts an altered sense of reality and the objects and spaces within it. Rather than a formal reordering of perceived color and form (e.g., Pointillism), psychedelia promises something different—access to more deeply hidden truths of reality and alternate planes of lived experience.
“Cracking open” ordinary reality is not unlike the preferred metaphor of the counterculture’s throwing open—following Aldous Huxley, then Jim Morrison—the “doors of perception.” In psychedelia, the role of the artist is to bear witness to or induce such revelations in others: its primary mode is depiction—re-creating the effect post-trip, reporting back one’s experience—and these representations were sufficiently discernible and unique enough to be categorized as its own aesthetic. Thus, Arnason provides a formal analysis of psychedelic art: “heavily figured,” “acid colors,” “undulating lines,” “amorphous space,” and so on.5 Isolating the characteristic visual language of psychedelia was tantamount to codifying its style. It is not surprising then to see psychedelia portrayed, discussed, and ultimately dismissed as a style with its resultant commodification.
Artist Jud Yalkut was already wise to the situation when he wrote in Arts magazine in 1966 that “‘Psychedelic’ symbology appears as the next reworking of our vernacular,” and warned, following the example of the rapid reabsorption of Pop art back into popular culture, “The dangerous temptation is getting ‘hung up’ by gaudy surface appearances and easy associations,”6 noting that “LSD Art” had already been canonized by Life magazine.7 While it may be possible to understand psychedelia in its historical moment as a style of the times as represented in both conventional and unconventional art forms, it was also simultaneously postulated as a timely style or fad—another marketing strategy, a “magic sales word,” as duly noted in the Wall Street Journal.8
Rather than a formal reordering of perceived color and form (e.g., Pointillism), psychedelia promises something different—access to more deeply hidden truths of reality and alternate planes of lived experience.
Arnason wasn’t alone in his speculations about psychedelic art. In 1968, Robert E. L. Masters and Jean Houston published the book Psychedelic Art, which featured a broader range of examples, including the paintings and drawings of Isaac Abrams, whom Arnason had included in his text, and Ernst Fuchs as well as media-based environments and light installations by artists such as Jackie Cassen and Rudi Stern, USCO, Don Snyder, and Yayoi Kusama. Psychedelic Art offers the most in-depth study, perhaps the only one, of the subject: searching for a definition (art produced as a result of or during a psychedelic experience or used as a catalyst to induce one); comparing and contrasting it to other artistic movements and styles such as Surrealism; embracing other new forms such as the multimedia installation, experimental film, and the light show; and parsing the differences between psychedelic environments and scripted Happenings.
Despite this more expansive range of media and practices and extended context, the boundaries of psychedelic art proper are policed to exclude the applied arts and design—essentially nothing associated with commerce: no vibrant rock posters, no sexualized comix, no dance club environments, and most certainly none of the gaudy paraphernalia of the “psychedelicatessens, head shops, and acid marts.”9 However, by avoiding commerce, it also evaded much of the culture too—the expansive canvas of psychedelic practices that historian and curator Lars Bang Larsen describes: “What was and still is called ‘psychedelic art’ was made in the service of the hippie lifestyle and politics. It unfolded on camper vans, in communal murals, in light shows and media happenings, and in the graphic design of rock posters and record covers.”10 Larsen concludes, “However non-conformist and immersive these were, the counterculture was generally indifferent towards the art concept and reified art in its aestheticisation of everyday life.”11
The counterculture was too preoccupied inventing a new world of cultural experiences and social rituals—acid rock music; guerrilla or street theater; anarchic literature; Eastern-infused spirituality; freestyle dancing, “de-schooling” and the free university; androgynous fashion
Despite its rather short-lived existence in the annals of art history, psychedelia itself lives on, less circumscribed as an art practice and much more expansively inscribed in the cultural imagination where it was first manifested and where it remains lodged—still radiating in the glow of its afterimage. Psychedelia in its more expansive cultural sense has been the subject of recent curatorial reprise and critical reappraisal. A decade ago in 2005, Tate Liverpool mounted an extensive reassessment of the period, Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era, which examined a broad range of disciplines and media, inclusive of both art and design. The exhibition’s curator, Christoph Grunenberg, asks in his introductory essay “Art with No History”: “Why has a movement with an acute presence in the 1960s been purged from the official history books?”12 Grunenberg provides his own answer: “The free-wheeling shapes, exaggerated acid colours and pervasive formal entropy of psychedelic art continue to be met with aesthetic revulsion and intellectual arrogance. The apparent frivolity of psychedelic art and artefacts, its assumed affinity with kitsch and other decadent manifestations of mass culture, suggest a lack of substance. Its aesthetic, political and social radicalism, it seems, has been obscured by a veil of bright colours, ornamental, all-over patterns and general over-indulgence in decorative surplus.”13
Writing earlier, in 2003, Lars Bang Larsen concedes: “Art historically, of course, it doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Only a small segment of psychedelic culture was art, and what was art was part and parcel of the beads and the bongs, the light shows, the love-ins and the sit-ins. That is, the art aspect is anti-academic more by fate of lifestyle than by choice, destined as it was to be derivative of broadly cultural sources, most notably the rock and fashion scenes.”14 For Larsen, who has since written extensively on the subject, psychedelia marks a limit condition for art in its rejection or exclusion from both the “art market and academic dogma.”15
Unlike Pop art, which was steeped in the gallery and museum systems for promotion and sales and drew upon popular culture as its point of reference and departure, psychedelia developed its own subculture and thrived in the commercial marketplace of its own fashioning, eventually generating enough useful symbolism to be exploited by mainstream society. Unlike Minimalism and Conceptualism, which were virtually formed in a discursive space created by artists and critics, psychedelia was, in the words of art critic Dave Hickey, “permanently out of academic fashion,” with its penchant for visual excess and its resistance to interpretation.16 For Larsen, the topic is not necessarily one to be recuperated and reinserted into art history as Grunenberg argues, but rather that psychedelia suffers from, in his words, “too much history,” or perhaps more correctly, too much cultural baggage to be taken seriously as art.17
Ultimately, the reduction to psychedelia of a diverse range of countercultural artistic practices—let alone the era itself—is the problem. This was identified already in 1968 by Theodore Roszak, who coined the term counterculture as a way of differentiating the generational rejection of postwar American values in his book The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition.
Beyond Psychedelia
Despite its seemingly omnipresent character, psychedelia is and was too limiting a concept by which to judge or gauge the artistic merit of the countercultural output of the 1960s and early 1970s. To understand the diversity of practices during such an intensely experimental period, the curatorial net has to be cast much wider and much farther.
Some more recent attempts to do so include Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner’s West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977 (2011) for the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke’s The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside (2013) for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. As both titles indicate, the theoretical focus takes on a genius loci approach, placing the American West and California, in particular, as the epicenter for more expansive understandings of the social and cultural transformations being wrought as a new form of global modernity emerged in the 1960s.
West of Center seeks to expand the art-historical canon of the period by including formerly excluded practices, art forms that did not conform to the prevailing ethos of an East Coast–dominated avant-garde that remained preoccupied with categories such as the art object, artistic medium, and disciplines, even as it tried to actively undermine all three.
By contrast, the West Coast proffered hybrid experiments that eschewed and challenged disciplinary boundaries, often commingling art, craft, design, and performance with filmic and architectural practices; extending the notion of medium into a riotous range of media assaulting the senses; and tending to privilege individual experience as the basis of social transformation, while creating a personal yet political commitment that went largely ignored by the New Left political scene.
Unrecognizable as either art or politics, many forms of countercultural practice suffer from “a double whammy” of neglect, as Auther and Lerner relate: “The unfortunate fate of the counterculture is that its story doesn’t blend well with either the narrative of the New York avant-garde or the political histories of the 1960s. While its commitment to social transformation divorced it from the histories of the avant-garde, its emphasis on culture and lifestyle alienated it from political histories of the 1960s.”21
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Selections from the Whole Earth Catalog, July 1970
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Selections from the Whole Earth Catalog, July 1970
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Selections from the Whole Earth Catalog, July 1970
The 2013 exhibition, The Whole Earth, locates its emblematic beginnings with the first images of the planet taken from the vantage point of outer space, a cause taken up in 1966 by Stewart Brand, who created a campaign asking for the release of such pictures, which were then controlled as part of the military-security apparatus of the United States. Eventually, such images would adorn the covers of his iconic Whole Earth Catalog. Like a poster child for a new form of holism emergent in the 1960s, the picture of the whole Earth embodied metaphors of interdependence, interconnectedness, and global completeness that merged perfectly with the era’s new adages, such as those by Marshall McLuhan and his evocation of a “global village” connected by new forms of media or Fuller’s technological-cum-ecological metaphor of a “Spaceship Earth.”
Diederichsen and Franke embrace a wider cultural history of the period in which art, images, texts, music, and ephemera are orchestrated in an overarching narrative of the “planetary paradigm,” as they call it, which they suggest emerged around 1968.22 They place at the heart of their endeavor the technological and ecological imperatives that grew out of the counterculture, particularly in California, a place that birthed both back-to-the-land eco-communalism as well as a fervent technological optimism that witnessed the birth of the personal computer and the advance of cybernetics, and would later spawn a public and commercial Internet.23 Extending these well-known historical moments, their project embraces the past and the present, the historical archive as well as the contemporary image sphere. Despite the presence of art, both new and old, the project purposefully foregrounds an intellectual rather than an art history, one that extends countercultural ideas into present-day concepts of neoliberalism, networked capitalism, globalization, climate change, and Empire.
Hippie Modernism attempts to further expand and expose the range of such artistic and cultural practices—the proverbial tip of the iceberg that West of Center surfaced four years ago—with a particular emphasis on radical architecture and critical design of the period, which were not part of that project’s focus. It also offers an alternative aesthetic and theoretical framework for which to understand the countercultural output of the period as a radical break from progressive politics, art, and culture of the time.
Rather than focusing strictly on the geography and mythology of the American West, the exhibition takes a broader view of countercultural production, examining how basic tenets such as consciousness expansion, social awareness, and community formation were made manifest through the art, architecture, and design of the period. Like West of Center, Hippie Modernism partakes of a new generation of historians who are just beginning to mine the archives of these lost episodes in cultural history—moments of great interest and inspiration to a new generation of artists, architects, and designers.
Photo: Greg Beckel
An Alternate Architecture
If art history ultimately rejected the petition of psychedelic art to enter its canon, then a similar fate befell countercultural architectural experiments. In his book Architecture Today (1982), author and architectural theorist Charles Jencks offers a survey of recent work that attempts to delineate the differences between late-modernism and postmodernism in architecture. Positioned as the concluding and final section of the book, an eighty-page chapter by architectural historian William Chaitkin is titled simply “Alternatives.”
By alternative, Chaitkin refers to the experimental work of the 1960s and 1970s initiated by two different camps, one enacted by architects but critical of their field and another operating outside or beyond the field of architecture proper. On the one hand, there were those projects undertaken by mostly young architects, recent graduates of architectural programs, which embodied provocative and visionary schemes that might not ever or could never be built, or that extended the notion of architecture well beyond the realization of a building. Often existing as compelling drawings and visually powerful collages, they offered a conceptual alternative to normative architectural schemes and practices of the day—a powerful critique of both the affirming and servile nature of much professional
A second category of experiments took place in parallel by essentially nonprofessional architects or amateurs in the best sense of the word, whose work and practice entailed not only the design but also the fabrication of experimental structures.
Typically, their work was an extension of their lives, a personal or communal need for shelter replacing the client commissions of professional practice, while their own manual labor contributed to the task at hand and thus further collapsed the distinctions among the varied roles of designer, builder, and inhabitant. This was not, however, simply a case of indigenous, anonymous, or impoverished building. In their pursuit of alternative living, their ideas challenged conventional notions of public and private property, the use and fixity of space, and of conventional building methods, among other things, while embracing both old techniques and new materials.24 By doing so, it challenged the basic precepts of architecture from largely the outside the profession.
It is on this second camp that Chaitkin focuses his attention, preferring to discuss built works because they were “short on theory but long on practice,” paralleling Jencks’s use of realized or built commissions in the book’s other sections.25 In his important chronicle of countercultural architecture, Chaitkin covers structures such as the mathematically precise geodesic domes of Fuller, an engineer, and also the variant geometries of handcrafted hippie “zomes” of Steve Baer for the celebrated communal architecture of Drop City. He embraces the funky aesthetic of the wooden houseboats of Sausalito and the “woodbutcher’s art”26 of myriad hand-built homes nestled in the woods as well as the revival of indigenous and nomadic forms such as the tepee or the yurt. Despite a foray into inflatable architecture, its leanings in the direction of technology were more toward the appropriate and alternative type, rather than the speculative and technophilic. Chaitkin eyes renewable energies like solar and the reuse of cast-off materials from industrial society as well as the recycling of motor vehicles into forms of mobile architecture—the conversion of school buses, vans, and cars into he calls “truckitecture.”
In Marcuse’s 1969 book An Essay on Liberation, the pessimistic Frankfurt School philosopher sees a glimmer of hope in transforming the repressive technocratic state of his self-described one-dimensional man. The optimism derives from the so-called “youthquake” of the 1960s: the students of the Free Speech Movement on the Berkeley campus in 1964; the 100,000-plus so-called flower children who descended into Haight-Ashbury in the summer of 1967; the thousands of French students who were joined by the 11 million workers who went on strike during the protests of May 1968; the half-million antiwar demonstrators who had gathered in Washington, DC, in 1969; the 210,000 young men officially accused of evading the draft, and millions more who sought refuge through deferments; the 250,000 readers of the Black Panther Party newspaper or its members who took up arms for social justice in cities across the United States; the millions who participated in riots across America’s racially polarized cities; and the hippies or freaks who dropped out to join or create one of an estimated 3,000 communes in America—and all the rest who enacted aspects of Marcuse’s great refusal against the smooth, comfortable existence in what he called the “democratic unfreedom” 37 of modern industrial society’s “repressive tolerance.”38
Marcuse’s liberation was not from totalitarian regimes but rather from affluent society itself and his refusal was a call to reject forms of social oppression and economic domination and employ a relentless criticism of such policies and practices. According to Marcuse and others, postwar abundance—largely in the industrialized West—had been achieved through an increasingly techno-rational bureaucratic management of society, at a cost which perpetuated not only the alienation from truly productive labor but also engendered a false consciousness about the new consumer-oriented culture of consumption to which work, life, and the economy was now inextricably bound.
Marcuse saw revolution possible not through the conventional Marxist expectation of the working classes rising up, but rather through those who had rejected or had yet been absorbed into the working life. The mass counterculture of the 1960s—an eclectic mix of radical intellectuals, acid heads, politicos, hippies, yippies, communards, feminists, antiwar protesters, gay rights activists, and Panthers of all types and stripes—provided Marcuse with his great refusal.
In this seemingly awkward yet poetic conflation, Marcuse merges acts of political resistance and cultural pleasure. It is a contradictory set of circumstances but one that sutures the larger rift between the era’s New Left political commitment—those manning the barricades, marching in the streets—and the hippie’s commitment to “make love, not war.” The barricade defines a point of contact between opposing parties, a marker of competing physical forces and a symbolic political act to either build one or topple one. It conjures indelible pictures of civil rights marchers facing down fire hoses and police dogs in Birmingham, helicopters dispersing tear gas onto students on Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza, or the overturned cars on the streets of Paris.
The dance floor by contrast is a commons, a mingling or mixing of bodies, a mass choreography of individuals moving to a common soundtrack, and in this era, against a liquid light show pulsing in sync with the fluidity of the crowd. It evokes the hallucinatory chaos of the Trips Festival, the disco-cum-radical architecture program of Space Electronic in Florence, or the jubilation on the muddy fields of Woodstock. Barricades define a disciplined urban battlefield while the dance floor defines an anti-disciplinary hedonistic playground. These distinct conditions and spaces appear irreconcilable. However, in a spirit of the age that will presage the postmodern, it is not about reconciling opposites but rather connecting disparate notions: not this or that, culture or politics, but rather this and that, culture and politics. This would seem to contradict the received wisdom of the era that saw the activities of the self-professed freaks of the counterculture as essentially nonpolitical from the perspective of the New Left.
The two major factions of the counterculture, the politicos and the hippies, would eventually be joined in the figure of the yippie, whose most prominent
The same impulse to inject a critical dimension and social consciousness into the hippie scene guided the San Francisco’s Diggers, who rejected the increased commercialization of the Haight-Ashbury community through pronouncements such as the “death of hippie, son of media,” while at the same heralding the “birth of the free” with their distribution of free food and meals or the creation of a free store as tangible examples of modeling what they called a “post-competitive” society.
The merger of politics and culture can also be gleaned even earlier in Amsterdam’s anarchist Provo movement (1964–1967), who in their series of “white plans,” for instance, called for free bicycles painted white and the elimination of cars in the city center (White Bicycle Plan); argued for squatting rights to unoccupied properties, which would be painted white, to solve the city’s housing shortage (White Housing Plan); and proposed to fine and stigmatize air polluters by painting factory smokestacks white (White Chimney Plan). The success of the Provos in leveraging public sympathy and media attention would prove influential to the counterculture in the United States. The era’s blend of culture and politics defined a hopeful moment, a glimpse into such liberation, a situation as Marcuse describes, “where the hatred of the young bursts into laughter and song, mixing the barricade and the dance floor, love play and heroism.”39
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