Era That Offered Much More Than Modernists by Ken Johnson Art Review
From Fine art Journal 72, no. four (Winter 2013)
Ken Johnson. Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art. New York: Prestel, 2011. 232 pp., 150 colour ills., 10 b/w. $49.95
David S. Rubin, ed. Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art since the 1960s. Exh. cat. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. 138 pp., 92 color ills. $31.95
When H. H. Arnason published the first edition of his 1968 volume The History of Modernistic Fine art, it ended with a one-page entry on "Psychedelic Art." Positioning the inchoate movement as a bridge between the mod and gimmicky periods, the entry was a blueprint for a future that would never come to pass, and was expunged from all further editions, helping to relegate psychedelia to the proverbial dustbin of history.
The problems with psychedelic fine art were foundational, as its detractors were quick to indicate out. From its inception, it proved difficult to define: "psychedelic" is a 1950s neologism meaning "mind-manifesting," and in asserting that psychedelic art both derived from and induced a heightened awareness of the globe, its promoters obscured the stardom betwixt psychedelic fine art and art in general, as it is commonly understood. (Timothy Leary himself is supposed to have said that "All Fine art began as a psychedelic expression to turn others on," evacuating the concepts of both art and psychedelic feel in the process.)1 In fact, it was unclear whether one needed to have taken a so-called psychedelic drug (such as LSD or mescaline), or to accept engaged in whatever other kind of mind-altering experience (yoga or meditation, for example), to produce psychedelic work. Perhaps every bit a issue, psychedelic art lacked any defining stylistic features: it could exist figurative or abstract, realist or fantastic, geometric or biomorphic, static or kinetic, object-based or environmental. The confusion over what defined a work of art as psychedelic was only compounded past long-standing debates—dating at to the lowest degree to the birth of modernity—over the varieties and causes of psychedelic experience.2
Two recent books revisit the human relationship of art and psychedelia, but avoid the hazards of trying to theorize a motion, as they characterize psychedelia every bit an baggy influence rather than a denoting fashion: Ken Johnson'south Are You lot Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art, and Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art since the 1960s, a catalogue edited by curator David S. Rubin for an exhibition at the San Antonio Museum of Fine art. Though psychedelic art (any it might have been) was literally erased from the fine art-historical record, these books argue that a psychedelic sensibility (any that might be) persists in the work of a broad range of artists, from the expected (Bridget Riley, Fred Tomaselli) to the provocative (Frank Stella, Jeff Koons). At the showtime of his volume, Johnson— a critic for the New York Times—even wonders whether "all contemporary art is psychedelic," reflecting widespread cultural transformations stimulated past the popularization of psychedelic drugs in the mid-twentieth century (10). Rubin, who aims "to investigate the notion of a psychedelic sensibility within the context of contemporary fine art," similarly positions psychedelia as a electric current, even ubiquitous, influence (16). Notably, both authors dissimilarity their projects to a spate of recent exhibitions devoted to either a more historical or a more narrow formulation of psychedelic art, like Tate Liverpool'due south 2007 Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's 2005 Ecstasy: In and About Altered States.three
In a review of Robert E. L. Masters and Jean Houston's 1968 book Psychedelic Fine art—the first book devoted to the topic—a critic for Fine art in America wrote, "To take issue with the authors . . . is much like attacking a couple of recipients of revealed truth for their beliefs."4 The text was described every bit long on conviction, but short on testify to support the claim that such a thing equally psychedelic art exists, and that information technology is interesting. In the case of Rubin's catalogue, the images are largely left to speak for themselves, and they almost convince united states of america of their psychedelic sensibility: Frank Stella's Double Scramble (1968), a Day-Glo stripe painting so evidently trippy that it inspired Rubin to curate the show, dares us to account for its Technicolor vibrancy solely through the critical language of Minimalism. In other words, the book's presentation of this and other works within the framework of psychedelia relies on their resonance with the clichés of psychedelic visual civilization, including "extreme color," "kaleidoscopic space," "obsessive mark making," "immersive environments," "pictorial fragmentation," and "invented universes." These formal comparisons, withal, are buttressed only by the flimsiest of historical circumstances (e.g., the fact that Double Scramble was made in 1968, at the acme of the psychedelic counterculture) and all-besides-rare personal testimonies. The catalogue's essay by the countercultural guru Daniel Pinchbeck—in which the author at one point entertains fellow guru Terrence McKenna's theory that psilocybin mushrooms were sent to Earth by alien lifeforms—also labors to embed these works within the discourse of psychedelia. But the more they speak to Pinchbeck and his followers, the less these objects seem to have to say to art history: if they are informed by a psychedelic sensibility, information technology is not readily credible how that information might impact our existing narratives of modernistic and contemporary fine art.
While Rubin aims to expand the canon of works that have a psychedelic (that is, "optical" or "visionary") sensibility, Johnson more ambitiously aims to aggrandize our sense of what counts every bit psychedelic in visual art. He provides ample evidence for his conspiracy theory that psychedelia is everywhere, merely in doing so, he likewise comes close to claiming that psychedelic feel includes everything. His close readings in detail can be insightful, equally in his parsing of Christopher Williams'due south staged photo of an overturned Renault Dauphine-Four as a meditation on the hope—and futility—of the anarchic energies of May 1968 (Johnson, 65). His suggestion, nevertheless, that psychedelic experience fosters anti-authoritarianism, and too triggers metacognition, intensifies the experience of embodiment, hastens sexual awakening, develops one's sense of humor, then forth, makes his argument that Williams'south piece of work has a psychedelic sensibility almost meaningless: following Leary, one wonders if every work of art—not simply every work of contemporary art—might be psychedelic. Consequently, when he separates a work from its familiar fine art-historical context in social club to review it with his new "heuristic," Johnson sometimes offers a reading that seems to obscure rather than illuminate its object.
Fifty-fifty if a work compels u.s.a. to reevaluate information technology through the kaleidoscopic lens of psychedelia (and many here do), what do we ultimately gain past recognizing its true (psychedelic) colors, then to speak? The field of fine art history would perhaps benefit more than from deploying the rhetoric of psychedelia to rub these objects confronting the grain, allowing that rhetoric to disturb, for example, our received notions of Minimalism. At their cores, both of these books try to plough psychedelia into a mainstream fine art phenomenon: co-ordinate to these authors, the psychedelic sensibility is pervasive, even if its influence on fine art oft goes undetected. Like the subconscious patterns "revealed" by tripping, it is an invisible force that structures the globe—including the paintings of Frank Stella, or the steel sculptures of Richard Serra, as Johnson claims. Yet instead of moving psychedelia from margin to heart, it might be more than valuable to preserve some of psychedelia'due south outsider, or more specifically oppositional, status; following Lars Bang Larsen (who follows T. J. Clark), possibly psychedelia is even a "limit term" of modernism.v In their anthology West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977, Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner remind u.s. that the term "counterculture" was coined in the 1960s to designate "an oppositional movement with distinct norms and values generated out of its conflictual interaction with the ascendant society," in contradistinction to a subculture, which is "a mere subset of ascendant society" that is "neutral with respect to ascendant gild'due south values."vi Auther and Lerner argue the importance of reevaluating 1960s and 1970s countercultural art (including but non express to psychedelic art) despite or even considering of its oblique relation to the mainstream East Declension art of the period; this approach seems more productive than insisting that the old meaningfully informed the latter.
The discussion of the part of psychedelia in contemporary art might also exist enriched by mobilizing a more current model of psychedelia itself. Both of these books revive the thought that psychedelic experience produced sociocultural transformations through the expansion of individual consciousness; but in the decades since the 1968 publication of Leary'south The Politics of Ecstasy, scholars take reconsidered the meaning of psychedelic feel and the legacy of the psychedelic revolution. For example, historians of engineering and of art akin have addressed the imbrication of the 1960s counterculture with the emergence of postindustrial data technologies—an idea encapsulated by Steve Jobs'south use of LSD, and by Leary's rebranding every bit a "cyberpunk" in the 1980s. For some scholars, the use of engineering to produce psychedelic experiences of spatial and temporal dislocation or psychic fragmentation (in places ranging from world's fairs to hippie communes) results in the maintenance of hegemonic power relations, while for others, it produces new subjectivities that can evade technocratic forms of control.7
Though neither addresses any of this scholarship, both Rubin and Johnson practise include artists working with video and other new media. Jennifer Steinkamp, Jeremy Blake, and Leo Villareal appear alongside painters and sculptors in Rubin's book, while Johnson devotes a chapter, "From Expanded Cinema to Cyber-Psychedelia," to artists ranging from Stan Brakhage to the net fine art team of Eva and Franco Mattes. Both authors debate that digital technology and mind expansion are intimately related: Johnson rhetorically asks, "If today's art is near altering consciousness and doing then broadly, what meliorate medium to achieve that than the computers and the Net, which can reach millions?" (101), while Rubin posits that "a psychedelic sensibility . . . seems appropriately suited to our current digital age" (28). Yet neither assuredly explains why computers and hallucinogens share an elective analogousness, which would require both a consideration of the material specificity of digital technologies and a more focused view of the term "psychedelic."
Using more nuance to narrate the relation of technology and psychedelia would not only connect these books to ongoing fine art-historical debates, just likewise prompt a new discussion of the politics of psychedelic art. The thought that the historical counterculture was apolitical, and therefore indifferent to the radical activism of the New Left and other movements, has long been dismantled; equally Julie Stephens has argued, a major aim of the counterculture was to redefine the notion of politics, and groups like the Diggers and the Yippies are best understood on their own terms.8 Consequently, it is disingenuous to merits that psychedelic art typically responds to "the raging globe of globalization, transcultural collisions, economical pass up, envi-ronmental disaster, and armed services confrontations at all levels" with a "desire to get inwards," as claimed by the third correspondent to Rubin's catalogue, Robert C. Morgan (47). The same tired association of psychedelia with self-absorption informs Johnson's fantasy of simple life on a rural commune (which, to his credit, he freely admits is problematic). The but author in these books to connect psychedelic consciousness to gimmicky politics is Pinchbeck, who compares our "current economic and ecology meltdown" to "the dismemberment and detaching that shamans undergo in dreams and visions": as we painfully become aware of the dangers of debt-based global commercialism, we are analogues of those psychedelic voyagers who seek the true reality behind false illusion (Rubin, 53). On its confront, this is non a productive ascertainment, merely on further inspection, information technology echoes Diedrich Diederichsen'south compelling comparing of hallucinogenic drugs, which "alienate" us from our everyday reality, to Marxist strategies of pulling dorsum the veil of reification.9 Diederichsen articulated his politics of hallucination—inspired by the drug-induced ruminations of Walter Benjamin himself—in the catalogues for Ecstasy and Summer of Love, the very exhibitions from which Rubin and Johnson are then eager to distance their own projects. This is unfortunate, as his theorization offers us another avenue to what these ii books are missing, from an art-historical perspective: a sense of the larger critical stakes of a psychedelic sensibility in art.
Tina Rivers is a PhD candidate in the department of art history and archeology at Columbia Academy. Her dissertation is the first major study of the Howard Wise Gallery, examining its role in the ascent of media fine art in the 1960s. Her writings accept appeared in publications such every bit Art in America and Framework: The Journal of Movie theater and Media, likewise as in several books, and her criticism appears on Artforum.com.
The review originally appeared in the Winter 2013 issue of Art Journal.
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Source: https://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=4506
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