Audio By Carbonatix
In the 1960s, the oldest of the baby boomers were coming of age, and
they collectively launched the counterculture across America. The
unofficial capital of this youth movement was San Francisco, where
thousands of hippies descended and turned American culture upside down.
They embraced pre-industrial styles of dress, grew out their hair and
lived together in groups, and they really got into taking drugs,
especially LSD. Music — in particular, rock — was
often inspired by this psychedelic drug use; it became that society’s
anthem and led to, among other things, a revolution in graphic
design.
It is this final piece of the puzzle that is the topic of a
homegrown blockbuster called The Psychedelic Experience: Rock
Posters From the San Francisco Bay Area: 1965-71, now about
midway through its run at the Denver Art Museum.
The Psychedelic Experience was put together by Darrin Alfred,
the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) assistant curator of
graphics at the DAM. The AIGA in Alfred’s title is part of R. Craig
Miller’s legacy. Miller founded the department of Architecture, Design
and Graphics at the DAM in 1990, and in 2003 talked the AIGA into
donating its massive archives of posters and other graphics material to
the museum.
Now at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Miller has founded a similar
department there and recently unveiled a major exhibit called
European Design Since 1985. It’s the companion to a show on
American design from the same period that Miller presented at the DAM
some years ago and, like its predecessor, breaks new scholarly ground.
The European show was mostly put together in Denver and has been billed
as a collaboration between the IMA and the DAM, but, oddly enough, it
won’t be presented here. It’s a sad story, and reminiscent of a lack of
support for Miller by the DAM when he was here.
Though some people have lashed out at The Psychedelic
Experience because they feel it displaced Miller’s European
Design show, it really wasn’t a case of either/or, and having
met Alfred, I think he’d have worked well with Miller. In fact, a
number of the posters in The Psychedelic Experience have been
acquired in Miller’s honor.
Interestingly, the posters in The Psychedelic Experience
aren’t part of the aforementioned AIGA hoard but rather highlight a
collection assembled by David and Sheryl Tippit of Boulder, who
partially donated them. The Tippits are connoisseurs whose collecting
interests vary widely. In the case of the posters, they sought out
examples that were in the finest condition available and those that
were artist-signed.
The exhibit is ensconced in the Anschutz Gallery, on level two of
the DAM’s Hamilton Building. This is deliciously ironic, because donor
Philip Anschutz, for whom the space is named, is an avowed right-winger
and major supporter of conservative Christian causes, positions that
are anathema to the spirit of the psychedelic material on view. It’s
also somewhat inappropriate, because the posters themselves are so
small — diminutive, even — and the Anschutz Gallery is
enormous, with gigantic walls and sprawling spaces. On the other hand,
the space allows Alfred to include 300 works, an enormous number for
any exhibit. As big a selection as this is, it’s just the tip of the
iceberg in terms of the Tippit stash, which numbers over 800.
To whittle down the selections, Alfred focused only on those posters
done before 1971 and on those by artists based in the Bay Area. This
reflects both the primacy of San Francisco in the psychedelic graphics
movement and Alfred’s own personal experience, since he came from the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he was a design curator. It
also allowed him to include some Denver-related material, since the
short-lived Family Dog concert hall, operated by Chet Helms on West
Evans Avenue in the fall of 1967, was promoted with psychedelic posters
for groups like Blue Cheer, the Grateful Dead and the Mothers of
Invention. After three months of almost constant police harassment, the
Family Dog was shut down. Looking at the section devoted to the venue,
it made me wonder if there were other clubs in the area that featured
psychedelic posters done by local Colorado artists. I’ll bet there
were.
Alfred uses the show to feature the principal artists involved in
the movement and exhibits the work of each in separate sections
arranged chronologically. The walls have been hung salon-style in
places, meaning clusters of posters were hung two high or in more
amorphous arrangements. One of the big surprises for me was their small
size. Instead of the large format of more familiar older concert or
travel posters, as with the Elvis poster in the entry to the show,
these could be attached to light poles or taped to doors and
windows.
Specialists in the field have identified a big five, but Alfred
disagrees, so he instead included seven stars (one of which is a team)
in this exhibit: Lee Conklin, Rick Griffin, Alton Kelley & Stanley
Mouse, Bonnie MacLean, Victor Moscoso, David Singer and Wes Wilson. All
but Moscoso (more about him in a minute) were self-taught, and it
shows: Stylistically, the posters have little, if anything, to do with
mainstream graphic currents of the time — again, aside from
Moscoso’s pieces.
Alfred, who is too young to have any firsthand knowledge of the
period, says the artists would go to the library and troll for images.
This is how they came across historic illustrations that they copied or
responded to. Art nouveau is the most obvious source of the style, as
is clearly demonstrated by a poster such as “Girl With Green Hair,” by
Kelley and Mouse, from 1966. The artists needed to do research to find
these kinds of approaches, because at the time, art nouveau was not
well known to anyone other than scholars.
And now to Moscoso: As a student at Yale University, he had studied
with the great Josef Albers, a master of color theory. When he moved to
San Francisco and learned that concert promoters were commissioning
posters, Moscoso set up his own studio, the Neon Rose, in 1966. This
allowed him, unlike the others, to retain the rights to his work. More
than any of the other artists, Moscoso was more intimately connected to
the fine-art world, and his pieces may be broadly connected to ’60s pop
art.
Taking the color theories of Albers, who was a constructivist and
not a pop artist, Moscoso was able to set up unbelievable contrasts
between the different shades he employed so that they vibrate as we
look at them. In some, he created posters that move when subjected to
different colored lights, making them literally animated.
Light shows were common features of the concerts being advertised by
the posters, and one can only imagine their effect on the drug-addled
audience. In the DAM exhibit, there’s a small, dark room with its own
light show, where some of these Moscoso posters have been hung. One is
1968’s “Incredible Poetry,” which has a big mouth in the center that
seems to open and close as the colored lights flash on it. Another
depicts winged women whose wings flap as the lights change. Here’s how
it works: The lights are in the primaries of red, yellow and blue, with
the illusion of movement created because each shade blocks out its
related color on the posters.
Despite the obvious subtexts of sex, drugs and rock and roll that
are inherent in a show about psychedelia, there’s a surprisingly
innocent character to the work. The artists had modest goals, and their
sincerity comes through with none of the cynical hipsterism so common
today. For this reason alone, the show is well worth the price of
admission.
The Psychedelic Experience
