A Magical Mystery Tour
Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era
The New York Sun, June 7, 2007
At one time or another, most of us have gone through that gray-faced morning routine: the shameful stumble through the shambles of a living room reduced to a wasteland of empty bottles, dirty glasses, and elusive memories, you know how it goes. The night before had been fun, you think, you hope, but what was it, exactly, that had happened?
And so it was with that starburst we call "the '60s." For a few brief, blinding moments, there was illumination, chaos, and destruction, sometimes creative, sometimes not, sometimes fun, sometimes not. When it all ended, we were left with the paradox of a world transformed, but little recollection of what had taken place, or why. As the saying goes, "If you can remember anything about the '60s, you weren't really there."
Now, 40 years on — 40 years after the sublime "Sergeant Pepper," 40 years after grubby Haight-Ashbury — the Whitney Museum of American Art is hosting "Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era." The exhibition is a botanical garden planted with flower power's best: posters, paintings, film, photography, album covers, crazed architectural blueprints, various installations that I cannot begin to describe, and other madcap cultural detritus all designed to place psychedelia within its wider intellectual framework. That this show's organizers have found a degree of coherence within the acme of exactly the opposite is no small achievement, but anyone hoping for a broader history of the 1960s will be disappointed. To the extent that larger historical themes can be detected, it is only as muffled echo or fun-house reflection, a presence barely visible through the fog of narcissism, self-congratulation, and intoxication that did so much to define artistic expression in those times.
The show itself is entertaining, playful, informative, visually striking, and comes glowing with a nostalgic enchantment guaranteed to delight many more than just those ancient enough to have spent three muddy, magic days at Max Yasgur's farm. The psychedelic moment may have been just that, but its afterlife lingered on. Even when that, too, had faded away, the symbols of the summer of love were quickly repackaged as nostalgia. You no longer have to have lived through the 1960s to miss them. The average age of the large crowd at the Whitney the Saturday that I came to gawp was well below 50, and many of those younger visitors, I reckoned, had been drawn there by more than just morbid, malicious fascination with boomer folly.
What's perhaps most interesting about this exhibition is the way that, implicitly more than explicitly, it ties psychedelia to what had come before. If this was an avantgarde, it was one with its eyes fixed firmly on the past. Superficially, this was simply a question of style. The curves of psychedelic illustration owe an obvious debt to the sinuous twists and seductive sexual suggestion of Art Nouveau, but the homage to earlier times, or at least, an imagined version of earlier times, ran far deeper than that.
Across the Atlantic, English psychedelia referred back constantly to the lost whimsy of the Victorian nursery, while back home, the vanished Arcadia seemed to have been located somewhere between late wigwam and early Klondike. As for "Sergeant Pepper," arguably psychedelia's most enduring monument, it came saturated in the sounds and sights of the prelapsarian, pre-1914 music hall, and packaged in a sleeve (naturally, it's on display at the Whitney) that famously mixed fanboy enthusiasm with hallucinatory historical eclecticism.
To harp on the past in this way is to suggest a profound discontent with the present, and, despite the prosperity of the mid-1960s, discontent there was. The psychedelic experiment aimed to derail the rationalism that was widely (if inaccurately) believed to lie at the heart of 20th century war, oppression, and alienation. The acid colors and ecstatic twirls of psychedelic art were an act of revolt against the clean lines, clarity, and stripped-down aestheticism of modernism. If the words on posters, such as those for the Fillmores (East or West) that make up a central part of this exhibit, were often barely decipherable, that was the idea.
The irony is that not much of this was particularly novel. For instance, it's a shame that there is little at the Whitney to suggest that an attachment to Eastern religion, concocted or real, fanatic or dilettante, had been a staple of a counterculture steeped in the rejection of reason for nearly a century before the Maharishi made monkeys out of Beatles. As for all those happenings (the Whitney has Jud Yalkut's film of "Kusama's Self Obliteration" as one notably entertaining specimen), it would have been instructive to note that there was nothing about them that would have shocked the salons of silver age Saint Petersburg.
What was different was the extent to which this particular celebration by the Western art world of the ecstatic, the irrational, and the Dionysian was first fueled by drugs (to furnish the vision) and technological know-how (to realize it), and then nourished by affluence and sped-up by mass media into the arms of popular culture and the maw of big business. The intelligentsia had found an audience for their games far beyond the salon, an audience that had trouble even spelling the word "Dionysian" but knew a good party when it saw one.
Despite a regrettably small section dedicated to Andy Warhol, chilly and prescient, an examination of the aftermath of the psychedelic explosion turns out to be largely beyond the scope of this show. The visitor is left with only insinuations of disaster, hints of disillusion, and suggestions of astonishing change, mere scraps of a fascinating story that the Whitney doesn't really attempt to tell. That's frustrating, but it shouldn't deter you from turning up and tuning in to what is a remarkable exhibition. Feed your head.