Öyvind Falström Notes for ‘The Little General’ A, 1968 Tempera and ink on paper 45 x 60.5 cm Louisiana Museum of Modern art, Humlebaek, Denmark. Donation: The Joseph and Celia Ascher Collection, New York.
Interview with curator Lars Bang Larsen, by Sophia Satchell-Baeza
In “Electrical Banana”, a recent book on psychedelic art by Norman Hathaway and Dan Nadel, the German artist Mati Klarwein (he of the famous Miles Davis “Bitches Brew” album cover), described the scorn dumped on him for being a “psychedelic artist”. Especially, he observed “when seen in the company of Tim Leary – too close to LSD for the straight culture-vultures of Madison Avenue”.
Art history and film theory have not been kind to psychedelia, and many artists have felt uneasy about identifying as such, even if Klarwein was an exception. Not just because of its proximity to illicit substances and so-called “low-brow” popular culture (as seen in the trippy rock poster and science fiction comic), psychedelia may well be tainted by sheer exhaustion. Mass-market commodification resulted in a style that quickly saturated mainstream magazines and fashions, coming to represent the worst excesses of the “Swinging Sixties”.
This new exhibition at Raven Row in London seeks to redress that imbalance through a creative and non-canonical curation of artworks that, more importantly, leave behind the clichéd image that has long blighted it. Instead, psychedelic art appears rooted in social events and bodily affects, as an art form or style that begins to move away from human subjectivity. Here, the nervous system becomes, to quote the show’s curator Lars Bang Larsen, “a site of production and creation”.
Many of the artists on show here come from around Europe, Japan, Scandinavia and Latin America, and many seem to be processing or “filtering” psychedelia through ideas of automatism and post-humanism in a radical challenge to our perceived anthropocentric viewpoint. In Jordan Belson’s hallucinatory cosmological films (“Séance” (1959), “World” (1970) and “Chakra’” (1972)), bright colours and patterns recreate a state of deep meditation, with the latter film soundtracked by the distant sounds of motors and bees. Marta Minujín’s colourful felt-tip illustrations reflect the influences of popular culture – from Jimi Hendrix to the Beatles – but filtered through the designs of a frantic mind. The pages appear from her zine “Lo Inadvertido” [“The Inattentiveness”], thought to be Latin America’s first psychedelic magazine. Öyvind Fahlström’s “The Little General (Pinball Machine)”, a large pool work of floating babies, politicians and genitalia, appears like the festering remnants of the worst acid trip in human history. The Otolith Group’s film “Anathema” (2011) explores the LCD plasmatic landscapes of television commercials, revealing the psychedelic underbelly of information technology.
Pierre Huyghe L’Expédition Scintillante, Act 2 (light show), 2002 Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC) Photograph by Marcus J. Leith
With a vibrant mix of different media and artists (the most well known of which is the Japanese graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo), Reflections from Damaged Life provides a lot of material to, in the words of Jefferson Airplane, “feed your head”. We spoke to the show’s curator, art historian Lars Bang Larsen, about putting together the exhibition, as well as the many meanings and associations of all things psychedelic.
The exhibition seemed to focus on psychedelic art in a way that moved quite explicitly away from what we have come to associate with the centres of psychedelia: the US and the UK. Was this a conscious decision? Yes – one of the intentions of the exhibition was to focus on the local contraband of psychedelia. This includes art created outside of the Anglo-American world, where the ideas, sounds and images of the counter-culture travelled and were picked up at a distance. Psychedelia promises (or ought to promise), something off-centre, leftfield, outside of the familiar orbits… and focusing on its geopolitics was a way of taking this into consideration. I wanted to avoid the clichés around the psychedelic, including its politburo of LSD gurus and blues singers, in order to reassess it and keep it alive as an aesthetic concept. One of the ways of doing so was to show how psychedelia became estranged from itself by travelling to other cultures, and then began a dialogue with artists back here. This resonates in our current globalization too, seeing that we are dealing with an aesthetic movement that – maybe even in a more dynamic way than other artistic avant-gardes at the time – reflected the birth of Empire.
Psychedelia is a notoriously difficult term to pin down. Yes, you can break the word into its two parts (“psyche” and “delos” in Greek come to signify a manifestation of exteriority), but after a point the word suffers a semantic drift, coming to mean a lot of different things to different people. How would you define psychedelia? Drifting, tripping and transformation are the concept’s potential and promise. But you are right that this is also how it may spend itself, and how it played itself out historically. In the sixties and seventies it was buried in the mainstream because it became the perfect adjective that could adorn and sell anything. Apart from that it obviously describes the use of a certain type of drugs and the subjective experiences that they produce – experiences that people may cherish or abjure.
To me it is important that the concept was created in the context of modern psychiatry (by the Canadian psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1956), and that LSD was invented at the same time as the bomb, the pill, the computer and space exploration, which defined what human life meant after World War II. In this way psychedelia revolves around technology and modern experience. But where the computer and the pill, for instance, are about control of communication and human reproduction, psychedelia is about flipping mechanisms of control and rendering them liminal. This excess is crucial.
Can you speak a little more about the Magma installation you were involved with in the exhibition and how it came about? There are certain concepts that are privileged by psychedelia, such as feedback or vibrations. Together with my good friend Yann Blanc Chateigné, who is an art historian and curator, I explored the notion of magma that relates to everything luminously gooey, such as lava lamps and the amorphous blobs that were projected in light shows. This was also a way to include music in the exhibition at Raven Row – music was of course a central referent to everybody involved in the counter-culture. Yann and I decided to write a picture essay departing from the French group Magma who play (they are still around) a kind of goth-psych prog jazz-rock and sing their lyrics in a synthetic language called Kobaïah. In the pamphlet that Yann and I wrote we are piggy-backing on the history of Magma and using the band’s highly experimental involvement with linguistics to discuss the cosmological imagery and imaginary of magmas, and how language itself becomes soft and pliable in a psychedelic perspective.
The installation includes Jes Brinch’s chipboard lava lamp. What role do you think light or light art has in representing the psychedelic experience in art? For example, you drew a very interesting connection in the Magma book between liquid light projections/lava lamps/magma and Wilhelm Reich’s orgone? Brinch’s chipboard lava lamp is actually a kind of post-punk denigration of the nineties’ psychedelia revival. It was originally part of a 1997 installation that was an unfriendly spoof on the Copenhagen club scene at the time. It is the exhibition’s guarantee against holism! If anybody thought that psychedelia is only about good vibes and easy transcendence, think again… (Which is also to say that there was a good deal of antagonism in the moral exhibitionism of the hippies, so I think that the famous beef between hippies and punks is more a kind of family quarrel, really. But that’s another story.)
Reich, the renegade psychoanalyst, was a very important figure in the counter-cultures in Europe and the US. He developed the psychoanalytic narrative behind the hippie imperative to make love, not war. According to the artist Gustav Metzger, who created the amazing Liquid Crystal Environment in London in 1965, Reich showed him how it was possible to combine a political engagement with art-making. So in spite of Reich’s wayward theories one shouldn’t create a linear narrative around him as a freak. His ‘discovery’ of orgone, a vital matter that he claimed exists at all levels in the universe, is a central example of the vitalism that pervaded the counter-culture as a festival of life. You could say that the light show, with its pulsating plasmatic surfaces, is the visualization of an exuberant psychedelic vitality.
Marta Minujín in front of her work Importación / Exportación at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires in 1968 Courtesy the artist
You say that when “things fall part, art’s psychedelic connections can produce loquaciousness and drama against the silence of normative powers”. Do you read psychedelic art as political? Is there such thing as a “psychopolitics”, maybe? This would be interesting to speculate about. In the sixties, counter-cultural lifestyle was political because it obscenely transgressed everything that had been connected with politics until then – party programme and doctrine, union and parliament. Suddenly politics became molecular and had to do with behaviour: how you dressed, what you ate and smoked, your sexuality. This is what later has been theorized as micro-politics, and the question is where this discussion is at today, because clearly this is also the terrain of late capitalism. In general it is probably a very bad idea to turn psychedelia into a political project with a capital P: when ideology enters the fray it becomes religious or sectarian. I see the psychedelic through art as something playfully nihilistic – a critique with a dimension of madness – and with a large range of aesthetic strategies for dramatizing and irritating the body politic.
You say that art history has “failed to address” the unexplored aesthetic potential of the connection between visual art and psychedelia. Why do you think this is? This connection is tainted to many people: there is the stigma about the drugs and their lack of academic and institutional prestige. There is the fact that the art and visual production related to the counter-culture came out of activism and protest. On the other hand, a lot of bad and reactionary art, or non-art, was produced under the heading “psychedelic art”. Beyond this there is the risk of reducing art’s psychedelic connection to the visual face of the summer of love. The curator Christoph Grunenberg organized an exhibition in 2005 about “psychedelic art”, which he called “art with no history” because he saw it as an art form that had been repressed by serious art historians. On the contrary I would argue that the connection between visual art and psychedelia is encumbered with too much history – Woodstock, the revolutions, the music… And when you look at what artists did, rather than at counter-cultural mythology, you are left not with a canonical proposition but with a range of singular artistic positions. It is very challenging to try to write an art history for this type of phenomenon, because it is fragmentary and dissipated, with many ins and outs. You can’t promise completeness. You can’t get it right.
Do you think psychedelic art is timeless, and if so, why do you think it still captures people’s imaginations? I wouldn’t say that an art related to the psychedelic is timeless. True, there is a shamanistic aspect of it, but that is one that I haven’t explored because I think it is belief-based. Nor am I really interested in the hallucinatory states as such; I’m interested in how artists have dealt with them. If all of this captures people’s imaginations today it must be because it speaks about, and still appeals to certain historical, embodied experiences. And because it is so uninhibited in the way that it addresses both trauma and euphoria.
Reflections From Damaged Life: An Exhibition on Psychedelia
Raven Row Gallery, London
Until 15 December, 2013