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Psychedelic art

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Psychedelic art is art inspired by the psychedelic experience induced by drugs such as LSD, Mescaline, and Psilocybin. The word "psychedelic" (coined by British psychologist Humphrey Osmond) means "mind manifesting". By that definition all artistic efforts to depict the inner world of the psyche may be considered "psychedelic". However, in common parlance "Psychedelic Art" refers above all to the art movement of the 1960s counterculture. Psychedelic visual arts were a counterpart to psychedelic rock music. Concert posters, album covers, lightshows, murals, comic books, underground newspapers and more reflected not only the kaleidoscopically swirling patterns of LSD hallucinations, but also revolutionary political, social and spiritual sentiments inspired by insights derived from these psychedelic states of consciousness.

Features of psychedelic art

  • Fantastic, metaphysical and surrealistic subject matter
  • Kaleidoscopic, fractal or paisley patterns
  • Bright and/or highly contrasting colors
  • Extreme depth of detail or stylization of detail.
  • Morphing of objects and/or themes and sometimes collage
  • Inclusion of phosphenes and other entoptic motifs
  • Repetition of motifs

Origins

Psychedelic Art is informed by the notion that altered states of consciousness produced by psychedelic drugs are a source of artistic inspiration. The psychedelic art movement is similar to the surrealist movement in that it prescribes a mechanism for obtaining inspiration. Whereas the mechanism for surrealism is the observance of dreams, the psychedelic artist turns to his drug induced hallucinations. Both movements have strong ties to important developments in science. Whereas the surrealist was fascinated by Freud's theory of the unconscious, the psychedelic artist has been literally "turned on" by Albert Hofmann's discovery of LSD.

The early examples of "Psychedelic Art" are literary rather than visual. It should also be noted that these came from writers involved in the Surrealist movement. Antonin Artaud writes of his Peyote experience in "Journey to the Land of the Tarahumara" (1937). Henri Michaux wrote "Miserable Miracle" (1956), to describe his experiments with Mescaline and also hashish.

Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception" (1954), and "Heaven and Hell" (1956), remain definitive statements on the psychedelic experience.

Albert Hofmann and his colleagues at Sandoz Laboratories were convinced immediately after its discovery in 1943 of the power and promise of LSD. For two decades following its discovery LSD was marketed by Sandoz as an important drug for psychological and neurological research. Hofmann saw the drug's potential for poets and artists as well, and took great interest in the German poet, Ernst Junger's psychedelic experiments.

Early artistic experimentation with LSD was conducted in a clinical context by Los Angeles based psychiatrist Oscar Janiger. Janiger asked a group of 50 different artists to each do a painting from life of a subject of the artist's choosing. They were subsequently asked to do the same painting while under the influence of LSD. The two paintings were compared by Janiger and also the artist. The artists almost unanimously reported LSD to be an enhancement to their creativity.

Ultimately it seems that psychedelics would be most warmly embraced by the American counterculture. Beatnik poets Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs became fascinated by psychedelic drugs as early as the 1950s as evidenced by "The Yage Letters" (1963). The Beatniks recognized the role of psychedelics as sacred inebriants in Native American religious ritual, and also had an understanding of the philosophy of the surrealist and symbolist poets who called for a "complete disorientation of the senses" (to paraphrase Arthur Rimbaud). They knew that altered states of consciousness played a role in Eastern Mysticism. They were hip to psychedelics as psychiatric medicine. LSD was the perfect catalyst to electrify the eclectic mix of ideas assembled by the Beats into a cathartic, mass-distributed panacea for the soul of the succeeding generation.

Psychedelic Art in 1960s Counterculture

Leading proponents of the 1960s Psychedelic Art movement were San Francisco poster artists such as: Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse & Alton Kelley, and Wes Wilson. Their Psychedelic Rock concert posters were inspired by Art Nouveau, Victoriana, Dada, and Pop Art. Richly saturated colors in glaring contrast, elaborately ornate lettering, strongly symmetrical composition, collage elements, and bizarre iconography are all hallmarks of the San Francisco psychedelic poster art style. The style flourished from about 1966 - 1972. Their work was immediately influential to album cover art, and indeed all of the aforementioned artists also created album covers.

Although San Francisco remained the hub of psychedelic art into the early 1970s, the style also developed internationally: Majorca based painter Mati Klarwein created psychedelic masterpieces for Miles Davis' Jazz-Rock fusion albums, and also for Carlos Santana Latin Rock. Pink Floyd worked extensively with London based designers, Hipgnosis to create graphics to support the concepts in their albums.

Psychedelic light-shows were a new art-form developed for rock concerts. Using oil and dye in an emulsion that was set between large convex lenses upon overhead projectors the lightshow artists created bubbling liquid visuals that pulsed in rhythm to the music. This was mixed with slideshows and film loops to create an improvisational motion picture art form to give visual representation to the improvisational jams of the rock bands and create a completely "trippy" atmosphere for the audience. The Brotherhood of Light were responsible for many of the light-shows in San Francisco psychedelic rock concerts.

Out of the psychedelic counterculture also arose a new genre of comic books: underground comix. "Zap Comix" was among the original underground comics, and featured the work of Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, and Robert Williams among others. Underground Comix were ribald, intensely satirical, and seemed to pursue weirdness for the sake of weirdness. Gilbert Shelton created perhaps the most enduring of underground cartoon characters, "The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers," whose drugged out exploits held a hilarious mirror up to the hippy lifestyle of the 1960s.

Psychedelic art was also applied to the LSD itself. LSD began to be put on blotter paper in the early 1970s and this gave rise to a specialized art form of decorating the blotter paper. Often the blotter paper was decorated with tiny insignia on each perforated square tab, but by the 1990s this had progressed to complete four color designs often involving an entire page of 900 or more tabs. Mark McCloud is a recognized authority on the history of LSD blotter art.

The fact that LSD blotter art kept evolving over decades shows that the Psychedelic Art movement did not end with the '60s, and if considered more deeply it did not begin in that decade either. The use of drugs by artists is nothing new - the Roman poet Ovid said, "There is no poetry among water drinkers." However, since drugs have always been taboo, the drug use of artists has not always entered the historical record. It was part of the youth rebellion of the 1960s to openly use drugs, but the psychedelic drugs were also seen in a different light from more traditional inebriants such as opiates, cocaine and alcohol. LSD was a new invention that had shown wondrous promise as a psychiatric medicine. It is beyond the scope of this article to describe LSD research and its various results, but importantly to the counterculture movement of the 1960s it had been strongly associated with creativity and had been promoted as a gateway to mystical experience. These aspects drew artists and intellectuals to experiment with LSD and other psychedelic drugs.

Psychedelic Art in Corporate Advertising

By the late 1960s, the commercial potential of psychedelic art had become hard to ignore. General Electric, for instance, promoted clocks with designs by New York artist Peter Max. A caption explains that each of Max’s clocks “transposes time into multi-fantasy colors.”[1] In this and many other corporate advertisements of the late 1960’s featuring psychedelic themes, the psychedelic product was often kept at arm’s length from the corporate image: while advertisements may have reflected the swirls and colors of an LSD trip, the black-and-white company logo maintained a healthy visual distance. Several companies, however, more explicitly associated themselves with psychedelica: CBS, Neiman Marcus, and NBC all featured thoroughly psychedelic advertisements between 1968 and 1969.[2] In 1968, Campbell’s soup ran a poster promotion that promised to “Turn your wall souper-delic!”[3]

The early years of the 1970s saw advertisers using psychedelic art to sell a limitless array of consumer goods. Hair products, cars, cigarettes, and even pantyhose became colorful acts of pseudo-rebellion.[4] The Chelsea National Bank commissioned a psychedelic landscape by Peter Max, and neon green, pink, and blue monkeys inhabited advertisements for a zoo.[5] A fantasy land of colorful, swirling, psychedelic bubbles provided the perfect backdrop for a Clearasil ad.[6] As Brian Wells explains, “The psychedelic movement has, through the work of artists, designers, and writers, achieved an astonishing degree of cultural diffusion… but, though a great deal of diffusion has taken place, so, too, has a great deal of dilution and distortion.”[7] Even the term “psychedelic” itself underwent a semantic shift, and soon came to mean “anything in youth culture which is colorful, or unusual, or fashionable.”[8] Puns using the concept of “tripping” abounded: as an advertisement for London Britches declared, their product was “great on trips!”[9] By the mid-1970’s, the psychedelic art movement had been largely co-opted by mainstream commercial forces, incorporated into the very system of capitalism that the hippies had struggled so hard to change.

Psychedelic Art and the Digital Age

Computer Arts have allowed for an even greater and more profuse expression of psychedelic vision. Fractal generating software gives an accurate depiction of psychedelic hallucinatory patterns, but even more importantly 2D and 3D graphics software allow for unparalleled freedom of image manipulation. Much of the graphics software seems to enable a direct translation of the psychedelic vision. The "digital revolution" was indeed heralded early on as the "New LSD" by none other than Timothy Leary.

The Rave movement of the 1990s was a psychedelic renaissance fueled by the advent of newly available digital technologies. The rave movement developed a new graphic art style partially influenced by 1960s psychedelic poster art, but also strongly influenced by graffiti art, and by 1970s advertising art, yet clearly defined by what computer graphics software and home computers had to offer at the time of creation.

File:B23.land of psychedelic illuminations.jpg
Land of Psychedelic Illuminations (©Brian Exton): example of fractal influence

Concurrent to the rave movement, and in key respects integral to it, are the development of new mind altering drugs, most notably, MDMA (Ecstasy). Ecstasy, like LSD, has had a tangible influence on culture and aesthetics, particularly the aesthetics of Rave Culture. But MDMA is (arguably) not a real psychedelic, but is described by psychologists as an "empathogen". Development of new psychedelics such as "2CB" and related compounds (developed primarily by chemist Alexander Shulgin) are truly psychedelic, and these novel psychedelics are fertile ground for artistic exploration since many of the new psychedelics possess their own unique properties that will affect the artist's vision accordingly.

Perhaps the future of psychedelic art will be defined by those artists who have practiced it most purely. That is to say by those artists who have sought to record the visions derived from the psychedelic drug experience into works of art. Even as fashions have changed, and art and culture movements have come and gone certain artists have steadfastly devoted themselves to psychedelia. Well known examples are Alex Grey and Robert Venosa. These artists have developed unique and distinct styles that while containing elements that are obviously "psychedelic", are clearly artistic expression that transcend simple categorization. While it is not necessary to use psychedelics to arrive at such a stage of artistic development, serious psychedelic artists are demonstrating that there is tangible technique to obtaining visions, and that technique is the creative use of psychedelic drugs.

Psychedelic Art in Prehistory

Possible example of prehistoric psychedelic art from New Grange, Ireland

Using altered states of consciousness as a source for artistic expression is not a new concept and has been practised throughout human history. Where this art occurs in the past it is often called 'psychedelic art' to conceptually link it to the well-known modern movement. This linkage is contentious and the difficulty in proving the psychedelic origins of prehistoric artwork has led many people to refer to it as entoptic art or subjective visual art. 'Entoptic art' emphasises the fact that evidence for its hallucinatory origins comes mainly from identification of motifs related to entoptic phenomena. Prehistoric entoptic art lacks the range of colours of modern psychedelic art and is often characterised by repeating concentric circles and spirals.

Psychedelic Artists

See also

References

  1. ^ Heimann, Jim. 60's All American Ads. Italy: Taschen, 2002. pg. 523
  2. ^ Herdeg, Walter. 68/69 Graphics Annual. Zurich: The Graphics Press, 1968. pgs. 45, 75, 248
  3. ^ Heimann, Jim. 60's All American Ads. Italy: Taschen, 2002. pg. 798
  4. ^ Heimann, Jim. 70's All American Ads. Italy: Taschen, 2004. pgs. 443, 102, 76, 85, 484.
  5. ^ Herdeg, Walter. 71/72 Graphics Annual. Zurich: The Graphics Press, 1971. pgs. 39, 49.
  6. ^ Herdeg, Walter. 71/72 Graphics Annual. Zurich: The Graphics Press, 1971. pg. 78.
  7. ^ Wells, Brian. Psychedelic Drugs. New York: Jason Aronson, 1974. pg. 19
  8. ^ Wells, Brian. Psychedelic Drugs. New York: Jason Aronson, 1974. pgs. 19-20
  9. ^ Heimann, Jim. 70’s All-American Ads. Italy: Taschen, 2004. pg. 523
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