Feature Reviews Revisiting Psychedelia gillian whiteley Summer of Love, Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the Sixties christopher grunenberg and jonathan harris (eds) Liverpool University Press and Tate Liverpool d25.00 320 pp. Fully illustrated in mono and colour isbn 0853239290 T his anthology, the eighth in the Liverpool University Press ‘Critical Forum’ series, was published to coincide with Tate Liverpool’s show, ‘Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era’. I visited the exhibition after going through Adrian Henri’s papers in the Special Collection at the University of Liverpool. My research was part of a wider project with specific connections to Jeff Nuttall, another focal figure on the British countercultural scene. On a personal note, in 1968, I vividly recall when Henri was introduced to my English class – a note of ‘progressive education’ on the part of my comprehensive school in the South Yorkshire coalfields. Listening to him reciting ‘pop poetry’ was a minor but significant event. Surrounded by the stifling social and moral structures of working-class life and an educational system which, even for intelligent creative girls, offered limited horizons and sensible careers, I embraced Sixties’ hippiedom completely. ‘Flowerpower’ – with its pop poetry, be-ins, sitins, love-ins, communes, freak-outs and happenings – appeared to offer a mind and gender-liberating release. Psychedelic boutiques such as Sheffield’s Lift Up Your Skirts and Fly, music and clothing offered young people the opportunity to be transgressive. At the Tate Liverpool show, the latest inheritors of 1960s’ psychedelia – groups of young art and design students – gazed at Martin Sharp’s posters, whilst ‘chilling out’ to Soft Machine, with a familiarity which demonstrated how completely countercultural production has been absorbed into the contemporary consumerist mainstream. Add to this, a recent trip to San Francisco to research ‘beat culture’ and junk artists of the 1960s, which also included visiting Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Citylights bookshop to hear Dale Pendell, ethno-botanist and author, talk about his recent scholarly threevolume study of psychedelic plants – and I feel duly equipped to evaluate this book from a range of perspectives. That said, one’s subjectivity weighs heavily: in his essay, Gordon McKay refers to his own ‘attitudinal subcultural baggage’, reminding us that we need to be vigilant with our own radical cultural histories and sensitive to both their possibilities and their political limitations. Undoubtedly, reassessments of the 1960s have been hampered with problems of nostalgia, prejudice and a curious reluctance to treat the era as seriously as any other cultural phenomenon. As the editors assert, psychedelia was never ‘simply a matter of style’ – but then nothing ever is. The artistic, sociocultural and ideological legacies of psychedelia and 1960s’ counter-culture have been extraordinarily persistent and yet they have barely been addressed with any scholarly rigour. With a determination to examine rhetorics, practices and legacies, this book attempts to initiate that process. In the introduction, Jonathan Harris sets out the book’s objectives, indicating that it represents an ambitious attempt to theorise the pyschedelic moment as ‘a series of unstable contradictions’, largely focusing on the middle to late 1960s and mainly the USA and UK. The editors purposefully set out to produce a critique of visual culture within a conjuncture of socio-political change and crisis. The book’s central purpose is to seek to understand the phenomena and concepts of counterculture and psychedelia as an overlapping, complex and contradictory set of practices and ideas that not only draw on historical precedents but also have an ambivalent, often parasitic, relationship to mainstream culture. Fifteen well-illustrated essays address a range of topics, starting with the economic, social, and political conditions of the 1960s, and their authors unpick the key problematic terms – ‘psychedelia’, ‘counterculture’ and ‘the underground’. A range of psychedelic Martin Sharp,Blowin’in the Mind, poster originally designed for the cover of Oz magazine. r Martin Sharp, courtesy Peter Goulding/InspirationalTimes Collection. From Summer of Love,Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the Sixties by Christopher Grunenberg andJonathan Harris, (eds). moments and geographical locations are covered (primarily London, New York, San Francisco, Paris and Liverpool), with some essays addressing specific aspects of culture (including Pop music, design, fashion, and multimedia light shows). Others deal with specific or iconic events and institutions – or anti-institutions – and subcultural groups. Stuart Laing sets up the economic, social and political backdrop, with the ‘permissive society’ built around legislation on homosexuality, abortion, contraception and divorce, all introduced in 1967. Arguing that the key move was from a production/work culture to one centred on consumption/leisure, Laing identifies three forces competing for cultural hegemony: traditional bastions of cultural value (BBC and the ‘quality’ press); the increasingly profit-based popular culture market (advertising, pop music, new magazines, and independent television); r 2007 the author. journal compilation r 2007 bpl/aah volume 14 issue 4 november 2007 The Art Book 15 Feature Reviews and a series of ‘alternative’ short-lived forms (pirate radio, the underground press). The latter, in Laing’s view, posed a major challenge, as much of the most innovative cultural work of the decade operated across these three poles. Another emerging phenomenon, referenced in a range of essays, was ‘student power’, rooted in the CND protest movement of the previous decade but flourishing following the expansion of the universities in the 1960s. Laing concludes that, ultimately, the socio-economic and political upheavals of the mid-1970s – the growing fuel crisis and the miners’ strikes in 1972 and 1974 – forced the idea that ‘culture and society could be transformed by psychic liberation and creative play to pass fully out of the general consciousness and return to the cultural margins by the mid-70s’. The way in which the US model of counterculture was exported and embraced by the UK is examined by George McKay. He identifies race as a foundational issue and the Vietnam war as pivotal – the war was viewed by many as part of a common struggle of the world’s nonwhite population against white oppression. McKay sets out the political – and anti-political – complexities of various countercultural groupings, such as the Yippies, the Crazies and Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers with their credo, ‘We defy law and order with our bricks, bottles, garbage, long hair, filth, obscenity, drugs, games, guns, bikes, fire, fun and fucking’. With LSD, the new pharmaceutical drug of choice for the ‘cosmonauts of inner experience’ (as the Scottish Situationist and key counterculture figure, Alexander Trocchi, famously termed the ‘trippers’), a key dynamic starts to emerge. Many of the authors refer to the increasing polarity between those concerned with the ‘inner journey’ of self-liberation and others dedicated to a much more conventional hardline political revolution in the world of social and economic realities. In his essay on the ‘spontaneous underground’, Andrew Wilson maps the significant locations and events in London between 1965–8, highlighting the role of the Indica Gallery and Better Books, the opening of London Free School, the foundation of the World Psychedelia Centre, the carnivalesque International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall and the 14-hour Technicolor Dream at Alexandra Palace. The Roundhouse hosted key events such as Angry Arts Week and the Dialectics of Liberation Conference. The fate of the short-lived ‘anti-university’, formed in December 1967 – condemned to inertia after endless debates about the direction it should take – was symptomatic of the problems inherent in the countercultural movement as a whole. Through these few years,Wilson identifies a shift from passive to meaningful engagement and he articulates how the changing tone of dissent divided and polarised. For him, the events across Europe in 1968 marked the moment that social and cultural change had to be fought for. This further exposed the splits that were already there between mystical LSD-users who believed that imagination was enough and ‘activists who understood that social and political struggle entailed a return to more orthodox – even Marxian – forms of analysis, conflict and action’. A range of essays look at the psychedelic experience, personal liberation and sexual politics within particular aspects of visual culture : Nannette Aldred brings the idea of performance to a re-reading of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album, examining the psychic formation of body and space through Roeg’s film, Performance; Stewart Home looks at the tangled roots of psychedelia, film and the role of key figures – such as Alexander Trocchi, Francis Morland and Michael Hollingshead – in disseminating ideas related to what Home terms ‘shamanic consciousness’; Edwin Pouncey investigates the development of the ‘multimedia light show’; Cally Blackman examines the eclectic origins and development of hippie fashion and design from its emergence on the West Coast to its ousting of the ‘mod’ look in London; Branden W Joseph presents a history and critique of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The book makes a limited attempt to map and analyse counterculture in locations outside San Francisco, New York and London. Jon Murden poses the possibility that Liverpool not only embodied psychedelia but also represented an English equivalent of San Francisco. He concludes that the city was largely countercultural ‘by association’ and was far more concerned with industrial politics than ‘peace and love’. Interestingly enough, San Francisco had a long radical history of engagement in trade union struggles and anarcho-syndicalism. Although the Liverpool scene emerged in 1967, with Adrian Henri a major catalyst, it had been developing in coffee bars around the city since the early 1960s. Murden is hesitant about his conclusions and his points suggest that a good deal more research is needed into the role and interrelationship of counterculture, social class and conventional political routes outside London. Furthermore, Poirier’s important contribution to the book, an examination of the ‘hyperoptical and kinetic stimulation happenings and films in France’, sits uneasily as it is the only essay that directly addresses the role and influence of the European countercultural scene. Poirier looks at works that attempted to cross sensory thresholds and disturb consciousness, arguing that the streets of Paris were ‘a magnet’ for artists, with groups such as GRAV staging spontaneous participative public events. The inclusion of a single essay that deals directly with the European context points to the main weakness of the anthology as more consideration could have been given to other groups and centres in Europe and globally – for example, the Amsterdam Provos, Carl Weissner and the Panic Press in Germany, Malay Roy Choudhury, Subimal Basak and the Bengali, Indian and Asian countercultural scenes. Finally, Glenn O’Brien’s evaluation of the legacies of pyschedelia is useful if rather schematic, with ‘rastafarianism’ an odd choice as the most truly post1960s art movement. His suggestion that Matthew Barney, born in 1967 in San Francisco, is an artist whose work embodies a strong element of psychedelia is equally surprising but refreshing. Overall, with an excellent bibliography, this book must be welcomed as an essential starting point for all students and scholars of the 1960s. It initiates a reassessment and re-contextualisation of psychedelia and counterculture within a broader socio-political framework. It also raises questions about the geographical and social reach of such cultural phenomena and their manifestation in the visual arts and the wider social psyche. The legacy of the decade continues to be fought over with claims and counterclaims, and the whole topic demands more research. The fortieth anniversary of the political upheavals of 1968 will surely present an opportunity to ditch any residual ‘attitudinal subcultural baggage’ and facilitate a serious engagement with the political and social legacy of the countercultural discourses of the 1960s. gillian whiteley Loughborough University School of Art and Design 16 The Art Book volume 14 issue 4 november 2007 r 2007 the author. journal compilation r 2007 bpl/aah