Ken Kesey

The imagery of spider webs has always been characterized by a fundamental ambivalence. Disgust and admiration, transience and eternal cycle, demonization and attribution to divine genius are combined in this image much like nature and technology or woman and man. After a description of the cultural-historical roots of this dialectic relationship the paper addresses the aesthetic of the cobweb and analyses on that basis the narrative formations of the metaphor. The myth of Arachne in Ovid's Metamorphoses serves here as a reference for a reading of three modern texts: Hanns Heinz Ewer’ Die Spinne, Ken Kesey's One flew over the cuckoo's nest and Manuel Puig's El beso de la mujer araña. I argue that spider webs illustrate asymmetrical and gendered power structures, in which negatively connotated spiders represent femininity. Furthermore, in literary texts spider webs seems to symbolize the eternal provisional arrangement that characterizes the life of modern figures. That may be considered as an updating of the tension between immanence and transcendence which existed since Arachne.

Considering Louis Althusser’s inquiries into the function of ideology in sustaining power, the writers of this article discuss the operation of ideological and repressive apparatuses in the asylum Ken Kesey portrays in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). The novel recounts the story of a group of people contained in an institution that is supposed to treat their allegedly mental problems, whereas under the facade of psychiatric treatment lies a ruthless controlling system whose major purpose is to turn the inmates into obedient, submissive “subjects”. The agents of the institution preserve the patients’ docility through strict rules besides the so-called mental therapy that actually results in more confusion in inmates who consequently lose their self-consciousness and self-confidence. But since every ideological system, besides inducing docile “subjects,” raises a sort of resistance among them, gradually resisting forces are formed in the asylum of the novel by the coming of a new inmate who defies the dominant ideology of the institution. By his jovial, life-affirming ideology, he breathes new life into others, makes them think and believe in themselves and trust each other, and thereby acts as a source of inspiration for several inmates, specially the Indian American narrator of the novel that subsequently challenges his schizophrenia, and finally, when his friend is shocked by electrical devices as the result of which he totally loses his consciousness, smashes the control panel of the ward to escape from that penitentiary.

El objeto de estudio de este trabajo es el Arte Psicodélico, más concretamente el diseño gráfico -los carteles de conciertos y carátulas de discos- asociado a los sonidos del llamado rock ácido o rock psicodélico de los años sesenta. La psicodelia -el uso de drogas alucinógenas- surge a mediados de esa década en Estados Unidos como una de las facetas de la contracultura hippie, y se extiende luego al Reino Unido, donde se enmarca dentro del fenómeno conocido como “Swinging London”. 

El término psiquedélico fue acuñado por el cientifico Humphrey Osmond en 1957 y significa “manifestación del alma o de la mente”. Será un adjetivo que se aplique a aquellas obras inspiradas en, o relacionadas con, la experiencia producida por el uso de drogas alucinógenas, como el rock psicodélico. Era un sonido totalmente nuevo, que desafiaba la estructura básica de la canción pop y empleaba instrumentos nunca antes utilizados. Este tipo de música induce un cambio en la representación visual de la industria musical, como se demuestra estudiando las carátulas de discos y los carteles para conciertos: convertidos en materiales de creación artística, se vive un nuevo entendimiento de estos objetos, y su importancia ha ido creciendo desde entonces. Este trabajo estudia la evolución estética del diseño gráfico musical de la década de los cincuenta a la década de los sesenta, poniéndolo en relación con un contexto histórico muy especial y con el surgimiento de una música radicalmente nueva.

El desarrollo en la creación de pósters para los conciertos es comparable a la época del modernismo. El póster deja de ser funcional, casi contradiciendo su propia razón de ser: ya no solo debe aportar información sobre el grupo, el lugar y la fecha de un evento musical, sino que se presenta como un lienzo en el que distribuir dicha información con un lenguaje completamente nuevo, a veces indescifrable, inspirado en el tipo de música que se va a escuchar en el concierto. Los carteles se conforman a partir de formas suntuosas de influencia modernista con una imagineria onírica, como influjo del surrealismo. Las formas se fusionan con las nuevas tipografías y se desenvuelven por el espacio de manera orgánica, con colores vivos y contrastados. Como artistas psicodélicos americanos destacan los conocidos como “The Big Five”: Wes Wilson, Alton Kelley, Stanley Mouse, Víctor Moscoso y Rick Griffin. En Inglaterra la producción más importante fue la de Michael English y Nigel Waymouth como colectivo “Hapshash and the Coloured Coat” y la de Martin Sharp.

La revolución del póster pronto influye en el desarrollo de las carátulas. En los años cincuenta la cubierta de un disco solía contentarse con ofrecer una fotografía del artista muy sobria y su nombre con una tipografía muy simple. En los años sesenta hay un cambio sustancial con los avances tecnológicos y el influjo de las visiones del LSD. Formalmente en estos diseños encontramos influencias de la fotografía de las vanguardias o la cartelería de la secesión vienesa. La carátula adquiere una importancia que no había tenido nunca antes y empieza a ser realizada por pintores y diseñadores con conciencia artística.

Though often read as critiquing mainstream mid-century US politics of the individual, Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest also restages moments of the Columbia River’s systematic damming and straightening by US agencies. Kesey highlights the damage done to indigenous notions of the synecdochic self, sovereign nations, and indigenous peoples’ environmental responsibility in contrast with America’s expansive and suffocating policies of containment and restraint. Reading Cuckoo’s Nest as a document of traumatic loss, this essay demonstrates the centrality of Columbia River history in more fully explaining Kesey’s frustration with the US federal government’s ideas about progress.

En el año 1962 apareció en Estados Unidos publicada “Alguien Voló Sobre El Nido Del Cuco”, novela contracultural escrita por Ken Kesey, uno de los escritores que más experimentó con drogas en la época psicodélica y Hippie, en especial con el LSD. El libro posee apuntes autobiográficos ya que Kesey trabajó durante un tiempo en un manicomioEn la novela, narrada en primera persona por un paciente llamado Chief Bromden, la representación simbólica se expone en la presencia de un personaje femenino autoritario (figura de la madre castradora) que encuentra posiciones rebeldes en un interno de nombre Randle P. McMurphy.

Aunque gratuita en algunos efectos narrativos de su tiempo (que influyó a otros autores, como Hunter S. Thompson o Chuck Palahniuk), la novela es un ejemplo válido de posiciones críticas contra los excesos autoritarios que coartan y manipulan, limitando las voluntades naturales de forma artificial, y prohibiendo por decreto cualquier mínima determinación y/o espacio vital individual.

This project tells a history of allegory from late modernism into the present. It presents case studies of four sites of allegorical thought and practice in late twentieth-century American cultural production, with a focus on post-WWII art, theory, literature, and material culture: Aldous Huxley’s psychedelic writings in dialogue with the work of Color Field painter Morris Louis and his critics; the relationship between materiality and hermeneutics in Ken Kesey’s communal art project, Furthur; the literary theory of Paul de Man, where allegory becomes conflated with irony; and allegorical structure and performativity in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Understanding allegory as a structure of thought—a transmedial structure based on an urge for meaning-making inherent in the human mind that is modified and adapted in response to evolving historical contexts, circumstances, and pressures—it examines these sites of allegorical transformation to ask how allegory was mobilized, theorized, or used by historical actors working within the limits of their contextual conditions of possibility. In doing so, it asks how recent changes in allegorical form, structure, and function come to shape the mode’s contemporary appearance, arguing that allegory’s structure undergoes a progressive flattening of levels as its aesthetic transcendence is reimagined as aesthetic immanence.

L'articolo discute un film mitico e semisconosciuto girato nel (o a partire dal) 1964 da Ken Kesey (l'anno della pubblicazione di "Sometimes a Great Notion" e due anni dopo quella di "Qualcuno volò sul nido del cuculo"), durante un lungo viaggio dalla California a New York su uno scuolabus multicolore. Un film lungo cinquanta ore e in gran parte invisibile, del quale è difficile trovare notizia nei manuali di storia del cinema, del cinema americano o del cinema sperimentale. Un film pasticciato ma non privo di fascino, che dialoga con certe esperienze radicali di cinema “espanso” e di cinema diretto dell’epoca, e col nuovo road movie e il film pop-psichedelico che sarebbero nati di lì a poco. E certamente anche con la tradizione western e i più classici archetipi narrativi statunitensi. Un film ("il più grande home movie mai realizzato") la cui caratteristica principale è il fatto di essere "unedited", non montato: non un difetto, ma una precisa necessità poetica.

Mais Stephen King revient à la charge et supprime tout espoir car quand l’individu a perdu sa personnalité sous pression sociale, que sa personnalité a été remplacée par une matière préfabriquée et prédigérée d’origine sociale, le monde extérieur a été intériorisé et le sentiment de frustration produira un désir de mort du monde et donc de soi, comme si mourir pouvait détruire le monde.
J’ai l’impression que cette conclusion posée à partir d’une œuvre publiée en 1981, il y a vingt cinq ans, méritait diablement le voyage.

An open issue featuring articles on Deleuze and film, Kesey's Last Go Round, Benjamin's influence on Carolyn Forche, an historical rethinking of hegemony, maternal cannibalism in fairy tales, and workplace surveillance. Plenty of reviews, too.

This paper will focus on the hospital (or Foucaultian “clinic”) as a contested, and often contradictory symbol in the political imaginary of the post-war period. Against the welfare state’s narrative of collective care, writers like Kesey, Quin and Burroughs mythologised the asylum as the logical totalitarian conclusion of growing State biopower. Nevertheless, hospital scenes remain a regular staple of Beat biographies; the nadir-point of lives arcing between adventure and misadventure. The paper goes on to analyse Alex Trocchi’s abortive Project Sigma (“an invisible insurrection of a million minds”) as a potential blueprint for deterritorialised, rhizomatic healthcare. Research drawn from the Jeff Nuttall archive at John Rylands, Manchester, reveals a membership list with an international network of Sigma collaborators; Burroughs to Burgess, Guy Debord to Doris Lessing. Proposals from R.D. Laing for nomadic, non-sited approaches to care are included in the archive alongside fevered correspondence revealing the chaos of Sigma in practice. The contradictions which hamstrung Sigma at once reflect the experience of a Beat generation liberated by post-war prosperity but constrained by its structures, while also prophesying contemporary national healthcare struggles in the context of globalised capitalism.

Presented at EBSN Conference at the Wonder Inn, Manchester June 2016.