Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York, NY 10021
Tel. (212) 570-3633
May 24 – September 16, 2007
By SANDRA
SIDER
A Grain of Sand 1963-1965
oil on board, 78-3/4 x 78-3/4 inches
Originally organized by the Tate Liverpool, the Summer of Love exhibition sweeps through two floors of the Whitney Museum like a breath of fresh air, with works dating from the 1960s to 1970. Most of the pieces are wall art, accompanied by a dozen sculptural works. The visual energy of this exhibition is matched by the sound, which unfortunately can be distracting when music from the video rooms competes with other soundtracks. I recommend using an audio guide unless you want to channel Janis and Dylan simultaneously.
The exhibition begins on the third floor, the entrance wall virtually exploding with psychedelic posters and prints, accompanied by a light show in a darkened room to the right. Jaded as we are today by sophisticated digital imagery, it may be a bit difficult to appreciate the technical achievements of these early light shows. Many of them were physically produced, such as the quivering, bursting colors created in the chemical reactions of acid on glass slides for Beyond Image and Son of Beyond Image (1969) by Mark Boyle and Joan Hills. Other artists with multimedia installations in the exhibition include Jordan Belson, Stan Vanderbeek, James Whitney, and Marian Zazeela.
Summer of Love does a good job of distinguishing among the 60s scenes in San Francisco, New York, and London. Posters, magazines, and books help to accomplish this goal, with San Francisco and Berkeley as obvious beacons of psychedelic visual culture, and the Fillmore as its Mecca. The influence of art nouveau style is unmistakable. One very effective floor case has a plethora of hippie-related pulp fiction, including A Tiger in Haight-Ashbury (the cover showing a nude woman with body paint), and Happening at San Remo: A Daring Novel of Today’s Young Underground (a nude woman with psychedelic lights on her body).
Mati Klarwein’s painting A Grain of Sand (1963-65) is a pluralistic extravaganza. This painting served as the ceiling in his Aleph Sanctuary, a sort of visionary temple with paintings covering the interior. Summer of Love has a reproduction of the sanctuary, and a visitor could spend an hour or more studying the walls. The interior is like a miniature Sistine Chapel for the 60s.
Missing from the exhibition is one of the prime sources of psychedelic style—tie-dyed clothing. As much as I love Lynda Benglis’s poured floor painting Contraband (1969), it consumes a massive amount of floor space. That precise spot would have been a great location for a collection of Grateful Dead t-shirts in their tie-dyed glory. Contraband, revolutionary in its own way, happens to have swirling colors. I doubt that Benglis conceived it as a piece of psychedelic art; she simply wanted to work away from the constraints of the wall. At any rate, the wall label might have mentioned the artist’s importance in the Anti-Form and Anti-Illusionist alternative art movements of the late 1960s.
The second floor contains images of alternative architecture and environments, along with Verner Panton’s Phantasy Landscape Visiona II (1970, recreated 2000). This colorful environment originally was installed at the 1970 Cologne furniture fair. It apparently turns everyone who enters it into a playful child. This floor of the exhibition also features a wall of photographs by Robert Whitaker of flower children and various rock stars, including Eric Clapton in a pair of wicked red trousers. On the second floor, be sure to enter the USCO strobe room (unless you are subject to seizures). The sensory assault of this mind-numbing experience appropriately completes this stimulating show.
Phantasy Landscape Visiona II 1970, recreated 2000
wood, foam rubber and woolen fabric, 314-15/16 x 236-1/4 x 94-1/2 inches
There is, however, a problem with the exhibition. Summer of Love makes a half-hearted attempt to deal with political dissent, and the result is disappointing. The subject might better have been avoided altogether. While some of the publications lined up in the floor cases include resistance politics in their articles, their purpose in the show seems to be the place of their covers in the history of graphic design. Fewer than a dozen of the other pieces openly refer to or demonstrate political dissent, which is puzzling when we consider that many people experimented with psychedelic drugs to retreat from an untenable political situation—the war in Vietnam: “Tune in, turn on, drop out.”
The Kent State shootings (May 4, 1970), for example, are represented by Richard Hamilton’s 1970 screenprint. On the day of the shootings, Hamilton photographed an image from his television, which accounts for the blurred image in the screenprint. He undertook a mammoth project to print 5000 copies as a sort of visual memorial to the dead students. None of this information is given in the wall label; his screenprint is presented with the same minimal text as the label for Mick and Bianca Jagger’s wedding photo.
More troubling is the lack of information about the My Lai Massacre (March 16, 1968) poster, produced by the Art Workers Coalition from a color photograph by Ronald Haeberle. The AWC added the text “Q. And babies? … A. And babies” taken from an interview with a soldier who participated in the massacre of hundreds of civilians. Some fifty thousand copies of the poster were distributed around the world and carried in numerous protest rallies. It was probably the most famous single work of art resulting from the Vietnam war. But no one learns anything about this poster’s history in the exhibition.
Nevertheless, Summer of Love does capture the joyful, crazy (What were we thinking?) exuberance of the 60s. It really was a time of innocence, especially before 1968 when the horrors of Vietnam became all too clear, on a massive scale. If we focus on that beautiful summer of 1967—the main subject of the exhibition—then Summer of Love can be a magical experience.
