黑料不打烊

The artists in the Godfathers exhibit at the Chambers Project, which is the first exhibit mounted by the Psychedelic Arts and Culture Trust, or PACT (Disclosure: the author of this article is a member of the PACT board), in Grass Valley, California, are all important figures in the history of art. The centerpieces of Godfathers are paintings and drawings by three master artists whose careers began in the late 1960s – historically important and iconic imagery by Roger Dean, Ralph Steadman, and Rick Griffin. These artists shaped psychedelic and visionary art. They are at the heart of the counter-culture.

The experiences of explorers of the visionary world that lies beyond the ordinary convinced these artists that the universe was far more complex than the simple binaries offered by the grey theorists of the avant-garde, and time has proven them right. The strange uncertainties of quantum theory and dark matter have shown that the universe is not a simple place of Cartesian laws, but a place where time and space and gravity do in fact bend. We are certain, now, that human sensory perception has a very narrow range, and that we only understand a small amount of what we are capable of perceiving. The telescopes NASA has thrown into space show us that we really do live in a miraculous cosmos of infinite potential, and that we are almost insignificantly small. These new understandings of our universe coincide with the aesthetics of psychedelic and visionary experiences.

Brian Chambers’ curation of this exquisite exhibit and the establishment of PACT challenges the art world and the academy to treat the neglected paintings and prints of the 20^th century with the respect they deserve – the late 1960s and early 1970s in particular represent a brief and unique moment in the cultural history of the West, when the subcultural forces of utopian idealism met with a new kind of imagery witnessed by intrepid explorers of the psychedelic world – the art of the era was a direct response to the forces shaping it. Its significance cannot be ignored. The art world is no longer divided by the simple binary of avant-garde and kitsch, it is an emergent, post-modern bubble-bath of multiple different kinds of art and artists, all working with different ideas and priorities, all bubbles inflating and deflating as their ideas gain and lose traction. Finger-pointers insulting art as “kitsch,” as a pejorative to condemn sensual art are using a ludicrously antiquated non-sequitur.

Roger Dean, Arrival in Clouds, Acrylic on Canvas, 32" X 48" 2014

The outmoded ideas of the art elite are obsolete, art has changed, and so have our social circumstances. Recreational marijuana is now legal in much of the United States after reason and research showed that it is certainly less damaging to health than alcohol, and persecuting its users was ludicrous. Psilocybin has been decriminalized in many cities. These substances have been legalized because they are more benevolent and beneficial than harmful. These experiences are not simply amusements for a hippy underground, for they are providing real change for people as medical treatments for stress, and PTSD, for lifting people from the patterns of self-destructive habits. As these treatments gain acceptance, so does the aesthetic of the experience. Naturally, a resurgence of public interest in psychedelic and visionary art has followed the legalization of psilocybin and cannabis in many Western cities.

Now, the bubble-bath of postmodernity favors popular art and emergent art forms which rise from the chaos of contemporary culture. As living memory becomes history, The Chambers Project exhibit Godfathers is an important step on the road to saving the treasures and stories of an extraordinary era, gathering many of the most important milestones of this essential stream of Western art.

Contemporary psychedelic and visionary art are the most recent expressions of an experience which has been celebrated for millennia, beginning in the ice age, when our paleolithic ancestors painted pictures of their shamans, their plants, and the patterns of their sensory experiences on cave walls in darkness and danger. Our classical ancestors spoke to their gods using plants to find the world between heaven and earth. Native tribes of America and Mexico still use cacti and fungi as medicine for body and mind, and have for centuries. The medieval alchemists knew exactly what psychedelic herbs could do, and laughed at their friends’ hilarious behavior when they gave them samples from their experiments. Napoleon’s soldiers brought North African hashish to enthusiastic nineteenth century bohemians, who ate it by the spoonful with honey and almonds, and painted and wrote their visions into romantic and symbolist paintings and stories. In the 1960s and 70s, psychedelic art became the expression of an alternative society. Now the tech magicians of Silicon Valley micro-dose daily on psychedelic medicines to find inspiration and creativity, and psychedelic therapy is winning acceptance from the federal government. Throughout the West, an honest appreciation for the benefits – and the dangers – of these medicines has emerged, and the old and ignorant reactionary resistance is slowly being overcome. Even in contemporary China, a growing subculture of discrete ayahuasca-drinkers use the medicine to find their full potential in business and self-improvement.

This is not just the opening of an exhibit of paintings and drawings from the era of psychedelic and visionary art, then. The Godfathers exhibit establishes psychedelic and visionary art as a historic phenomenon. This is a moment of legitimization.

Rick Griffin, Hawaiian Aoxomoxoa, Ink and Whiteout on Illustration Board, 29” x 17”, 1968

The great Rick Griffin is the earliest of the iconic artists in the show. He has achieved almost mythic underground status since his death in 1991. Chambers has included the original artwork created for the poster known as The Hawaiian Aoxomoxoa, designed by Griffin to advertise a canceled concert by The Grateful Dead. The poster has a legendary status among the rock poster collecting community, and the original art is an historic artifact of extraordinary significance and value. Chambers is also showing some of the original art Griffin made for his remarkable Man from Utopia, a prescient masterpiece which stretched the boundaries of graphic comic art into the abstractions of conceptual art. In his ink calligraphy for Junkyard, he chose to make lettering which ignored legibility completely and celebrated the abstraction and form of lettering for its own sake, and set the model for a generation of street graffiti painters.

Rick Griffin, Junkyard, Pen & Ink, 8” x 14”, 1969

Roger Dean is a living legend of visionary art. Chambers is exhibiting some of Dean’s most important works for the exhibit, including the iconic Relayer and his beautiful Floating Islands. Dean found a balance of a diverse range of influences, including psychedelia, bonsai trees, the world inspired by Yes’ extraordinary music, Song Dynasty paintings, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Japanese woodblocks of the floating world, his own walks among the wonders of nature, and the balanced landscapes of Feng Shui. It was when all these sources met that Dean became Dean, when he began painting the Fragile World, and when his paintings evolved into something more than album cover art – printed in more than 10 million editions, and seen by billions of viewers online, as posters, as postage stamps, phonecards, and album covers. Dean’s paintings have immense cultural currency, transcending the bounds of commercial art after the pattern of Albrecht Dürer, who understood the value of the popular press and became famous through it. His paintings are wildly more recognizable than a vast number of avant-garde artists, and more meaningful to their admirers. Dean’s beautiful painting The Quest recently sold for $960,000.

Roger Dean, Floating Islands, Acrylic on Canvas, 48" x 72", 1993

The exhibit emphasizes that the psychedelic and visionary aesthetic is not one-size-fits-all. The art exhibited in Godfathers covers a range of experiences provided by the altered state. These artists are not drug-fueled maniacs on a rampage of hedonist extravagance, their work is clearly disciplined, thoughtful, and intelligent. Rick Griffin’s calligraphy was an astonishing breakthrough. Roger Dean’s paintings are a confluence of post-modern multicultural elements. Ralph Steadman’s drawings reflect on the chaos and gonzo madness of Hunter Thompson’s insane excesses.

Ralph Steadman, Dr. Gonzo, Pen & Ink, Whiteout on Paper, 15” x 21”, 1971

Representing the anarchic and hedonistic side of the psychedelic subculture of the 60s and 70s, only the punkish British artist Ralph Steadman could equal the deranged writing of Hunter Thompson. Steadman was Thompson’s visual sidekick when the famed gonzo journalist wrote his insanely drug-infested novel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, published in 1971. While Thompson cranked out smashed sheets of staccato typing, Steadman drew the iconic images which illustrated the demented story, and they were eternally tied together by it when the book became a masterpiece of American literature. In Vintage Gonzo, the guilty figure of Thompson is caught as he surreptitiously sneaks from a Vegas hotel without paying the bill, tormented by dark bats, puffing ink-splattered smoke from his iconic cigarette holder, and leaving a trail of pills dribbling from his bulging briefcase.

Ralph Steadman, Bombing into Vegas, Ink and Whiteout on Paper, 20” x 22", 1971

Steadman is the splattered master of fast and dirty drawings of the subterranean life that thrives beneath the surface of respectable society. He is firmly in the editorial tradition of William Hogarth’s biting satire. For the exhibit, Chambers has secured Steadman’s historic original inks for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which were first printed in Rolling Stone magazine, together with the famous Rolling Stone cover portrait of President Nixon and other drawings from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. The drawing Steadman made for the cover of Fear and Loathing recently sold for more than a million dollars.

Many writers have described the social circumstances of visionary art, especially its coalescence in San Francisco during the late 1960s, but few have treated it with the respect and care of an art historian. The fourth Godfather, Jacaeber Kastor, understood its importance in the 1960s, and preserved a superb collection of posters and art, displaying them in the 1980s at his Psychedelic Solution Gallery in New York. Chambers has included two neon signs which once flashed in the window of the gallery. The first is a unique design created by psychedelic pop-artist Peter Max, and the second was designed by Kastor. Kastor organized important exhibits throughout the end of the 20^th century, and was one of the first to appreciate the art historical significance of psychedelic and visionary art. He also recognized the cultural significance of printed LSD blotter sheets as a vanishing art. Decorated with spectacular designs, the sheets were soaked in liquid LSD for distribution, and because they were consumed by users, the original designs are rare artefacts of the visual history of the acid underground. Several examples of the blotters are in the exhibit – they have survived because they were never doused in the drug. They are signed by heroic giants of the American psychedelic movement like Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, and Albert Hoffman.

Peter Max, Icarus, Neon Sign, 48" x 48", 1986

The four godfathers of psychedelic and visionary art who Chambers has included in the show are historically significant, but he also has a unique eye for cultural iconography, and he has nurtured the careers of a new generation of artists who are creating a new kind of soft psychedelia – paintings that build on abstraction with extraordinary depth, three-dimensionality, and carefully balanced palettes of bright color. He is the fifth godfather of this exhibit, and his hand has guided the career of many of the most important artists of contemporary psychedelia.

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