Jacob Korczynski
Psychedelia and the Site of Cinema
- Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era
- Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
- 2 May to 16 September 2007
Scattered across a spectrum of artistic activity marked by aesthetics as much as by decadence, the psychedelic era has settled into a shortened narrative consisting of a series of historically fetishized images and sounds. Forty years after the culmination of a counter-culture during the so-called Summer of Love, an exhibition of the same name arrived at its first American venue after opening at Tate Liverpool in 2005. In developing this exhibition, curator Christoph Grunenberg sought to establish a historical survey of an era that is often a point of reference but not a subject of critical analysis, and furthermore, to situate psychedelia within the larger socio-political arc culminating in the years 1967 to 1972 and its climate of societal revolt, which included the civil rights movement, second wave feminism, and opposition to the Vietnam War. However, the curatorial link developed between psychedelia and this milieu is unresolved, uncertain, and even tenuous. While the former is shaped by the internal and solitary revelation of the hallucinogenic trip, with individuals giving themselves over to the effects of outside forces, the latter, in stark contrast, is marked by the collective action of communities working directly against systems that maintain or support racism, sexism, and militarism through the isolation and control of individuals.
Grunenberg attempts to contextualize the geopolitical developments of the late 1960s and early 1970s through the documentary photography and cultural ephemera he has assembled in Summer of Love and yet he fails to connect the period to the experience of psychedelia. The dominant role of the historical document, tracing a multi-city genealogy of psychedelia that includes London, New York, and San Francisco, holds the contemporary viewer at a distance from the soft focus of psychedelia and its immersion of the individual into a temporal experience that expands both perception and consciousness. Although primarily instigated by hallucinogens, the psychedelic experience in the Summer of Love exhibition is cultivated through a spectrum of cinema. In a study of American experimental film published in 1967, Sheldon Renan considered the mutations of expanded cinema then emerging and concluded: “The forms of cinema are proliferating. Every new way of creating or controlling light is potentially a new form of cinema.”1 Whether through a montage of moving images or the coalescing of various projected forms, the role of the cinematic experience in Summer of Love occupies two roles: first, cinema animates the exhibition, unfolding as an ongoing temporal experience that the contemporary viewer may enter into, in contrast to the fixed perspective of the historical documents, and, second, cinema and its situation within the gallery site creates a space where the dynamic of the individual and collective experience of the psychedelic is negotiated.
Attention! What you see here is only an excerpt of a longer article. The full text appears in printed copies of the magazine. To purchase the issue of Fillip in which this article appears, please visit one of our many retailers worldwide, or contact us directly. You can also purchase the full text of this article for $2cdn via Paypal. A link to the full article will be emailed within 24 hours of your received payment.
About this Article
Psychedelia and the Site of Cinema was first published in Fillip 7 in Winter 2008. For more articles from this issue, see the Table of Contents.
Notes
image: Kenneth Anger, still from Invocation of My Demon Brother 1969/2004, 2004. Ultrachrome archival photographs.
The views expressed in Fillip are not necessarily those of the editorial board or the Projectile Publishing Society.
All content appearing on this website is copyright to the authors, artists, editors, and the Projectile Publishing Society, or is published with the permission of the copyright holders. No part of this site may be reproduced, copied, or transmitted in any form or by any means without express written permission.