In the tableau at the entrance, the present is questioned by the past. A magnificent 1965 Porsche 356c convertible stands there, painted in psychedelic colours. It belonged to Janis Joplin. The Janis Joplin who, a few years later, was to beg the Almighty for a Mercedes Benz because all her friends were driving Porsches. The Janis Joplin who was already dead by the time the a capella »Mercedes« was issued; she had died a rock’n’roll death two weeks after Jimi Hendrix, nine months before Jim Morrison. Over Joplin’s Porsche hangs the Esso logo, red in a blue circle; next to it, the same circle, the same typography, with the word »LSD«. Öyvind Fahlström’s work is from the year 1967. At the time, there was no driving ban in sight, intellectual mobility and automobility were still compatible concepts, LSD was fuel for the spirit. When did that change? When was the first oil crisis? What does a litre of petrol cost? Where can you get LSD today? These are the type of questions that come to mind at this entrance, which can without hesitation be called a »door of perception«, to quote William Blake, the inspiration behind the name of the band »The Doors«. One also asks whether the second Summer of Love will also get a look in. In the summer of 1989, the rave scene exploded in Acid (-House); for the first time since the Summer of Love in 1967, a new sound was firmly connected with a new drug, Ecstasy. In the E-culture, Fahlström’s method of label piracy was varied on fliers and T-shirts. No, the second Summer of Love is not mentioned, neither the parallels between the psychedelic era and the »rave-o-lution« nor the illuminating differences, for example regarding the drug question.

The curator, Christoph Grunenberg, has worked hard at illustrating the psychedelic era. Huge quantities of contemporary documents and artefacts were collected, most of them from the hippy metropolises of the sixties: London, San Francisco and Los Angeles, but also Vienna, Frankfurt and New York. Films and record covers, Robert Indiana’s »LOVE« sculpture and Beatles photos by Linda Eastman (later McCartney), Agit-P(r)op and Eso-Art, concert posters and stroboscope storms, naked women and Verner Panton’s famous residential landscape cave »Phantasy Landscape Visiona«. Everything flows and morphs into each other in standard psychedelic fashion. The fact that the borders between »high art« and everyday »low art« are dissolved constitutes both the strength and the failing of the psychedelia. The strength: art is taken down from its pedestal as a result of the anti-authoritarian movements. The failing: the joint celebration of the moment gives rise to a tendency towards apologia. The lavishly ornamented rock posters especially look as if they have all come from the same production line. The abundance of material produces the picture of a movement that was amorphous, but came together in a flow embracing all areas of social life. The curators should have emphasised the differences more to avoid the impression of historical arbitrariness and conformity,. This is what the catalogue does. Diedrich Diedrichsen sees contrary currents in the Summer of Love, and diagnoses a temporary »simultaneity of ideology-critical concepts of deconditioning and spiritual scenarios of enlightenment«. In the heat of the psychedelic summer, a political and a mystical branch fuse together, only to separate again all the more fatally once things have cooled down: into political sects, psycho sects, drug sects, gangs, junkies and neo-careerists. But the exhibition unfortunately does not investigate the question that this throws up: whether the separation and decline of the art exhibited here were already pre-inscribed.

In the catalogue, Dave Hickey reminds us that his generation – the activist acid heads – was clearly different »from the half-spiritual moods of the day-glo hippies, who were a little younger.« Hickey describes his »canon of psychedelic art« as being »always political in its implications«. »The best place to take acid is right in the midst of everything«, he writes, in a completely unspiritual and anti-escapist way. Only then, he says, can you »perceive cracks in the filigree of power and surveillance«. Hickey is committed to the concept of deconditioning, so he is far removed from spiritual scenarios of enlightenment or unconscious, routine pot-smoking. By joining together the various praxes of drug consumption to form one »long, strange trip«, the exhibition affirms a historicizing and de-politicising view of the Summer of Love. Back then, it suggests, a whole society went wild. A mad accident of history. Then, when everything was over, the new resources were diverted into productive channels. »It is no coincidence that Silicon Valley was created not far from Haight Ashbury; the computer revolution of the seventies and eighties is indivisibly connected with the counter-cultural revolution of the sixties«, writes Cristoph Grunenberg, citing Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead as his main authority: »Acid Test was nothing else than formlessness. Chaos research.« LSD, you motor of progress! It is certainly no coincidence either that the curator speaks of a »counter-cultural« revolution and a »computer revolution«, but not of a political one. This exclusion of the political dimension makes it possible to retrospectively celebrate »acid« as a productive force, without having to ask oneself questions about drugs at the present day. And perhaps being forced to conclude that drugs today do not so much serve drop-outs from the disciplinary society and the discovery of the cracks in the filigree of power, as the opposite: the mass drug cocaine works as a kind of doping in the workaholic 24-7 round of the control society, where subjects have to ensure their flexibility and speed on their own. So was the psychedelic experience only a research laboratory for digital capitalism? Diederich Diedrichsen examines this idea at the stroboscope and decides that these »light politics no longer free the senses, but prepares them – at least in the view of pessimists – for the reaction times of new technologies.«

Pessimism is also a reasonable response to the second motor of the psychedelic experience: sex. Curator Grunenberg adopts Hickey’s enthusiastic definition, in which the psychedelic arts rank »complexity higher than simplicity, the pattern higher than the form, repetition higher than composition, femininity higher than masculinity«, etc.. Sounds good, but: who is ranking what femininity higher than what masculinity? Women artists are no less underrepresented in psychedelic art than in other areas of public life of that time. What femininity? In psychedelic art, women as objects are just as overrepresented as in pornography or washing powder advertisements. The naked female body serves as the symbol of a sexual revolution that is never clearly defined. »Whatever the product, sex sells«: whatever your revolutionary goal may be, you will sell it better with a naked woman on the cover. »Song: Zeitschrift für progressive Subkultur « shows a long-haired man with a bow in his hand, but instead of playing the double bass, he is drawing it over the naked behind of a blonde.

Apparently, an accelerated time like the Summer of Love already carries its »future backlash« within itself: sexploitation and sexism in the name of libertinage and sexual revolution; self-exploitation and self-optimisation in the name of drugs and expansion of consciousness. To understand that, the Summer of Love has to be brought out of the time tunnel.

»Summer of Love«, Shirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2 November 2005 to 12 February 2006; the exhibition will then be on display in the Vienna Kunsthalle (12 May to 3 September).

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

---