Title: West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977
Abstract: Work on the counterculture of the 1960s era usually doesn't do a lot with the art that accompanied and enriched the cultural upheaval of the time. The counterculture was spectacularly visual, what with the flamboyant clothing and exultation of the body that were everywhere, and yes, there were some notable artists such as the whimsical Peter Max, but the great creativity that was so much the engine and product of the counterculture has rarely received its due. At the same time, the fact that the rise of countercultural art had more than a little to do with moving the American art scene westward from New York has hardly been noted until now. As the editors write in their introduction, “The unfortunate fate of the counterculture is that its story doesn't blend well with either the narrative of the New York avant-garde or the political histories of the 1960s. While its commitment to social transformation divorced it from the histories of the avant-garde, its emphasis on culture and lifestyle alienated it from political histories of 1960s radicalism” (xviii). Those overlooked happenings—the art of the counterculture and its movement out of New York—have finally been resurrected with this hefty book. Indeed, the wildly creative architecture of Drop City, so long written off as some kind of aberration, is right on the book's cover. In addition, it introduces a genuine appreciation of the art of this new time and place, showing how it influenced what would come later in the art world. It should be noted early on that the book was the volume that accompanied an exhibition first mounted at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Colorado, and, appropriately, is lavishly illustrated.As for utopianism, the whole 1960s-era counterculture could easily be seen as a utopian project, but the diversity of the twenty chapters of this work makes them vary quite a lot in their utopian content. The utopian focus of the first four chapters is not in doubt: they survey Drop City, the pioneer American hippie commune whose geodesic domes covered with car tops recovered from junkyards influenced a whole era of countercultural communitarians; the wide-ranging experimental workshops of Anna and Lawrence Halprin, which sought new ways of approaching design involving such art forms and exercises as dance and building structures from driftwood, always involving “a communal participatory encounter” (37); the Crossroads Community, an early experiment in living in harmony with nature in San Francisco that recovered wasted spaces under a freeway and used them for gardens, orchards, and animal husbandry, putting new environmental concepts into action; and that city's video collectives, which took an emerging technology and made it usher in new art forms, working in collaboration with each other.Part 2 also has a solid utopian center, with its chapters on queer costumes in San Francisco, especially the creations of the flamboyant Cockettes and their spin-off group, the Angels of Light, costumes that were typically assembled from clothing and decorations dumpster-dived or found in cheap thrift stores; Libre, the Colorado artists’ commune that pioneered creative ways of hand-building homes, with structures ranging from domes and zomes to a home built around a huge boulder; the visionary Italian-born artist Paolo Soleri's communal settlements, Cosanti and Arcosanti, the latter conceived by him as a utopian city that would integrate human needs, physical, intellectual, and spiritual, in one radically environmentally sound created city and both embodying, in the Arizona desert, “archology” (architecture plus ecology); Pond Farm, the summer craft enclave that centered on pottery making from 1952 to 1980 under the direction of Marguerite Wildenhain, who had earlier learned her craft at the Bauhaus; the groundbreaking L.A. light shows of the Silver Wing Turquoise Bird collective, known for its extraordinary technological creativity as well as its fantastic shows; and the powerful political posters that drew the radical young into hundreds, maybe thousands, of social organizations and events dedicated to overthrowing the old order and creating a new American culture. Part 3 examines the ethnic and other culture-based creative political works that saturated the countercultural milieu: the political prints of Yolanda López, who created powerful activist Latino art; the counterculture's appropriation and visualization of American Indians, an expression of the back-to-nature, back-to-old-ways ethic that was found not only in the great Human Be-In of January 14, 1967, but at countless festivals, ceremonies, and political actions; the emergence of feminist/goddess art as second-wave feminism sought its own cultural expression, some of it in a feminist past both historical and imagined; the work of Black Panther artist Emory Douglas, who both embodied and propelled the rage that was in significant part a response to unrestrained police brutality in black neighborhoods; and the post-Stonewall exodus of gay and lesbian men and women into the countryside, where one channel of their creativity was the publication of periodicals—RFD for rural gay men and Country Women for back-to-the-land lesbians. The book's last section, called “Altered Consciousness,” examines the arrival of the Esalen Institute and the naked pictures taken by Ansel Adams there, although without the reproduction of any of his images thanks to a dispute of the author with the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust; the explorations by Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison of the intersection of art and environment; psychedelics and their shattering of perceptions, something profoundly influential on every other part of the 1960s-era counterculture; the art inspired by the Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa, perhaps the most influential of the hundreds of spiritual teachers who made their way from Asia to America and found a huge audience among the spiritually hungry young of America, at his Naropa Institute and other spiritual centers; and, finally, the visionary art of rock music posters, which drew a new generation into the music of their time.The chapters of the book are so diverse in content and approach that coming up with an overall critique of the volume is difficult. It would be better to evaluate the chapters one by one, but that is too large a task for this space and, for that matter, too large a task for one reviewer, since the academic specialties needed for evaluation vary widely from one chapter to another.Given my own interest in intentional communities, I found especially useful the chapters spotlighting some of the 1960s-era communes that both reflected and helped shape the larger counterculture. The chapters on Drop City and Libre (1 and 6) are some of the best accounts to date of those pioneering communes. The haunting art and architecture of Paolo Soleri at Arcosanti, the community he founded, embody the eccentric and visionary elements of the counterculture beautifully. The briefer looks at such other communities as Short Mountain Sanctuary, the gay redoubt in Tennessee, and the early Tibetan Buddhist community called Tail of the Tiger (now Karmê Chöling) in Vermont bring new information on and visual representations of those places to the foreground. And there are others, some only mentioned, but for those of us of a certain age these 1960s-era cultural plantings recall the visual vividness of the time. But those are my chapters; every reader will have his or her own.I will stop here because I am not equipped to provide a proper examination of each of the chapters in this remarkable book. My advice to utopian scholars, indeed to the reading public, is to get the book and be prepared to spend a good deal of time with it as it draws you into the remarkable alternative world the counterculture created. It will be time well spent. An appreciation of the creative, utopian art of the counterculture that challenged long-accepted canons has been severely overdue, but now the passionate artistry of one of the most creative eras of our history is finally beginning to receive the notice it deserves. May a thousand flowers bloom.
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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