Carl Solway Gallery’s new show rediscovers four
pioneers of Psychedelic art
'Distant Horizons: Pioneers of Psychedelic
Art' is a thoughtful exhibit that features mind-blowing, kaleidoscopic works.
STEVEN ROSEN
JUN 14, 2017 12 PM
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Isaac Abrams’ 1965 “Hello Dali” is one of
the mind-blowing artworks in "Distant Horizon."saac
Abrams, one of the four artists featured in the Distant Horizons:
Pioneers of Psychedelic Art exhibit opening Friday at Carl Solway
Gallery, well remembers when he tried the hallucinogenic drug LSD. It was 1965
and he had already taken the mind-altering substances psilocybin and mescaline.
But acid, as LSD was called, was stronger — it caused a radical heightening of
consciousness.
“I came away with the idea that the experience was
profound and had to generate an artistic response,” he says. So he started a
gallery devoted to Psychedelic art, Manhattan’s Coda. He found few if any
artists creating the kind of work he liked, and eventually cash ran
short.
“So I traded for a large canvas, 5-by-7 foot, and some
small canvases and I spent a short time learning how to mix paint and which
brushes to use and I embarked on my first serious painting,” he says.
That work, 1965’s “Hello Dali,” is the largest of 10
paintings that Abrams has in this thoughtful show, which also features
Psychedelic work by the artist collective USCO (particularly Gerd Stern), Tony
Martin and Ira Cohen. (There are also films.) “Hello Dali” is, fittingly,
mind-blowing — as if a kaleidoscopic camera had been installed in your brain to
beautifully scramble your vision of a landscape into ornamented, segmented
fragments of green, blue, yellow, red and every other color in the mind’s eye.
In fact, the mind’s eye is there, itself, on the canvas, as if floating through
doors of perception.
“Hello Dali” comes to the Solway Gallery — as does some
other artwork in Distant Horizons — straight from a traveling
museum exhibit, Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia. That
show has been hailed for taking seriously an art movement of the mid-to-late
1960s that is considered today more of a fleeting cultural trend, if it’s
considered at all.
Hippie Modernism’s
artists and message appealed to Michael Solway, director of the gallery his
father established. Growing up in Cincinnati in that era, he loved Psychedelic
art and music — his father had a show of the music poster and underground
comics artist Victor Moscoso in 1973. He also liked the musicians favored by
the late Ira Cohen, who took woozy, distorted color photographs of them and
others reflected on the surface of Mylar. In this show, Cohen’s 1968 “Jimi
Hendrix” is a fitting portrait of the Rock star whose “Are You Experienced?”
song is one of Psychedelic Rock’s greatest.
Solway asked his friend, New York-based critic and curator
Carlo McCormick, to organize Distant Horizons. “It appeals to
me as a way of redressing art history and also being for the underdog,”
McCormick says about the task. “These guys are not the Pop artists of
Psychedelia — not the Peter Maxes and stuff like that. They were innovating
visual strategies really early, and they really did get the historical short
shrift. They were known for a while, but the art world didn’t want their
maximalism and instead went toward Minimalism. It was a way to get rid of this
experiential kind of art.”
It would be simplifying things to say that LSD was the
sole propellant for the work made by Psychedelic artists. It was outlawed in
1968 amid stories of “bad trips,” but by then its insights into the values of
expanded consciousness had affected the arts, especially; inversely, the
inherent creativity of artists became increasingly revered by those of the
youthful 1960s counterculture who were newly “experienced.”
Artist Tony Martin — who shows oil paintings, posters,
drawings, ephemera and more in this exhibit — says he was never deeply into
acid.
“I took a very minor amount of drugs in the ’60s,” he says
via email. “I tried LSD once; it was an interesting experience. I felt it
related to my own natural imagination. (So) I relied on my own natural
imagination, which was fertilized by the history of art, the art around me, the
wonderful natural world and human world joined together.”
In the 1960s, he created “paintings in time” —
multi-projector visual presentations involving light, liquid and dry
ingredients, abstract hand-painted slides and some realistic imagery — for New
Music composers at the San Francisco Tape Music Center.
“That didn’t mean I was decorating their music,” he says.
“I was making my own compositions that went with their music. That’s important
— some of those I (visually) scored.”
He went on to do light shows at San Francisco Rock
ballrooms. He also has made innovative sculptural installations
like 1968’s “You Me We,” in Distant Horizons, which merges the
images of two people looking into custom-made two-way mirrors.
USCO’s Gerd Stern goes back to the roots of the Beat Era
and published a book of poetry in 1952. Distant Horizons has a
variety of appealing multimedia pieces created by USCO — the artist collective
that was primarily Stern, Michael Callahan and Stephen Durkee. Also in the show
is Stern’s “NO OW NOW, USCO: Two Mantras” circular word collage on vinyl. A
precursor of Baba Ram Dass’ admonition to Be Here Now, it
repeats “Take the no out of now/then take the ow out of now/then take the then
out of now/It is possible that it is possible.”
It’s probably Abrams who best explains the impact LSD
could have on an artist’s life. “I’ve had experiences incredibly attuned to the
physical natural world, like digging a hole and looking at everything revealed
in the leaves and the little bugs and their color,” he says. “Sometimes I’ve
had very crystalline experiences, and sometimes out-of-body (ones). They reveal
themselves in some of the works I’ve done. The experiences are enriching. I
haven’t done psychedelics like I did at one point for quite a while, and I’ve
still been growing as an artist and a painter.”
DISTANT HORIZONS: PIONEERS OF PSYCHEDELIC ART opens Friday with a 5-8 p.m. reception at Carl
Solway Gallery (424 Findlay St., West End). The artists and guest curator Carlo
McCormick will have a panel discussion at 12:30 p.m. Saturday, followed by a
poetry reading by Gerd Stern. The show is up through Sept. 16. More info: solwaygallery.com.
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