O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : ‘Psychedelic Experience’: a Long, Strange Trip

It’s funny how the mere mention of psychedelia is enough to start reminiscences flowing from members of the boomer generation.

Art critic Dave Hickey opens his sprightly essay for “The Contemporary Psychedelic Experience,” an exhibition at Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery through April 27, with memories of seeing “the stars fall and the sky fold” back in Austin in 1965.

As he notes, “the latent snobbishness of the drug culture” is such that he himself initially discounted a recent account of French philosopher Michael Foucault’s experience with LSD because it occurred too late (in 1975), at a “tacky place” (Zabriskie Point in Death Valley) and with the “wrong” music (by German serial composer Karlheinz Stockhausen).

On my way to the exhibit, I found myself replaying pertinent moments--alas, perilously close in time to Foucault’s epiphanies--including my attempt to turn mescaline-trip revelations into a college art project. Believing I had discovered an obscure truth about the minute shifts in vision experienced by a body in motion, I made a (thankfully brief) student film that tracked a pair of anonymous feet crunching through a forest, represented by wobbly shots of branches against the sky.

Utterly baffling to my instructor and fellow students, this venture into Super-8 auteur ship was a fruitless attempt at offering what Hickey calls “a vertiginous glimpse into the abyss that divides the world from our knowing of it.”

In fact, all psychedelic art comes up against a built-in failure to communicate. The trappings of psychedelia--the swirling, complex patterns, the clashing colors, the puffy lettering, the outlandish scenarios--are merely code references, broad winks that say, “Hey, man, I’ve been there.”

By using this language, artists are understood to be to gesturing toward the indescribable: a mental state in which the universe seemed to be spilling open all of its secrets at once, sensory input is piercingly keen and taboos are turned inside out.

You may be thinking, “Thanks for the memories, but what does this all have to do with the ‘90s?” Well, as Hickey points out, “psychedelic style” is simply one of many ways artists have rebelled against academic strictures in art. Whether the style in question is Rococo, Art Nouveau, psychedelic or graffiti-inspired, it aims to break down the established order by infecting it with outlandish vulgarity.

Nearly all 14 artists in this show transform the ‘60s look in ways variously inspired by custom-car culture, tattoo designs, graffiti, cartoons, “high” art, punk music, horror movies and disgust at 12 years of Republican presidencies. For the most part, apocalyptic scenarios have supplanted the blissed-out flower power look. Everybody’s on a real bad trip, thanks to the fog of cynicism that has supplanted the sunshine of our love.

But the important thing to remember is that, rather like “outsider” art, most of the work in this show runs on a track separate from the pieties of the serious contemporary art world. (When the twain do meet--as in “Helter Skelter” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles last year--the art crowd tends to feel about as uncomfortable as a tattoo artist at a gallery of minimal art.)

So keep in mind that lots of the art in this show is about being childish and disgusting and obsessed with pop trivia and pop taste. On a basic level, it’s about expressing your most outre personal fantasies. If you are male--as all but one of these artists are--these fantasies may or may not cast women in a clearly feminist light.

On a somewhat more nuanced level, the art is about the juxtaposition of clashing (or surprisingly simpatico) visual styles drawn from different eras (‘60s vs. ‘90s), sources (fairy tale illustrations and tattoos) or spheres of the pop world (car culture and Saturday cartoons).

The artists--most of them unknown except to a small band of fans--range from septuagenarian Henry Hill, who was involved in legal experiments with LSD in the late 1950s, to Douglas Vincent O’Neill, who was born in 1958. He grew up in a world where tie-dye T-shirts were available at Sears and “Woodstock” was a record his seventh-grade teacher played for the class.

Hill’s drawings--big, puffy letters spelling out “Nancy” and “Love” with doodle-type designs reminiscent of bubbles, driftwood and skeins of thread--are pure retro fun. His huge “The Force” offers the adolescent vision of a sky-borne megalopolis populated by a curvaceous nude perched on a building, robots, mutated chess pieces and a cavalcade of red-and-white striped creatures.

O’Neill’s generic computer-generated drawings contain the sort of cliches young men doodle in their class notebooks: nubile women, staring faces, an animal head on a human body. In fact, O’Neill uses a scanner to “sample” imagery from other sources which is then converted into digital information and recombined into patterns of his own devising--much like the aural excerpts collaged into industrial rock.

An artist known only as Reynolds offers the grandstand moral heroics and panting lust of the adolescent mind in “Desecration,” an etching rife with such images as a pile of skulls, a flaming nude, an imperturbable mask face, twisting shapes and knotty patterns.

Freakishness and deformity are the stuff of R.K. Sloane’s Grand Guignol scenes, which appropriately include painted theatrical curtains. In “The Song of St. Mary,” a fetus with a clown face spills out its blue intestines inside the belly of a woman with vestigial arms and truncated legs. Brain matter and eyeballs float in space, a half-blind clown with wounds on his chest holds a knife and gun, a hellish fire burns and the stage seems overrun with green bile.

Sloane’s imagery is reminiscent of the absurdly disgusting stories that tabloids use as filler and horror movies depend on. Lurching in and out of plausibility, his scenes confront real-life agonies with black humor.

Karen Carson’s collages score political points by combining saccharine fairy-tale imagery with tattoo monsters--which serve as grim visions of political doom and ecological disaster. In “Reagan/Bush Years,” two cute lady bears have a drink outside a little house adorned with an American flag and a target. A devil leers down from the sky, and crocodiles close in on either side.

S. Clay Wilson, a major illustrator for Zap comics, has cooked up eye-poppingly complex, indescribably appalling silk screens that sometimes seem to have a sociopolitical edge. In “Poets in Hell,” a purple devil reads to a cigar-chomping fellow who might be conservative Sen. Jesse Helms. A flaming body drops onto a bound and wounded nude man in the pose of the martyred St. Sebastian--although the chains suggest that this fellow might be a sadomasochist.

Anthony Ausgang’s pneumatic, Kool-Aid colored cartoon characters inhabit a world in which violence and dehumanization sport a perky veneer. In “Welcome to the Jungle,” a yawning--or screaming--six-armed creature clutching a rubbery pencil and a spray can poses in front of a brick wall sprayed with graffiti. The small “found” painting of a tiger and bamboo that Ausgang stuck onto his own painting--a tame-looking traditional jungle image by an amateur artist--offers a piquant contrast.

Deliberately vulgar pattern is the key to Byron Werner’s sculptures spoofing middle-brow worship of classical composers. Busts of Chopin, Bach and Beethoven all wear wildly patterned duds: Chopin’s jacket has a pattern of hugely enlarged pencil shavings, while Beethoven’s is decorated with a print of giant candy corn.

The exhibit is not only about flaming bad taste and letting it all hang out, however. Suzanne Williams and Glenn Hirsch work with subdued abstract imagery, while Jim Shaw and Fred Tomaselli--the most sophisticated artists in the group--skillfully navigate a path that loops around art and pop culture.

Williams’ meticulous trapezoid-and-lozenge abstractions combine the vocabulary of car finishes (pin-striping and air-brushed fields of color that gradually dissolve into nothingness) with the sleek Moderne style of architecture and industrial design. In her paintings, blocks of color shift from two- to three-dimensions with the naively puzzle-happy ease of M.C. Escher.

Hirsch brings back ‘40s-era Surrealist abstraction in a group of free-form mixed-media paintings. Some look like studio discards while others, such as “Adoration of the Shape,” deftly evoke the biomorphic imagery and heavy-duty Angst of the period.

The weird part, of course, is the idea of trying to recreate such “high art” paintings in the ‘90s, with its utterly different social climate and prevailing attitudes toward art. Judging by his autobiographical statement, Hirsch doesn’t view his work ironically, yet the tiny collaged image of a TV floating in space in “Chagall Bladder” suggests that he does at least have a sense of humor.

Shaw’s take on Surrealism couldn’t be more different. In “Blue Cross,” a blue cross--the corporate health care logo--divides layers of soft, pastel images (a man, a woman, a dove, a fetus); in place of urgent metaphors drawn from the subconscious, Shaw offers wishy-washy platitudes of the sort more likely to appear in advertising campaigns. By translating the high seriousness of Surrealism into New Age vapidity, Shaw sends a smart bomb zooming toward the overblown ego of modernist art.

Although Tomaselli has become rather notorious for embedding drugs--legal and otherwise--in his work, it retains an ironic distance from psychedelic excess. In his small painting “For D. W.,” vertical rows of marijuana leaves are embedded under a waxy surface. Transformed into ribbon-like patterns of saw-toothed ferns, the drug is tamed and useless--except as a vehicle for viewers’ aesthetic “head trips.”

With a serial format that alludes to contemporary painting, the piece proposes a parallel between the effects of art and drugs. If viewers don’t fully engage themselves with art--for whatever reason--isn’t it as mentally ineffectual as wax-covered dope?

“The Contemporary Psychedelic Experience” continues through April 27 at the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St. in Orange. Hours: noon to 5 p.m., Mondays through Fridays. Admission is free. (714) 997-6729.

Two receptions for the artists will be held Thursday, from noon to 1 p.m. and from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Argyros Forum on campus. Hingu Garage Sale, a local psychedelic band, will play an amplified set of original music at the early reception and an acoustic set in the evening. The public is invited to each reception; admission is free.