Kunst-Blog.com

Those were the associations which popped up when I was reading the title mentioned above and which made me blind for its actual meaning.
I just felt unpleasantly reminded of a number of exhibitions on the subject of “those were the days”, which had washed a heap of stuff inside museums´ walls, which – so I thougth - don´t belong there.
The bad news is: they do belong there.
After all the museum is supposed to protect and preserve what needs protection and deserves preservation. And of course the remnants of past societies meet these requirements.

     Back story
When 2005/06 Kunsthalle Schirn in Frankfurt, Germany, had staged an exhibition called “Summer of Love”, its curator, the Tate´s director Christopher Grunenberg, stated that the show was to emphasize the “visionary and creative potential” of those days´ art. To convince those who are too young now or had been too old then to come into contact with happyhippieloveandpeace the Frankfurt exhibition had created an immensely successful theme park where everybody was enabled to play “psychedelic”.
It had been really entertaining – for school classes. And slightly boring for those who remember once owning the stuff themselves, which now filled the display cases, and dsiscarding it decades ago. Too bad, but it certainly will take some more decades to finally develop a historical view of our own life span and observing our biography from a museum perspective. Yet there already have been attempts in the 1990ies, when middle-aged artists – that is those around the age of twentyfive – emulated Warhol´s Time Capsules by sweeping their personal belongings into exhibition spaces and calling it individual mythologies.¹
Hence thes process of situating one´s own history within the general one has already set in, hasn´t it? Haven´t we all started taking closer looks at seemingly self-evident gimmicks we are about to trash, wondering if they might be valuable some day?

     Freeze frame
However all those has got little to do with the Cologne mushroom-exhibition – as it turned out. Because this show has nothing in common with tediously repeated clichés which imbue the mass media renderings of the “hippie era”. The image of the 1960ies, as it is mulitplied endlessly in advertising, tabloid press and entertainment industry, is distorted beyond all recognition. The reason for this falsification of history lies in the fact that everything that was really changing and developing, was too ephemeral, too – live. Lifely perhaps.
New ways of communicating and working had not been contrived with regards to a long-term perspective. Photographs, slides, films, audiotapes, magazines and books usually were poor-quality. In those days the term “alternative” – like alternative methods of production and distribution – was synonymous with low-budget. Until today media have had approximately 40 to 50 years time to peacefully bleach, crumble and decompose. While the relics were mouldering, they were outlived by industrially manufactured, brightly coloured consumer goods which spread in the aftermath of a cultural movement already dissolving. The 1960ies were the decade when advertising discovered youth as a powerful sales promotion. Since then merchandising has been tirelessly sticking to the heels of any alternative culture. That´s why the majority of sixties´ imagery nowaday just exists as a commercialized version of inventions which have long disappeared.

     Memory aids
Not quite. Yes, there is material – within the Cologne exhibition for example. Unfortunately it´s not as garish as today´s fahion ads, not as catchy as immortal ditties on the level of “if you´re going to Saan Fraan Ciscooo” and similar light weight products. Curators Barbara Engelbach, Friederike Wappler and Hans Winkler assembled authentic documents – another word for material which needs either a sound personal memory or an advanced imaginative ability in order to be complemented with sensorial quality.
In the realm of mass media the wish to create an atmospherically intensive picture of days gone by demands a simplified and thus fictional history. By accumulation of unvarnished material the exhibition however offers one main insight which usually falls victim to glorification. That is: the respective time period was one of inconsistencies.
Unfortunately those discrepancies are not as promotionally effective as soft focus images of rainbow-coloured furry youngsters with eyes widened by an expanded conciousness, frolicking in the park and only taking omnipresent joints from their lips to kiss everything that moves. Compared to those high-polish versions, the truth sometimes looks quite plain. After all incoherencies irritate us and consequently are quickly deleted from conciousness. But luckily the mushroom exhibition is riddled with actions and pictures which, from a contemporary perspective, seem to be incongruous.

     Nothing fits
Especially from a German perspective one striking feature of the US-American hippie-movement has always been the easy compatibility of the affiliation to an alternative society while joyously identifying with national values and traditions. This being proud of and critical towards one´s nation at the same time characterizes the majority of exhibits. An example for this ambivalent, yet not incompatible attitude is H.C. Westermann´s series of prints See America first, which proves his devotion to his country´s sights together with his repulsion of it´s military enterprises. Rainbows and skulls populate the pages in harmony.
The way the former member of the navy jams US-Marine vessels between icebergs, surrounded by swimming rats, leads the way to Peter Saul´s paintings, which render cashflow and the ever increasing desire for more in a posterlike fashion between pop art-painting and comics. Imaginative, humorous and cynical at the same time Saul expresses an occupation with epidemic industrialisation and the mentality of cold-warriors like Edgar C. Hoover in surrealist, or - more precisely – plainly sexist images.
Anyway this goes for a great number of visual artists of his generation: Whatever nowadays is considered politically correct did not belong to their core competences.
Leading the way to a continuous celebration of sexism and violence is Robert Crumb and his entourage. Less funny but more aggressive than Freakbrother´s inventor Gilbert Shelton, Crumb´s cartoons wallow in sex and drugs and bashing and slashing - in order to attack each and every no-no society at that time had to offer.
So did Wallace Berman, albeit quite differently. His magazine Semina belongs to the deliberately primitively made media mentioned above, intended to contrast with the increasingly streamlined way of publications within the art world. Utterly unprofessional as far as manufacturing is concerned, Berman´s collection of loose leaves, tucked together between cardboard, dealt with possibilities of discovering sacred aspects of everyday life. Focusing on interpersonal relationships as the ultimate source of art, Berman´s enthusiasm for more or less spiritual love earned him a series of trials in the 1950ies. Berman is another example for the deep roots which connect the then new with the old society. After all the meaning Berman attributes to family life is as much in accordance with the tradtional American value-system as it became his source of an autonomous way of living.
The inseperability of tenderness and cruelty which dominated a society living in cold war and the age of aquarius at once manifests in a series of fotos which show performance artist Terry Fox burning down Chinese jasmine with a flame thrower. Growing in front of the Berkley Art Museum of UCLA the exotic plant functioned as an outpost of the building´s content: the fine arts, which enjoyed national protection while outside the country wars were raging. With this miniature model of the usage of napalm in Vietnam, Fox confronted the devotees of beauty with ugly reality. By destroying flowers with a weapon he demonstrated that two terms, which for centuries had been mistaken as identical, in fact can be highly contrary: art and beauty.

     Dr. Leary and Mr. Hide
Quite the opposite reaction to the political violence in- and outside the US is represented by Allen Ginsberg´s Human Be-In 1967. This well known way of introducing large audiences to the good life had started with a group called “The Merry Pranksters”, touring the country in a fantastically painted bus to acquaint respectable citizens with the blessings of a just recently discovered substance called LSD. Those then still legal “acid tests” took place in the first half of the sixties, hence at a time, when professor Timothy Leary did research on this auspicious substance quite legally in his laboratory at Harvard College. Leary himself could be called the personification of contradiction. Shortly before his death 1996 he admitted temporarily having received financiation by the CIA in exchange for results of his experiments. Since the 1950ies the CIA had been using LSD as a method to interrogate and torture prisoners.

     Of Panthers and Men
Consisting of peaceful and militant sections the Black Panther-movement was an equally ambivalent phenomenon. Within the exhibition audiotaped descriptions of the planning of attacks with explosives and snappy quotes by Eldridge Cleaver are placed opposite to documents of pieces which deal with victims of death penalty² , next to imaginative ways of processing waste products. A bizarre example for the latter would be a mysterious object called Slant Step, around which Bruce Nauman and his teacher, the sculptor and performance artist William T. Wiley, raised a downright cult.

     Differences of time and space
Apart from this visualization of omnipresent opposite forces the show specifies differences of time and space, thereby clarifying why San Francisco was to become the hotbed for the development of alternatives of all kind. Compared to the application of mechanised ways of working as practised by pop artists at the east cost, their western peers adressed the flourishing art market in a kind of arte povera approach by employing objects and actions which had been excluded from all kinds of market.
A serious ommission of the whole show is the total absence of feminist artists, who had been among the first and most inventive ones concerning the expansion of art´s forms and contents.
Chronological differences within the US-American art scene are made visible by the evaluation of the individuum. The beatnicks of the 1950ies had been a rather small group of nonconfromists, whose insistence on individuality encouraged their quite peculiar pursuit of happyness. The counter culture of the following decade, which involved an incomparably high number of people, was shaped by the very opposite: the awareness of connectedness and solidarity which was to overcome all all worldy evils.
Since the curators´ intention was to emphasize interdisciplinary processes which involve music, literature, film, performing and visual arts as well as political engagement, the result is not exactly a feast for the eyes. Rather it displays the demure charm of photo albums in the attic. But once the dust is blewn off, the exhibits call forth the wish to further investigate into an era, consisting of simultaneous social and artistic approaches, which haven´t even been followed through, let alone being exhausted.

¹Not to be confused with the subtitle of Harald Szeemann´s documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany, 1972.
²That is Bruce Connor´s Hommage to Chessman

© Charlotte Lindenberg M.A. arbeitet als Autorin und Kunstlehrerin in Frankfurt am Main.