While often overlooked as a bi-product of the counterculture movement and an also-ran alongside the dominant Pop Art movement in the 1960s, psychedelia possesses enough of its own individual merit to stand as a continuation of Romantic thought, particularly regarding the evoking of the sublime.
The movement shares an intimate link with the popularisation of the psychedelic drug LSD, as the work created is directly inspired by the effects it produces. Psychedelic directly translated means “mind-manifesting” in Greek, and was coined by Humphrey Osmand in 1956 to author Aldous Huxley, writing ‘I have tried to find an appropriate name for the agents under discussion: a name that will include the concepts of enriching the mind and enlarging the vision…My choice, because it is clear, euphonious and uncontaminated by other associations, is psychedelic, mind-manifesting.’ The drug itself was created in 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman, giving it a very recent start date in comparison to drugs such as Psilocybin and Dimethyltryptamine, which had been in use for thousands of years. Arguably any work created under these substances the creation of LSD could retrospectively be called psychedelic, as the drugs are now grouped under the same umbrella in terms of drug classification, however the art movement itself was triggered specifically by the spread of LSD and an increased level of consumption and creative output, co-inciding with the growth of what is now called the sixties counterculture, a loose group of protestors and objectors to mainstream life and politics, liberal in leaning and more willing to experiment with substances.
The effect of the drug is important, as to understand it is to see why the artwork inspired and created for the experience tries to evoke the sublime.
On first trying the substance, creator Hoffman reported ‘a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed…I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colours.’ (Hoffman, 1980)
Initially the drug was used in medical facilities, as it was thought to mimic the effects of schizophrenia, and also to treat other drug dependencies, such as heroin and alcohol, with 33 and 50 percent success rates reported respectively. Experiments also found a large creative boost when experiments were conducted on artists.
Researchers, scientists and other academics who had access to such supplies began to take the drug recreationally in private, but it was not long until through a mixture of enthusiasts such as Timothy Leary and medical trial subjects such as Ken Kasey, that word of LSD and the experience under the drug reached a wider sphere of people. Leary wrote books a conducted lectures, viewing the effects in an almost religious light, where as Kasey went on tour, promoting the drug at “Acid Tests”. Once dosages were being created by backstreet chemists, it was not long before the governments of all countries where LSD was popular banned it, in 1966, creating scare mongering adverts and imposing custodial sentences on those caught dealing and partaking. Eventually the movement petered out with the counter cultural movement, as protest movements stopped and more widespread crackdowns on the drug meant that less people were falling under the spell of LSD.
The artwork itself had hallmarks of the visions that the drug generated. Chris Grunenberg (2005a,7) writes psychedelia as ‘the result of a highly productive interaction between art, technology, politics, drug culture, music and many other influences, creating an extraordinary aesthetic exemplifying the spirit of liberation and freedom”, with Fred Tomaselli listing the aesthetic qualities:
‘…Psychedelia was the beginning of pop culture’s post-modern style war. It was a carnival of repressed histories and multicultural theft, hybridising German Romanticism, William Blake, Surrealism, Pop, sci-fi illustration, comics, jazz age cartoons, Asian, animist and Islamic art, druidism, hot rod and surf culture, art nouveau, leftist agitprop and, of course, cowboys and Indians’ (Tomaselli, 2005, 206).
The use of illegible text, clashing colours, deformed shapes, appropriated icons, surrealist elements and classical figures were all common and related to the feeling of being “under the influence”.
Psychedelic rock and pop aimed to enhance and capture the editing of sound as it is heard having taken the drug Simon Reynolds (2005, 147) describes psychedelic music below;
‘…hallmark psychedelic effects typically involve the smearing of sounds and chromatic intensification. Effects such as phasing, flanging, and ‘swirling’ blur the edges of specific instruments and create a miasmic effect, a cloud of sound seeming to swarm out of the speakers and enfold the listener.’
Light shows (see separate blog entry) accompanied the live playing of music, enhancing the experience to be multi-sensory and more stimulating, creating an environment rather than just a visual focus.
What has not been discussed is what makes this experience sublime.
LSD works by blocking sensory neurons which transmit data to the brain. This was explained in detail by Dr Karl Jansen in the BBC Horizon programme Psychedelic Science. ““Psychedelics can block the transmission of messages from the outside world to the inside and it does that by selectively blocking the action of chemical messages which carry the message from neuron to neuron. If you block that perception or sensation from coming in, there will be a bit of a vacuum in your mind, and nature tends to abhor a vacuum so you mind fills it up with memories, perceptions and meaning, if you like, so there are lot of changes going on in a neuro-electrical sense, and you give it meaning; your mind gives it meaning. As a result of that you can see the world in a new way.”
The effect that this produces is sublime as it is not of a rational world. The brain’s subconscious images are so removed beyond the realms of reality that, to paraphrase William Blake, the doors of perception are cleansed, moving the taker to a sublime state, where the imagination and subconscious make up the perception of the world around them. As there is no possible comprehension for such a state, as nothing is based on reality, the mixture of awe and wonder can be linked to the experiences of the natural sublime, where mountains and chasms held the same ambiguous structure, unfathomable yet visible to the eye.
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