Ken Johnson Are You Experienced How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art
Saturday, July ninth, 2011
Are Y'all Experienced? Ken Johnson on Psychedelic Consciousness
Ken Johnson's Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art
For a long time, drugs have been played a role in the social life of the art globe. Charles Baudelaire wrote about them. If yous practice not possess a Delacroix, he said, the next best thing is to exist loftier. But he was opposed to drug utilise, a weak person's style of achieving aesthetic experience. In the 1960s, when use of marijuana and LSD became commonplace amongst the American middle-classes, drugs certainly influenced how visual art was made and seen. Many believed that getting loftier was the all-time way to see through the political subterfuges of the establishment. And yet social historians of art hesitate to introduce this history—in which many of them must, I expect, accept participated—into their narratives. Thomas Crow's not bad The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, for case, focuses instead on the ceremonious rights movement, the consumer economy, and the Vietnam War. The aforementioned is true of the k history of modernism by the writers associated with Rosalind Krauss's Oct.
Are You Experienced? is a dazzling, extraordinarily radical revisionist history. For since taking drugs changes perception, they surely must affect how art is fabricated and seen. Everyone sees that 1960s head store fine art shows the direct influence of psychedelics, simply what is the connection, exactly, between the promiscuous use of drugs and art world art? Ken Johnson, who came of age in this period, offers a highly personal business relationship of it. His volume is very good at explaining how drugs were linked to seductive ideals of political liberation; to contemporary films; and to a groovy variety of art from the past half-century. He describes how R. Crumb was inspired by his acid trips; how James Rosenquist's F-111 deals with the endless period of information, which especially fascinated people who were loftier; and he connects the writing of Robert Smithson, and the art of Chris Burden and Richard Tuttle, with the experience of being stoned. His aim, Johnson explains, is not to link individual artists or works of art with drugs, but to betoken to the ways that the drug civilisation influenced how a slap-up deal of fine art was made and seen, whatsoever the personal concerns of the artists. In the 1960s "some kind of enkindling took place in fine art. . . and the creative and intellectual energies that were brought to life are nevertheless feeding the imaginations of artists today" (p. 220-1).
Johnson himself certainly is not nostalgic, and has a critical perspective on the era of his youth. Being loftier, he rightly notes, didn't make you lot a better person, or saner. Nor did it make you lot an original creative person. Simply you cannot sympathize much recent art without knowing this history. "The psychedelic civilisation of the '6os involved about of the same aspirations that contemporary art has, and it became for me a hub where all roads intersected" (p. 225). Part of the fascination of Johnson'due south account lies in its very fast movement and the variety of paintings and sculptures discussed. "If todays fine art is about altering consciousness and doing so broadly," he writes, 'what meliorate medium to achieve that than computers and the Internet, which can reach millions?" (p. 101). When he pulls such dissimilar artists into the assay equally Ed Ruscha, Sigmar Polke, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Lucas Samaras then we see how diverse the drug-fuelled experiences of art have been. Jeff Koons' erotic scenes, Tino Sehgal's performances and Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living all pose the question: "In a real, shark-infested world, can fine art be a means to attain broad-minded, transcendental consciousness?" (p. 199). I cannot call back of a better one-sentence statement describing the nowadays state of our fine art world.
After you read this volume, lots of familiar fine art will look different—as if you, also, have momentarily get high. Strange enough to be a masterpiece, its quick motion and far reaching analysis is a reminder of how slow moving, by comparing, is about all scholarly writing near modernism and gimmicky art. We are accustomed to make a distinction between art history, which is frankly academic and art criticism, which provides a lively perspective on the immediate present. Are You Experienced? gives reason to question that distinction. Unless an artist can sketch a man throwing himself from the fourth floor before he hits the ground, Baudelaire quotes Delacroix to say, he "will never exist capable of producing slap-up machines." Of course, Baudelaire also describes himself, for a gifted art critic, too, must exist capable of responding very apace. E'er suggestive, always readable and very often highly original, Johnson is as supple as anyone writing fine art history today.
Ken Johnson, Are You Experienced?: How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art. (Prestel, 2011, ISBN 3791344986, $49.95)
Source: https://artcritical.com/2011/07/09/pyschedelic-consciousness/
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