The Death of the Great Poster Trip
They still crank out the posters for dances at the Fillmore, Avalon and Winterland —— the posters don’t really look all that different than they did years ago, but somehow they rarely pack the same excitement anymore.
The writing began appearing on the wall last year, in flowing psychedelic script: exhibits in museums and plush art galleries, critiques in newspapers, color-spreads in Life and a cover on Time Magazine. There were term papers, and this year there will probably be masters’ theses and doctoral dissertations. All this could add up to only one thing: The Great Poster Trip is largely over the hill.
The posters, however original or “artistic,” were mass-produced commercial products, and their decline is largely explainable in terms of classical economic laws: flooding the market (or how many can you fit on your walls) and bad imitations driving out good originals. The whole thing turned into a tourist fad. And from the start, it was a phenomenon containing massive doses of camp, fresh to begin but staling as quickly as TV’s “Batman.”
At the same time, an ironic development seems to be just at its beginning stage. The magazine field is replete with examples of bad imitations driving their models to a higher level of quality, and then being driven there themselves by worse imitations: Today’s “Gent” is tomorrow’s “Playboy” and next month’s “Esquire.” Something of the kind seems to be happening among the originators of the psychedelic poster. Rick Griffin, Kelley, Victor Moscoso and Stanley Mouse are still producing posters, but they are also increasingly involved in original art work. Wes Wilson has virtually abandoned the poster biz for serious painting. Bob Fried had a recent show of paintings at a university art gallery. It’s a little like the topless dancer always longing for that serious dramatic role. The commercial poster-makers are going art.
It was good clean fun while it lasted, though, and significant in a very deep way. I once wrote that psychedelic poster art might be the first revolutionary movement to sneak into art history by way of the society and entertainment pages of the newspaper; the art establishment still had trouble recognizing real pop art in its natural context. The other side of this is that the poster movement itself has served as a backdoor which has gained for art a new audience, approaching art in a new way. To a generation that grew up on fingerpainting and largely dropped-out of school before art appreciation courses had instilled their deadly, monumentalizing religious awe toward art, the posters were a non-intimidating art form full of familiar ingredients —— pop advertising art, culture hero photographs and reminders of Victorian relics in grandma’s attic; they poked fun at the plastic slickness of adult commercial art, the reverential attitude toward fine art, and flaunted the taboos against marijuana and mushrooms. They were an art which everyone could identify and live with, simply by sticking four thumb tacks in the wall. The result is a come-off-it, it-ain’t-got-a-thing-if-it-ain’t-got-that swing attitude which is carrying over as a healthy new standard in approaching more serious art.
Poster-art, for all its exotic references to God’s eyes, Islamic calligraphy, Buddhist mandalas and Indian swatiskas, was basically a combination of two contemporary and highly native trends: pop art and the Victorian revival, including Art Nouveau.
In spirit, psychedelic poster art harks back to developments in Europe and England (and New England) that formed an undercurrent through much of the 19th century, from Blake and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood through the Oxford Movement, the Gothic Revival, and William Morris, to Art Nouveau and its eastern European counterpart, Jugendstil.
These movements combined varying proporations of mysticism, Utopianism, and irrational romanticism in reaction against the Age of Reason, the Industrial Revolution, and the onset of mass production. It was the age which first sharply questioned the idea of progress as it had developed in western civilization since the so-called Renaissance.
Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites sought to re-establish roots in the vitalizing currents of the past —– in medieval simplicity and purity, the mystical union of thought with feeling which existed before alchemy and astrology divided into science and magic. The Transcendentalists –— and in ways the Impressionists –— began western civilization’s first major journey to the East, importing Indian thought and Japanese prints. Morris and his contemporaries fought the assembly line with the kind of design that only the hand could make, the printing press with a revival of calligraphy. Beardsley and the Jugendstil artists countered the analytical hang-ups of the age with a sensously irrational symbolism and in Tolouse-Lautrec, the era created the commercial art poster.
Most of these developments –— reactionary in the terms of their day —— quickly became footnotes to the mainstream of western history, although a return to primitive centers of energy was part of the later appeal of African sculpture and New Guinea masks, and the medieval craftsman’s guild idea was strong among the early German expressionists. Cubism, however, marked the beginning of a long flirtation of art with science, urbanization and industry, and surrealism and expressionism responded with Freud.
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