Chronology is a bitch. The fool’s frame by which we mangle and molest the irascible erratic energies of culture into some semblance of order, the compartmentalization of time into a cluster of events, is the pedantry of history misinforming our necessary understanding of the messy ways in which ideas and sensibilities flow freely and unpredictably across generations.

Quite arguably a necessary evil, its scope and limitations are at once useful and problematic, as much for the museum as for all those other cultural industries by which nostalgia is fobbed off as history. Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, organized by the Walker Art Center and arriving February 7, 2017 at the Berkeley Art Museum, is at once a scholarly argument for the insights afforded by following a single strain of thinking over a set time period, and a cautionary example of the distortions and displacements endemic to describing the unruly and mutable form of any zeitgeist as if by thesis.

Beyond those tired exaggerated flashbacks of boring old baby boomers declaiming the parties and politics of their youth as if a badge of long-expired hipness, there has been so very little attention paid to the radical visual strategies that emerged out of the psychedelic era. Hippie Modernism is a vital testament to some of the greatest artists that hardly anyone has heard of, and this is by no means insignificant. While many who can name the legendary bands of the era that now constitute that comfortable cultural rut called Classic Rock, any knowledge or understanding of those artists working with paint, prose, light shows, film and other expanded media to describe this same psychedelic experience is esoteric to the point of impossible obscurity. What is odd and misfit is the expanse of the show, from 1964 to 1974, where the kind of ground-zero, blow-your-mind impact of this counterculture is followed far into the fallow fields of back-to-nature escapism, navel-gazing utopianism, and after the riots of entrepreneurship that made the early 1970s such a wretched bearded and unwashed mess of smug, hypocritical faux-enlightenment.

Kent YellowSubmarine 1967
Corita Kent: yellow submarine, 1967; screenprint on paper; 23 x 25 in.; Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White.

You really should see this show for yourself, and if you don’t, you’re just an ignorant pig. Hippie Modernism’s premise that the same futuristic media theories of pop philosophers like Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller that informed the pioneers of early psychedelic art would be followed through by the developers of alternative lifestyle cultures a decade later is pretty clever and outright stunning. This lineage, like much of our past, is a bit too white and polite by contemporary multicultural standards and uncomfortably at odds with the Civil Rights Movement that was so much a part of the epoch. But that should be well rectified in this Berkeley Art Museum version as they team up with the legendary Pacific Film Archive on an ambitious program that will range from the eye-popping abstractions of Expanded Cinema to the verite activist docs of the day. But such are the contradictions of this complex era, indeed, benefitted by the comprehensive scholarship of the show, while oddly incomplete, as the great explosion of this maximal art form from the mid-1960s must share the stage with the most unstylish aspects of that time where those communal-living, bean sprout-eating, Whole Earth Catalog-reading cultural exiles were just begging for punk to come along and obliterate all that nonsense.

Carlo McCormick

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Originally published in the March 2017 issue of Juxtapoz Magazine, on newsstands worldwide and in our web store.