Disclaimer: this is not a trend report on the influence of psychedelic art on the contemporary. This is a column (my first!), and as such, in limited space, I will present to you my judgment of the first weeks of the gallery season. Those Kant readers among you will know that aesthetic judgment is a loaded phrase, and so in this limited space, I will make some unsupported claims (just you wait), and you will have to rely upon the institution of the Spectator and the authority with which I name-drop artists you might not yet know (though you soon will!).
Given the omnipresence of a psychedelic aesthetic—the ternary color palette, the chaotic assemblage, the sheer enthusiasm—the Whitney Museum’s “Summer of Love” exhibition from this past summer might come off looking ahead of the curve. Yet the show was a critical flop—and for good reason. The exhibition treated the ’60s like some paradise lost: curator Christoph Grunenberg’s catalogue entry refers to the ’60s as a “repressed aesthetic,” and so he treated the works like a nostalgia show.
Psychedelia is not repressed, although it may have been gestating in such far-off places as Providence, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. And in the last few years, it has matured—if it hasn’t reached complete saturation. Witness the vogue for the ecstatic cartoons of the Fort Thunder, Paperrad, and Dearraindrop art collectives, all from Rhode Island School of Design; the zeal for ephemera; the sudden vogue for monochrome tie-dye; and finally, witness the sophistication with which it’s been incorporated into this September’s shows.
What is psychedelia? It’s a total art work, though typically rendered in one medium. It’s intended to short-circuit your ability to reason. Without the weight of intellectualism, it is enduringly populist. As such, it upends traditional art hierarchies. What is colorful is literally filled with colors, or it has primitive spiritual implications. Dave Hickey explains in “Freaks,” the 1997 essay reproduced in the Whitney’s catalogue, that psychedelic art is generally characterized by “complexity over simplicity, pattern over form, repetition over composition, feminine over masculine, curvilinear over rectilinear, and the fractal ... over Euclidean order.”
The most directly psychedelic of these artists, Jim Drain, takes Euclidean order and traditional hierarchies and hangs them from the ceiling. Drain, pseudonym Gorgon Radeo of the Forcefield collective, emerged from the RISD and made a name for himself with his ”knitted sculptures.” In 2005, Drain won the Baloise Prize at the world’s largest art fair, Art Basel.
Drain fills the irregular space of the Greene Naftali Gallery with hulking, intricate sculptures. Drain’s sculptures have an innate weight—a damp, loose tactility that consumes the room. They’re intensely detailed: sewn and knitted hands grab at each other, seams rip across extended surfaces. They are the elephants in the room: an embarrassment of kitsch aesthetics and household labor.
In the middle of the room, Drain hangs a frayed, knitted, Day-Glo grid. He doesn’t bring that high modernist symbol down: he bedazzles it. It’s a marvelous work, one that absorbed the room of the opening, and rendered Mondrian’s high modernist symbol effeminate, gay, idiosyncratic, and utterly approachable. One woman’s heel got a little stuck in it, in fact.
Drain’s works, the artist has admitted, are sometimes done by machine. It’s a relief: this amount of work is best left for solitary confinement. But the ease with which the works could be received—the cozy, hipness of palette and craft—say a lot about the importance of rupture in the work. The sculptures photograph beautifully, but in the space of the gallery, they were less than exuberant. At the opening of “I Would Know my Own Hand” in the huge, complicated space of Greene Naftali, the most ebullient space was the grid—the others felt sadly unapproachable. They were no longer hands-on; they’d become art.
It should be noted that the most effective use of the psychedelic look comes to the aesthetic by way of gay art and history. The fluorescent face paint and crude editing of Ryan Trecartin’s A Family Finds Entertainment stole the show at the last Whitney Biennial. It’s a confluence of kitsch and camp, where the characters, primarily the artists’ friends and peers from RISD, speak with a John Waters’ Baltimore drawl, wield a glue gun, and flash their scrotums.
“Don’t act like I don’t know what decade they’re trying to hide,” says the character Pasta, in a long line of non sequiturs from Trecartin’s latest full-length film I-Be Area, on view at Elizabeth Dee. Psychedelia here is an access to a specific type of kitsch—one that has been appropriated, incorporated, and in many ways valorized by a self-congratulating, gay-friendly art world. Trecartin’s success has been phenomenal—he’s collected by megalomaniacal collector Saatchi—and so the self-reference is warranted.
Trecartin’s films are a composite of “bad painting” and soap-opera acting; the scene at times turns literally into an infomercial. The filming is uneasy, and in many cases scopic, like reality TV, and the characters speak to the camera. There are so many holes it’s hard to make something solid out of it.
Along this yellow-brick road, Trecartin scatters existential questions with the rigor of Beckett. Characters are constantly changing their names, and with them, their personas. Babies, who possess the ultimate ego and yet whose identities are most formed by their surroundings, are crucial to the plot: “We’re going to make an amazing jail for [the baby],” says Pasta, who has either adopted or abducted him.
At one point, Trecartin’s characters are shoplifting from a bead store (they’ll use their funds to start their careers). They stop, and there’s a bizarre product placement interlude in honor of Burt’s Bees—that tiny, fetishized, utterly numbing lip balm. A drug that offers a break from culture and becomes its own: what could be more psychedelic?
iJm Drain’s “I Would Know my Own Hand” is on view at Greene Naftali, 526 W. 26th St., #8; Ryan Trecartin’s I-Be Area is on view at Elizabeth Dee, 545 W. 20th St.