The CultureCritic Guide to Psychedelia...

Psychedelia is in the air this Autumn, with an Alice in Wonderland exhibition at Tate Liverpool, the Barbican's Transcender festival and a Pipilotti Rist retrospective all coming up, and a festival at the Wysing Arts Centre dedicated to the 'genre' last Saturday. We thought it would be a good time to offer a small taster of some classic psychedelic films, books, music and art, as well as have a closer look at how its legacy lives on. Good news for those of us too young to remember the 60s and 70s, and for those of us that were there, but still don't remember.

MUSIC

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The year is 1966. The Doors are recording their self-titled debut (released in 1967), Arthur Lee's Love release their debut and record its follow up Da Capo and psychedelic music arguably reaches its commercial peak with John Lennon's ‘Tomorrow Never Knows', Revolver's closing track the lyrics of which are reputedly adapted from the 1964 hippy handbook, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Miles away from both America's West coast and swinging London, in Dallas, Texas Roky Erickson and The Thirteenth Floor Elevators were also recording and releasing their debut The Psychedelic Sounds of... Amassing a large cult following and recognition by discerning rock music aficionados, the record is too often overlooked in a world where Jim Morrison t-shirts have become a painful cliché. It's not just that The Thirteenth Floor Elevators were the first band to apply the term ‘psychedelic' to a record or its art work, The Psychedelic Sounds of... is a stone cold classic, an eclectic mix of garage rock (on the groups best known track ‘You're Gonna Miss Me') and experimental sounds (‘Rollercoaster', ‘Reverberation'), including innovative use of an electric jug throughout. And for proof of the record's enduring influence, just check out tribute album The Psychedelic Sounds of The Sonic Cathedral, released by the always excellent Sonic Cathedral and featuring Sarabeth Tucek, The Black Angels, A Place To Bury Strangers and Dead Meadow among others.

The legacy of 1960s psychedelic music is vast and certainly isn't confined to guitar music. Some bands, like San Francisco's Wooden Shjips and Anton Newcombe's The Brian Jonestown Massacre wear their influences on their sleeves and seem to belong in a different era. The former's latest record West revels in heavy scuzzed-out psychedelia, amid droning riffs and swirling organs.

Baltimore's Animal Collective and Cleveland's Emeralds (who play as part of the Barbican's Transcender psychedelic music festival this September) offer a more modern take on the genre, the former's latest record Merriweather Post Pavillion won praise in 2009 for its ‘hallucinatory kaleidoscopic sounds'.

FILM

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Identifying a psychedelic ‘genre' in cinema proves a tricky task, the influence of freaked-out excess seeps into many films; most people will remember the 'Pink Elephant' scene from Disney's Dumbo for a start. There are, of course, a few titles that seem to stand for something about the 20th-century's age of pyschedelia; Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider or Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey are both beacons of 1960s far-outness, and a few lesser known examples such as The Monkee's plotless psychedelic-art film from 1968, Head (reportedly so titled to enable the backers to run their next film with the tagline "from the guys who gave you Head").

Our pick of the lot, however, is British director Ken Russell's 1980 sci-fi flick Altered States. The film is based on Paddy Chayefsky's novel, which in turn was based on American scientist John C. Lilly's sensory deprivation experiments of the 1950s, carried out in isolation tanks under the influence of psychedelic drugs.  It notably features William Hurt's screen debut and some truly intense mind-bending scenes, as Edward Jessup (Hurt) embarks on what are probably fair to describe as several pretty bad trips.

In one memorable sequence following Jessup's stay with a Mexican tribe, he consumes a strange concoction of indigenous plant and his own blood. He later appears to travel to hell, in a particularly nightmarish and vivid vision (see above). Eventually the line between inner and outer reality is transcended completely as he appears to begin to revert to a version of primitive man. Things get pretty weird, but Jessup's visions are never less than compelling to watch.

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Equally grueling is Gaspar Noé's two-hour and twenty-minute Enter the Void, which is either a spectacularly deranged treatise on out-of-body experiences or an overlong stay inside the mind of a teenage boy, depending on taste. The film follows a young American man in Japan, who reads the Tibetan Book of The Dead, embarks on an acid trip, gets shot, and enters a kind of spirit phase. Attempts at depth are outshined by technological feats, as a constantly moving camera soars through skies and penetrates walls. Many, many shots of breasts and brilliantly-coloured, otherworldly recreations of seedy Tokyo are what stay with you.

ART

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Utopic, visionary and surreal - what characterises psychedelia at its big moment in the 1960s has long held sway in visual art, a medium extremely well suited to both flights of imaginative weirdness, transcendence and progressive, unifying ideals. Of course chemical highs have never been far from the core of many an artistic community. From William Blake to Andy Warhol to Damien Hirst, hedonism, excess and out-of-this-world aesthetics are an art world staple.

The visuals synonymous with 1960s counter-culture however are probably Bay Area poster and graphic art associated with the music scene of the time, and the related drug-induced visions. Wes Wilson was one of the style's founding fathers. A onetime horticulture student, he arrived in San Fransisco in 1965 and helped pioneer Art Nouveau-inspired swirls and organic fluid lettering that overpowered even the smallest whiff of white space, for gig posters for the likes of Grateful Dead, The Byrds and Jefferson Airplane. Although really a Pop artist, Robert Indiana is responsible for a true icon of the time, his "LOVE" paintings and sculptures capturing the ethos of a certain summer. 

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Japanese-born Yayoi Kusama's career began in the 1950s, but she's still going, with crazed installations, paintings, clothing and outdoor interventions featuring a recurring motif of polka dots or whorls derived from a childhood hallucination. Piplotti Rist is a big international name associated with feminism, who inexpicably has not yet had a survey exhibition in the UK. This will remedied by the Hayward later in September, with a show of her video works that overload the senses with distortions in sound and speed, saturated colour and skewed versions of reality.

Painter Fred Tomaselli's intricate surfaces look at ideas of utopia, with shapes that hark back to the swirling patternation of the 1960s constucted from objects such as button, pills and natural hallucinogens captured in resin. Scottish artist Jim Lambie's multicoloured tape floors, spangled found objects and collaged installations tap the aesthetic and the spirit of exuberance gleaned from pop culture, music (albeit mostly punk) and contemporary pleasure.

A recent turn in contemporary art has seen a revived interest in esoteric spirituality, cults, and collective idealism. The manner of handling of such references suggest a shift in interest towards this socially and politically engaged yet bugged-out golden era that signifies something more than simple nostalgia.

BOOKS

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Aldous Huxley detailed his psychedelic adventures on Mescaline in Doors of Perception in 1954, bringing a previously little-known drug into public prominence and opening up the potential for an influx of trippy literature. William S. Burroughs gave us the notoriously graphic Naked Lunch in the lead up to the acid-hazed 1960s and 70s, following a junkie protagonist through surreal and disjointed landscapes. Hunter S. Thompson followed thirteen years later with the cult classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

A lesser-read example of psychedelic literature that we like is Philip K. Dick's 1965 novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich. It centres on a hallucinogenic substance called Chew-Z found on Pluto in the distant 21st century. Chew-Z threatens to overshadow Can-D, a drug sold in conjunction with Perky Pat dolls, which allows users to participate in collective hallucinations and interact sexually with the dolls - an idyllic life, all at the pop-of-a-pill. Following the pattern set by previous works of psychedelia, substance-induced trips are here essential forms of contemporary escapism, and boundaries between reality and the supernatural blurry indeed.

Government involvement in recreational drug distribution was a recurring theme for Philip K. Dick, reflecting the CIA's infamous LSD experiments as part of MK-ULTRA in the 1950s. These experiments are tackled head-on in Thomas Brendan Fahey's 1995 Wisdom's Maw.

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Alice in Wonderland opens at Tate Liverpool from 4th November until 29th January. Read the latest reviews here.

Transcender begins on 23th September and runs until 29th September. Click here for a chance to win a pair of tickets to the opening night.

Pipilotti Rist opens at the Hayward Gallery on 28th September and runs until 8th January. Read the latest reviews here.

Wooden Shjips latest record West is out now on Thrill Jockey. Read the latest reviews here.