Summer of Love : Art of the Psychedelic Era at Kunsthalle Wien

Wednesday, 28 June 2006 10:32

Vienna, Austria - “Psychedelia” bears witness to a social, political, ethnic and sexual liberation that had its beginning in San Francisco in the 1967 “Summer of Love”.  “Psychedelia” is also one of the most interesting and, at the same time, most neglected phenomena in the history and art history of the 20 th century.  On exhibit until 17 September, 2006.

Summer of Love is an exhibition about psychedelic art that reveals the unprecedented exchanges among contemporary art, popular culture and political protest in the 1960’s and early 70’s.  The dialogue carried on among psychedelic art, political revolution and counterculture found its reflection in unique aesthetics, bordercrossing, overflowing, formless and motley; aesthetics that, just as Albert Hofmann describes the effect of LSD, appear “in an unexampled play of colors and forms ...... kaleidoscopically self-transforming, ... opening and again closing itself in circles and spirals, spraying fountains of color, reordering and retraversing itself in constant flux”.  The striving for an ecstatic art demanded the expansion of consciousness and the deliberate overexcitement of the senses.  These were not seldom achieved with the aid of hallucinogenic substances, which were an essential ingredient of the psychedelic movement.

At a time when the stylistic and formal elements of the art, design and music of the 60’s and 70’s are again being liberally exploited, it is important to move beyond a nostalgic reception and attempt to understand the original creative and utopian potential of this extraordinary style.

The exhibition is organized by Tate Liverpool in cooperation with the Kunsthalle Wien and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.  It presents paintings, photography, films, light shows, environments, posters, record covers and documentary material from Europe, the USA, South America and Japan.

Christian Skrein documents artists, fashions and people from 1968 in his photographs.  The remarkable Austrian architectural scene of the time, including Coop Himmelb au, Hans Hollein, Haus Rucker Co and Walter Pichler, transform the clear structures of modernism and surmount orthogonal systems in their works.  The critique of rationality becomes a delight in experiment, attested to by, for example, their inflatables, the application of flexible materials, and new and forward looking municipal and living spaces.  The boundaries of the body are plumbed: prosthesis like body extensions are created, such as helmets, capsules, glasses.  Questioning of the Establishment may be found in the works of Zünd Up, with their slogans redolent of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School; in Alfons Schilling’s Chicago Riots, lenticular photographs of the demonstrations against the Vietnam War; or in the works of Friedensreich Hundertwasser and Max Peintner, who raise questions about ecology.

Padhi Frieberger and Ernst Fuchs represent the typical hippie look, but actual contact with hallucinogens remains rare in Austria.  One of the few who experiments with drugs is Arnulf Rainer; his repertoire of explored boundaries and immediacy manifests itself in aesthetics of emphatic bodily externalization.

International artists: Isaac Abrams, Ant Farm, Archigram, Richard Avedon, Thomas Bayrle, Cecil Beaton, Lynda Benglis, Mark Boyle/Joan Hills, Bernard Cohen, Öyvind Fahlström, Richard Hamilton, Robert Indiana, Abdul Mati Klarwein, Yayoi Kusama, John McCracken, Verner Panton, Nam June Paik, Adrian Piper, Lucas Samaras, Peter Sedgley, Graham Stevens, USCO, Andy Warhol, James Whitney, Joshua White, Thomas Wilfred, Jud Yalkut, La Monte Young / Marian Zazeela u. a.

Artist groups and artists in the Austrian section of the exhibition include Raimund Abraham, Christian Ludwig Attersee, Padhi Frieberger, Ernst Fuchs, Coop Himmelb au, Hans Hollein, Haus Rucker
Co, Marcel Houf, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Isolde Joham, Max Peintner, Walter Pichler, Arnulf Rainer, Alfons Schilling, Christian Skrein, and Zünd Up.  Supplementary posters document the reflection of psychedelic aesthetics in everyday Austrian graphic work. Curator: Christoph Grunenberg, Tate Liverpool

Visit the Kunsthalle Wien at : http://www.kunsthallewien.at/