Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia: Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MIJune 19–October 9, 2016Walker Art Center, MinneapolisOctober 24, 2015–February 28, 2016University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film ArchiveFebruary 8–May 21, 2017Catalogue Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia Edited by Andrew BlauveltMinneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015.448 pp.; 200 color and 80 b/w ills.Paper $55ISBN 9781935963097

2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/693810

2153-5558

Haneen Rabie,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

Previous articleNext article FreeExhibition ReviewsHippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia: Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MIJune 19–October 9, 2016Walker Art Center, MinneapolisOctober 24, 2015–February 28, 2016University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film ArchiveFebruary 8–May 21, 2017 CatalogueHippie Modernism: The Struggle for UtopiaEdited by Andrew BlauveltMinneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015.448 pp.; 200 color and 80 b/w ills.Paper $55ISBN 9781935963097Haneen RabieHaneen Rabie Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreHippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia presents the art and design of the counterculture, here signaled by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ 1964 drug-influenced cross-country road trip in a psychedelic school bus and bracketed at its waning by the 1973–74 oil crisis. The exhibition catalogue, edited by curator Andrew Blauvelt, contains eleven scholarly essays and eight original interviews. Among the exhibition’s stated goals is a recuperation of countercultural production from the margins of the history of art, architecture, and design. For Blauvelt, countercultural output has been sidelined because it appeared during a period of transition between modernism and postmodernism, and because it cannot easily be made to fit within disciplinary boundaries around painting, sculpture, and architecture.Rather than discard the problematic formalist, teleological march of styles that often informs the study of art and in particular decorative art and design, Blauvelt momentarily lingers within these traditional parameters. His essay’s most latently generative contribution is perhaps its argument for psychedelia as a distinct stylistic category demanding equivalency with pop, color field, minimalism, or conceptualism.Wes Wilson, Can You Pass the Acid Test?, flyer, ca. 1966. © Wes Wilson.The exhibition opens with painted canvases by Isaac Abrams and Judith Williams, which seem to call for more inter-mediate environments and cannot alone rise to the challenge of representing the psychedelic. By contrast, Alan J. Shields’s Zig Zag (1976) pushes painting past its codified forms toward a new relevancy for countercultural spaces and practices. Zig Zag belongs to a series of hangings typically made of beads and strips of painted cloth combined into latticed grids and webs. On the basis of his interest in R. Buckminster Fuller and the geodesic dome, Shields created paintings that could be viewed from all sides and could hang on the curved surfaces of Drop City’s domes (1965) or perhaps in the inflated interiors of Instant City (1971).Psychedelic art mainly occupies the first half to two-thirds of the exhibition. While it vows to avoid the clichés of the period, Hippie Modernism takes as its organizing paradigm the phrase “turn on, tune in, drop out,” encompassing art that alters perception, enhances awareness, and creates alternative, often utopian societies. For the viewer, the show can effectively be divided into two halves. The first, comprising the sections “Turn On” and “Tune In,” flows from painting to video to posters, work that was imbricated with drug experimentation during a period in which LSD had not yet been criminalized. If psychedelia is to be given its due, perhaps we ought to start with the poster art. As at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2007 showing of Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era (organized by Tate Liverpool in 2005), psychedelic posters here are triple and quadruple hung; divorced from any inkling of technique, concept, or artistic practice; and consequently deadened.The exhibition’s third section, “Drop Out,” presents considered social critique from San Francisco’s Diggers, the Italian radical designers Superstudio, and Amsterdam’s Provo, along with the clear-eyed visions of utopian planners such as Ant Farm.The concept of “hippie modernism” offers to draw together these divergent areas of countercultural practice but ultimately does not transcend the exhibition’s bifurcation. According to Blauvelt, the phrase was first used in reference to “a certain type of 1970s design” practiced in the classrooms of Cranbrook. The core example of hippie modernism indicated by Blauvelt is a poster mapping the route of the 1973 Cranbrook Design Trip, a student road trip from Michigan to New York. In Blauvelt’s analysis, the poster combines a “modern” aesthetic sensibility (presumably its black-and-white color scheme and its staid, albeit serifed, typography) with “hippie otherness” (11). “Hippie modernism” would be most valuable if it were made to push past notions of style toward a more holistic concept of ideological-artistic-cultural work. In Blauvelt’s example, it seems more accurate to consider modernistic stylistic conventions as being one among the vast array of reference points incorporated within hippie lifestyles and the psychedelic arts.Select exemplary objects in the exhibition can perhaps be said to balance hippie and modern movement ideals and aesthetics. The WOBO / World Bottle (1963) was designed by Nicolaas John Habraken at the request of third-generation Heineken executive Alfred Henry Heineken. Made of the beer company’s signature green glass, the bottle is flattened and modified with a concave bottom so that rather than being discarded, it could be stacked like a standard brick for use as a building material. The WOBO was unfortunately never realized to its full potential.Ken Isaacs’s Living Structures, presented by way of pages from How to Build Your Own Living Structures (1974), are based on a three-dimensional grid. They ingeniously integrate two or more levels for living, one elevated roughly two feet above another. Isaacs’s innovation allows living in close quarters with minimal resource exploitation while providing privacy and personal space. Its spare, minimalistic design is a meeting point between ecology and geometry.Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida, CC5 Hendrixwar / Cosmococa Programa-in-Progress, 1973; colored hammocks, 35mm slides, audio disc. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2007.The exhibition includes a reconstruction of a similar such object, Victor J. Papanek and James Hennessey’s Relaxation Cube, from Papanek’s Nomadic Furniture 1 (1973). Its pristine new fibers resting on hygienic marble, the living space as reconstructed reads as perhaps a bit overly modernistic. Similarly, the exhibition’s final object, CC5 Hendrixwar / Cosmococa Programa-in-Progress, by Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida, is a sound and video installation in which music by Jimi Hendrix accompanies images of the musician sprinkled with white powder representing cocaine. Here the visitor encounters a sea of hammocks from which to view the images projected onto the walls and ceiling of the white cube gallery. If the monochrome hammocks hung from metal frames by necessity neutralize some of the piece’s experimental, ad hoc funkiness, they are a welcome, generous curatorial touch. The piece by Oiticica and D’Almeida is only one in a handful of immersive, multimedia psychedelic installations, a key strength of the exhibition.A copy of the small-scale “polar zonahedron” dome constructed by residents of the Drop City artist collective to contain The Ultimate Painting (1966/2011) might have proven more evocative had it been made of a mix of reclaimed waste or scrap materials. As it stands, its uniform, brightly colored panels appear at once flimsy and overly anachronistic.In her catalogue essay, Catharine Rossi tantalizingly touches on Ettore Sottsass’s photographs of beatnik domestic interiors in 1962 San Francisco, which were published in Domus. The images are not included, and Rossi’s essay moves quickly on to survey Sottsass’s subsequent work and entanglements within the broader context of Italian radical design. Such photographs of the messy lived experience of the counterculture might have provided an instructive counterpoint in the tidily modernistic exhibition spaces.Among the show’s most materially compelling objects are Evelyn Roth’s Family Sweater (1974) and Environment for Reading Recycled from 100 Sweaters (1974). Made from recycled, re-dyed sweater yarn, the pieces bring an organic warmth to the exhibition and represent both the handcrafted aesthetics and the anticapitalist privileging of do-it-yourself making that were both central to hippie lifestyles.Clark Richert, Richard Kallwelt, Gene Bernofsky, and JoAnn Bernofsky, “Drop City” ca. 1966. Photo by Clark Richert.Objects of Italian radical design including Zanotta’s 1968 Sacco beanbag chairs and Gaetano Pesce’s UP-5 chair, complete with spherical UP-6 ottoman (1969–70), are scattered throughout the exhibition and treated as furniture rather than as design objects. Compressed into their packaging, Zanotta’s chair and ottoman made of self-expanding foam would achieve their final shape after being unboxed. Archizoom’s 1966 Superonda sofa offers a perch from which to view in their entirety “Ceremony” and “Life,” the two completed segments from Superstudio’s Supersurface: An Alternative Model for Life on Earth, the film produced to accompany the collective’s Continuous Monument collages in the 1971 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape.Archizoom Associati, Superonda sofa, 1966. Courtesy Dario Bartolini (Archizoom Associati) / Archive Centro Studi Poltronova.Continuous Monument, of course, insists on the abolition of design and posits a utopian, radically nomadic world in which all needs will be met by a monolithic yet endlessly mutable, omnipresent grid. The work, depicting hippie couples and families populating its gridded landscapes, provides a link between the hippie and the postmodern. Among the practitioners of Italian radical design, Ettore Sottsass, Michele de Lucchi, and others went on to produce the work of high postmodernism. With Superstudio, the exhibition moves toward its explicitly stated goal of disrupting the received narrative that considers 1968 to be a radical rupture bisecting art and culture into the modern and postmodern.If Continuous Monument remained largely theoretical (a furniture series inspired by the grid, dubbed “Quadra,” was produced by Zanotti but is disappointingly not included), a number of hippie modern utopian communities were in fact realized. These settlements, their art, their social organization, and their domed, inflatable, or simply assembled structures offer avenues for further art historical and design historical research, as does the consideration of psychedelia as an artistic genre.The show, which kicked off at the Walters Art Center, will be on view at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive from February 8 through May 21, 2017. Notes Haneen Rabie is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by West 86th Volume 24, Number 1Spring–Summer 2017 Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center, New York Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/693810 © 2017 by The Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.