The groovy: an everyday aesthetic of the sixties

ABSTRACT

In Christine Brooke-Rose’s novel, Out (1964), we are introduced to ‘Mr Blob’, a ‘filmy monster’ known for rearranging his molecular constitution on live television into a soft ensemble ‘of different wriggling shapes’. Mr Blob’s spectacular wobbles are quintessential of a Sixties moment and its everyday aesthetic of the groovy, which once salvaged from post-modernist irony can be said to function at the complex intersection of black jazz and second-order cybernetics, space age kitsch and trippy post-capitalist desires. Moving between the ‘groovy […] sociable atmosphere’ of the Jolly Dollar in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and the ‘groovy TV’ imagery of Nam June Paik’s Global Groove (1972), the essay presents a novel theory for an overlooked aesthetic of immense significance to twentieth-century culture. Throughout, the essay homes in on an increasingly powerful synthetic chemicals industry hellbent on the formal excavation of a molecular lability that seduces almost every aspect of everyday life, rendering almost every surface cartoonishly susceptible to the insidious grooves of a new kind of injection-moulded reality.

KEYWORDS:

• Modernism
• Postmodernism
• The Sixties
• Everyday aesthetics
• Anexact form

The dyes from the paper factory were seeping downhill into the gelatine factory, creating blue, brown and even dappled jello

— Renata Adler, Speedboat (1976)

1. Mr. Blob & the invisible man

In Christine Brooke-Rose’s experimental novel, Out (1964), we are introduced to the iconic TV star, intermolecular stuntman, and ‘filmy monster’ known simply as ‘Mr Blob’. On live television, before an audience of millions and assisted by a vast team of scientists, cameramen and PR professionals, Mr Blob’s molecular solidity turns liquescent, becoming a soft ensemble ‘of different wriggling shapes’, at once ‘a jellyfish’, a ‘tiered hierarchy of diagonal wobbles’, and a mass of tubes ‘wavering like algae’. Mr Blob warps and wavers in a way that seems quintessential of the Sixties and its everyday aesthetic of the groovy, which once salvaged from post-modernist irony can be said to function at the complex intersection of the animatedness of alienated black jazz performers and the self-organising feedback loops of second-order cybernetic machines, the thermoplastic deformations of space age armchairs and the mind-bending revolutionary desires of tripped-out hippies – veering all the while between affective authenticity and depthless spectacle in a manner that is often at once conformist and countercultural, biomorphic and synthetic, free-wheeling and yet overengineered. For not only does Mr Blob’s TV stunt seem to fold the groovy formal affordances of what Shigeko Kubota calls television’s ‘liquid reality’ – that is free ‘to dissolve, reconstruct, mutate all form, shape, colour, location, speed, scale’ – into an excitation of the molecular lability at the heart of mid-century advances in industrial chemistry, Brooke-Rose also underlines the racialized valences of such apparently trivial groovy spectacles of corporeal bends. That Mr Blob emerges within Out as the unconscious daydream of an anonymous enslaved person – the novel is set in a post-apocalyptic future where an increasingly sickly ‘colourless’ people are ruled by the ‘Melanian’ races, in this case the rich heiress ‘Mrs Mgulu’ – suggests that Brooke-Rose is not only toying with the mind-bending formal possibilities of new mid-century technologies like thermoplastic and television, but also with the period’s disturbing endurance of representations of marginalised black bodies as at once ‘excessively “lively”’, as Sianne Ngai writes, and cartoonishly ‘pliant […] unusually susceptible to external control’, to the point of seeming like ‘a kind of mechanization’. By extension, Mr Blob’s groovy animatedness underlines the sinister racial dynamics that haunt the 1960s fetishisation of chemically-engineered processions of continuous deformation, epitomised by Timothy Leary’s slick sloganeering – ‘Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out’ – throughout the Summer of ‘67 and Ken Kesey’s far-out encouragement in Over the Border (1973) that ‘we get so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves’.¹

The word ‘groove’ refers, of course, to any sort of ‘channel or furrow’ – be it of ‘natural formation’ or ‘cut by artificial means’ – and the pre-twentieth century condition of being ‘in the groove’ describes a remarkably square state of being ‘settled into (or in) a routine of work, habit’, or indeed, stuck in a certain ‘narrow, limited, undeviating course; a ‘rut’’ (OED). Following the rise of the gramophone in the early-twentieth century, however, the term ‘groove’ takes on increasingly rhythmic, affective, euphoric, and even clinamenatic proportions, becoming associated specifically with the swerving ‘spiral cut in a gramophone record […] which forms the path for the needle’ (OED). As Robert S Gould suggests in A Jazz Lexicon (1964), to be ‘in the groove’ is to be ‘carried away or inspired by music’ and throughout the mid-century, this jazz-oriented and gramophone-induced modernist condition of being ‘in the groove’ increasingly denotes a state of becoming locked into an automated, pre-recorded, or pre-determined rhythmic flow that feels paradoxically devious, mottled, spontaneous, raw, or freeform. ‘Groove is when overlapping patterns of rhythm interlock, when beats syncromesh until they generate an automotion effect’, writes Kodwo Eshun in More Brilliant than the Sun (1999), ‘an inexorable, effortless sensation which pushes you along from behind until you’re funky like a train’. To be ‘in the groove’, so then, is to have one’s interior rhythm ‘locked’ into and automorphically ‘adapted’ by the intense dynamics of an exterior mechanism, or what Eshun calls a certain ‘fictionalized rhythm engine which draws you on its own momentum’. As we shall see, the vernacular aesthetic judgement of a non-classical rhythm or form-rhythm as ‘groovy’ subsequently emerges in mid-century African-American jazz circles – alongside similar expressions like ‘cool’, ‘hip’, ‘swinging’, ‘funky’, or ‘out of sight’ – before quickly coming to describe a more nebulous mood of disenfranchised communality and in turn a mode of alternative group consciousness attuned to the ‘fictionalized rhythm engine’ of burgeoning social and political activism that falls prey almost instantly to wider late capitalist consumerist forces.²

‘You like the groovy music on the juke?’ asks the Jolly Dollar’s barkeep, Barrelhouse, to an increasingly agitated MacAdams in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), in what is an iconic moment in the early ascension of the groovy as a distinct aesthetic category. ‘And you like our good, clean, sociable atmosphere? [… I]f you like it, like it, and don’t start trying to bug my other customers. This here man’s done more for the community than you’ll ever do’. On the surface, the vernacular aesthetic judgement of the ‘groovy’ can be said to simply index the Jolly Dollar’s amicable mood that welcomes all manner of funky, hip, cool, and swinging mid-century black cultures, similar to that which Larry Neal experiences when the Black Arts School arrives in Harlem in the summer of ‘65 in a euphoric wave of ‘groovy black people swinging down Lenox Avenue’.³ Beneath this veneer of groovy communality, however, Ellison encourages us to read the Jolly Dollar’s ‘groovy […] sociable atmosphere’ as a volatile façade imperfectly disguising the more complex feelings of African American alienation otherwise encapsulated in the invisible man’s ‘inorganic’, ‘artificial’, and anti-social ‘hole’. Filled with artificial light powered by electricity rerouted from ‘Monopolated Light & Power’ alongside the electronic ‘vibration’ of five radio-phonographs all simultaneously blaring ‘groovy music’ – Louis Armstrong’s 1929 cover of Fats Waller’s ‘(What Did I Do to Be So) Black And Blue’ specifically – the artificial and inorganic intensity of the invisible man’s ‘hole’ offers a powerful expression of what Herman Beavers calls the novel’s ‘noisy lostness’.⁴ Crucially, it is precisely within this meticulously composed artifice of ‘noisy lostness’ – and most certainly not within the more explicitly ‘groovy […] sociable atmosphere’ of the Jolly Dollar – that the invisible man finds his groove. ‘Under the spell of the reefer’, he muses alone in his electric void, ‘I discovered a new analytical way of listening to music […] hearing not only in time, but in space as well’.⁵ Riding the sonic textures of Armstrong’s radio-phonic replication – pushed into the cacophony of white noise – the invisible man dissolves into the emergent form-rhythms of his alienated subterranean artifice. Grooving not simply in opposition to but also through his containment in inorganic estrangement, the invisible man finds his own sort of liberation from commodification in a cool inversion of the public spectacle of animatedness. As Ellison says, ‘the jazzman must lose his identity even as he finds it’ and in turn it is through the cold simulation of black alienation proffered by the ‘noisy lostness’ of the ‘hole’ that the invisible man first finds himself by way of losing himself within the grooves of Armstrong’s ‘fictionalized rhythm engine’.⁶ Hereafter, the invisible man feels his mind expanding as he moves-with a dynamic and spatial sonority of twisting ‘nodes’ – disappearing ‘vaguely’ and ‘slipping into the breaks’ – experiencing an indelibly (as opposed to superficially) groovy way of being in and with the world.⁷ ‘[T]he Universe / is the rhythm’, as Amiri Baraka says, ‘there is no on looker, no outside / no other than the real, the universe / is rhythm’. And in turn it is here, in this intensely private procession of alienated black becoming that the everyday aesthetic experience of the groovy first moves: ‘where the flag / is not / where the air is funky / the music / hot / Inside the hole / in the American soul’.⁸

2. The birth of groovy One World vibery

Appositely, these two sides of the groovy – as both the mind-bending TV spectacle of Mr Blob’s corporeal plasticity and as the invisible man’s alienated awakening within the grooves of a noisy jazz record – come together in the mid-1960s liquid light show and its kitsch consumerist doppelgänger, the iconic ‘Astro Lamp’ (or ‘Lava Lite’).

Epitomised by Mark Boyle and Joan Hills’s Projection from Son et Lumière for Earth, Air, Fire and Water (1966) – a work made famous by its performance alongside the psychedelic noise of Soft Machine and Pink Floyd at the opening of the ‘UFO Club’ on 23 December 1966 – the groovy liquid light show pivots on both the oddly Ellisonean imperative to fill a subterranean ‘hole’ with ‘groovy music’, ‘electric light’, and social outcasts, and the superficial spectacle of Mr Blob’s performative dissolution into the televised event-affects of ‘different wriggling shapes’.⁹ The grooviness of Projection from Son et Lumière pivots, first-and-foremost, on an animate artifice of ‘idiorhythmic’ form-rhythms, wherein we discover the Day-Glo incantation of something like Émile Benveniste’s 1951 theory of the ancient Greek concept of ruthmos (or rhuthmos, the etymological root of rhythm) that is not only a time-based ‘flux (derived from rein [or ῥϵῖν])’, but also a spatialising ‘structure’, a ‘form’, or a ‘configuration’ of dynamic flow.¹⁰ Crucially, this synthetic artifice of ruthmos is also farcically politicised and intensely eroticized in the ‘sensual laboratory’ of the liquid light show. Projecting what Gene Youngblood in Expanded Cinema (1970) calls ‘a tribal language that expresses not ideas but a collective group consciousness’, the liquid light show’s techno-primitivist spectacle of ‘gooey spludges’ and ‘porous and spongy disintegrations’ swallows both the ‘groovy […] sociable atmosphere’ of the Jolly Dollar and the invisible man’s cool artificial ‘hole’ in the spectacular gloop of an overwrought desire for what Ellen Willis calls ‘a social and psychic revolution of almost inconceivable magnitude’.¹¹ As Clarence Major writes in Juba to Jive (1994), the term ‘Groovy adj’. becomes increasingly ‘rare among black speakers after the fifties but popular among white users of slang during the sixties and after’, as the groovy morphs in the mid-1960s specifically into the aesthetic experience of an increasingly superficial – and predominantly white middle-class – globular ‘tribal language’ promising farcically indeterminate and eroticized dreams of a free-loving post-capitalist lifeworld.¹² As suggested, the liquid light show’s groovy form-rhythms also attempt to awaken this vague new species of ‘group consciousness’ from within the libidinized gunk of post-industrial consumerism. Communicating Baraka’s funky evocation of cosmic grooves by way of the perversely artificial animations of biological and chemical admixtures, works like Projection from Son et Lumière depend on the hyper-magnified projections of dollops of saliva and synthetic dyestuffs – alongside blood and semen and Day-Glo emulsions – pressed between translucent plates of iridescent Perspex.¹³ As such, the cartoonishly groovy artifice of these faux-encephalic biochemical matter-flows – which Tom Wolfe satirises as showcasing ‘the very ooze of cellular Creation […] ectoplast[ing] into the ether’ – tends to communicate the ‘look’ of a ‘group consciousness’ uneasily in thrall to the depthless and directionless spectacles of a libidinal materialism or what Jean-François Lyotard calls ‘the libidinal economy’ and its mindless ‘ephemeral explosions of libidinal intensities’.¹⁴

As we shall see, it is precisely this increasingly artificial, eroticized, and euphoric aesthetic of the groovy that will come to congeal across mid-to-late 1960s and early-1970s popular culture, as the volatile façade of the Jolly Dollar’s ‘groovy […] sociable atmosphere’ morphs into the slick and ironic malaise of what Ian Penman calls post-modernism’s ‘groovy One World vibery’ and its hypercommodified aesthetic experiences of ‘pretend togetherness’ analogous to ‘groovy little group therapy feel-good sessions for an audience cut off from its own emotions’.¹⁵ Appositely, the mid-1960s moment of groovy simulacrums of ‘One World vibery’ also gives rise to the space age kitsch of Edward Craven-Walker’s ‘Astro Lamp’ (patented in 1964), which is amongst the first iterations of a new kind of groovy consumerism. Indirectly domesticating and deftly commodifying the counterculture’s libidinized artifice of ‘pretend togetherness’, the Astro Lamp emblematises the instantaneous and perfidious acquiescence of the groovy in the Sixties within the wider forces of what Christian Bök calls the mid-century’s ‘injection-moulded mentality’, wherein almost everyone and everything – from groovy African American jazz performers to groovy thermoplastic armchairs – come to seem as ‘pliable and durable as any blob of polypropylene’.¹⁶ As such, a key ‘fictionalized rhythm engine’ driving the myriad aesthetics of the groovy as they emerge in the Sixties and beyond is that of an increasingly powerful synthetic chemicals industry and its rapidly multiplying ‘chemical regimes of living’ hellbent on the formal excavation of a molecular lability that seduces almost every aspect of everyday life and that renders almost every surface cartoonishly pliant, cartoonishly susceptible to the insidious grooves of a new kind of injection-moulded reality.¹⁷

At its core, so then, ‘The Groovy: An Everyday Aesthetic of the Sixties’ is about these novel affordances that new synthetics proffer as they unfurl throughout the 1960s and beyond, inculcating not only countless (1) groovy spectacles, (2) groovy communities, and (3) groovy consumerisms, but also more promiscuous varieties of (4) groovy scientism and (5) groovy monstrosity. Peeling back the groovy’s aesthetic attachment to the popular and the ironic – epitomised equally by the tags ‘Be Groovy!’ and ‘Groovy Baby!’ from Jimi Hendrix and Austin Powers respectively – and excavating the groovy’s surprising role across a dizzying range of 1960s avant-gardes – from Eva Hesse’s ‘groovy drawings’ to Baraka’s ‘groovy poems’ – we can better understand what this ubiquitous yet overlooked aesthetic category means to mid-century culture, and in turn, how and why it continues to haunt our own early twenty-first century moment.¹⁸

3. A mesomorphic imagination of thermoplastic deformation

The distinctly groovy kinds of depthless Day-Glo ruthmos that emerge in the mid-1960s under the paradoxical aegis of a counterculture’s ‘free-wheeling’ yet ‘injection-moulded’ mentalities often seem to be intoxicated by something like ‘Pitch Penny’s Patent Plasticizer’, first described in Jack Cole’s ‘Plague of Plastic People!’ comic-strip in Plastic Man #22 (1950). Here, a band of hapless criminals spill a batch of ‘Pitch Penny’s Patent Plasticizer’ into the city’s water supply and cause everything – be it oak tree, handgun, river, or human flesh – to spontaneously plasticise. As nose tips morph like elastic-fists, as knees buckle in gelatinous squiggles, as lovers loop their necks in sky-high slipknots, and as spines unspool toroidal in loose cowboy lassoes, Cole’s cartoon offers an indelibly groovy vision of mid-century culture’s emergent fetishisation and aestheticization of an increasingly ubiquitous kind of libidinized thermoplastic animatedness.¹⁹

The conterminous rise throughout the mid-century of a so-called ‘chemistry of gunk’ – meaning the emergent science of synthetic polymers – undergirds the later proliferation of the groovy as a popular aesthetic in the 1960s. Rising from the ruins of what Andrew Ede describes as an intense expansion in ‘colloidal chemistry’ research from 1900-1935, in which matter’s mesomorphic semi-state phases are closely observed – and that gives rise to all manner of interwar consumerist gels, pastes, sols, emulsions, detergents, liniments, foams, and lotions including ‘Gunk’ itself, a ‘self-emulsifying colloidal detergent solvent […] launched by the Curran Corporation, Malden, Mass., in 1932’ – the subsequent chemistry of gunk catalyses the immense expansion of the petroleum-based research capabilities of three giants of modernist industrial chemistry: DuPont in North America, ICI in Britain, and IG Farben in Germany.²⁰ In the ‘long mid-century’ – that runs, approximately, from the early-1920s through the early-1970s – what Kirsty Robertson calls the ‘chemical wonderbox [of] petroleum’ cracks open, kickstarting a radical molecular reorganisation of the structural and formal properties of everyday matter across Europe and North America.²¹ As physical chemist Pierre-Gilles de Gennes writes in Fragile Objects (1994), ‘[i]t was not until 1920 that the concept of long-chained molecules, or macromolecules, was accepted by the community of chemists and physicists’, as interwar chemistry eventually gives rise to a mid-century boom in polymer science. Throughout the 1920s, Hermann Staudinger synthesised longer and longer molecule chains, or polymers, and ‘these chains remained well-defined’, de Gennes continues, until Richard Kuhn proved that long-chain molecules are not ‘stiff rods’ but ‘quite flexible objects’ – like high-tech noodles – that invite complex processes of precise deformation.²² By 1931 Carothers’s first patent for a ‘superpolymer’ – the basis of strong yet hyper-tensile fabrics like nylon – emerges alongside various interwar thermoplastics like Koroseal (1931), Vinylite (1930), and Plaskon (1930), as well as Joyce’s linguistic experiments in Finnegans Wake (1939) wherein words, as David Trotter writes, turn ‘thermoplastic: reheated, they have been made to flow into [groovy] new shapes’. Within these emergent technologies of colloidal chemistry and synthetic superpolymers we can locate the stirrings of an increasingly groovy – and corporate-friendly – species of animate form suffused with the structuralist plasticity of what Jeffrey Meikle calls ‘thermoplastic flux’.²³

Artistic experiments with the formal affordances of thermoplastic manifest groovy form-rhythms as early as Naum Gabo’s pioneering sculptural engagement with Perspex in works like Model for Construction through a Plane (1935-1935) or Spiral Theme (1941). The emergent grammar of groovy animate form afforded by the molecular lability of new synthetics is further explored in JG Ballard’s short story, ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ (1962). Here, Ballard imagines a groovy sort of space age home constructed from ‘plastex’ – a portmanteau of ‘plaster’, ‘Perspex’, and ‘latex’ – that is a synthetic bio-polymer made from ‘vinyl chains […] hand-crafted literally molecule by molecule’, similar to the long-chain cross-linked molecular superpolymers of synthetic textiles like nylon or polybutadiene. Throughout, the ‘plastex’ house becomes increasingly sentient, as Ballard bathetically collapses the post-Euclidean topologized architectural form-rhythms of Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal (1959–1962) or later Ant Farm’s House of the Century (1972) into a pulp modernist ‘blob’ intent on the consummation – and indeed the plasticisation – of everything in its vicinity. Ballard’s and Gabo’s neo-biomorphic appropriations of new synthetics also underlines the mid-century’s prolific ‘mesomorphic imagination’ of thermoplastic deformation that is as Gaston Bachelard writes, ‘an imagination intermediate between the formal and the material’ and predisposed to essentially inexact semi-states that are ‘intermediate in form or structure’ (OED).²⁴ What is more, this mesomorphic imagination of thermoplastic deformation comes to envelop swaths of groovy Sixties cultures, from the luxury interior designs of Verner Panton’s Panton Chair (1967) and Visiona II: Phantasy Landscape (1970) through to the literary experimentalism of Christine Brooke-Rose.

The stretch-and-squeeze of Ballard’s plastex house – that bubbles ‘like boiling toothpaste’ and warps ‘like over-extended gum’ – coalesces with the surfaces of ‘radical ontological hesitation’ that by turns animate and anchor Brooke-Rose’s Out.²⁵ Here, Mr Blob’s molecular lability folds out into the novel’s wider descriptions of an injection-moulded reality in which the cool, orthogonal, and grey-scale precisions of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau roman finds its technicoloured, thermoplastic, and indelibly groovy double.²⁶ At one point, for instance, Out describes a garden footpath melting into the deranged molecular geometry of the ‘rubber sole’ of a ‘dirty canvas shoe’ standing upon it. First, the stone path slides into a complex network of ‘pink hexagonal tiles, slightly elongated like benzene rings’, before they convulse into obscure descriptions of ‘single carbon atom[s]’, ‘carbon atoms of naphthalene’, and ‘carbon atoms of adenine’. Herein, solidified cement liquifies into ‘energy-rich phosphate bonds’ and the ‘left heel’ of said ‘rubber sole’ dissolves into the ‘enzyme […] in a ribose molecule’. Amidst this complex petrochemical mix of ‘benzene ring[s]’ – benzene being an elementary petrochemical – and ‘carbon atoms of naphthalene’ – naphthalene being a derivative of coal tar and a product of petroleum refining – we also find a ‘green thermoplastic hose’ that periodically intervenes as it ‘slithers along the left flower-bed’.²⁷ The stable realist surface melts periodically throughout Out into the groovy plasticity of a petroleum-soaked and cartoonishly topologized playspace of homeomorphic deformation. Furthermore, in these brief moments we find something like what one reviewer of Ronald Sukenick’s novel Up (1968) – writing in The Kirkus Review (1969) – calls a ‘reading experience […] best labelled ‘groovy’ but unfortunately, not as yet, profound or moving’.²⁸

4. In the groove for autopoiesis

Brooke-Rose’s depthless performance of the ‘rubber sole’ of Sixties realism finds a remarkable bedfellow in the surface grooves of Lynda Benglis’s pioneering latex ‘pour’ paintings of the late-1960s, like Blatt (1969), Night Sherbet (1969), and Odalisque (Hey, Hey, Frankenthaler) (1969). Here, the classical fundament of the ground is playfully animated by way of the continuous deformations of synthetic matter-flow as Benglis pours out tons of liquefied latex and simply leaves it to ooze and slip into the amorphous form-rhythms of various liquid rubber blobs. In doing so, Benglis rudely reawakens the interwar surrealist’s plasmodial interest in the ‘language spoken by the universe itself’, presenting synthetic gunk as a vital if venomous strain of matter-flow’s self-organising processes. ‘I realized that the idea of directing matter logically was absurd’, writes Lynda Benglis in LIFE magazine (February 1970), ‘[m]atter can and will take its own form’. In turn, Benglis’s latex pour paintings – like a good deal of the groovy aesthetics of the Sixties avant-garde – can be said to coalesce with what David Kaiser and W Patrick McCray call ‘groovy science’.²⁹

Groovy science describes a certain countercultural ethos in mid-century science intent on subverting the royal scientism ‘promulgated by giant government programs, defence contractors, and corporate research labs’ – think of ‘square’ Californian aerospace engineers defecting from the military-industrial-complex to develop ‘groovy’ short-board surfboards. As such, alongside the major chemical agencies of Zyklon-B or Plutonium-239 that emerge from the mid-century’s military-industrial-complex, we can locate a countercultural strain of groovy science that toys with the more everyday chemical agencies of stuff like liquid crystals, food dyes, nylon tights, and latex emulsions suffusing the period’s ascendant ‘chemical regimes of living’. Further, by experimenting with the form-finding agencies of these new synthetics, Sixties artists like Benglis, Boyle & Hills, Gustav Metzger, and Hans Haacke also give aesthetic expression to a wider shift happening in the history of mid-century science whereby the ‘closed, controlled, mechanical world of physics’ gives way to the more ‘approximate, active, and qualitative world of biology as a model of both scientific and metaphysical explanation’.³⁰

Gustav Metzger’s collaboration with the physical chemist Arnold Feinstein in Liquid Crystal Environment (1965) is exemplary of this scientific facet of the groovy as a distinct aesthetic of the Sixties. Metzger develops a form of groovy science so as to produce an ‘Auto-Destructive Art’ in which self-organising processes – or what he calls ‘chemical-electrical interactions, fusions, explosions, implosions’ – are harnessed to excite ‘an astronomical number of new forms, colours, and textures’. Crucially, Metzger’s countercultural imperative to ‘use science to destroy ‘science’’ often depends on the multitudinous and indeterminate expressions of self-organising synthetic materials as encapsulated in the first public demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art in June 1960, when he douses a nylon sheet in hydrochloric acid and looks on at the textile’s automorphic disintegration. Later, in Liquid Crystal Environment Metzger expands this practice, harnessing the ‘wonderfulgroovy’ agencies of liquid crystals – purchased from the multi-national company, Merck Chemicals – by simply feeding them into various projection apparatuses and letting their cacographic idiom run riot in a vague yet rigorous play of precise deformation. As such, the groovy art-objects of Benglis and Metzger can be said to disclose not only a fascination for new industrial chemicals but also the period’s wider interest in ‘dynamical processes rather than static units’, as M Norton Wise writes, and the confrontation of objects as ‘defined by their [groovy] topological or morphological properties’.³¹

As in the process-oriented ‘systems art’ of Hans Haacke’s Clear Flow (1966), where emulsion enclosed in Perspex grooves into and out of all manner of bubbling form-rhythms, the groovy art of Benglis and Metzger engages rigorously yet promiscuously with the mid-century science of second-order cybernetics. The phrase ‘self-organization’ first emerges in 1930s biology and Gestalt psychology, as Evelyn Fox Keller notes, ‘as a new order of precision for organization and purpose’, before rising to the fore throughout the 1950s and 1960s as a distinguishing feature of second-order cybernetics, marking ‘a shift in emphasis from information to coupling; from the reproduction of ‘order-from-order’ (Schrödinger) to the generation of ‘order-from-noise’ (von Foerster)’ or ‘from ‘command, control, and communication’ to an approach that could be assimilated to [Humberto] Maturana and [Francisco] Varela’s concept of “autopoiesis”’.³² Writing in Autopoiesis and Cognition (1972) Maturana-Varela align the origins of their groovy new concept, in part, with the attempted revolution of May 1968 at the University of Chile, wherein ‘language began to change, […] new things could be said’ and they were inspired to invent a new word for a non-classical world of ‘composite unity’, riven and grooved with both the repetitions of praxis (action) and the clinamenatic cadence of poiesis (creation). Although the word ‘autopoiesis’ emerges in the 1970s, so then, its presence is felt throughout the 1960s fascination for the groovy self-organising form-rhythms of new synthetics, encapsulated by works like Metzger’s Liquid Crystal Environment, Benglis’s Blatt, and Haacke’s Clear Flow.³³

5. Groovy gimmickry

‘‘Wowwwww! Wowwwwwww!’’ writes Wolfe in Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), ironizing the euphoric vapidities of Ken Kesey’s Band of Merry Pranksters, ‘it’s so groooovy!’ By the mid-to-late 1960s, the authentic desire for alienated black Americans to find community – however volatile – in spaces like the Jolly Dollar’s ‘groovy […] sociable atmosphere’ is increasingly reappropriated within the gimmick-laden likes of Kesey’s ‘creamy groove machine’ and Leary’s slick McLuhanite invocations to ‘Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out’. As when Baraka refers to attending ‘a groovy party […] given by Popfag Andy Warhol’, in a letter to Ed Dorn in 1964, ‘with dig this Aluminium Foil wallpaper’ everywhere – alongside ‘toilet plungers painted silver. Gag’ – the mid-1960s marks a crucial shift wherein the vernacular aesthetic judgement of the groovy morphs not only from the complexities of Ellisonean ideas of alienated black communities into the ‘groovy One World’ gloop of the underground liquid light show, but also into the hypercommodified gimmickry of Andy Warhol’s space age toilet plungers.³⁴

This commodification of the groovy by way of an increasingly disingenuous counterculture is foreshadowed by a 1960 feature in the New York Times titled, ‘Rent a Beatnik and Swing’. Here we learn of a new ‘fad of hiring beatniks to enliven parties’, marking a crudely epochal moment in which ‘the beatnik has been lacquered into an interior-decorating vogue, like cigarstore Indians or butter-churn lamps’.³⁵ Like the Sixties beatnik, the groovy attains an aggressively debased cultural status throughout the decade, coming to seem in relation to ‘the cool’ like that which the kitsch is to the beautiful: a cheap double. Cool, as it emerges in mid-century jazz, indexes an authentic eruption of idiorhythmic form, a pure play of the spontaneous impurities of ruthmos unfazed by an increasingly mechanised, standardised, artificial, and administered world.³⁶ By contrast, from the mid-to-late 1960s onwards the groovy tends to crudely replicate this free-form amorphousness for financial gain, such that a self-reflexive facet of the groovy as a distinct aesthetic experience can be said to undermine from within late capitalism’s wider appropriation of the cool in the immediate post-war period, commenting on the process wherein the ‘hip (or cool)’ becomes, as Thomas Frank writes, ‘central to the way capitalism understood itself and explained itself to the public’ from the 1960s onward. In short, the mid-to-late 1960s art and literature of the groovy is often intensely self-aware of the fact that, as Mike Jahn surmises in the New York Times in 1971, the word ‘Groovy’ meaning ‘Good, nice. […] Came in[to pop culture] around 1966 and now is used mainly for soft-drink commercials and ads for suburban boutiques’.³⁷

A good deal of these paradoxically square and hypercommodified aesthetics of the groovy coalesce with Sianne Ngai’s aesthetic theory of ‘the gimmick’, which also comes to the fore at this late-1960s and early-1970s moment of late capitalist ascension. Consider Archigram’s satirical gadget, the Electronic Tomato (1969). Described in a spoof advertisement as ‘a groove gizmo’, the Electronic Tomato promises not only to deliver the individual unto a post-capitalist lifeworld free from waged labour (with farcically disingenuous assurances to ‘direct your business operations, do the shopping’ and even ‘hunt’ and ‘fish’), but to also infuse said liberated individual with perpetual orgasmic joy (‘connects to every nerve end to give you the wildest buzz’).³⁸ We might think of such a groovy gimmick as a species of commodity that not only overpromises and underperforms with regard to what Ngai calls the gimmick’s ‘technological fix’, ‘product-based fix’, and/or ‘financial fix’, but that also promises a distinctly groovy kind of libidinal fix, or an endless dose of ‘libidinal intensities’.³⁹ This disingenuous commixture of hyper-libidinized functionalism marks the groovy gimmick out as a distinct kind of aesthetic and economic judgement based, paradoxically, on the capitalisation and aestheticization of post-capitalist desires, indexing a new class of emotionally manipulative consumerist object that attempts to both excite freedom from the drudgery of menial everyday labour (cooking, shopping, cleaning, paying bills, etc) and to simultaneously commodify said ‘freedom’ with the eroticized ‘buzz’ of an equally torturous economics of fully-automated jouissance.⁴⁰

The burgeoning agency of gimmickry within the everyday aesthetics of the groovy is also explicit in Bridget Riley’s almost perniciously groovy and gimmicky op art painting Fall (1963). Following MoMA’s ‘Responsive Eye’ exhibition in February-April 1965, Riley’s art is immediately absorbed by both a negative critical sphere that denounces it within what Warren R Young calls the ‘gimmick-fevered marketplace of modern art’ and a gimmicky pop consumerist sphere of mid-1960s moirémania, rich in luxurious op art bikinis and cheap Sear’s bath towels, Star Trek (1966–1969) ‘Communicators’ and kitsch moiré movie sets.⁴¹ Championed by infamous Sixties art dealer, Robert ‘Groovy Bob’ Fraser, Riley’s Fall presents a deft embodiment of the groovy ‘fictionalised rhythm machine’ of molecular lability increasingly animating everyday 1960s life, including the decade’s overwhelming predisposition for the trickery and false wonderment of cheap gimmickry. For while Riley’s ultraprecise and yet erratic ‘programming of structuralist plasticity’ seems, in some sense, to radically encapsulate the groovy free-wheeling injection-moulded confusions of mechanical repetition and sensual delirium suffusing the Sixties, so too does the aesthetic experience of Fall slide problematically into cheap geometrical trickery.⁴² Wriggling and writhing like Ian Hamilton Finlay’s noisy ‘nutshell axioms’, the groovy yet gimmick-prone form-rhythms of Fall ‘undulate, and turn themselves slowly inside-out, and back’ with an overengineered abandon, as the polyvinyl ‘spiral cut in a gramophone record’ seems to give way – before our very eyes – to another kind of kitsch and tricksy simulation of the ‘noisy lostness’ more authentically excavated in works like Ellison’s Invisible Man.⁴³ As such, the only way to ‘groove with’ Fall is to allow oneself to become consumed by its curiously flat ‘fictionalised rhythm engine’ of perniciously groovy binarized waveforms that inculcate, as David Rimanelli notes, a sort of demonically commodified aesthetic experience by turns ‘slick’, ‘supercool’, ‘tacky’, and ‘groovy-cheap’.⁴⁴ By extension, the ‘groovy-cheap’ aesthetics of op art gimmickry presented by Fall seem to communicate – with a tricky slickness – an unlikely conjunction of cold mechanical precision and hot sensory delirium that is quintessential of the Sixties at large, as Riley folds the binarized cybernetic repetitions of the information age into the more dynamic spheres of a libidinal thermoplastic consumerism with all the brevity and diabolical depthless replicability of a true Maddison Avenue ‘Creative’.

Appositely, into the 1970s Ballard registers this moirémaniacal force of groovy gimmickry as comically monstrous in his tale of perversely animate synthetic ‘bio-fabric […] Op Art bikinis’ in ‘Say Goodbye to the Wind’ (1970). Crucially, as the libidinized commodities of groovy moiré bikinis come to seem ‘more alive than their purchasers’, flexing and arching from mannequins, pulsing like inflamed suns, and growing increasingly ‘livid and discontent’, once more the groovy comes to seem less concerned with the specifics of racialized expressions of animatedness, alienated ideas of countercultural communality, or psycho-socio-political revolutions of any kind, and more simply attuned to the idiorhythmic cadences of an increasingly artificial lifeworld and its intensely affecting powers of molecular lability.⁴⁵

6. Groovy monsters

Countercultural poet and bookseller, Ed Sanders – whom Baraka marks out in the mid-1960s as an especially ‘groovy yng cat’ – seems to warn against this monstrous new species of groovy consumerism in Peace Eye (1965), referring recursively to what he calls the ‘blob-system’, or the ‘BLOB-CULT’, a collective paranoia that will later slide into the ‘bad trip’ that defines James Riley’s cultural history of ‘the end of the Sixties’.⁴⁶ Ishmael Reed is amongst the first and most prescient of mid-century artists to dissect this insidiously groovy ‘BLOB-CULT’ in The Freelance Pallbearers (1967), satirising the ways in which a hypercommodified Sixties entertainment industry functions in conjunction with both countercultural clichés and wider systemically racist socio-political infrastructures. Reed’s satire pivots on the groovy totalitarianism of ‘Harry Sam’, a super-hip-hopping sort of proto-post-modernist dictator who rules over the ‘groovy nowhere’ that is his self-titled Kingdom, ‘Harry Sam’. As both an entertainment-addled nation-state and a kind of ‘Teflon President’, Harry Sam is, as Ngai says, perversely ‘protected by his own slickness’.⁴⁷ It is, in turn, precisely this groovy new synthetic affordance of the glossy skin of the slick that Harry Sam uses to disguise his secret penchant for eating black kids. Despite periodically feasting on the impoverished populace surrounding his Kingdom, for example, Harry Sam remains overwhelmingly popular because of the groovy soft defence tactics of his state-sanctioned faux-countercultural ‘underground’ performance artist-cum-Hoopla-Hoop-industrialist, ‘Cipher X’.⁴⁸ In turn, when the novel’s protagonist discovers Harry Sam’s monstrous secret, Cipher X spontaneously appears, grooving on about ‘HOW TO BE A HIP KITTY AND A COOL DADDY O’, and parroting Harry Sam’s precision-engineered slogans.⁴⁹ Most importantly, Reed’s groovy dictator and the ‘groovy nowhere’ that is his kingdom of slick gimmickry, stands at the heart of an array of groovy monsters that come to the fore at the end of the Sixties. Coalescing in a clutch of mid-to-late 1960s films and TV shows – stretching from the groovy prison of Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise (1966) and the despotic reality TV sex shows of Nigel Kneale’s The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968) through to the ‘psychedelic shotguns’ and groovy industrialists of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain (1973) – this eruption of groovy monsters can be said to reflect growing anxieties regarding the coercive, seductive, and sedative powers of the post-war period’s ever-expanding ‘chemical regimes of living’.⁵⁰

A quintessential example of this distinctly groovy – hyper-libidinized and injection-moulded – rendition of The Blob (1958) is in the chthonic monster of ‘The Mathmos’ in Rodger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968).⁵¹ Amidst schools of synthetic furs, thermoplastic objects, and iridescent goo ‘The Mathmos’ indexes a groovy petroleum powered entity that feeds on the evil populace of ‘Sogo’ and in return maintains the city’s post-capitalist lifeworld of infinite leisure (or the incessant eroticised buzz of ‘warmth, light, and life-itself’).⁵² Crucially, the groovy monster of Barbarella’s lava-lamp-like ‘Mathmos’ bubbles and writhes with the ‘monstrous anonymity’ of ‘libidinal intensities’ that later captivates Lyotard in his ‘evil book’ (‘livre méchant’) – written in anguished response to the failures of May 1968 – Libidinal Economy (Économie Libidinale) (1974). Not only is Vadim’s super-polymeric-shoggoth a curious commixture of interwar ‘pulp modernism’ and post-war ‘hippie modernism’, it is also the uncanny expression of the ‘labyrinthine and Moebian band’ of what Lyotard calls the ‘Libidinal Skin’ as it entangles with ‘The Exorbitant’, or the irrational and unequivocal law of emotional value that supersaturates the superficial rationality of economic transactions.⁵³ ‘The capitalist economy is a total externality’, as Keti Chukhrov writes miming Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, ‘[and] our critique of it doesn’t situate us beyond its externality, because our impulses and desires are unconsciously inscribed in the production of this alienated externality’. Like the viscous fundament of the Mathmos that conditions the very existence of the city of Sogo, the groovy monstrosity of the libidinal economy is presented by Vadim as an unescapable fact of our post-war, post-industrial, post-modernist lifeworld. As Chukhov says, ‘capitalism is libidinally desired, even if it might be theoretically and conceptually denounced’, and the groovy monstrosities of the late-1960s pay heed to this weird force of unconscious seduction at the strange heart of late capitalist alienation.⁵⁴

We can see the apparent impossibility of overcoming this new kind of omnipresent and monstrous grooviness in the iconic 1967 TV show The Prisoner. Here, lava lamp imagery recurs on electronic screens placed throughout a luxurious prison known as ‘The Village’, where nameless individuals are at once held captive and encouraged to live a groovy post-capitalist life of perpetual leisure (albeit under the omnidirectional eye of a cybernetic thermoplastic blob called ‘Rover’).⁵⁵ As in the hyper-libidinized swirl of Barbarella’s ‘Mathmos’, The Prisoner marks a shift wherein in the groovy form-rhythms of amorphous synthetic blobs mutate from the naïf countercultural emblems of an impending ‘social and psychic revolution’ into the more mainstream and paranoid iconography of a new sort of totalitarian group consciousness. As such, the ‘feel’ of McGoohan’s ‘Village’ is that of an another unnervingly playful and nauseatingly erotic ‘groovy nowhere’. Afloat in time and space, stable concepts of ‘work’ and ‘pleasure’ – not to mention ‘freedom’ and ‘incarceration’ – are synthesised with an incorrigible ease throughout The Prisoner, as life itself gives way to the injection-moulded grooves of a senselessly over-sensualized existence. For what exactly is the difference, McGoohan asks, between one of Kesey’s groovy drop-outs – ‘grooving over […] wax dripping’ and melting eternally into solipsistic seas of ‘groovy silvery ripples’ as Wolfe says – and his own pampered prisoners, enclosed in their own dreamworld of chemically regimented inertia?⁵⁶

‘I’m trying to set up this groovy religious group – Teenage Evangelism’, says former LA Hell’s Angel ‘Deadeye’ in Joan Didion’s ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ (1967), before stepping nonchalantly over a young girl passed out on the carpet. Surveying the dropouts and delinquents of Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love in ‘67, Didion toys with the dark ubiquity of the groovy as an increasingly debased colloquialism indexing the spiraline meaninglessness of cultish devotion.⁵⁷ In time, a deadlier kind of ‘groovy religious’ furore erupts at ‘the end of the Sixties’, with both the Altamont Rock Festival (1969) – where youthful spectators are murdered, stabbed, robbed, and crushed while Mick Jagger wails ‘about how groovy it is to be Satan’ – and Charles Manson’s infamous killing spree.⁵⁸ John Giorno’s narrative-poem, ‘Groovy and Linda’, first published in the avant-garde New York magazine 0 to 9 (1968), further testifies to this mythology of the monstrous that attaches to the groovy as the counterculture is absorbed into a burgeoning entertainment industry.

‘Groovy and Linda’ concerns the highly publicised rape and murder of the 18-year-old girl Linda Fitzpatrick alongside a hippy in ‘skin-tight / black / vinyl / black vinyl / pants’, James Leroy Hutchinson, while staying in Sanders’s infamous ‘Peace Eye’ bookstore. Hutchinson is known by ‘his fellow East Village / hippies’, as Giorno writes, ‘as ‘a beautiful person, / groovy / groovy … / that’s what / we called him: / Groovy’. The elegiac incantations of Giorno’s repetitions of ‘groovy’ suggest both the monotony of cliché and the self-reflexive angst of a counterculture that now knows itself to be all but dead in the water. Giorno’s poem seems beset by the paradox of an agential paralysis of mournful nostalgia typical of the late-1960s, wherein the spectre of what might have been comes to overwhelm the desire for collective political action. As Giorno skewers the social realism of the poem with groovy space age references to the ‘whirling motion’ of exploding stars – as ‘gravitational / energy / released / explosively […] / ejects great quantities / of matter / into space’ that reach ‘nova stage’ and burn ‘extremely luminous’ – so too do we get a glimpse of the Sixties counterculture’s incandescent faith in a social and psychic revolution of unprecedented magnitude, fading out to another spectacular crisp.⁵⁹

7. Of global grooves & the swallowtails of catastrophe

Then, at the very early-1970s moment when the groovy seems almost entirely diluted as a distinct aesthetic within the post-war avant-garde, Nam June Paik delivers an epic deconstruction of the emergent post-modernist corporate media landscape from within, in the acclaimed multi-media art-work Global Groove (1972–1974) and its attendant essay ‘Global Groove and Video Common Market’ (1970). The groovy formal possibilities of television’s ‘liquid reality’ return now in what Paik calls the ‘groovy TV […] image’.⁶⁰ With the assistance of the ‘Paik-Abe Synthesizer’, which offers a range of groovy (and gimmicky) special effects able to fold, warp, and deform orthodox ‘square’ TV-images into the catastrophic form-rhythms of ‘‘groovy’ TV’, Paik develops an aesthetic attuned to the creation of a techno-utopian ‘videoland on this spaceship earth’, or ‘a video landscape of tomorrow, when you will be able to switch to any TV station on earth’.⁶¹ Appositely, many of the groovy deformations performed by the Paik-Abe Synthesizer – as when President Nixon’s face is promiscuously stretched-and-squeezed like electromagnetic silly putty – occur in oblique mimesis of René Thom’s mid-1960s geometry of ‘The Seven Elementary Catastrophes’. Indeed, what Thom calls the ‘dynamic structuralism’ of his elementary catastrophes – of ‘folds’, ‘cusps’, ‘swallowtails’, and ‘hyperbolic umbillics’ – seems to punctuate and spur Global Groove’s politically charged imperative to create a new media platform of groovy communality, intent on destroying ‘the hieratic monism of TV culture’ and facilitating ‘the free flow of video information’.⁶² As catastrophic swallowtails waltz with Japanese Pepsi ads and avant-garde John Cage performances float out into and through glitching Nixon speeches, Paik shows us a cybernetic ‘videoland’ of ‘groovy One World vibery’ that is as politically conscious as it is self-reflexively ironic. Global Groove crackles with the felt possibility of once more imagining an open, egalitarian, qualitative, communal, and truly groovy global media ecology that really is made of and for and by everyone and everything.

8. Coda

‘Topology is Groovy’, writes Greg Lynn in 1996 as he delves into the architectural value of ‘‘isomorphic polysurfaces’ or what in the special-effects and animation industry is referred to as ‘meta-clay’, or ‘blob’ models’. Lynn’s computer-assisted designs (CAD) and digital architectures developed throughout the 1990s alert us to the belated relevance of the groovy as an everyday aesthetic force in what Brian Massumi calls the new millennium’s ‘topological turn’. Lynn’s self-confessedly groovy digital architectural designs are based on what he calls ‘the logic of the blob’s [autopoietic] structural system’. Evidencing a more nuanced engagement with the groovy than that of other 1990s contemporaries in thrall to a popish sort of ‘Sixties Revivalism’ – as in The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Their Satanic Majesties’ Second Request (1996) or Mike Myers’s blockbuster Austin Powers (1997–2002) franchise – Lynn translates the non-classical dynamic structuralism of groovy form-rhythms into a sort of digitally mediated nostalgia for a mid-century moment’s injection-moulded realities that once promised, as Aaron Betsky writes, ‘to bring us into an unprecedented era of swerving, curving forms, freed from the need for the columns and beams that had held up the old rectangular world’.⁶³

In turn, just as the Sixties counterculture collapses almost immediately into exploitative and even violent forces, Lynn’s ‘sticky and flexible’ groovy aesthetic of virtual blobs is quickly coerced into a corporate-friendly species of ‘parametricist’ architecture ready and willing to become subservient to the ‘international style’ of postmillennial neoliberalism. Parametricism displays a cold, ultra-hygienic, and quintessentially late capitalist replication of the groovy’s dynamic structuralisms, as epitomised by the superficially mesmerising yet cold and anti-democratic form-rhythms of Zaha Hadid Architects’s Heydar Aliyev Center (2012), a groovy monument to the former KGB Officer and Azerbaijani dictator Heyday Aliyev. The groovy aesthetics of parametricism divest the digitised complexities of Lynn’s experimental architecture theories of their playful idiosyncrasy and countercultural intensity in favour of developing a homogenous corporate style that has become synonymous with a ‘neoliberal political economy of urban growth, ‘characterized by an anti-public agenda’, as Teddy Cruz writes, ‘and socioeconomic inequality’. Far from simply dissolve into the ether of post-modernist irony, so then, the postmillennial ubiquity of paramatericist architectures across a global network of cities pays testimony to the near total absorption of the groovy into what John Armleader speaks of as a hypercommodified contemporary culture's ‘supermarket of forms’.⁶⁴

Figure 1. Bridget Riley, Fall (1963), polyvinyl acetate paint on hardboard, 1410 × 1403 mm. Tate. © Bridget Riley.

Figure 2. Lynda Benglis, in Bourdon, David, ‘Fling, Dribble, and Drip’ in LIFE (February 27, 1970). Photo by Henry Groskinsky/The LIFE Picture Collection © Henry Groskinsky.

Be it in the explicitly stylised groovy gimmickry of a Special Edition ‘Flower Power’ Apple iMac G3 (2001) or in the more insidious parametricist form-rhythms of a pair of ‘YEEZY Foam Runners’ (2020), the everyday aesthetics of the groovy continue to haunt our ‘age of laissez-faire aesthetics’. For while the groovy is almost certainly now but another minor servant of ‘capitalist realism’ – a mere cog in the procession of post-modernism’s ongoing naturalisation – so too do the ghosts of the groovy that continue to haunt us remain curiously prescient expressions of what may be the abiding truth of our times: that political activism and democratic agency have all but collapsed, as Romulus Roy reminds us, into the mass desire for little more than ‘tasty morsels from groovy hubs’.⁶⁵

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Christine Brooke-Rose, Out (London: Michael Joseph, 1964), pp. 52–53; Shigeko Kubota quoted in Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality, ed. Gloria Sutton (New York: MoMA, 2021); Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (London: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 12; Ken Kesey, Kesey’s Garage Sale (New York: Viking Press, 1973), p. 95.

2 Robert S. Gould, A Jazz Lexicon (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1964), pp. 130–131; Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet Books, 1998), p. 82.

3 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 425; Larry Neal quoted in Rambsy II, Howard, ‘Introduction’, The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), pp. 1–16.

4 Ellison, Invisible Man, pp. 2–8; Herman Beavers, ‘The Noisy Lostness: Oppositionality and Acousmatic Subjectivity in Invisible Man’, in Marc C. Conner and Lucas E. Morel (ed.), The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), pp. 75–98.

5 Ellison, Invisible Man, p. 8.

6 Ralph Ellison, Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison: Revised & Updated (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 267.

7 Ellison, Invisible Man, p. 8.

8 Amiri Baraka, ‘J. Said, ‘Our Universe is Generated by a Rhythm’’, in SOS: Poems 1961-2013 (New York: Grove Press, 2015), p. 281; Amiri Baraka, ‘Incriminating Negrographs’, in SOS, p. 341.

9 For records of these groovy ‘UFO Club’ performances and other liquid light shows, see Mark Boyle's Journey to the Surface of the Earth, ed. J.L. Locher (Cologne: Hansjörg Mayer, 1978). Other liquid light shows are developed conterminously in the USA in the 1960s by the likes of Bill Ham’s ‘Light Sound Dimension (LSD)’, Harry Smith, and Elias Romero on the West Coast. A definitive history of the liquid light show remains to be written.

10 Émile Benveniste, ‘The Notion of ‘Rhythm’ in its Linguistic Expression’, in Problems in General Linguistics trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 281–288. For a discussion of ‘idiorhythmy’ see: Roland Barthes, How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Perspectives trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 7.

11 Gene Youngblood, ‘Multiple-Projection Environments’, in Expanded Cinema: 50th Anniversary Edition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), p. 387; Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2013), pp. 29–33; Ellen Willis quoted in Fisher Mark, Post-Capitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, ed. Matt Colquhoun (London: Repeated Books, 2021), p. 101. See Ellen Willis, Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), p. 158.

12 Clarence Major ed. Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 215.

13 See also Hills and Boyle’s Son et Lumière for Bodily Fluids and Functions (1966).

14 Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (London: Black Swan, 1989), p. 216; Lyotard, Jean-François, Libidinal Economy trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 18.

15 Ian Penman, ‘Tricky: Tricknology’, in Vital Signs: Music, Movies, & Other Manias (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998), p. 359; Ian Penman, ‘Tarantino: Don't Try this at Home’, in Vital Signs, p. 345.

16 Christian Bök, ‘Virtually Nontoxic’, in ESC: English Studies in Canada vol.42 iss.3-4 (December 2016), pp. 25–26.

17 Michelle Murphy ‘Chemical Regimes of Living’, Environmental History, 13, no. 4 (Oct., 2008), pp. 695–703.

18 Eva Hesse, Eva Hesse: Transformations - The Sojourn In Germany 1964/65 & Datebooks 1964/65: VOL.2, ed. Sabine Folie and Gerald Matt (Koln: Walther König, 2004), p. 108; Ed Dorn, Amiri Barak & Ed Dorn: The Collected Letters, ed. Claudia Moreno Pisano (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013), p. 82.

19 Jack Cole, ‘Pitch Penny’s Patent Plasticizer’Plastic Man #22 reprinted in Spiegelman, Art, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits (New York: Chronicle Books, 2001).

20 Andrew Ede, The Rise and Decline of Colloid Science in North America, 1900–1935 (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007), p. 14.

21 Kirsty Robertson, ‘Oil Futures/Petrotextiles’, in Adam Carlson et al. (ed.), Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), p. 245. See also Jeffrey L Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995); Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ‘The Fabric of Modern Times’, in Critical Inquiry, Autumn, 1997, 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1997), pp. 191–245.

22 Pierre-Gilles De Gennes and Jacques Badoz, Fragile Objects: Soft Matter, Hard Science, and the Thrill of Discovery trans. Alex Reisinger (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996), pp. 8–9.

23 David Trotter, ‘Thermoplastic’, in Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between the Wars (London: Harvard University Press, 2013); Meikle, American Plastic, p. 264.

24 J G Ballard, ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’, in The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1 (London: Fourth Estate, 2012), pp. 414–436; Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter trans. R Edith Farrell (Winnipeg: Pegasus Foundation, 1994), p. 106. For more instances of the mesomorphic imagination of thermoplastic deformation, see Harry Mathews’s Tlooth (1966) – with its array of quasi-pataphysical synthetic materials like ‘apatite […] a “stone” of great elasticity’ and ‘blackblende’ a ‘highly elastic material’ that can ‘expand or contract to any size’ – the litany of ‘rubbery Presidents’, ‘green liquid oblong[s]’, ‘smoky jelly’, ‘mounds of vaseline’, and thermoplastic Whitmans populating Elmslie’s Sixties oeuvre, and the cartoonishly rubberized ontological plasticity of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). See Harry Matthews, Tlooth (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998), pp. 49, 68; Kenward Elmslie, Routine Disturbances: Selected Poems & Lyrics 1960–1998 (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1998), pp. 48, 102, 99, 101, 80, 233; Kenward Elmslie, The Orchid Stories (New York: Song Cave, 2016), pp. 81, 81, 73, 60; Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (London: Vintage, 2000), pp. 246, 374, 892.

25 Brian McHale, ‘The Postmodernism(s) of Christine Brooke-Rose’, in Utterly Other Discourse: The Texts of Christine Brooke-Rose (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), pp. 192–213.

26 For a close reading of Out as a ‘parody of La Jalousie’ see: Morton P. Levitt, Modernist Survivors (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1987), p. 58.

27 Brooke-Rose, Out, p. 52.

28 Anonymous, ‘Review: Death of the Novel & Other Stories’, in Kirkus Review (27 August, 1969) accessed online Spring 2023 at https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/ronald-sukenick-2/the-death-of-the-novel-and-other-stories/. This descriptive mode of homeomorphic deformation is also ubiquitous in a class of ekphrastic poetics that emerges in response to the mid-1960s liquid light show. In the ontological concretions of exfoliating flowers that become a viscous morphology of ‘bone tissues’, ‘eggs’ and ‘diamonds’ in MacBeth’s groovy poem, ‘In the Oil, Flowing Heads’ (c.1966–1968), for example, a sort of hyper-attentiveness to surface variation remoulds stabilities of form into the continuous deformations of a kind of sheer poetic artifice of analogical ecstasy, in thrall to endlessly destabilizing morphogenetic form-rhythms. See also Dom Sylvester Houédard’s poetic descriptions of the ‘habitable Barbarella space-world’ and ‘live Rorschach blot[s]’ of Gustav Metzger’s Liquid Crystal Environment. See McBeth, George, ‘In the Oil, Flowing Heads’ (London: Fulham Gallery, c.1966–1968) lithograph, 77.5×52cm, illustrated with liquid light projection from Joan Hills and Mark Boyle. Accessed online Autumn 2023 at https://www.beatbooks.com/pages/books/40222/mark-boyle/in-the-oil-flowing-heads?soldItem=true. Houédard, Dom Sylvester, Aesthetics of the Death Wish? Change as Creative Destruction: the Ravensbourne Symposium on Creation Destruction & Chemical Change: Record and Comment (London: Destruction/Creation, BM/DIAS, 1966).

29 Lynda Benglis quoted in ‘Fling, Dribble, and Drip’, in Life (February 27, 1970), p. 62. See also the Blatt-like “liquid latex rubber” octopus “sitting inside a bathysphere on a truck bed” in Rudolph Wurlitzer’s cult psychedelic novel, Nog (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1969) 4.

30 David Kaiser and W Patrick McCray, ‘Introduction’, in David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray (ed.), Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time (London: MIT Press, 2001), p. ii.

31 Gustav Metzger, ‘The Chemical Revolution in Art’, in Mathieu Copeland (ed.), Gustav Metzger: Writings 1953–2016 (Geneva: JRP Editions, 2019), pp. 133–135; Metzger, Gustav, “Five Bubble Machines” (1964) in Gustav Metzger 96; Metzger, Gustav, “The Chemical Revolution in Art” 135; Houédard, Dom Sylvester, Aesthetics of the Death Wish? unpaginated; Wise, Norton M, “Introduction: Dynamics All the Way Up” in Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives on Recent Science ed. Norton M Wise (London: Duke University Press, 2004) 19. See also Leslie, Esther, Liquid Crystals (London: Reaktion, 2016) 25–38.

32 Evelyn Fox Keller, ‘Marrying the Premodern to the Postmodern: Computers and Organisms after World War II’, in Growing Explanations , pp. 192–193.

33 Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (London: D Reidel, 1980), pp. xvi–xvii. See also Lillian Lijn’s Liquid Reflections (1968), wherein water bubbles trapped in a Perspex disc move and shift on a gyrating turn-table – like ‘interstellar clouds of gas’ – while acrylic balls careen across the surface.

34 Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, p. 338; Baraka, Amiri Baraka & Ed Dorn, p. 173.

35 Gilbert Millstein, ‘Rent a Beatnik and Swing’, New York Times (April 17, 1960), p. 26.

36 This definition is indebted to Ted Gioia’s conception of the cool, which is traced back to the Renaissance courtier Baldassare Castiglione’s definition of sprezzatura as “the art of doing difficult things, but making them look easy.” See Ted Gioia, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool (New York: Speck Press, 2009), p. 51.

37 Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, & the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 26; Mike Jahn, ‘If You Think It’s Groovy to Rap, You’re Shucking’, New York Times (June 6, 1971), p. 28. See also the groovy representation of mid-to-late 1960s middle class America in I Love You Alice B Toklas directed by Hy Averback and starring Peter Sellers (Warner Bros-Seven Arts Inc: 1968).

38 Archigram quoted in Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia ed. Andrew Blauvelt (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2016), p. 196.

39 Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgement and Capitalist Form (London: Harvard Belknapp Press, 2020), p. 4.

40 A similar self-aware expression of the aestheticization of the groovy animates the Alphaphone Brainwave Analyzer from Aquarius Electronics, a ridiculous $450 device (about $3,500 today) that promises to allow (rich) “kids […] to groove their way into an instant satori,” as one 1971 New York Times magazine feature puts it. Aquarius Electronics are at the forefront of an early-1970s West Coast craze for “alpha wave” gadgetry that cybernetically attunes the consumer to the 8-12Hz neural groove that Buddhist monks ride whilst practising Mindfulness, commodifying nothing less than the groovy encephalic simulation of nirvana. See Gay Luce and Ebik Peper, “Mind Over Body, Mind Over Mind” in New York Times (September 12, 1971) 34.

41 Warren R Young, ‘Bringing Chaos Out of Order’LIFE (11 December 1964), p. 138. See Joseph Losey’s “groovy movie” Modesty Blaise (1966). Namely, the groovy op art interior of the Tower’s prison cell where Modesty Blaise (Monica Vitti) lies motionless amidst the libidinized delirium of purple and black post-Euclidean form-rhythms that seem more alive than she does.

42 A good-deal of this mid-1960s moirémania is also buoyed by Dr. Gerald Oster’s collaborations with Edmund Scientific Co. on a range of cheap moiré prints and education materials. See Gerald Oster, The Science of Moiré Patterns (New York: Edmund Scientific Co., 1964); ‘Art and Science Meet in Gallery’ New York Times (January 18 1964), p. 21.

43 Finlay, Ian Hamilton, The Model of Order: Selected Letters on Poetry and Making ed. Thomas A Clark (Glasgow: Wax366, 2006), pp. 28–29.

44 David Rimanelli, ‘The Return of Op’,Artforum 49, no. 9 (May 2007).

45 Ballard, JG, “Say Goodbye to the Wind” The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2 (London: Fourth Estate, 2011) 307–322.

46 Amiri Baraka, Amiri Barak & Ed Dorn, p. 173; Sanders, Ed, Peace Eye (Buffalo, NY: Frontier Press, 1967), pp. 3–14; James Riley, The Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties (London: Icon Books, 2019).

47 Ishmael Reed, The Freelance Pallbearers: An Irreverent Novel (London: Allison & Busby, 1990), p. 108; Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick, p. 9.

48 Reed, The Freelance Pallbearers, p. 92.

49 Ibid., p. 109.

50 See also the collection of ‘far-out’ films catalogued in Irv Slifkin’s Groovy Movies: Far-Out Films of the Psychedelic Era (New York: Visible Ink, 2004). Specifically see Daniel Mann’s Our Man Flint (1966).

51 Appositely, Craven-Walker’s lava lamp company shares its name with the original Mathmos creature of Jean-Claude Forest’s erotic sci-fi comic Barbarella (1964). For another example of a groovy graphic novel, see the closing episodes of Doug Moench and Alex Nino’s Theodore Sturgeon’s More than Human: The Graphic Story Version (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978).

52 Roger Vadim, dir., Barbarella (Paramount Pictures, 1968).

53 Mark Fisher, ‘Memorex for the Kraken: The Fall’s Pulp Modernism’, in K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (London: Repeater Books, 2018), pp. 323–423; Hippie Modernism ed. Andrew Blauvelt (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2016); Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p. 11, 17, 82. The groovy monstrousness of Lyotard’s prose in Libidinal Economy also alerts us to the groovy valences of various 1960s and 1970s French philosophies—the analysis of which is beyond the scope of this essay—evident in the post-structuralist dynamics of Jacques Derrida’s interest in the ‘protogeometry’ of phenomenology; Michel Serres’s topologized style of thought; and Deleuze-Guattari’s experimental philosophy of intense matter-flow. See Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction trans. John P Leavery Jr. (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Michel Serres, Hermès I: La communication (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1968); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus trans. Brian Massumi (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

54 Keti Chukhrov ‘Sexuality in a Non-Libidinal Economy’, e-flux Journal, no. 54 (April 2014), pp. 1–3. See also Keti Chukhrov, Practicing the Good: Desire and Boredom in Soviet Socialism (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).

55 McGoohan, Patrick, dir., The Prisoner (MGM-British Studios, 1967)

56 Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, p. 319.

57 Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (London: Fourth Estate, 2017), p. 97. Didion’s essay also ends with the the eerie vision of a five-year-old girl tripping on LSD, grooving alone to a comic-book in the middle of a suburban living room.

58 Rolling Stone, ‘The Rolling Stones Disaster at Altamont: Let It Bleed’, in Rolling Stone no. 50 (January 21, 1971). Something like the Altamount crush is foreshadowed in Brian Aldiss’s novel Barefoot in the Head (1969) during an immense liquid light show at “the Grand Place”. See Brian Aldiss, Barefoot in the Head (London: Victor Gollancz, 1990), pp. 161–162.

59 John Giorno, ‘Groovy and Linda’, in 0 to 9 4 (June 1968), p. 18.

60 Nam June Paik, ‘Versatile Color TV Synthesizer’, in John C. Hanhardt, Gregory Zinman, and Edith Decker-Philips (ed.), We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik (London: MIT Press, 2019), p. 142.

61 Nam June Paik, ‘Global Groove and Video Common Market’, in We Are in Open Circuits, pp. 142–144.

62 David Aubin, ‘Forms of explanation in the catastrophe theory of René Thom: Topology, Morphogenesis, and Structuralism’, in Growing Explanations , p. 96; Nam June, Paik, ‘Global Groove and Video Common Market’, pp. 142–144.

63 Greg Lynn, ‘Blob Tectonics, or Why Tectonics is Square and Topology is Groovy’, in Folds, Bodies, & Blobs: Collected Essays (Brussels: La Lettre Volêe, 1998), pp. 173-174; Brian Massumi, ‘1997: Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible’, in Couplets: Travels in Speculative Pragmatism (London: Duke University Press, 2021), pp. 136–142; Aaron Betsky, ‘A Virtual Reality: The Legacy of Digital Architecture’, in Artforum 46, no. 1 (September 2007). See also Celia Lury and Parisi Luciana, ‘The Becoming Topological of Culture’, Theory, Culture & Society, pp. 3–35.

64 Greg Lynn, ‘The Folded, the Pliant, & the Supple’, in Folds, Bodies & Blobs, p.113; Teddy Cruz, ‘The Architecture of Neoliberalism’, in The Politics of Parametricism: Digital Technologies in Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 190–191.

65 Jed Perl, ‘Laissez-Faire Aesthetics’, in Magicians & Charlatans: Essays on Art & Culture (New York: Eakins Press, 2012); Mark Fisher, ‘They Can Be Different Too’, in K-Punk 1008–1009; Jesse Armstrong, Succession “Which Side Are You On?” Season 1, Episode 6, dir. Andrij Parekh (HBO: July 8, 2018).