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Abstract
The practices of multimedia lightshows adopted by the British counterculture in London during the 1960s are related to aesthetic practices involving the use and manipulation of light in kinetic and op art. Both reflect a new sense of matter and energy that emerged from the adoption of post-Newtonian understandings of nature and the cosmos in the mid-twentieth century. The stereotypical cosmic mysticism with which the counterculture is associated was more techno-scientific than it is painted. The London underground press is a good source with which to elaborate this more nuanced reading. The counterculture’s cosmic speculation was as much earnest reflection on new vistas of nature and the universe as glib reflections on a Technicolor acid trip.
Notes
1. Sally Tomlinson’s essay in the catalogue for Tate Liverpool’s 2005 Summer of Love exhibition is an exception. See Tomlinson, “Sign Language.”
2. Op art and op art aesthetics are associated with psychedelic aesthetics and psychedelic states in the popular imagination. This association almost certainly arises from the embodied and multi-sensory experience of “viewing” a piece of op art where the sense of disorientation, wooziness and vertigo, coupled with an illusionary sense of movement and color emerging on the plane of an op canvass is likened to the sensory experience of some hallucinogens.
3. Here, like Aldo Pellegrini, I include in the broad definition of kinetic art two- and three-dimensional works: from the illusory movement represented in abstract op paintings through to moving objects and sculptures and those consisting of projected and manipulated light. For a fuller definition see Rycroft, “Art and Micro-Cosmos.”
4. The 1960s underground press in London and the United States are readily accessible from a number of libraries. The Little Magazines Archive and University College London have original copies of UK publications and many libraries in the United States have full runs of the most popular UK titles and most US titles on microfilm, such as in the research library at UCLA. These microfilmed records are copies of the archives of the Underground Press Syndicate. I used both of these archives for this paper. Additionally, the full run of International Times is now available as an online archive at http://www.internationaltimes.it/archive/ (accessed January 10, 2013).
5. For a notable exception written by a scientist, see Perkowitz, Empire of Light. In this book Perkowitz tracks at once the changing cultures of representing light in visual art and the evolution of the ways in which scientists understood light in the modern period.
6. Lippard, Six Years, vii.
7. For instance Kepes, “Introduction;” Howorth, Atom and Eve; Gamow, Mr Tompkins Explores the Atom.
8. Forgan, “Atoms in Wonderland.”
9. See Jellicoe, Studies in Landscape Design; Rycroft, “Mapping, Modernity and the New Landscape.”
10. Mook and Vargish, Inside Relativity.
11. Dalrymple Henderson, “The Image and Imagination of the Fourth Dimension,” 133–6.
12. Dalrymple Henderson, “Vibratory Modernism.”
13. Brett, “The Century of Kinesthesia,” 65.
14. Latham, John Latham; Macdonald-Munro, “John Latham.”
15. Wentworth Thompson’s book predates the “proof” of Einstein’s theory of relativity and its influence on the ICA exhibition of the same name concerned the immateriality of material where the sense of immateriality was not influenced by new notions of matter and energy.
16. Hamilton, 1951, quoted in Moffat, “A Horror of Abstract Thought,” 101.
17. Rickey, “The Morphology of Movement,” 230.
18. Popper, “Kinetic Art,” 5. See note 3.
19. Pellegrini, New Tendencies in Art, 164.
20. Reichardt, “Op Art,” 239.
21. Robertson, “Introduction and Biographical Note,” 8.
22. De Sausmarez, Bridget Riley, 29.
23. Robertson, “Introduction and Biographical Note,” 8.
24. De Sausmarez, Bridget Riley, 20.
25. Pellegrini, New Tendencies in Art, 167–8.
26. Bann et al., Four Essays on Kinetic Art; Brett, Kinetic Art; idem, “The Century of Kinesthesia;” Popper, Origins and Development of Kinetic Art.
27. For a more thorough account see Rycroft, “Art and Micro-Cosmos.”
28. Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision, 38–9.The apparatus was also used in the 1930 film Lichtspiel Schwarz-Weiß-Grau.
29. Quoted in Pellegrini, New Tendencies in Art, 162.
30. Hoenich, “Kinetic Art with Sunlight,” 115.
31. Brett, “The Century of Kinesthesia,” 35.
32. Henry, “Horizontally Oriented Rotating Kinetic Painting,” 239.
33. Ibid., 241.
34. See for example Anon, “Why Not This Year?;” Darnton, “Magick Mushroom;” Hinkle, “Tripping and Skipping;” Murray, “You Are Now Entering Gandalf’s Garden.”
35. Burroughs, “The Invisible Generation;” idem, “The Invisible Generation, Cont.;” idem, “Tactics of Deconditioning;” idem, “W.S. Burroughs alias Inspector J. Lee.”
36. Mottram, “New Time and Space Structures,” 4–5; idem, “New Time and Space Structures 2.”
37. Pouncey, “Laboratories of Light.”
38. Put simply, Marshall McLuhan suggested that all media are extensions of our bodies in space. Electronic media were in effect extensions of our central nervous systems and their use would, he proposed, result in a global village in which participation was maximized: “A tribal and feudal hierarchy of traditional kind collapses quickly when it meets any hot medium of the mechanical, uniform and repetitive kind ..sSimilarly, a very much greater speed up, such as occurs with electricity, may serve to restore a tribal pattern of intense involvement such as took place with the introduction of radio in Europe, and is now tending to happen as a result of T.V. in America. Specialist technologies detribalize. The non specialist technology retribalizes.” McLuhan, Understanding Media, 24. This of course was very appealing to the counterculture and it was an idea that had a significant effect on the style and aesthetics of its cultural products including the underground press and the multimedia lightshow.
39. Stowell, “Head-Lights,” 13.
40. VanDerBeek, “Culture,” 16.
41. Pouncey, “Laboratories of Light.”
42. Ibid.
43. Nuttall, Bomb Culture.
44. Anon IT “Lightshow.”
45. IT Oct Citation1966, 14.
46. Whitehead, Wholly Communion.
47. Stansill, “The Life and Death of IT.”
48. Throughout the long 1960s there were regular discursive and symbolic battles between New Left factions and the more popular, less conventionally “political” countercultural factions. The two perspectives waxed and waned over the period as local, national, and global events affected the shape of the counterculture in London. What is clear from the city’s underground press is that despite the in-fighting, each faction shared a project to develop anti-technocratic modes of expression and politicking. Rycroft, Swinging City, 83–100.
49. Stansill, “Psyching in the New Age,” 12.
50. Amongst these were: Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism; Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth; Laing, The Divided Self; Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man; McLuhan, Understanding Media; Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture.
51. Stowell, “Head-Lights,” 13.
52. Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 77.
53. Ibid., 175.
54. Expanded Cinema is an edited compendium of some of his Free Press articles.
55. Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 433.
56. Ibid., 164.
57. Ibid., 160; on the influence of expanded cinema on British avant-garde see White, “British Expanded Cinema.”
58. Grunenberg, “The Politics of Ecstasy,” 39.
59. Bacon and Shatavsky, “Tune-in with Psychedelic Light Show Systems,” 158.
60. Rycroft, “The Nature of Op Art;” idem, Swinging City; Riley, “The Pleasures of Sight.”
61. Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 97.
62. Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions;” idem, Apollo’s Eye, 235–67.
63. Youngblood, “Environment as Light/Scale,” 35.
64. Grunenberg, “The Politics of Ecstasy,” 13; Nash, “The Art of Movement.”
65. The 1966 film Open Source by Robert Rauschenberg was one outcome of this collaboration which also involved EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology). See http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=642 (accessed January 10, 2013).