| Summer of Love | Summer of Love exhibits include over 150 posters, album covered and underground magazines. The exhibition concentrates on four centres of counter-cultural activity: San Francisco, New York, London and Liverpool. The 1960's underground press is represented by Oz magazine, International Times, East Village Other and The San Francisco Oracle. |
The far-reaching Summer Of Love exhibition at the Tate Gallery, Liverpool is spread over two enormous floors and includes posters, record covers, books and magazines, underground newspapers, paintings, photographs, designs, films and installations. I thought it might be a bit tiresome and dated but no, it is dynamic and I was constantly reminded of how the psychedelia of the 60s found its way into all forms of creative expression. As someone who has never taken a mind-expanding drug, I may not be the best judge but this is a wonderful exhibition, well worth a visit to Liverpool. It will take you two hours to go round it comprehensively – and you will also have done your exercise for the day. The prime requirement for promoting a gig is surely a clear poster, informing the public who is on and when and where. This went by the board in San Francisco in the mid-60s as the posters featured intense vivid colours with bizarre typefaces that made the details hard, almost impossible to read. How did the stoned hippies make it to any gigs by the Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane? The poster artists must have had very colourful trips or traumatic experiences with kaleidoscopes. Presumably some of the originals were even more colourful as they must have faded with time.
 | | See films featuring Allan Ginsberg |
Peter Fonda’s film, The Trip, was meant to have a moral: “Take these, kids, and this could happen to you”, but the poster is so mind-blowing that only those who experimented with LSD would have shown any interest. The most psychedelic of all the exhibits is Janis Joplin’s painted Porsche. Fantastic! Jimi Hendrix is the patron saint of psychedelia and amongst the memorabilia is a painting, Flower Demon, by Hendrix himself. It is more impressive that the four-hander painted by bored Beatles in a Japanese hotel room. I love too the authentic documentation of the time like Elliott Landy’s crowd scenes at the Woodstock Festival and Robert Whittaker’s photographs of Swinging London. In what other decade could the Royal Albert Hall be filled for a poetry reading? As pretentiousness invades every corner of the arts world, plenty is on display here, especially in some of the ridiculous installations. However there are pieces presented with great humour. I loved Akira Shinizu’s Colour Blindness Test Chart No.6, which took an optician’s chart and added nudes. Oyvind Fahlstrom had two pumps, one labelled Esso, the other LSD. Richard Hamilton made a pointed collage from news-cuttings of the Rolling Stones’ arrest and there is a photograph of Frank Zappa sitting on the toilet. There wasn’t much psychedelia in Liverpool itself but there is a colourful collection of posters for the Liverpool Scene. | "There is no doubt that many creative people took LSD and it changed their lives completely. " | | Spencer Leigh |
The point about LSD was that it made everything less boring and more significant and this is one reason that the Beatles could listen to Eastern music for hours on end. There is no doubt that many creative people took LSD and it changed their lives completely. As the Creation commented, “Our music is red with purple flashes.” I do wonder about the morals of this exhibition. Certainly there are people who blew their minds in the 60s and lost their lives or are still casualties today. I doubt that we would have had any of the art in this exhibition without the drugs, and I doubt whether we would have had ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ or ‘A Day In The Life’. Whether that justifies it or not, I don’t know, but it is certainly well worth going along and forming your own opinion. It runs until late September and as they used to say, “Be here now”. SUMMER OF LOVE – ART OF THE PSYCHEDELIA ERA
Tate Liverpool, Albert Dock
Exhibition runs to 25 September 2005 Spencer Leigh |
