PSYCHEDELIC

*JjLm-% M. Robert E. L. Masters <$ Jean Houston

 or-4,9

Psychedelic A vt
ROBERT E.L. MASTERS & JEAN HOUSTON
with contributions by Barry N.
Schwartz

6 Stonier Krippner, Ph I >

Marshall Lee
Edited, designed, and produced by

"Psychedelic art" has become a popular phrase, and its style

neckties to tele-
has invaded almost every area of design from
in things
vision commercials. However, the tremendous interest
publicity explosion that has over-
psychedelic has created a

shadowed and misrepresented the serious psychedelic art move-

iiidit, and thus most of its works are practically unknown.

awareness,
Psychedelic experience begins with an expanded
and may proceed from there through deepening levels of con-
sciousness to the most profound mystical union. Through the
in of psychedelic drugs, for the first time in Western culture
a large number of artists have been able to experience what only
;i few have before. The implications of this are vast, and reach

into other areas besides art.

Although the movement is in its early stages, enough has

been accomplished to indicate an extremely important
new
itive force. Working in all the conventional
media aug-
mented by lumia and multimedia, the psychedelic
(art of light)

ait ist is producing works inspired by images, concepts, and

per-

ceptions which arc not often accessible to others. The

power
of this new source is suggested by the fact that some of the best

work is being produced by artists who began their creative ca-

reers onlj and by others whose

after a psychedelic experience

st\lc and/oi subject matter changed dramatically by this means.

Psychedelic arl is too complex a subject to be covered ade-

quately from a single point of view. In this book, which presents
the scope and depth of tins new art form, the significant his-

toid al, cultural, and psychological aspects have been explored

as well.

Masters and Houston chaw on a combined J vcars of re-

1

search with peyote and LSD-type Substances to explain and

discuss the nature of psychedelic experience and its effect on
creativity rhej clarifj the distinction between the "psychedelic
sensibility" ol artists such as Bosch. Blake, and Tchelitchew and
the true psychedelii experience, and laj Brmrj to rest the notion
tli.it 'all ait is psychedelic." The psychological, historical, and
mythic content of psychedelic consciousness a related to the
ail <>l tins and otlici times. In then Opening Statement, the

authors deal with rhe rragicomedj of publi< polk) on psyche

d< li< drt

Barrj Schwarti proposes a definition ol psychedelic arl in

and proceeds to build a theoretical structure

round il ll<. relates the presenl movement to its antecedents.

ntinued <"' bddk flap

Presumptuous is the artist who does not follow his road through to the
end. But chosen are those artists who penetrate to the region of that

secret place where primeval power nurtures all evolution.

There, where the powerhouse of all time and space — call it brain or heart

of creation — activates every function: who is the artist who would not
dwell there?

In the womb of nature, at the source of creation, where the secret key to
all lies guarded.

PAUL KLEE
i*s Y<m:i>i:i.ii 1
ART

Robert E. L. Masters $ Jean Houston

with contributions by Barry N. Schwartz

$ Stanley Krippner, Ph.D.

Edited, designed, and produced by Marshall Lee
A Balance House book
GROVE PRESS, Inc. New York
FOR ROBERT E. L. MASTERS III

Copyright < k/.s hv Balanct House

All rights n tervt d. This book may not be reproduced <>r otherwise used
in whole, in part, or h\ method <>r medium without permission,
</m
pi thai hiu\ quotations und <>r up to ^ illustrations nun be
•l l<" I'":- | n view 01 criticism.
Printed in the I 'fitted States of America
mnted in Switzerland
'
''" \ud Numbei 67 ;i 583
Contents

Psychedelic art & society # 17

Art <y psychedelic experience # 81

Context, value 6- direction # 129

BARRY N. SCHWARTZ

The psychedelic artist # 163

STANLEY KRIPPNER, PH.D.

Bibliography • 183

Index • 1
87
 1 5

Ill us tru Notts

COLOR PLATE 25. tom blackwell. Periphery (series 1 4-

26. tom blackwell. Periphery (series) 48

1 cassen 4- stern. Experimental motion picture, 9
2 cassen 4 stern. Deaf h of the Mind, 10
COLOR PLATE
3 Allen atwell. Mandala, 1 1

15 tom blackwell. Untitled, 49

4 ai.i.en atwell. Psychedelic temple, 12-13
16 tom blackwell. Periphery-1, 50
5 isaac abrams. Flying Leap, 14
17 Bernard saby. Untitled, 51
6 isaac abrams. All Things Are Part of One Thing, 1
18 edward randel. Moon Mantis, 52
7 isaac abrams. Cosmic Orchid, 16
19 edward randel. Hegira, 53
8 matt klarwein. A Grain of Sand, 25
20 francis lee. Experimental motion picture, 54
9 Richard aldcroft. Infinity Machine projections, 26
21 robert yasuda. This Is Dedicated to the One I Love-I.
10 don snyder. Psychedelic projection photograph, 27
55
1 1 don snyder. Multiple slide projections, 28-29
22 robert yasuda. This Is Dedicated to the One I Love-VI.
12 ernst fuchs. Cherub's Head (like my father) 30 56
13 ernst fuchs. Moses and the Burning Bush, 3

14 lex de bruijn. Untitled, 32 ILLUSTRATION

27 robert yasuda. Behind the Drums, 57
ILLUSTRATION 28 robert yasuda. This Is Dedicated to the One I Love-IU.
J7
1. lex de bruijn. Mandala Rhythm-I, 33 :9 robert yasuda. This Is Dedicated to the One I Lo\c-ll.
2. LEX de bruijn. The Last Man of the Amazon Is Gone,
58
33
30 Bernard saby. Untitled, 59
3. cassen 4 stern. Scene from The Rake's Progress, 34
3 1 Bernard saby. Untitled, 59
4. cassen 4 stern. Environment 5: Vibrations, 34
s- edward randel. Cellular Dance, 60
5. cassen 4 stern. Environment 5: Vibrations, 35
33 edward randel. Eye of Indra, 61
6. cassen 4 stern. Environment 5: Vibrations, 35
34 ALVIN meyerowitz. Untitled, 62
7. allen atwell. Untitled, 36
33 huco mujica. Mandala-I, 62
8. allen atwell. Millbrook Mandala-II, 36
36 martin ries. Those Who Sit in Darkness. 62
9. allen atwell. Mandala, 37
37 JACQUES KASZEMACHER. Untitled. 63
10. isaac abrams. Untitled, 38
38 Irwin cooen. Return to Source-r\', 64
11. isaac abrams. Untitled, 39
39 irwin cooen. Vibrafions-I. 64
12. isaac abrams. Landscape, 39
4° martin carey. Celebration: The Rose. 65
1 3 isaac abrams. Spring Painting, 40
41 arleni ski sk w uns n in Batwma Fiaawm and Hcll-I.
14. aki iii'R okamura. Untitled, 41 66
15, ARIIU'R OKWH'KA. Untitled, 41 INK ARM
4: ARI SKI EINSTEIN. FtttS* landscape.
\(> don ssi ni k Psychedelic projection photograph, 42 BNE SKI AR 0~
43 ari \\ EINSTEIN. Inside j SivJ.
17. don ss\ di k Nude, 42 FREDERIC PAJtDO. MllldTCSpJ, 68
44
18. donsnyder Scene from Quasar, 43 4s i \ki kEDACx, 1 inninage pro jectot, f>o

to, iknsi 1 11 us Dancer in zebra costume, 44 PAT DI CBOOT. Untitled. 09

4«
JO. iksm ii'Mis I'mmiph of Christ, ^ 4" CAMILLA BLAFFEE. OdOftUt 09
1 iknsi in us Chmvb (lik$ a rhinoctrot) 4; s CHARLES CIULIANO. /'/lesvns jrni tOW, ~o
4
iknsi rucRi job and th* Judgment of Paris, 4<> oni r\i mi k Landscafta, jo
4*>

mat! ELAawitN Portrait of Mn Carmen Kaplan, 4'' sine

roM »i m rwEU Untitled, 47
 8 1

51. usco. Contact Is t he Only Love, 71 74. nahum tchacbasov. Skull of a Bird on the River Styx, 117

52. usco. Strobe room, 72 75. henri michaux. Scene from Images du Monde Vision-
aire, 1 1

COLOR PLATE 76. ernst fuchs. Psalm 69 (detail) 119

77. arlene sklar-weinstein. Self-Portrait in Mirror, 120
23 usco. Seven Diffraction Hex, 73 arlene sklar-weinstein. G, 121
78.
24 usco. Lotus Mandala, 74 isaac abrams. Untitled, 123
79.
25 The Electric Circus, 75 80. allen atwell. Untitled, 124
26 paul ortloff. Inhalation /Exhalation, 76 81 yves tanguy. Multiplication of the Arcs, 1
. 3
27 arlene sklar-weinstein. Between Heaven and Hell-II,
paul klee. The Red Balloon,
82. 132
77
83. joan miro. Landscape, 133
28 frederic pardo. Untitled, j8
84. Salvador dali. Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized By Her
29 earl reiback. Crystalline projections, 79 Own Chastity, 135
30 jud yalkut. Us Down by the Riverside, 80
85. ernst fuchs. The City-I, 136
86. ernst fuchs. CarmeZ, 137
ILLUSTRATION 87. frederic pardo. Hatam, 138

53. jud yalkut. Us Down by the Riverside, 83 88. claes oldenburg. Foto-Death, 139

54. richard aldcroft. Infinity Machine, 84 89. usco. Tie-dye Cave, 141

55. richard aldcroft. Infinity Machine projections, 85 90. yayoi kusama. Peep-show, 142

56. jean- jacques lebel.The sugarcube ceremony, 85 91. don snyder. Series of painted color slides, 144

57. vincent van gogh. The Chair and the Pipe, 89 92. don snyder. Projection on figures, 145

58. mati klarwein. Abstract Vision in Form of Spanish Land- 93. cassen & stern. Motion picture, 146
scape, 95 94. Scene from Astarte. Ballet by Robert Joffrey, 147
59. chen hung-shon. Sage contemplating the Divine Mush- 95. Scene from Astarte. Ballet by Robert Joffrey, 147
room, 102 96. wes Wilson. Byrds, 149
60. Mushroom stone, 104 97. The Electric Circus, 150
61. TEPANTITLA FRESCO, 105 98. The Electric Circus, 151
62. tsa toke. The Cormorant Bird, 106 The Electric Circus, 151
99.
63. tsa toke. Morning in Peyote Tepee, 107 100. The Electric Circus, 151
64. Stephen mopope. Peyote Meeting, 108 101. Robert yasuda. This Is Dedicated to the One I Love-TV,
65. William blake. The Circle of the Lustful, 110
66. arthur heygate mackmurdo. Wallpaper design, 110 102. harriette Frances. Drawing, 158
67. ivan albright. Self-Portrait at 55 East Division Street, 103. harriette Frances. Drawing, 158
111 104. usco. Shiva, 167
68. gustave moreau. The Pretenders, 111 105. Drawings made before and during an LSD session, 170
69. pavel tchelitchew. Hide-and-Seek, 112 106. richard villegas. Still Life, 170
70. pavel tchelitchew. Genesis, 113 107. RICHARD VILLEGAS. Untitled, 171
71. hieronymus bosch. The Garden of Delights, 115 108. hugo mu j ica. Mandala—II, 173
72. lotte jacobi. Untitled, 116 109. tom blackwell. Periphery (series) 175
73. ingo swann. Kismet No. 3, 117 110. isaac abrams. Birth Cycles, 179
 jackie cassen & rudi stern. Experimental motion picture, i q6~.
Using a technique called "Theater of Light." this film represents a vovage through
various levels of psychedelic experience.

3 jackie cassen &• rudi stern. Death of the Mind. Developed in

spring 1966, this kinetic light production was shown at the Village Theater. N
York, in the fall of that vear as part of a psychedelic celebration. Several projectors
throw constantly changing images of painted slides on both front and back of the
screen, while dancers and other figures mo\ c in the projected light.

3 allen at well. Mandala. Casein on plaster. 60 x 60". 1964. This painting

is a focal point on a wall of the psychedelic temple shown in color plate 4.

allen at well. Psychedelic temple. Casein on plaster. 1 064 As

unfinished, this painted environment co\crs all walls, the calms, and adjoining
spaces of a large room in a New York apartment.

isaac a b r a m
Flying Ltap, Oil on canvas. 50
s. I 50". 1000. Collection
Stanley K. Sheinbaum, San Francisco.

O 1 s ^ ic \ i< k \ \i s. All Things Arc I\jrf of Olt» . Oil on Canvas

1966. Collection Reed Erickson, Baton Rouse. Louisiana.

T ium' v n k v m s Cosmic Orchid. Oil on canvas. 60 1 "4". 1967

JACKIE
3 JACKIE CASSEN A; RUDI STERN
3 ALLEN ATWELL

ALLEN ATWELL
•> ISAAC ABRAMS
6 ISAAC ABRAMS
i s k \ C IBS A MS
Psychedelic art &
society

For thousands of years men have used psychedelic or consciousness-alter-

ing substances to explore the far inward reaches of the self and to per-

ceive the external world in unaccustomed ways. Or they have sought

somewhat similar results by means of practices ranging from fasting and
flagellation to the elaborate physical and mental exercises of yoga and its

Occidental counterparts.
Yet, for contemporary Western man, psychedelic experience is

something new. Mind-altering chemicals more potent than any that

existed in the past have become accessible to millions of people. Some
hundreds of thousands have obtained the psychedelics and, in the great

majority of cases, taken them alone or in the company of friends. Com-

paratively few have had the benefit of adequate preparation and guidance.
The results have been diverse, a sense of crisis has arisen, and society's

ultimate response to a unique and disturbing situation has yet to be

made.

Psychedelic experience might be described briefly as the experi-

encing of states of awareness or consciousness profoundly different from

the usual waking consciousness, from dreams and from familiar intoxi-

cation states. Sensory experience, thought, emotions —awareness of self

and of world — all undergo remarkable changes. Consciousness expands

to take in the contents of deep, ordinarily inaccessible regions of the

psyche.

The psychedelic artist is an artist whose work has been significantly

influenced by psychedelic experience and who acknowledges the impact

of the experience on his work. Most of the artists whose works are in-

cluded in this book have used one or more psychochemicals on one or

more occasions. LSD-25 was the substance used most often, but such

similar psychedelics as mescaline, peyote, psilocybin, and others have

been employed in many cases. A few of the artists claim similar experi-

ence resulting from the practice of Zen, yoga, sensory deprivation, and
other induction procedures. Almost all conceive of themselves as dealing
 —
not with magical or occult practices, but with the human brain and 18 % Psychedelic art

nervous system as these are subject to functional manipulation. ^ societ}'

The artists (and the authors of this book) are under no illusion that

alteration of consciousness confers the ability to create works of art. The

artist, not the chemical, has to provide the intelligence, feeling, imagina-
tion, and talent. The psychedelic experience is experience, not injected

talent or ingested inspiration, although the artist may draw inspiration

from any thought or perception, whatever the situation of its occurrence.

Extraordinary experience has always been a factor of importance in

shaping the artists' work; travel to India or the South Seas, living to its

dregs the Paris demi-monde life, prolonged self-exposure to sunlight or

moonlight. Gauguin, Modigliani, Van Gogh are examples that come to

mind. Psychedelic artists of today arc using the discoveries of modern

chemistry to provide themselves with extraordinary experiences. Where
artists of the past traveled to the ends of the earth, these new artists

travel inward, to what Aldous Huxley called the antipodes of the mind
the world of visionary experience.

The result is psychedelic art: works of art attempting in some sense

to communicate psychedelic experience, or to induce psychedelic ex-

perience, or at least to alter consciousness so as to approximate aspects of

the chemically induced state.

It is still too early to make final judgments about the value of what
is being done. We feel strongly, however, that psychedelic art deserves
study at this time. The achievements already are of considerable interest

and the potentials may be of major importance. No art of the present

can point so clearly toward the probable radical innovations of the future.
This book will have served a worthy purpose if it clarifies what is prob-
ably one of the most complex and misunderstood developments in art

history.

In selecting materials for inclusion, we have had to work without

the benefit of either an artists' or a critics' literature on the subject. In

the absence of manifestoes and critiques, we have had to do our writing

handicapped by an almost total lack of previous statements of the con-
cepts and theory of the art. Finally, we have had to find and bring to-

gether works of art which in many cases have had little or no public ex-

posure. Thus it is possible, and even probable, that some artists of merit
have been overlooked. This, of course, we regret.

There arc other artists who belong in these pages who. not without
reason, have been fearful of linking themselves or their work to psv-

chedelics. We have indicated that some artists have induced altered

states of consciousness by nonchemical means; but this has not seemed
to all a sufficient safeguard. Just being involved in a labeled movement
.inv kind ot movement has its nsks \ movement concerned with al
1
9 tered states of consciousness is a particularly tempting target to some
critics. This is evident both from art history and from the response to

the few exhibits in which psychedelic artists as such have participated.

However, those familiar with creative process know that the whole his-

tory of art is concerned with altered states of consciousness, altered brain

chemistries, intensifications and distortions of perception. Creative proc-

ess itself involves altered awarenesses, out-of-the-ordinary psychodynam-

ics, more or less closely related to some of the phenomena of the psy-

chedelic experience.

We especially appreciate the courage of those artists who have been

fully candid concerning the relation of their work to psychedelic experi-
ence. Such boldness is required if we are ever to understand the creative

process in general, and particularly if we are to define the value of psy-

chedelics for creativity.

While we have here first of all a book about art, along with some
unique psychological data, it is clear that we have also new documents
to be injected into the bitter struggle accompanying the emergence of a

dawning age of psychochemistry. The documents are suggestive, not

conclusive. But they raise once again the question of whether society is

going to accept or reject the challenges posed by LSD-type substances.

At present the policy is one of rejection, and the prohibition of research

with normal persons has meant, among other things, the end of all ex-

perimental work with artists and other creative people. In these con-

troversial circumstances we feel that the reader is entitled to have a

statement of our views on psychedelic experience and the uses of psy-

chedelic chemicals.

On the basis of our experience — a combined fifteen years of re-

search with LSD, peyote, and other psychedelics —we believe that LSD-
type chemicals provide the best access yet to the contents and processes

of the human mind. Thev have value in psychotherapy, but also for re-

search in many areas outside medicine and thcrapv — for example, phi-

losophy, psychology, anthropology, religion, scientific problem solving,

and the arts —and research with normal persons probably will vield re-

sults of ultimately greater value than the therapeutic uses. We favor

greatly expanded research programs unburdened by excessive bureau-

cratic interference but subject to periodic evaluations to determine that
the work is responsible and that risks have been minimized. There are

numerous and substantial findings that psychedelic work can be safe for

both subjects and experimenters when properly conducted.

It is always possible that LSD, or some other psychedelic, will even-

tually be found to have unacceptable physical side effects. Chromosomal

abnormalities have been reported among persons who consumed black-
market LSD. On the other hand, according to Temple University Medi- 20 9 Psychedelic art

cal School research, a study of persons receiving LSD in psychotherapy

failed to yield "anything to get alarmed about." Significant damage may
depend on how many times and at what dosage levels LSD is used. Any
evidence about LSD must be weighed in the light of its value and with

reference to what we find acceptable in other substances used in daily

life. And, of course, an effort should be made to develop new, more ef-

fective, and safe psychedelics.

Always, psychedelic sessions should be competently guided. Ex-

panded research thus implies the establishment of guide-training centers.

The centers should train guides from all relevant scientific, scholarly,

creative, and other fields. Those who already have demonstrated their

competence in psychedelic work should be authorized to resume their

research. All of this would greatly reduce the illicit and hazardous self-

experimentation with psychochemicals. Along with many other re-

searchers, we receive hundreds of letters from persons who want to have

guided psychedelic sessions. When, because of legal restrictions, we have
to refuse, some of these people go ahead and buy LSD, or something
claimed to be LSD, on the black market. Then they take it, with re-

sults that sometimes are disastrous.

The psychedelic guide does not merely direct a session. He screens

out, or has screened by someone competent to do so, those persons for

whom the experience would be dangerous. Then he spends considerable

time preparing the subject for the session to come. After the session, he
makes himself available to the subject to help him, should problems
arise. It is when screening, preparation, skilled guiding, and follow-up
arc wanting that people tend to get into trouble. Many have no difficul-

ties and have rewarding experiences without any guidance; but the risk

is there, and we warn strongly against self-experimentation and reliance

upon amateur guides.

This book suggests that artists arc among those who stand to profit
most from psychedelic experience and who are best able to cope with it.

The artists sense this, and many are stronglv attracted to an experience

that has so much interest and possible value for them. We wonder if

society should deal with this through laws that will send artists ( not to
mention Intellectuals, scientists, clergyman, or lawyers) to prison if they

feel that use of psychedelics is valuable enough to justify the risk? Or

may there be some better solution?

Laws to curtail indiscriminate distribution of psychedelics are <.-

sential New ehemieals, more potent and sometimes more dangerous

than the old ones, are beginning to appear. Rut it is our belief that am
punitive legislation should be directed against unauthorized manufac-

turers and distributors Of these ehemieals INe or possession of DS]

21 chedelics in noncommercial quantities should not be a punishable of-

fense. If it is, we run the risk of creating a new criminal class and of

ruining the lives of countless persons who otherwise might contribute

much to society. Already many university and college students have been
arrested under ill-conceived state laws. These laws should be repealed and
the recommended limited legislation, with expanded research, should be

given a chance to solve the problem. Meanwhile, LSD for research and
therapy should be made available to authorized workers, as was done
before scandals and governmental panic caused the only commercial

supplier to quit the field.

The trend, however, is increasingly in the direction of massive en-

forcement of sweeping punitive laws. If there is no reversal, and as

pressures intensify, psychedelic art will either perish or, more likely,

move entirely underground. Most researchers and therapists, confronted

by this choice, have thought the risk of underground activity too great

and so have stopped working with the psychedelics. The artists, on the
whole, are less cautious.

That psychedelic art should encounter these pressures is somewhat

ironic when one considers that here is an art almost totally free of the
preoccupation with neurosis, the ugly, and the sordid — with, that is, man
at his sickest —that saturates so much of the artistic expression of our

time. Instead, this art typically aims at providing or communicating

spiritual or aesthetically beautiful experience.

In this book we consider artists working in painting, drawing, sculp-

ture, films, theater, ballet, opera, inter-, multi-, or mixed-media, lumia

(art of light), and other creative forms. Utilizing these basically familiar

forms, but sometimes in new ways and with unique vision, psychedelic

art may come to speak better than any other to a new consciousness
emerging among our people in our time.

ROBERT E. MASTERS
L.

JEAN HOUSTON
The Foundation for Mind Research
New York City
November, 1967
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors, contributors, and editor are grateful for the generous help pro-
vided by Murray Levy, Charles Giuliano, Bruno Palmer-Peroner of the East
Hampton Gallery, Camilla Blaffer of The Contemporaries, Linn House of
Innerspace, The Howard Wise Gallery, The Riverside Museum, Dr. Frederick
J.
Dockstader of The Museum of the American Indian, Richard Davidson, and
Margaret Schneider, all of New York, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Paris, and Simon
Vinkenoog, Amsterdam. We thank also the many artists, museums, and indi-

vidual owners of works reproduced for their cooperation in making them avail-

able.
 9 mat i klarwein. A Grain of Sand. Oil on composition board. 72 x -:".
1965.

*F richard aldcroft. Infinity Machine projections, iq 57

M"F don snyder. Psvchcdelic projection photograph. ; qmm. iqo - .

M.M. don snvder. Sequences of multiple slide projections. Painted slides projected
simultaneously from two or more machines dissolve and strengthen in programmed
sequence.

M.& ERNST 1 reus. Cherub's Head (like my father) . Pencil, charcoal, and
tempera. -' 2 \ 1 1 Vz". 1964.

I *> ernst puchs. \f ses and the Burning Bush. OH and tempera 00 wood.
ox -".
1956.

II lex di bruijn Untitled. Gouache jo x 40". 1965.

8 MAT I KLARWEIN
 !

RICHARD ALDCROFT
a
a
>-

z
(/I

z
o
c

• . i •

1* *

a
 *«;
K<

*»

ml
....
::::: BPR* 'tjt

.» . |

^ffer

DON SNYDER
1

vl"? f, fM

"
f *
13 ERNST FUCHS
 v
3t>

if

13 ERNST FUCHS
14 I 1 \ PI IRUI J N
 33

i. lex de bruijn. Mandala Rhythm — J. Oil on canvas. 78 x 78". 1966. Collection Mr. and Mrs. Erik de Vries, Amsterdam.

f
w''
2. lex de bruijn. The Last Man of the Amazon Is Gone. Oil on canvas. B2 x 32
"- 1 9^5-
 o

fl
ill
1 i nB 1.1
. 1 V

3. JACKIE CASSEN & RUDI

stern. Scene from The Rake's
Progress. Kinetic lumia visuals by
Cassen and Stern were an integral part
of the production of Stravinslcv's opera
by the Opera Company of Boston in
1967. This was the first use of psy-
chedelic art in an opera.
4, $,6. jackie cassen & rudi stern. Environment 5: Vibrations.
These photographs show prototypes of environmental elements exhibited at the
Architectural League, New York, December 14, 1967-January 13, 1968. Photos
by Malcolm Varon.
7. ALLEN ATWELL. Untitled.
Oil on canvas. 100 x 70". 1966.

8. ALLEN ATWELL. MUlbwok

Mandala — II. Oil on canvas. 84 x 84"
1965.
9. allen at well. Mandala. Oil on canvas. 78 x 78". 1967.
3«

io. isaac urams, Untitled. Ink on paper. 14 x if. 1967.

 39

ii. isaac abrams. Untitled.

Ink on paper. 1 1 x 14". 1966.

L2. isaac abrams. Landscape. Oil on canvas. 70 x 50". 1967.

i}. isaac An rams. Spring Painting. Oil on canvas. 50 x 60". 1967. Collec-
tion Arthur Eaton, New York.
 41

14. ARTHUR OK AMUR A.

Untitled. Ink on paper. 4 x ^A".
1967.

15. ARTHUR OKAMURA.

Untitled. Ink on paper. 314 x 5% 6 ". 1967.
42

16. don snyder. Psychedelic

projection photograph. From 35mm
color slide. 1967.

17. DON SNYDER. Nude.

Augmented photograph. 10 x 5
4". 1966.
3
 "jr

w>
S «g
3 A

•
o
— * 4--
1> ^>

i_

p —
a2 oO

c ^ ^5
u c o
00 o -^
IS &
« Oh y
o -S ^£
x B y ~
z *

z
o
e i- O
o Jo

oo O-
rt
re
Ti W
19. ernst fuciis. Dancer
costume. Painted figure with felt
in zebra
headdress. 1955. This was an early attempt to express directly an image from a pevote experience.

20. 1 k n s 1 1
r, ns Triumph of Christ. Pencil on canvas. 77 x 77". 196a
 i'Jfw
1 'V
lift
1

SB
'•
fcu !
1 !

l»

r
x V Si yi
k« "••I.* .... «
/r> W '\SFM tfT^4

*-C
&f34&

21. ernst fuchs. Cherub {like a rhinoceros) . Pencil. 8V2 x 10". 1962.
Collection Aoki Gallery, Tokyo.
 ??*«**

w \
-

BB|»'I"
frf=

L^
22. ernst f uch s. Job and the Judgment of Paris. Detail. Pencil, guache, and watercolor. 1966.

23. mati k lar we IK. Portrait

of Mrs. Carmen Kaplan. Oil on canvas. 196-
24. tom b l a c k w e l l. Unti-
tled. Oil and acrylic. 30 x 40". 1965.
26. TOM black well. Periphery series Oil and acrylic. 24 x 24". 1965.
{ ) .

Collection Evert MacDonald, Laguna Beach, California.

15 tom b l a c k w e l l. Periphery in Four Sections. Mixed media on canvas

and wood panel. 36 x 36". 196-.

IO tom b l a c k \v e l l. Periphery (series) Oil on

. wood panel. ;6 x 24". \qt

VS Bernard s a b y. Untitled. Oil on cam.is. 57 x 4;". 1Q64. Collection

Galerie de 1'Oeil, Paris.

18 edward r a n del. Moon Mantis. Acrylic on glass lighted from behind.

24 x 24". 1966.

19 E d \v a r d ra Nde L. Ilcgini. Lights. lenticular vinyl film, .lcrylic polymer on

glass. 18 x 17". 1966.

«© FRANCIS lee. Experimental motion picture. 1967

21 Robert T asud A. This Is Dedicated to the One 1 Low — /. Oil on

58x42". 1966.

roberi 1 kSUDA. TJwhDi itothtOmlhom — VI. OQon<

52 x 64". 1967.
15 TOM BLACKWELL
17 BERNARD SABY

1§ .19 EDWARD RANDEL

fl
M
•J

U
21 ROBERT YASUDA
ROBERT YASUDA
 27. Robert yasuda. Behind
the Drums. Oil on canvas. 48 x 50"
1965. This painting represents an early
response to the psychedelic experience.
Those that follow show an exploration
of levels deeper than sensory alteration.

28. ROBERT YASUDA. T/l!S h

Dedicated to the One I Love— III. Oil
)n canvas. 53 x 62". 1967.
zq. roim k i YASUDA. this Is Deducted to the On, I Low -11 Oil on e.mv.is.
51 Yi x 76". 1967.
30. Bernard saby. Untitled
Oil on canvas. 37 x 29". 1966.
Collection Galerie de l'Oeil, Paris.

31. Bernard saby. Untitled.

Oil on canvas. 45V2 x 58". 1966.
Collection Galerie de l'Oeil, Paris.
32. edward randf. l. Cellular Dance. Lights and acrvlic polymer on glass.

24 x 24". 1966. Shown here arc four successive phases of light motion.
33. edward randel. Eye of Indra. Lights and acrylic polymer on glass. 36 x 36". 1966.
62

^'•^.W*»

34. alvin meyerowitz. Untitled. Photogram. 7 x 7". 1966.

36. MARTIN R I E S. TTlOSC W/lO Sl'f Dl DdT

Etching and aquatint. 4': \
s '>". \q6~.

55. bugo MVjii \ Mandate I. Ink on paper, aa" diameter. 1967.

37- Jacques kaszem acher. Untitled. Ink on paper. 9 Vi x 2V2". 1 1 965.
Collection Mr. David Fisher, New York. Superficially suggestive of optical art,
this work and others of this artist are related to Arabic geometric mysticism,
which combines with psychedelic experience to provide the form and content.
 m&L '&w-

tl .V

^•-

*C-r*^

v*
S •TV
38. Irwin c o o e n. Return to Source — IV. Light painting. jVb x 6". 1966.

V). irwin com v Vibrations J Light painting. 6% \ 4%". 1907*

40. martin carey. Celebration: The Rose. Ink on paper. 1 8 x 30". 1 967. 65

y I- • -*
"..:- > 'Si' :•

%o ;,
§J)
41. ARLENE SKLA R- W E I N-
stein. Between lleaxen and Hell-I.
Assemblage and acrylic on wood.
30 X42". 1966.

42. ARLENE SKLAR-WEIN-

stein. Fertile Landscape. Ink on
paper. 1 2 x 9". 1966. This, like many
psychedelic drawings, requires an un-
usuallv long viewing time until the
forms become activated. The spectator
feels adrift in a field of dynamic pulsa-
tions, energetic vibrations, and flowing
forms.
 Inside a Seed. Ink on paper. 9 x 2". 1966.
43- ARLENE SKLA r-w einstein. 1
M •
l(
>
"' < " pardo. Millartapa. Oil and tempera on wood. 24 x 46W. 1966.
 69

5. earl reiback. Luminagc Projector. Lumia. Changing, dissolving color

arms appear on glass screen. 42 x 30". 1966. Collection Lajolla Museum of Art,
^ajolla, California.

46. pat d e groot. Untitled.

Ink on paper. 7V2 x 8V4". 1967.

47. CAMILLA BLAFFER. OctO-

pus Psyche. Watercolor. 196-.
7°

Charles giuliano. Theseus and the Minotaur. Ink on paper. 24x22". 1966.

iyn] palmbb I andscap*. Ink .uul colored dyes on paper. 14x1 1".
1965.
 sine
""'j
50. usco. Yin/ Yang . 10' circumference. Mixed media. Color motion
pictures, slides,and oscilloscope light projected on revolving balloons. Photo by
George Cowdery. As exhibited at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston,
the Riverside Museum, New York, and other institutions in 1967, the psvehedelic
character of this work is unmistakable. The graceful and deliberate motion of
the twining bodies flow over the turning spheres in a counterpoint of time and
space; both seeminglv infinite. Sharply contrasting in color, form, and pace, the
oscilloscope projection heightens the sense of dislocated perception.

51. usco. Contact Is Only Love. Kinetic octagon. 7' diameter. 1963.
the
Contains sixteen interlocked sound and light systems. Photo courtesy Riverside
Museum, New York.
5
2 - usco. Strobe room. An environment exhibited at the Architectural League.
New York in 1967. Photo by Peter Moore.

23 usco. Seven Diffraction Hex. Motorized diffraction gratings and stroboscopic

lights. 196-.

r s c o. Lotus Mandate. Painting with lights. 1 10 x 110". 1965. Photo

courtesy Riverside Museum. New York.

25 The Electric Circus. New York discotheque. 196-. Photo bv Anne Simpkin.

26 pai'l ortloff.
(bottom) Exhalation.
( top ) Inhalation.
Tempera and
Tempera and
watercolor. z; 1
:
watercolor. 19 x 1S". 196*
\ 1S 1 :". ic :

27 ARL E NE S K L A R-W EINSTEIN. BctWCCll HcOWn and Hell 1/ A

and acrylic on wood relief. $6 x 50". 1966.

Frederic pardo. Untitled. Tempera and oil on wood. : ; \

Collection John Caldor. Sidney. Australia.

29 earl reiback. Crystalline projections. The color and ir.

by refraction, diffraction, and polarization of light. The color is
.ted

d not through

tlie use of pigments but rather b\ a combination of polarization and circular

dichroism. The images are projected from : \ ;" slides which :th

multiple layers of crystalline, organic chemicals and in some cases with ir:

plasties, in several of these slides a laser beam has Ken used to Conn p
of the 1111

30 run r alktj 1. U$ Down by the Riverside 10mm motion picture with op*
sound. 1966. Fifaned dining tlu USCO environmental exhibition at the R
Museum. Niw Yoik. Shown on television .vw] at various film I s in the
United States and Japan.
 m -
-
- -

. '-,>*

X
usco
 6

H
I m
w
V

vu
f

dn

The Electric Circus

!S8»S
d»

so 1' A U I. OHILO K K
27 ARLENE S KL AR- WE INST EIN
3* FREDERIC PARDO
-- 1

uuW
JUD YALKUT
A§*t$r psychedelic
experience

The initial response to much psychedelic art might be to its aliveness, its

crackling and leaping energies, or to its colorful, unceasing experiential

flow. An art movement that draws fundamental cohesiveness from an

experience sometimes called escapist, addresses the world with an ex-

uberance not suggestive of withdrawal.

There is little that is passive, static, contemplative. The art is Dio-
nysian, ecstatic, energetic; should it move at a more leisurely pace, it

still does not come to rest. The art is of Heraclitus, and Heisenberg — in

terms of motion —but also as archaic-modern visionary synthesis.

Mandalas irradiate and writhe. Buddha has a flashing light in his

middle. Microcosmic-macrocosmic interaction: protozoan explodes and

is a planet.

The art is religious, mystical: pantheistic religion, God manifest in

All, but especially in the primordial energy that makes the worlds go,
powers the existential flux. Nature or body mysticism: the One as an
omnisensate Now. Occasionally, more profound awarenesses.
Hedonistic art. The Cosmic Dance. Too much in its filling of time
and of space, but seeking to prevail by sheer joyous momentum. Birth
and rebirth, growth and renewal. Being quivering in ecstatic oneness with

itself.

We are generalizing, of course, about an art in emergence that in-

cludes many forms of expression as well as very different works to be

found within the context of a single form. But responses to particular

works, as to the whole, will usually be mixed, and ambivalent.

More than any art movement of our time, psychedelic art has a

future and potentials that lie beyond anyone's power to envision. Psy-

chochemistry, along with a new neurotechnology, may largely displace

art in its ages-old role as a primary shaper of the development of con-

sciousness; but there also will be an enormous enrichment of art in its

means of expression as well as in its content. We are witnessing only the

primitive beginnings, but already the outlook is awesome.
It is not only psychedelic art that appears to us in its infancy. Psy-
chochemistry is new and has yet to investigate even the range of plant 82 % Art (5 psychedelic
experience
life known for decades, centuries, or millennia to contain psychoactive

substances. New synthetic psychcdelics arc being developed, and some

will undoubtedly be more effective than any now in use. Moreover, we
are far from knowing how to utilize to the best advantage those chem-
icals already available. Psychedelic experience, too, is an infant, its po-

tentials barely tapped. On this new frontier there are only explorers,

stumbling across unaccustomed terrain, finding both depths and shal-

lows, riches and dross, and often unable to distinguish the one from the
other. Among these explorers are artists, scientists, philosophers, every-

one who penetrates the world of psychedelic experience. The new art

reflects accidental differences of experience as well as different person-

alities and degrees of artistic accomplishment.

Among the artists, there are some who, in style, content, and in-

tention, are unmistakably concerned with psychedelic states of con-

sciousness. Isaac Abrams, Arlcne Sklar-Weinstein, and Allen Atwell are

examples. On the other hand, Mati Klarwein is obviously close to the

surrealists and to the new Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. Frederic

Pardo, another European, also seems related to the surrealists, and his

occult works are reminiscent of some art traditionally associated with the
Rosicrucian and Theosophical movements. Peter Max does some work
related to art nouveau, as do other of the psychedelic artists. The works
of a number of others often center upon rather traditional Eastern man-
dala forms. But all are artistically concerned with psychedelic experience.

As examples of themes, Sklar-Weinstein gives us birthing worlds,

swirling mythologies, and a recurring sacred fire. Abrams typically paints

the One manifesting itself through the Dance-Becoming in which the

infinity of forms find their unity. Allen Atwell's organic mysticism can
resemble a kind of Blakean anatomy.
Filmmaker Francis Lee is, at this writing, at work on a motion pic-

ture (color plate 20) that attempts to convey an LSD session in its es-

sential totality. Characteristic imagery unfolds, takes representational

shape, and becomes increasingly complex and symbolically loaded as the

film progresses. lie will try by this means to suggest the progression

through deepening levels of awareness as it occurs in LSD-type states

Psychedelic experience has been treated cincmaticallv in different ways

by Casscn and Stern (color plate 1), Jud Valkut. and others.
Such films as these not only may describe psychedelic experience.

they also maj expand, deepen, and otherwise alter the awareness of the
viewer They do not give a psychedelic experience' — something no art

form has yet come close to doing—bui thej effect changes in conscious-

ness .it the same tunc that they elicit a positive aesthetic response. Mo
b'on pictures, along with other media, will in the years inst ahead become
 .M*'

Si

£ :

-
» ^

*•"**..

3. JUD YALKUT. Us Down by increasingly effective in inducing altered states. The aim then must be
he Riverside. Still from a motion
icture based on the USCO exhibit at an enrichment of consciousness, not just a random alteration.
Jew York's Riverside Museum in There is another verv different type of film, not too rare and, we
966.
think, less effective, that would inundate the senses and turn on the
viewer by means of an overload of sensorv stimuli. This seems to be the

intention of Jud Yalkut in a series of movies including Us Down by the

Riverside (color plate 30), D.M.T., Turn Turn Turn, and others. In

these films Yalkut barrages his audience with a torrent of hurtling colors

and lights, forms blinking, whirling, and surging. Image follows image in
rapid-fire succession, distorting awareness of time and space as the sen-

sory bombardment continues. A question is raised by this type of film:

is it more an induction procedure than a work of art? To reconcile sci-

ence with art and induce altered states without forfeiting artistic goals

is a problem for the psvchedelic artist in the various media. None has

solved it completelv, although some, including Yalkut, do better than

others.

The lumia artists, for many reasons, are more successful at altering

consciousness and at pleasing the viewer aesthetically than are most of

the filmmakers. They frequently use light boxes that project on a wall or 84 # Art 6 psychedelic
experience
screen an endless variety of shifting, dissolving color forms that recapture

the early unorganized visual imagery of the psychedelic experience. The

nonrepctitive experiential flow is intended to suggest "the infinity of
mind." The viewer loses himself in this flow somewhat as one may do
while looking at a fire. The effect is hypnotic, and trancelike states may
be induced in some persons. In these hypnoid states, suggestibility is

heightened, with the result that the beauty of the experience is enhanced.
Unlike a motion picture, these projections have no beginning and no end.
One stays as long as one wishes, and consciousness is changed according to
capacity and circumstance. Here there is only beauty, and the alterations

of awareness are innocuous. Nonetheless, with some artists, there seems

to be the questionable assumption that it is desirable to induce altered

states in the viewer — just to change consciousness, as a worthwhile end

in itself. This we are inclined to reject as directionless escapism. When,
as is frequent, a similar approach is made to the psvehedelic experience,

the induced awarenesses will be at best of a trivial nature.

Few of the lumia artists, however, have achieved much of an advance

over Thomas Wilfred's "color music," projected by his Clavilux, which

predates by manv years the emergence of psvehedelic art. On the other

hand, some of them have made important departures. Richard Aldcroft's

Infinity Machine (color plate g) blends whole and fragmented represen-

tational imagery with abstract forms to recall other stages of psychedelic

image experience. Edward Randel creates lumia works in which both

static and mobile lights underlie images that are viewed rather than pro-
jected (color plates 18 & 19).
Mixed-media (or multi-, or inter-media) artists such as Jackie

Cassen and Rudi Stern, Don Snyder, the USCO group, and others,
create "environments" intended to produce a high degree of involvement

on the Among
jections,
part of the audience. their tools are films

music, dancers, stroboscopes, oscilloscopes, and a varietv of

and slide pro-
f Jl
sounds —an amplified heartbeat, a scream, a laugh, breathing, a sexual

act, a train, the roar of a crowd. Evcrvthing is more or less integrated,

and aimed at the psyche, the emotions, the central nervous svstem. The
films and slides portray microorganisms, worlds in collision, soldiers in
battle, women giving birth, the panorama of the life process, but with

emphasis upon what is thought to be cmotionallv charged and psvcho-

:;_}. RICHARD A LD CROFT.
dynamically evocative. Objects are altered as to color and size, and people Infinity Machine. Photographs show
inside of proicctor without cylinder,
and events appeal in disordered sequences. The considered intention in
outside of projectOl with cvlmdcr con-
some cases is to decondition the mind, break through the categories of taming design dements suspended in
thought, undercut the constancies of perception, so that liquid, and projectOl with cvlmdcr in
a psychedelic
place. Photos In Scott Wilson. The
awareness tan conic into being. Theoretically, the brain cannot by its
cylinder revolves when proicctor is in

usual functioning handle the mass of materials and impose the ac operation. Projections varj m infinite
combinations according to the ele-
ments m the cyhndei and their
motion.
 customed organization on the scrambled images and events. The cortex
becomes exhausted or gives up and consciousness is governed principally
by the old-brain reticular system, as happens in LSD-type states.

Again, we do not get a psychedelic experience; but, when the media

are skillfully mixed, the artistic effect can be valid and powerful, with
awareness multi-leveled and expanded. Some of the multi-media artists

have worked with Marshall McLuhan and with others who have keen
insight into the mixed-media possibilities. This electronic playing on the
human nervous system is not without its dangers. As techniques are per-

fected, what is certainly a major art form of the future could emerge just

as well as a brain-washing nightmare.

On the fringes of psychedelic art are happenings and discotheques.

These may draw upon various of the other art forms while calling for
active participation by all present.

Happenings may be a valid art form, and many art critics so regard

them, but their connection with psychedelic experience is not always

clear. Jean-Jacques Lebel, who has staged some of Europe's livelier hap-

penings, sometimes employs obvious symbols to make the event psy-

chedelic — for example, sugar cubes cascading over the heads of naked

girls. However, his happeners also utilize "psychovitamins" (i.e., psy-

chochemicals) as "agents of illumination." Concerning his intentions,

Lebel says:
55. RICHARD ALDCROFT.
Infinity Machine projections.
Most of us considered these dionysiac celebrations as manifestations of
a collective subconscious from which we had been separated and alien-

ated by society and culture. We sometimes gained staggering thoughts

56. j e a n- j acques lebel. The sugarcube ceremony from 120 Minutes

Dedicated to the Divine Marquis. Happening. Paris. 1966.
 about ourselves and the world we were caught in . . . inasmuch as my 86 % Art & psychedelic
experience
work consciously intends anything, it is devoted to the problem or cere-
mony of perception. I see it as a sort of potlatch of exchangeable realities

to which the "creator" or the "viewer" each bring as much as they take.
... If the creative process turns the artist on to his psycho-social en-
vironment and to the myths he swims in then the work (or game) of art

should turn on the viewer. Such an activity is likely to take on a collec-

tive dimension as well as a function of transgression. Here are some of

the questions that modern art has left unanswered: Why are so very

few of the percepts, delivered pre-consciously but selected and organized

by the ego, permitted to enter consciousness? How do pre-conscious per-

mechanism of repres-
ceptions and artistic idioms in general relate to the
sion? How can we transcend the damning patterns of non-communica-
tion, sublimation or transposition imposed on us by our culture? These
are also the questions raised bv psychedelic art.

These questions, however, will probably have to be answered by

science rather than by art. As artists attempt to answer such questions,
whether with happenings or with other art forms, they run the risk that

art will become psychological experimentation, usually ceasing in some

degree to be art in the process. For psychedelic art especially, this is a

problem.
Discotheques also try to turn on their customers and create total

involvement in total environments. The method is a sensory onslaught.

Colored lights stream, blink, and sweep, sounds blare, and the mind is

deluged with sensation that can plav upon the bodv surface with tangible
vibrations. The experience is overwhelminglv sensory — visual, auditory,

tactile, kinetic —and eye catalepsies indicate that some dancers and ob-
servers have entered into trancelike states: electronics producing the

effects of primitive ritual or fundamentalist. Holy Roller-type revival.

Again, however, the present is only the seed of the future.

As technology and our understanding of the nervous system advance,

the discotheque seems certain to evolve (as one of several possible di-

rections) toward the pleasure domes or stimulatoria long envisioned by

science-fiction writers. In these places, mass electro-tactile stimulation

would provide degrees of physical pleasure hitherto experienced only in

less public situations. Then the issues that arise will have to do more
with medicine and morals than with art.

The discotheque, if it is art, is a kind of mixed-media pop art. It is

thus not surprising that many of the discotheque effects have been cre-

ated by the psychedelic mixed-media artists. Cassen and Stern, for ex-

ample, were contributors to New York's Cheetah; Earl Rciback's work

(color plate 29) is part of The Electric Circus.

Beyond even these fringes lie odds and ends of what arc presently
called psychedelia — be-ins; turned-on tours in psychedelic buses covered

with brightly painted arabesques; private parties and public dances fea-
 87 hiring strobe light, oscilloscope, and varied gaudy products of the psy-

chedelicatessens, head shops, and acid marts. Finally, psychedelic wall-

paper, neckties, shirts, dresses, magazine advertisements, and television

commercials. Recently, the Wall Street Journal had a front page item
headed:

CALL IT PSYCHEDELIC
AND IT WILL SELL FAST,
SOME MERCHANTS SAY

The writer of this article remarked that almost anything a merchant

might call psychedelic would sell, even "wildly colored widgets that have
been sitting on the storeroom shelf for years."

"Psychedelic," he said, "is developing into a magic sales word."

At the same time, the national debate over use of psychedelics is

bitter, frequently hysterical, and almost never rational.

The sweep of psychedelic art is disconcerting. It ranges from dis-

cotheques through the recent music of the Beatles to work seeking in a

sacred science new archetvpes adequate to the needs of modern man.

The psychedelic journey inward results in religious art erupting into

ecstasy or revealing the rich multi-dimensionality of consciousness.

Mystical awareness is being at one with all phenomena joined in a frene-

tic cosmic dance, or it is a union with the primordial substance and

energies. There are distortions of perception and intensifications of per-

ception; efforts to inundate our senses and other efforts to stir us in our

spiritual depths. There is primitive art and ritual art and art that would
turn us on by means of advanced electronic equipment and in the light

of the latest neurological findings; art shallow and deep, crude and re-

fined, childishlv simple and highly complex, with many gradations of

shading in between.
These different works of art do have a unity, common meanings and
intentions that keep them within the framework of psychedelic art. How-
ever, the unity may not in every case be apparent to the viewer who has
had no first-hand experience of altered states of consciousness and who
is not otherwise knowledgeable about psychedelics.

Psychedelic experience & psychedelic art

The artist's unique personality is always the basic determinant of his

psychedelic experience, as it is of his creative production. Mind-altering

chemicals —such as peyote, mescaline, LSD, psilocybin —activate various

mental processes. The specific contents of the altered awareness depend
upon the interaction of these processes with all that the person other-

wise is, including his set (preparation) for the experience. The other
main determinant is setting, including the persons present and especially 88 # Art & psychedelic
"
those guiding the session. Thus the experience can be one thing for one
person and something vastly different for another.

Of the classes of phenomena most common to the psychedelic ex-

perience, a few have particular relevance for the artist. They include

(among others) accessibility of unconscious materials, relaxation of the

boundaries of the ego, fluency and flexibility of thought, intensity of at-

tention or heightened concentration, a breaking up of perceptual con-

stancies, high capacity for visual imagery and fantasy, symbolizing and
mythmaking tendencies, empathy, accelerated rate of thought, "regres-

sion in the service of the ego," seeming awareness of internal body proc-

esses and organs, and awareness of deep psychical and spiritual levels of

the self with capacity in some cases for profound religious and mvstical
experiences.

What is most striking about this list is that, with a few exceptions,
we have itemized what many psychologists regard as main components of
the creative process — the very conditions of artistic, inventive, and other
creation. This might explain why some ordinarily noncreative people are
able in the psychedelic state to produce eidetic (visual) imagerv they

find to be more stunningly beautiful than any work of art they have seen.
The high value placed on this imagery is by no means self-delusive or a

product of narcissism in all cases. From such experience one might sur-
mise that the vision of even the greatest artist is to some extent impover-
ished by the time it is realized on canvas or in his sculpture or architec-

ture.

Artists are seldom able to work well with their hands during psy-
chedelic experience. The mind is alert enough, but in most cases coor-

dination is impaired or motivation wanting. Those who have frequent

sessions sometimes learn to overcome this. On the other hand, in the
LSD-type states, artists may perceive and conceptualize what will be ex-

pressed in their work later. The considerable but still limited value of

these states for a majority of creative persons has been stated by Gerald

Heard, writing in the Psychedelic Review

Can LSD provide am assistance to the creative process? Even when

given under the best of conditions, it mav do no more (as Aristotle said
when appraising and approving the great Greek Mvsterics) than "give
an experience." Thereafter the person must himself work with this en-

larged frame of reference, this creative schema.

There arc also, however, in I, SO experience potentials for therapy

and growth that can affect an artist's work. For example, creative blocks
;ire sometimes overcome. When the blocks are neurotically grounded, the

elimination of them is within the domain of psychotherapy. If it is more

a matter of gaining fresh perspectives and impetus, the experience ma]
 )

89 provide this without any evident therapeutic content. In some cases there

are claims of an enhanced creativity — inspiration — following psychedelic,

experience and lasting for days, weeks, months, or even years. We will

not attempt now to say why this occurs or what may be involved. But it

is not likely to impress the artist very much if we say, as some do, that

his inspiration is "only auto-suggestion." He will settle for having it and

leave the theorizing to others.

Psychedelic experience drastically alters both inward and outward

awarenesses. One's apprehension is of a world that has slipped the chains

of normal categorical ordering. A vast range of phenomena normally

excluded enter into the extended consciousness. The mind no longer is

subject to the highly selective censorship or screening usually imposed

upon it by the ordinarily dominant mechanisms of the newest (cortical

areas of the brain. Mechanisms much older in evolutionary terms become

dominant. Novel perceptions and a wealth of other experiences then
become possible. These may not serve the usual interests of survival and
practical functioning in the day-to-day world, but they can be immensely
seminal for the creative person.
Among the earliest effects arc the radical changes in sensor}- percep-

tion, very notably vision. All at once, colors and textures may be seen as

having a beauty and richness never known before. Lines, too, are seen
with exceptional clarity, and attention fastens on objects or details of

objects and invests them with intensified meaning and emotional charge.
A chair, for example, may be seen as Aldous Huxley saw one during his

initial mescaline session — as a noumenon or Ding an Sich —more essen-

tially real even than the chair in Van Gogh's painting, The Chair and the

Pipe.

There may be visual distortion as well as the heightened visual

acuity. Very often the world takes on a beautiful and magical appearance.
A research subject of ours gave a typical account:
We took a little stroll and outside in the warm Louisiana night — it then
was after ten o'clock — the world was transfigured. The full moon shone
so brightly it seemed like the sun, and, like the sun, one could not focus
one's eves upon it anv longer than an instant. The foliage appeared to be
a lush tropical garden, the waxlike leaves and blades of grass taking on a

deep seemed could distinguish even blade

-

olive hue. It as if I leaf, every-

of grass. It was like walking through a fairyland, a tranquil, dreamlike

landscape unassoeiated with anything I had previously known.

VINCENT VAN GOGH.
57.
The Chair and the Pipe.
Collection The Tate Gallery, London.
Spatial relationships are altered and objects may increase or decrease
in size, in a whimsical Alice-in-Wonderland way, or sometimes clearly
in terms of an intellectual or emotional reaction to the object. People

and things may be seen as if some slight tendency had become fully

realized. Should a human face be slightly equine or porcine, then the

person might be seen as in some of the familiar seventeenth-century 9° • -^ Tt & psychedelic
experience
Italian caricatures. The hint of slyness and cruelty in a face may become
a fully realized visual perception so that the person resembles the per

sonifications of human frailties found in the paintings of Bosch or

Brueghel. A loved one may be perceived as indescribably beautiful. Or a

face will be seen as having all the subtlety and richness communicated
in Rembrandt's great portraits. (Despite all this, we have not heard of

any portrait artist using psychedelic-state perceptions of his subjects.

When it happens, the results should be interesting.

In another type of perception, one might look at a flowered sofa

and find emerging from its floral design a variety of faces and other forms,

somewhat as these emerge, for example, in Tchelitchew's Hide-andSeek.

One of our subjects, looking at such a sofa, reported "a great face with

the trunk of an elephant that is blowing liquid on the face of a demon

whose body has been trampled into the ground. ... A herculean male
figure rises next to the elephantine face. He is trapped to the waist in
stone and this marbled stone looks like sea foam, it is so delicate and
lacy. Everything blends into everything else. The herculean figure is also

the ear of a face and the elephant-like trunk is the bridge of the nose of

another, larger, still more complicated figure." This same subject saw in

the sofa design Toulouse-Lautrec cafe figures, German art from the late

twenties and mid-thirties, works of Fclicien Rops and Modigliani, and a

good deal more. The basis for much of this we could not see; the sub-

ject was obviously building some of his perceptions from very slight hints

in the design.

Very early in the experience, the person may become aware of a

pulsing, vibratory excitation of the atmosphere, and remark small,

curved, flickering and sparkling particles of light that appear to dart in

all directions, dance briefly in place, then dart away again and disappear.
The flickering lights and the atmospheric excitation resemble what is

seen in the works of the impressionist painters and was theorized about

by Seurat, who believed that all objects arc a coalescence of these

(energy) particles.

In fact, so main' perceptions in the psychedelic experience resemble

materials found in art of the past that it becomes possible to make a

case for what might be called a psychedelic sensibility. Chemically in-

duced alterations in idea content, and verbal imagery, raise similar ques-

tions about such a sensibility in some novelists, poets, and other writers.

Artists naturally find such perceptual changes as those we have

mentioned to be of intense interest. ( )f even greater interest and relevance
are likely to be the eidetic images common in the psychedelic experience.

Eidetic images are those usually seen with the eyes closed, although

sometimes they may be projected in a gazing crystal or upon .1 blank.

91 flat surface, such as a canvas. Some Tibetan artists, without psycho-
chemicals, claim that they can project their images upon a surface and
then paint them.
It is difficult for those who have not experienced them to under-
stand what eidetic images are. It is as if a series of photographic slides,

or a motion picture, were being projected upon a screen, inside one's

head. Typically, the images are brilliantly illuminated and vividly colored,

the colors exceeding in their beauty and richness even the psvehedelic

perceptions of colors in the external world. People usually describe this

color and light as extraordinarily glowing, luminous, and "preternatural."

Some people see only shifting, swirling bi- or tridimensional masses
of color, like some of the lumia effects. Others image a flow of geometric
forms, or perhaps a succession of intricate arabesque patterns. Appearing

among these last may be other images still somewhat indistinct but sug-

gestive of known objects. For a description of this sort of imagerv, we

will take the account of Havelock Ellis, relating his experience with

peyote. Although written about 1898, it is probably still the best.

Closing his eyes, Ellis saw:

. . . images of the kaleidoscope, symmetrical groupings of spiked objects.

Then . . . mostly a vast field of golden jewels, studded with red and
green stones, ever changing. ... I would sec thick glorious fields of
jewels, solitary or clustered, sometimes brilliant and sparkling, sometimes
with a dull rich glow. They would spring up into flower-like shapes be-

neath my gaze, and then seem to turn into gorgeous butterfly forms or
endless folds of glistening, iridescent fibrous wings of wonderful insects;
while sometimes I seemed to be gazing into a vast hollow revolving
vessel, on whose polished surface the hues were swiftly changing. I was
surprised, not only by the enormous profusion of the imagery presented
to my gaze, but still more by its variety. . . . Every color and tone con-
ceivable appeared to me at some time or another. Sometimes all the
different varieties of one color, as of red, with scarlets, crimsons, pinks,
would spring up together, or in swift succession. . . . Although the
effects were novel, it frequently happened that thev recalled known
objects. Thus, once the objects presented to me seemed to be made of
exquisite porcelain, again of a somewhat Maori style of architecture; and
the background of the pictures frequently recalled, both in form and
tone, the delicate architectural effects as of lace caned in wood, which
we associate with the mouchrabieh work of Cairo. . . . On the whole, I

should sav that the images were most usually of what might be called

living arabesques.

Heinrich KliAver, in his meticulous study of mescaline and what he

calls the "mescal visions," isolates "form-constants" of the eidetic

imagery; that is, forms that recur again and again in the psychedelic state

and in both abstract and representational imagery. One does not have to

look very hard to find these form-constants frequently repeated in psy-

chedelic art.
 One of the constants. Kliivcr observes, is always referred to by sucb 92 £ Art ($• psychedelic
experience
terms as "grating, lattice, fretwork, filigree, honeycomb, or chessboard
design." The "cobweb figure" be finds to be closely related. A second
form-constant is usually described as "tunnel, funnel, alley, cone, or

vessel." A third is the spiral. He also notes the unusual brightness of the

colors and the high degree of illumination of the field upon which the
images appear. The "visionary forms" may be two- or three-dimensional.

As to size, imaged objects "vary from 'gigantic' domes to 'Lilliputian'

figures." His entire discussion of psychedelic imagery is important and

unique in the English-language literature.

One of our own experimental subjects demonstrates very well the

occurrence of Kliivcr's form-constants; her account also seems relevant

to psvehedelic and some other art. In describing her LSD session, this

young woman wrote:

From the first, everything was seen through a filigree grid of light, re-

sembling a most delicate and svmmetrical lace screen. I realized the

vision I seemed to have of encrgv particles structuring themselves did

not come through the set of eyes or state of consciousness normally in
use. For the duration of the experience, the points of light began to trace
the archetypal patterns basic to the recorded art of mankind. The early

triangular grid became one of snowflake-like crystals of quaternary then

pentagram formation. The pentagrams began whirling and I was re-

minded specificallv of the drawing of "The Star of Bethlehem" plant bv

Leonardo da Vinci. Evcrvwhere, these "starfish" became tinv spirals or
funnels. As the LSD's effects became more intensified, the combination
of crystals —one upon another —or whirling, i.e., the spiral, appeared as

the dominant form. At first, the grid resembled a magnified tungsten

atom which, itself, is no different from the pattern made on water's sur-

face bv rain or spray. . . . This shape, upon the grid, grew more com-
plex in a very short while and quite like a de-spined sea urchin or the
sacristy dome in San Lorenzo bv Michelangelo. I soon saw all in terms
of, or rather through, rose windows of an infinite, beauteous varietv. The
mandala was for the first time comprehensible to me. At times it seemed
like the intersecting gyres, or cones, described in W. B. Yeats's Vision.
The center of the mandala seemed to me to be the place one goes if a
change to a different plane of vibrations or consciousness is desired. Any
small section of the mandala seemed to be a funnel, as well, out of this
layer of life.

In addition to imagery of these kinds, many persons spontancouslv

produce eidetic creations that are representational and succeed one an-
other either without apparent connection or in a narrative sequence. In
the latter case, the unfolding drama may be personal, or possiblv his-

torical, legendary, or mythical. Then one sees realistic or fantastic per

sons, annuals, architectures, landscapes -* profusion of imagery in what

seems neai limitless variety. Foi example, one of our subjects reported
tins imager]
93 There are snakes, alligators, dragons, beautiful reptiles. They are lying
at the bottom of a kind of sea, but I don't think it is water. At the edges
of this place where they are there are tigers walking along the shore. Up
on the beach all kinds of wild orgies are going on. Lots of sex, people
getting drunk, and tigers eating the people. Tigers getting drunk on
blood and then slaughtering one another.

Another LSD subject, holding a gold cross, reported the following

eidetic images, among others:

I saw Jesus crucified and Peter martyred. I watched the early Christians
die in the arena while others moved hurriedly through the Roman back
streets, spreading Christ's doctrine. I saw Rome fall and the Dark Ages
begin and observed as little crossed twigs were tacked up as the only hope
in ten thousand wretched hovels. . . . My hand trembled, the cross
glimmered, and history became confused. Martin Luther walked arm in
arm with Graham, followed by Thomas Aquinas and the armies
Billy

of the Crusades. Inquisitorial figures leveled bony fingers at demented

witches and a great gout of blood poured forth to congeal in a huge,
Pope John XXIII called out "good cheer" to a burning,
clotted cross.
grinning Joan of Arc, and Savonarola saluted a red-necked hell-fire and
brimstone Texas preacher.

Imagery such as this may be experienced with great richness of

detail. The crowded canvases of some of the psychedelic painters are

attempts to convey this imagistic richness and a similar wealth of ideas.

The psychedelic state's extreme acceleration of the mental processes can

mean that the person experiences in minutes image or idea sequences

that would require hours or longer if experienced by a normal conscious-

ness capable of sustaining the undistracted flow. One thinks of the

hypnotic subject who, with time distortion, can re-experience in a few

minutes and at what seems a normal pace some film he has previously
seen which took two hours of objective, clock-measured time to run

through. But here the mind is creative, not just recollective.

Eidetic imagery has a greater diversity and beauty than the imagery of

dreams. The meanings of its symbolic forms may be quite clear, and in

any case the images are experienced by a lucid, waking consciousness

well able to consider them and commit them to memory. More often
with artists than with other groups of people, this imagery or something
like it recurs after the session. Some report the recurrence when they

begin to paint. The picture already is "on the canvas," or the artist some-
how knows exactly what to do. He can work very rapidly and with a

feeling of spontaneity. This sort of inspiration is by no means common,

but it happens often enough to be worthy of remark. The experience is

different from hallucination, and the artists are free of psychedelic-like

phenomena when they are not working creatively. There are also, of

course, some artists who have never knowingly experienced psychedelic-

type states who report similar mental processes.

 Possibly these perceptions and images alone would be sufficient to 94 # Art 6- psychedelic
experience
launch a psychedelic art movement. However, in themselves, they are

not the richest part of psychedelic experience. And the art takes its

impetus from an overall experience that at its most potent can radically

and bcneficiallv transform the human personality. It is usually a lesser

but still very powerful experience or series of experiences that motivates

the artist to center his concerns upon the psychedelic states.

The psychedelic experience that freely unfolds without blockage

from personal or external factors has a pattern of progression through

deepening levels of increasingly complex awareness. Specifically, four

levels may be distinguished in terms of each level's characteristic phenom-

ena. The experience begins on the shallowest sensory level and then

may progressively deepen through levels that we call recollectixe-analxtic

and symbolic, to the deepest, integral level. The integral only rarely is

reached, but experience of the other deeper levels is not uncommon,

especially when the person is fairly mature and an experienced guide di-

rects his session. Many themes and preoccuptions of psychedelic art be-

come clearer when viewed from the perspective of these levels.

On the sensory level, there is a very great enhancement of all sen-

son- experiencing, particularly the senses of vision, touch, and hearing.

The visual changes are those described earlier — a heightened acuity and
a distortion of visual perception. There also is another important phenom-
enon of vision that has not been mentioned: the imposition — or is it

a discernment? —of a patterning in nature more intricate, delicate, and

far more ubiquitous than previously recognized. In some respects akin

to the cidetic image-constants, these patterns and forms were observed

by Alan Watts, who described them in The Joyous Cosmology:

I am looking at what I would ordinarily call a confusion of bushes —

tangle of plants and weeds, branches and leaves going even- which way.
But now that the organizing, relational mind is uppermost I see that
what is confusing is not the bushes but my clumsy method of thinking.
Every twig is in its proper place, and the tangle has become an arabesque
more delicately ordered than the fabulous doodles in the margins of
Celtic manuscripts. In this same state of consciousness I have seen a
woodland at fall, with the whole multitude of almost bare branches and
twigs in silhouette against the sky, not as a confusion, but as the lacework
or tracery of an enchanted jeweler. A rotten log bearing rows of fungus
and patches of moss became as precious as any work of Cellini — an in-

wardly luminous construct of jet, amber, jade, and ivory, all the porous
and spongy disintegrations of the wood seeming to have been caned out
with infinite patience and skill. I do not know whether this mode of
vision organizes the world in the same way that it organizes the body, 01
whether it is just thai the natural world is organized this way.

There also are curious visual experiences in which everything is seen

with very great detail and with equal claritj regardless of the comparative
:8.
*
MAT I K LAR WE I N. Ak-
•tract Vision in Form
of Spanish
Landscape. Oil and tempera on distances of the things seen. This is exemplified in Klarwein's painting of
:anvas. 60 x 41". 1963.
a beach, above which rise tiers of stone walls. In this painting, a pebble

is seen as clearly as a large stone; and distance blurs nothing, so that the

stones in the wall in the foreground are seen as clearly but no more so

than the stones in the ever smaller walls that recede up the hill.

If awareness is internalized and focused on the body, there mav be

an acute sense of humming nerves, coursing blood, heartbeat, or other
physiological process. The rhythms of heartbeat or of breathing may be
projected onto objects, world, and universe, until there is a sense of

synchronous oneness and harmonious relationship with the cosmic proc-

ess. As the person breathes, a flower may be observed to breathe with

the same frequency and depth. The heartbeat of the cosmos is heard
and is the same as one's own. We have mentioned how such body
sounds, recorded and amplified, have been used in various mixed-media

attempts to induce or re-create altered states of consciousness. There is

no doubt that some persons make a strong emotional response to these

kinds of stimuli.
 It is also on the sensory level that the mental processes first acceler- 96 £ Art &• psychedelic
experience
ate, time is "slowed down," and great numbers of mental events may be
compressed into small segments of clock-measured time. Synesthesias
(cross-sensing) may appear, with the person "hearing colors" or "seeing

sounds." The cidetic images first emerge on this level. If these images are

representational, they have here no discernible symbolic or other mean-

ing beyond themselves but just are. The sensory-level images typically

lack continuity, so that they seem more like a flowing sequence of slide

projections than a motion picture. Moreover, there is no recognizable

associational link between succeeding images. When, rarely, the imagery

does have continuity and a kind of story line unfolds, the narrative is ex-

perienced as having no personal relevance. It would seem to be pure,

gratuitous entertainment— mind at creative play.

The necessity of coming to terms with these phenomena decondi-

tions the person of old ways of sensing, thinking, and feeling. This

creates an openness to new ways of being that permits further develop-

ment and deepening of the experience. A result can be the breaching of

walls that ordinarily separate conscious and unconscious minds. Then

consciousness comfortably accepts the emergence of a mass of usually

unconscious materials.
At this point, many persons turn away from their preoccupation

with the external world and their sensory-level experiencing of it. They
"descend" to the second, recollective-analytic level, where the explora-
tion is of one's own mental "inner space." The concern is increasingly

with self-analysis and personal problems and values. Long-forgotten and

also repressed experiences may come up freelv and sometimes be vividly

relived. In general, phenomena of this second level are the ones with

which psychoanalysis deals, and so this might also be described as a

"Freudian" level of consciousness. It is the level of the literal stuff of a

life's history and the complexes and fantasies built upon experiential

foundations. As such, it is a level whose materials differ from the svm-

bolic, race-historical, cvolutionarv, and other more universal experience of
the still deeper levels. Espcciallv interesting is the fact that the psv-
chedelic artists, having access to this lode of smoldering trauma with its

smoky fantasy, with few exceptions choose to make no use of it at all.

Should there occur in a work of art any forms or motifs with which
analysis has made us familiar, the artist to whom this is pointed out is

likely casually to accept or reject it, shrugging it off as being unimportant.

Major symbols and themes no longer arc taken, as bv the Freud-
Oriented surrealists, from neuroses and dreams. Psychedelic art. like

psychedelic psychotherapy, proclaims the long overdue news that Freud,

in the sense of most present use oi Ins ideas, is dead! The artist declines

knowingl} to exhibit or attempt to exorcise his own neurosis, if any,

97 through the medium of his art. He rejects the now all-too-familiar motifs

of madness, aberration, degeneration. He feels he has something better

to communicate. Essentially, this is life — a life moving forward, dancing
and ecstatic, one with the cosmic process, not a maimed, defeated, or

alienated life slipping shudderingly back into death.

The relationship to surrealism bears some further discussion. Psy-

chedelic artists, like surrealist artists, are concerned with depth probes of

the psyche and create a basically psychological art. As art "movements"

we can say of both what Patrick Waldberg has said of the surrealists,

that: "It is not a question of a school or a formal movement, but of a

spiritual orientation." Yet these two movements diverge at many crucial

points.

Especially, they diverge in their values, and it is in the area of

values that psychedelic art is distinctly advanced in relation to surrealism.

Presently, of course, the two movements also differ very greatly in ac-

complishment. Many artists of considerable merit have contributed to

the remarkable body of art that is surrealism. Mature artists and signifi-

cant works of art are still rare in a psychedelic art that is only in process
of emergence. But psychedelic art appears to have a values base that is

favorable to growth and to the production of a less limited art than

could arise from the surrealist world view and understanding of the mind.
Psychedelic artists do not, by and large, consider that they are deal-

ing with the marvelous. Inward realities are not necessarily more real than
external ones. In the case of the archetypes or noumena, these may be
comparatively more essential and enduring than the objects of the mate-
rial world. This, the psychedelic artist would say, is because the former
are rooted in man's genetic inheritance. They are part of his evolutionary

links with the past and change slowly as compared to objective, external

phenomena.
Surrealism was exclusive; psychedelic art is inclusive: it does not

withdraw from the external world but rather affirms the value of inward-
ness as complementary awareness. The aim of psychedelic experience is

to expand the consciousness so that it can be a consciousness of more.

Unlike surrealism, psychedelic art makes a basic tenet of spiritual har-

monv with the universe. Psychedelic art is not antagonistic to the reli-

gious art of the past and does not find its affinities with daemonic and

heretical art as such. It is more mature than surrealism in declining to

equate the beautiful with the bizarre. It has no fascination with madness

or the hallucinations of madness. It seeks out the images and other phe-
nomena to be found in the depths of the normal but expanded mind. It

shares with surrealism, and much other art, the intent to shock the viewer

into a transformed awareness.

Where surrealism is magical, psychedelic art would be scientific in

its approach to "mind." It also would be religious and mystical and finds 98 % Art 6- psychedelic
experience
no incongruity between being all these things; in fact, it might be called

a scientific-religious or a mystical-scientific art. In some ways more naive

than surrealism, psychedelic art has yet to work its way through a kind

of childish wonder at the realities uncovered in the altered states. Par-

ticularly, psychedelic art tends to be naive in its metaphysical outlook

and in its religious and mystical awarenesses. These are generally shallow
and rather primitive. Barry Schwartz calls psychedelic art "the surrealism

of a technological age." This is true if we understand that psychedelics,

with technology, have worked a transvaluation of many of surrealism's

concerns.

Those who regard the unconscious from a Freudian perspective are

likely to cast themselves in the role of black magicians. In calling up the

contents of the unconscious they are calling up demons. This magical

attitude is alien to the psychedelic artist, who tends not to fear the

unconscious or think of it as something tabooed. The contents of the

deeper levels of consciousness are, like objects beyond the eye's reach,

simply there to come into awareness when the proper stimulus has been

applied. With regard to externals, one enlarges one's awareness, and

much that was excluded before is now available.

Involved here is a view of consciousness that holds that much is

normally excluded by the mind because it would be distracting or lacks

survival value. This theory was mentioned by Henri Bergson and applied
to psychedelic experience by Aldous Huxley. In psychedelic experience,
said Huxley, the tunneling or screening function of consciousness is

suspended; the inhibitors are inhibited; and what was always there is now
free to enter in. We would like to suggest again that the mind also seems
to manifest a tendency to creative play in psychedelic experience. Per-

ception plays jokes and enhances the beauty of things. A variety of psy-

chodynamic mechanisms seem to behave in a similar way. Mind, liber-

ated from its everyday tasks, takes a holiday and gives free rein to all sorts

of capacities normally kept in check. The liberated psychedelic mind

is also able to initiate self-healing and growth processes, as we have de-

scribed in our book, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience.

On the third, symbolic level, the expansion involves basically a

movement beyond the particular-personal and toward the personal-uni-

versal — a movement toward broadening contexts and more universal for-

mulations. The person experiences historical events, evolutionary proc-

ess, myths and rituals, cither as spectator or as participant If he is a

participant, the senses can respond as to real events. Emotional involve

men! then is strong, and there remains only a slight residual awareness
thai the events participated in are fictitious.

The person may lx present at the

v
Roman Games, the building of a
oo pyramid, the storming of the Bastille, the painting of the Sistine Chapel.
As the eidetic images unfold, he may witness an incredibly rich portrayal

of the beginnings and subsequent development of life upon this earth.

At the same time, his body may be experienced as undergoing many

metamorphoses, as he becomes various of the life forms simultaneously
envisioned by him.
Or the person may image rituals in which he participates with all

his senses and with profound emotion, so that the rite of passage can
have the same effect as an actual rite, significantly advancing him toward
maturity. Someone else may image the archetypal figures of fairy tales,

legends, or myths, and perhaps discover the broad patterns of his own
life as he identifies with Prometheus, Parsifal, Oedipus, Faust, Don
Juan, or some other figure. In these mythic symbolic dramas, too, the

sense of participation may be complete as the images continue in a mean-

ingful sequence and the svmbols emerge undisguised and relevant to the

person's life and problems. Any one of these experiences — historical,

evolutionary, mythic, or ritualistic —may be beautiful, profoundly emo-

tional, and important for the person.

The experiencing of mythologies in psychedelic states would seem

to incorporate myths of almost every time and place. Of course, the ex-

perience of any one person is more limited; but even one person in one
session may deal with myths and mythic themes both Western and
Eastern, ancient and modern, primitive and civilized. The artist, while

he often has had such experience, tends to avoid in his art specific

mythologies and traditional archetypal figures. He may use broad mythic

themes, but for his symbols and archetypes he turns to the world of na-
ture and especially to the data of science. Then, for example, an experi-
ence or myth of rebirth no longer concretizes in a god figure. The new
mythology tends to be unpeopled and ungodded. Rather, the process it-

self may be deified and symbols taken from what in the psyche as well as

in nature is more fundamental than the old mythic archetypes: energy,

basic matter, the Heraclitean flux. Whether in Irwin Gooen's light

paintings, Edward Randel's lumia, or the oil paintings of Bernard Saby

(color plate 17), Tom Blackwell (color plates 1 5 & 16), and many of the

others, organic forms or thrusting energies are the main communicants

of the mythic message.

Familiar legendary and mythic figures do sometimes make their ap-

pearance in the art. Ernst Fuchs' Cherub (color plate 12), Ortloff's In-
halation and Exhalation (color plate 26), and various works of Arlene

Sklar-Weinstein, for example, contain some well-known if psychedel-

icized figures. The mandala itself is one of the more frequent and in-

teresting forms encountered. Buddhas appear with some frequency, as

do swamis and other Eastern gurus. For the most part, these seem
especially anachronistic and otherwise out of place in an art of the now 100 % Art b- psychedelic
xpenence
that sometimes surrounds them with products of our own technology
To defend this as "paradox" will not do.

On the deepest, integral level, the psychedelic experience is one of

psychological integration, "illumination," and a sense of self-transforma-

tion. In our experimental work with psychedelics, only a small percent-

age of the subjects ever reached this deep level. How many artists have
reached it, no one can say. Not in art or elsewhere do we find an entirely
successful attempt to communicate experience that men of all times and

places have tended to agree is essentially incommunicable.

The integral level seems always to be one of religious or mystical
experience. Whether some other way of experiencing this level is pos-

sible, we do not know. Here the ideas, images, body sensations (if any),

and emotions are fused in what is felt to be an absolutely purposive proc-

ess culminating in a sense of self-understanding, self-transformation, reli-

gious enlightenment, and possibly mystical union. The person here ex-

periences what he regards as a confrontation with the Ground of Being,

God, Mysterium, Noumenon, Essence, or Fundamental Reality. The con-

tent of the experience is self-validating and known to be true. There is no
question at all that these experiences are of profound depth levels of the

self. In no apparent way do thev differ from other religious and mvstical
experiences traditionally accepted as authentic.

After such an experience there is likelv to be a powerful wish to

communicate what has happened. Some of the psychedelic art mav be
thus motivated. What complicates the matter, however, is that pseudo-

religious and less profound types of mystical experience can occur on

even the sensory level of psychedelic states. Practitioners of voga and
Zen also frequently mistake these more shallow experiences for the more
profound ones. Thus we have the present-dav proliferation of people
whose claims to religious and mystical enlightenment properlv amuse or
stir feelings of pity in those who know them. The psychedelic subcul-
ture teems with such persons. The artists, most of whom do not belong
to this subculture, but manv of whom have been affected bv it, also tend

to be naive with regard to religious and mvstical experience. Some are

self-deluded in these areas, and, as mentioned, manv of them deal rather

shallowly with the spiritual or deep psychological awarenesses they would

like to communicate.
The hunger for some kind of religious or transcendental experience

is genuine. Especially so in America and some other countries where, for

the first time in history, main millions of people no longer have a

primarily economic concern. Among some of these people, a religious

man is replacing the old economic man. At the same tune, the tra-

ditional religions are felt by more and more people to be inadequate

 —
101 They do not, for one thing, provide means of personal growth; and the
ritual content of much psychedelic experience suggests that this is one
critical area of failure. These facts explain some of the appeal of psy-

chedelics and also the current embracing of superficial but new and sen-
sational religions with their false gods and prophets.
Xenophanes, in the sixth century B.C., remarked that if horses could

create works of art, the gods that they painted would all look like horses.
The gods painted by lions would look like lions; and the oxen, too, would
create their gods in their own image: even as men do. From time to time

and from place to place the metamorphoses of the gods, and of God,
have been many. Too often we get the impression that in our own time
and place, against a God who is called dead, there are arising gods who
are teenagers. Their prophets, who are also their inventors, are aging,

perennial adolescents who hardly need to be named.

Much psychedelic art is presently limited by some degree of adher-

ence to these pseudo-theologies and neo-primitive concepts. There is no

reason why it must remain so. When circumstances are more favorable,
a profoundly spiritual art should be able to emerge.

Psychedelic sensibility

The use throughout the world of plants that produce LSD-type states of

consciousness predates history. The new synthetic chemicals are some-

what more potent and have fewer immediate odious side effects, but the

ages-old plants afford similar changes in perception and similar profound,

multi-leveled awarenesses. Why is it that only now large numbers of

artists are producing work concerned with psychedelic experience?

Any attempt to answer this question must involve a considerable

measure of guesswork. Today's psychedelic art, along with the psy-

chedelic movement generally, must be seen as to some extent the prod-
uct of historical accident. Specifically, there is the coincidental develop-

ment of synthetic psychedelics and an increasingly prevalent turning

inward on the part of Western man. The ease with which LSD in par-

ticular can be made and distributed has surely been a factor. So have

present-day communications media, which quickly informed artists,

among others, of the existence and experiential possibilities of the new

drugs.

The challenge posed by these chemicals is exciting. They make pos-

sible exploration by everyman of what seems one of the last frontiers

"inner space." That the exploration can be hazardous may add to the

challenge for the adventurous spirit of artists.

 In societies where psychedelic-like substances have been in use for 102 Art & psychedelic
experience
centuries, there is not likely to be the same excitement of discovery, and
individual responses may by now have become rather uniform.

Nonetheless, it is in just such societies, notably in those of the Far

and Middle East, that we would expect to find a substantial body of art

of at least some period profoundly influenced by and concerned with

psychedelic experience. Hashish and other hemp products, opium, and

various species of "magic mushrooms" have been in use in many Near

and Far Eastern societies for hundreds and even thousands of years. All

qq. chf.n HVNO-SRON, Chinese

sage contemplating Ling-cWfc, the
Divine Mushroom. Seventeenth cen-
tury. Collection Wango Weng, New
York.
io 3 of these can produce vivid eidetic imagery and in other respects provide

psychedelic or psychedelic-like experiences. Thus, surely, at some point

in history they would have had their impact on art; and it makes better

sense to suppose that these widely used substances significantly affected

the art of Eastern cultures than to believe that somehow the art was not

affected. Nor does the argument rest there. So much Eastern art of the
past bears such a close resemblance to contemporary psychedelic art and

imagery that, once again, it is more reasonable to affirm a relationship to

psychedelic experience than to attempt to deny such a relationship.

On the other hand, why do we find no literature relating these

Eastern works of art to chemically induced experience? The relevant cul-

tures have not been, after all, very reticent in recording relationships

between psychochemicals and other varieties of experience, including the

religious and the sexual. It is possible that they distinguished between

experiences such as the religious and the sexual which occurred during

the psychedelic state, and works of art, created subsequent to that state.

Thus, although the latter may have expressed the content of psychedelic

experience, there may not have been the same sense of a cause-effect re-

lationship.

Possibly some artists may have felt, too, that any admission that
their art was related to psychedelic experience would give the impression

that they lacked imagination and were dependent upon such experience.
There are those who make a similar charge against contemporary psy-
chedelic artists. However, the charge lacks foundation in most cases, and
the artists, as we have pointed out, are expressing what seems to them
experience with which their art ought to be concerned. Most dealt with

other kinds of experience in the past, and most will undoubtedly go on

in the future to deal with still other, nonpsychedelic experiences.

Another point concerning the apparent absence of a psychedelic

art in some societies is that, historically and anthropologically, the plant

sources of psychedelic substances have often been regarded as sacred and

their use controlled bv priests and shamans. The plants have been vener-
ated as gods and only an elite could be allowed to acquire the supposed

divine insights and various supernatural powers. Or the plants have been

used as sacraments and as a means of inducing religious experiences, such

as visions and other awarenesses of the presence of the god or gods. The
extent to which religious ideas have been indebted to psychedelic ex-

perience is unknown, but surely the debt is very great. For instance, Mary
Barnard inquires, in The American Scholar:

What . . . was more likely to happen first, the spontaneously generated

notion of an afterlife in which the disembodied soul, liberated from the
restrictions of time and space, experiences eternal bliss, or the accidental
discover^* of hallucinogenic plants that give a sense of euphoria, dislocate
 the center of consciousness, and distort time and space, make them 104 9 Art 6- psychedelic
halloon outward in greatly expanded vistas? . . . the [latter] experience experience

might have had ... an almost explosive effect on the largely dormant
minds of men, causing them to think of things they never had thought
of before. This, if you like, is direct revelation.

Doubtless there is religious art of the past related to psychedelic ex-

perience, but historians have been unable to establish a definite relation-

ship. Certainly, where psychedelics have sacred significance, we should

not expect to find a psychedelic art of a nonreligious character.
This question of a possible relationship between psychochemicals
and art of the past is important and provides almost endless ground for
speculation. It cannot be given an extended treatment in a work con-
cerned primarily with the contemporary movement. But it seems highly
improbable that there should not be in existence a great many works of

art arising out of psychedelic experience. Future studies might establish

this and might also explain why the facts remain obscure.
There is probably a psychedelic art of sorts in the form of some
curious stone sculptures found in the Guatemalan highlands that go
back at least as far as 1500 b.c. The figures are mushrooms out of whose
stems emerge the head of a god. Such figures occur as Aztec artifacts as

late as the ninth century a.d. There are also relevant Aztec codices pre-
dating the Spanish conquest. One portrays the goddess of the sacred

60. Mushroom Stone. Sculpture

found in Guatemala. Reproduced
from R. G Wasson's Mushrooms,
Russia and Ilision- hv permission of
the author.
6i. tepantitla fresco. Soul Arriving on the Playing Fields of Paradise.
Detail of pre-conquest mural painting bv Mexican tribe known to be ritual users
of psychedelic mushrooms. Reproduced from R. G. Wasson's Mushrooms,
Russia and History by permission of the author.

(psychedelic) mushroom as she uses it successfully to tempt the god

Quetzalcoatl. Rites utilizing the mind-altering mushrooms still survive

among the Mazatec Indians of Mexico. And we might ask ourselves, as

does R. G. Wasson, whether the Tepantitla fresco "was not inspired

by the visions that the mushrooms of Paradise give to those who eat
them."
Some impressive religious psychedelic art has come out of the Native

American Church. The almost one quarter of a million American Indians

who belong to this church use peyote as their sacrament. During the
course of all-night religious ceremonies the Indians sing and pray and ex-

perience visions (eidetic imagery) that often include Christian as well as

traditional Indian religious archetypes. Some of this imagery has been

used by the Indian painters.

Such artists as Ernest Spybuck, Stephen Mopope, and Tsa Toke
have created many works directly related to their peyote experiences. Tsa
Toke, a Kiowa who died in 1956, painted mystical visions of the peyote
 62. t s a tore. The Cormorant Bird. One of a series of paintings inspired bv
the pevote ritual of the Kiowa Indians.

cactus, impressions of the pevote ritual, and symbols first seen bv him
.is cidctic images. Of Ins psychedelic experiences, lie wrote: "I went into
.1 meeting once and had ;i vision. I took the herb once and began to un-
derstand the time had come for further knowledge about this Cormorant
io 7 The
bird. consciousness awakened." The bird as a religious symbol recurs

repeatedly in his art.

Oliver La Fargc has said of Tsa Toke's work:

The paintings are extraordinary. They are symbolic, imaginative, with a

striking, mystic quality. . . . Tsa Toke's accompanying words are equally
remarkable. They leave no doubt that he is showing us a genuine religious

art. As competitor both with Christianity and with the older, Indian reli-
gions, the Peyote cult has been violently attacked, and particularly on
grounds that it is not a true religion. Tsa Toke has powerfully answered
that charge.

63. tsa toke. Morning in Peyote Tepee.

It is interesting that the Indian psychedelic art we have seen sug-

gests an eidetic imagery almost wholly free from the influences of the
non-Indian American culture. Christian religious imagery would be the
main exception. Also, apart from shared religious and mystical awareness,
American Indian psychedelic art bears very little resemblance to the
products of the present movement. The highly formalized character of

most Indian art must of course be considered. But published accounts

suggest that the peyote state perceptions as well as the imagery of the

Indians may be quite different from those of the new psychedelic artists.

In any case, we think that comparative cross-cultural studies of psy-

 im t

64. STEPHEN MOP OPE. P(T\Ote

Meeting. Watercolor. - x io 1 -*". 1930.

Collection Museum of the American
Indian, Heve Foundation. New York.

clicdelic experience might do much to tell us about what is universal in

human consciousness. Eidctic imagery could be the means of uncovering

ancient and forgotten interactions between peoples.

By comparison there is a great deal of past Western art that sug-

gests perceptions and other awarenesses closclv akin to those reflected in

contemporary psychedelic art. These artists of the past cannot be called

psychedelic artists; but it may be that we can speak of a psychedelic

sensibility. When phenomenological and other studies of altered states

of consciousness have been refined, we will have the possibilitv of a

critical psychology of art that may settle main- questions about the
mental states and perceptual processes of artists of the past. For now. we
have to look for psychedelic sensibility on a basis move intuitive than

scientific.
109 In concern with patterns such
its as intricate arabesque designs, psy-
chedelic art resembles some of the art of the mystic on the one hand
and of the psychotic on the other. What this means is that a preoccupa-

tion with patterns tends to accompany intense inward states of various

kinds. The patterns of the psychotic tend to manifest disintegration;

those of the mystic, integration. Intense inward states without spiritual

content can produce a patterning that is wholly decorative and seems

to go nowhere. When the artist is neurotic, he mav present us with
meandering, intricate doodles that give an impression of compulsion
or of being lost. The lines move, but the artist seems to be in a labyrinth

and unable to find his way out; or he moves aimlessly and perhaps obses-

sively, as if he has nowhere to go but still cannot rest. Psychedelic pattern

art does not manifest disintegration. It tends to be integrative, although
there are also designs that seem to go nowhere and doodles that seem to

be obsessive or compulsive or evidential of a fruitless effort to emerge

from some painful mental problem area. Edith Hamilton, in The Greek
Way, remarks:

The mystical artist always sees patterns. The symbol, never quite real,

tends to be expressed less and less realistically, and as the reality becomes
abstracted the pattern comes forward. The wings on Blake's angels do
not look like real wings, nor are they there because wings belong to
angels. They have been flattened, stylized, to provide a curving pointed

frame, the setting required bv the pattern of the composition. In Hindoo

art and its branches, stylization reaches its height. Human figures are

stylized far beyond the point of becoming a tvpe; they too are made into
patterns, schematic designs of the human body, an abstraction of hu-
manity. In the case of an Eastern rug all desire to express any semblance
of reality has gone. Such a work of art is pure decoration. It is the ex-
pression of the artist's final withdrawal from the visible world, essentially
his denial of the intellect.

Much mvstical art reflects psychedelic sensibility. It suggests that

similar psvchodvnamic and neurological factors underlie the works of the

mystical and the psychedelic artists. In the case of Blake, who often took

inspiration from spontaneous and vivid eidetic imager}

-

, the affinity with

psychedelic art is quite plain. We think of Jacob's Dream and Beulah

Enthroned on a Sunflower; and of the Hell Gate and the Circle of the
Lustful, in his illustrations to Dante.

At the same time, we should not make the error of supposing that

artists ever naturally and spontaneously experience the fullness of the

psychedelic state. At most, they may experience only some of its phe-

nomena; thev will never, unless they are authentic mystics, know its pos-

sible intensity. "Psychedelic sensibility" may include perceptions and

awarenesses differing only in degree from those of psychedelic experience,

but the difference of degree would be so great as to be tantamount to a
 no % Art 6- psychedelic
experience

65. WILLIAM BLAKE. The

Circle of the Lustful. Watercolor.
Eighteenth century. Collection Otv
Museum and Art Gallery, Birming-
ham, England. An illustration for
Dante's Divine Comedy.

difference in kind. It is unlikely that one can fully grasp the radical altera-

tions of consciousness produced by psychochemicals without having had

a profound psychedelic experience. And after such an exposure, any
suggestion that "all art is psychedelic," or that artists are naturally en-

dowed with a full-fledged "psychedelic consciousness," lacks credibility.

Blake anticipates art nouveau, and representatives of that nine-

teenth-century movement produced many works manifesting psychedelic

sensibility. Arthur Heygatc Mackmurdo, for example, created wallpaper

designs that would look familiar to anyone who has even a slight ac-

quaintance with psychedelic art. He was strongly influenced by Blake.

In many of its mystical, symbolist, and fantastic aspects, art nouveau

is suggestive of psychedelic art. More basically, there is an awareness of

66.arthvr a v r c \ t b 11

\n»r o. YV.1llp.1pcr design. 10 :

Collection Victoria and Albert Mu-

seum. London.
 organic line that could have emerged from psychedelic experience. It is

thus not surprising that some psychedelic artists have revived the art

nouveau style and that the work of many others is related to it in form.

The past artists of psychedelic sensibility, and the present psy-

chedelic artists as well, might be separated into categories of those who

suggest the sensory level perceptions and images and those who suggest
the more profound awarenesses of the deepest levels. A few artists, of
whom Blake may be one, would seem to stand with a foot in each of the

several categories.

Many so-called "eccentric" artists belong among those of psy-

chedelic sensibility who give us the primarily sensory level-type percep-

tions and images. Ivan Albright would be an example, with his Self-

Portrait at 55 East Division Street. The pointillistic etchings of Hercules

Seghers would be another example. Some rather shallow mystical art,

such as Wols' Komposition, we would assign to this class. The relevant

art nouveau also belongs here. The jewel-encrusted, inwardly glowing,

mythic paintings of Gustave Moreau are works, like Blake's, that stand

6~J.
IVAN ALBRIGHT. Sdf-Por- on a borderline, reflecting both depths and shallows of a psychedelic-like
55 East Division Street. Litho-
trait at

graph. 1947. Collection The Art

consciousness. The art of psychedelic sensibility moves out of the shal-

Institute of Chicago. lows with the works of Pavel Tchclitchew, beginning with Hide-and-
Seek and ranging through the "celestial physiognomies" to such mystical
geometric abstractions as Genesis and Inacheve.
Better than anv works of art we have seen, these abstractions seem

68. gustave moreau. The Pretenders

 69. PAVEL TCHELITCHEW.
Hide-and-Scck. 1940-42. Collection
The Museum of Modem Art. New
York. Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund.

able to express the psychedelic religious consciousness of sophisticated

modern man. Tchehtchcw is said to have died with the feeling that he
had not yet finished his Hell-Purgatorv-Paradi.se trilogv, of which the
first two were Phenomena and Hide-and-Seek. No doubt this is true, but
surely he was ncaring his goal in the paintings we have mentioned. For
in the last works we do find a profound, extraordinary consciousness of

the basic structures of Being as apprehended on the deepest psychical

levels.

I he birth agonies of the final splendid vision were apparent in }Udc

"3 and-Seek. In our terms, we might conjecture that the painting described
his struggle down through the symbolic level of consciousness, and that

with the mystical abstractions he was trying to communicate an integral

vision possibly more basic than he recognized.

How did Tchelitchew grasp the integral vision, or something very

closely akin to it? What we know of his life provides manv hints, al-

though no conclusive answers.

In his last years, the artist pursued with fierce intensity the revela-

tion of "Paradise" essential to the completion of his trilogv. Always a

70. pavel tchelitchew. Genesis. 19 54. Collection Oliver B. Jennings,

New York.
dedicated occultist, he brought a hermetic perspective to his contempla- 114 # Art 6- psychedelic
experience
tion of recent scientific findings and theories concerning relationships

between matter and light, space/time, and the primordial cosmic energy.

It may be that intense concentration on these themes, strongly reinforced

by the strength of his desire — in effect, a prolonged, successful medita-

tion — finally revealed to him contemporary forms expressive of a funda-

mental reality. Never a mystic in the traditional sense and having, so far

as we can learn, no background of exposure to psychedelic chemicals,

Tchelitchew nonetheless did fathom deep levels of the self, to bring back
new archetypes appropriate to the needs of modern man. For this, the

evidence resides in the work; it is only concerning the means to the

vision that we are left in doubt.

Did Tchelitchew, dying, feel he lacked vision or, rather, that his

powers of expression were inadequate? If it was the former, then there

is a remarkable irony here. For those artists of today who believe that

they have glimpsed the Ultimate Reality have given us no image so con-

vincing as Tchelitchew's efforts to realize what, for him, may have re-

mained only imaginable and so somehow lacking authenticity. What did

Tchelitchew understand by "Paradise"? And may it not be —and this

could have been his error —that Paradise is the Ground of Being and
that, in some cases at least, it must be precisely with imagination that the

vision of Paradise is grasped? Then we must suppose some affective fail-

ure accompanying the authentic vision; or, possibly, an overriding and

daemonic skepticism following in the vision's wake.

Another kind of profound psychedelic-type awareness is found in the

paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Probably, of all the artists of the past,

none is more evocative of multiple aspects of the psychedelic experience

than Bosch. In his uses of color and light, space relationships, time, cari-

cature, symbolic overload, and in other ways he repeatedly gives evidence

of a psychedelic sensibility or consciousness. It is not this consciousness,
however, but a profound pessimism and disillusionment with man that

peoples his manifold worlds with their monsters, demons, and other

teeming horrors. Where these appear, he becomes in effect the chroni-

cler supreme of the bad trip.

In Bosch, wc find castles constructed of beetles or of lobsters; birds

larger by far than men, and strawberries that weigh us down by their

mammoth proportions; a giant oyster, a huge knife, a pair of ears, an

owl's head, a harp — all drastically out of scale and scattered among
swarming hordes of men and women, demons and fantastic animals.

Simple everyday objects, like his monstrous beings, become the most pre-

cise embodiments of unconscious fears and character defects.

Everything in the paintings is metaphorically related and the whole

is seen in its relation to eternity. At the same time, there is a suspension
 A
H

i
-
, fc

i
'I. HIERONYMUS BOSCH.
The Garden of Delights- c. 1 500. Col-
lection The Prado, Madrid

<H
X *!
of all normal spatial and temporal categories. As the Bosch scholar de 116 £ Art 6- psychedelic
experience
Tolnay has noted, the painter's figures and landscapes appear to be gov-

erned by the laws of a magical space wherein things gravitate freely to-

ward one another and buildings stand upon a liquid surface, as in the

Hell section of the triptych Garden of Delights. What Bosch gives is a

very different order of reality, one that shatters the laws of space-time but

emerges nonetheless as perfectly consistent on its own transmuted, other-

worldly terms. As in the psychedelic experience, this new reality confuses

us at first, but finally we make it our own. Then the return to our normal

world requires a process of reentry and reaccommodation.

Bosch's work (and, to a lesser extent, Brueghel's) testifies to his re-

markable depth-psychological awareness and understanding. But it testi-

fies, also, to the late medieval world's sophistication concerning the un-

conscious and the multi-leveled realities accessible to those not confined

by their need for an exclusively "objective world." This sophistication

went, of course, hand in hand with a great deal of superstition; but the
understanding was extensive and profound. Psychedelic experience re-

opens old doors slammed closed by the glorification of reason which

began in the Renaissance and by the dogmas and biases of several long-
dominant schools in psvchology and psychotherapy.

-z. lotte jacob i. Untitled.

"Photogenic." iq66.
The works on these pages were created bv artists who have not used psvcho-
chemicals, but who have experienced altered states of consciousness which are, as
they are described, similar to psychedelic states.

73. i ngo s waNN . Kismet no. 3. 60 x 60". 1966.

74. N AHUM t s c ha c b a s o v. Skull of a Bird on the River Styx. Oil on

canvas. 30 x 40". 1962.
 The uses ofpsychedelic experience

There was very little use of psychedelics by contemporary artists until the

mid-i 950's, when Huxley published eloquent accounts of his mescaline

experiences. In The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, he pro-

posed a number of connections between psychedelic experience and the

perceptions and states of consciousness suggested by works of art. A few
artists then began to experiment, mostly with peyote. However, there was
nothing resembling an art movement until the present decade. Most psy-

chedelic artists are children of the tragicomic debacle that has marked
the emergence of the age of psychochemistry, especially psychedelics.

A pioneer in psychedelic art was Henri Michaux. As early as 1957,

Michaux exhibited in London a collection of works representing mes-

caline "visions" and said to have been executed by him while he was in

75, 11 1: Nr i m i c 11 a x. Scene from motion picture. ImagK du Monde

Visionaire, produced by Eric Duvivier. This scene is described bj Michaux as .1

mescaline vision in his book. Miserable Miracle. Photograph courtesy ol

Sciencefilm, P.iris.
 the mescaline-induced state. Ernst Fuchs, another European pioneer, is

not so widely known in connection with psychedelics, but is perhaps as

much concerned with psychedelic experience as Michaux.
LSD-type experience, as wc have noted, can be powerful enough to
transform the work of an artist almost totally. It can motivate people to
become creatively active and it can alter basic creative process even in an
artist whose work patterns have developed over many years and seem
firmly established. Much more often, psychedelics simply "give an ex-

perience," but an experience of such importance that the artist may

want to make it the principal concern of his art.

.76. ernst fuchs. Psalm 69 (detail)

The conclusions drawn from the very few scientific studies made in

the United States before the government prohibited such research were

divided on whether artists and some other creative people can profit sub-

stantially from psychedelic experience. However, since so much can

depend upon the structure of experiments, and upon the personalities of

those conducting them, these factors too would have to be studied in as-

sessing any results. This has never been adequately done and experi-
mental findings to date are inconclusive by scientific standards. Tn any
case, the subjective testimony of the artists and the observable changes in

their work are factors that can hardly be ignored altogether.

Arlene Sklar-Weinstein illustrates some of the changes psychedelic

experience can effect in the work of a professional artist. Her one LSD
session, guided by a psychologist, was extremely rich in eidetic imagery.

There were myriad emerging and dissolving forms, pulsating colors, rising

and falling. A series of mythic dramas were imaged. Everything was ex-

perienced as participating in the unitive rhythms of life. She looked for

a long while at a fire that was burning in the fireplace. This fire became
deeply rooted in her mind and acquired symbolic dimensions. Subse-
quently, fire images have appeared on many occasions when she was
painting and have assumed an important place in her new work.
Sklar-Weinstein was deeply moved by LSD experience. For months
afterward, she intensively considered its implications for life in general,

for her life in particular, and for her art. She worked to bring the ex-

perienced flow of forms, the spontaneous patterning of the LSD state,

into her work. Radical changes began to occur.We have only to compare
her pre-LSD Self Portrait in Mirror with such post-LSD works as G and

Between Heaven and Hell-II (color plate 27) to observe how profound
the alterations have been. She describes the impact of the psychedelic

experience as she sees it:

Facets of the work continue to evolve since the LSD experience two
years ago, but the demarcation of before and after is quite clear.
Work prior to LSD, developed over a twenty-year span, was com-
petent but largely derivative since there was no clear center of emanation.
 Areas of color and detail were arbitrarily closed. In effect, the LSD ex-

perience made available again the "lost" and forgotten visual modalities

one has as a child.

The unbelievably beautiful, strange imagery, the expanded concept

of time and life in terms of millennia, not years, and most importantly,
the sharpened sense of the multi-dimensional qualities in my character,

are products of the LSD experience too powerful not to have found their
way into my work.

The post-session art has new motifs and is freer, livelier, and more
exciting. Creative process is very different for an artist who previously

was academic and almost wholly cerebral. Now. when she begins to

paint, there is a welling up of materials seemingly from the psychic

depths. This had never happened before her session. She often paints the
spontaneously occurring materials as they become available to her. This
gives a freedom not possible before, when everything had to be carefully
planned in advance.

As is true of almost all psychedelic art, Sklar-Weinstein's work is

concerned primarily with events on a cosmic scale and with myths

that is, with universals rather than with the particulars of human experi-

ence. She does not, however, as do some of the artists, appear to have

become abstracted from humanity.

Isaac Abrams is one of the most interesting, original, and promising

of the artists. He also may be the most purely psychedelic. His paintings

and drawings seem quite inconceivable apart from psychedelic experi-

--. ARLENE SKLAR-WEIN-
stein. Self -Portrait in .Mirror.
ence. Mixed media on wood. 4: x 72". 1965.
Abrams, who is still under thirty, had created nothing before his An example of the artist's work previ-
ous to her LSD session. Her other
first LSD session in 1965. After that session, he quickly developed a stvle works reproduced are post-psychedelic
that is intensely individual and vivid. experience.

Abrams's works might best be described as ecstatic inscapes. Thev

are charged with vitality, spontaneity, and ecstasy. The paintings abound
with the flora and fauna of the psychedelic world: mushrooms of all

shapes and sizes, dragons, dinosaurs, suns, fish, insects, scarabs, the
pcyotc button, other-worldly clams, snails, sea shells, vegetable fantasies,
eggs encasing strange cities, curious faces, fires, phalli, real and fantastic

fruits and flowers, sea anemones, polyps, and a multiplicity of serpents

slithering along an itinerary only the psychedelic eve could follow. There
arc vaginal symbols and cellular syntheses, futuristic architectures and
turtles, spiny-backed beings, amoebas, eves, molecular patterns, and a
multitude of unnamablc shapes and happenings. It all is propulsivclv

alive and dancing, pulsing, whirring, blinking on and off.

It is difficult to gauge the effects of psychedelic experience upon the

Creative process in this artist's case. The strong motivation to paint, he
attributes to a radical change in his overall world view. Abrams has told
us that before his LSD session he had been conscious of the world e\
78. arlene skla r-w E i N s T E i n. "G" Wood
. relief and acrylic. 60 x 36",
1966. The movement from representational concrete forms to abstraction and
universality seems typical of the influence of psychedelic experience on the purposes
of the artist. See ills. 105, 106, and 107 for other examples.

clusivelv in its material, logical, rational aspects. During the session, he

discovered that there was also a rich inward life — spiritual, pre- or extra-

logical, irrational or going beyond reason. At the same time, he first be-

came aware of the world as possessing a balance, a harmony, above all a

unity not evident to him before. Afterward, even on the city streets, his

awareness was mainlv of the sacred and the beautiful. These were the
things he felt compelled to express and he turned to painting and draw-

ing as the best means for this expression. Subsequent psychedelic experi-
ences have confirmed the world view of the first session. They also ap-

pear to have heightened the creative momentum.

For Abrams, as for Sklar-Weinstein, what appears on the canvas or

sheet of paper often is a surprise. Thoughts and images, he says, materi-

alize on the canvas, painted bv a brush that is experienced as a natural,

inseparable extension of the hand. Drawings emerge as if they were latent

in the paper. It is true that some artists function similarly in the absence
of any psychedelic experience, but the point is that, before such experi- 122 % Art 6 psychedelic
experience
ence, these particular artists did not. And the value of this kind of

creative process is agreed upon by most artists — whether it is a natural

gift or is made available bv psychedelic experience or by the long, arduous

self-disciplines practiced by Taoist and other Eastern painters.
It is not always possible, even after long conversation, to under-
stand exactly what the artist means when he says, for example, that he

"orchestrates upwclling patterns," or that "the painting emerges as if

latent in the canvas." This type of creative process evidently is not com-
patible with keen self observation. It does appear, however, that the art-

ists are describing processes traditionally called "inspiration," and not

some variety of automatic painting in a trance state. The chemical does
not "give" this inspiration, but it apparently can help the person who
already is sufficiently developed to free himself of remaining blocks to the
process.

Another of the artists, Allen Atwell, has painted in a private apart-

ment on New York's upper East Side a psvehedelic temple (color plates

3 & 4) that would be a remarkable work of art in any context. A single.

coherent, "environmental" painting, it covers the walls and ceiling of a

large rectangular room and extends into the adjoining spaces.

Atwell is a mature painter whose vision is the most complex we

have found among the American psychedelic artists. To render this

complexity, great spaces seem to be required, although in his smaller

paintings, which still arc large canvases, he is able on occasion to achieve

what seems to us a type of authentic mystical awareness.

Atwell. who has lived and studied in the East, savs that he paints in

the tradition of the Tibetan masters: mentally projecting visual images

upon the space before him and then painting what was seen. However
that may be, the temple, better than any work of art we have encoun-
tered, succeeds in creating a manifold psvehedelic world in which the
viewer can feel himself immersed.

The kev to Atwell's temple is that it is a temple —sacred space.

evoking an extended awareness. Except for a mandala over the fireplace,

the icons and religious symbols arc not localized as in the usual church

or temple, but rather permeate the whole. The entire room is a sweeping
iconography, .1 spiritual organism. One lias the feeling of being inside a

mind thai is psychedelically aware of multiple complex realities and

shadings of reality. Then one is not objectified as an idea in that mind.
but instead there is a sense of active participation in its intricate but
still uiut.ir\ mental processes
Before visiting the temple, we had seen color slides of manv of its

details What had impressed us most were certain monstrous forms

daemonic, fantastic beings, clusters ol eviscerated organs, ami other
79- isaac abrams. Untitled. Ink on paper. 14 x 17". 1967.

horrors. They suggested a work of considerable power, but also a terrify-

ing charnel-house vision out of Poe or Lovecraft, peopled by the in-

habitants of the world of Bosch. Thus the harmony of the spiritual vision

and, especially, its integration of images and "worlds," found us alto-

gether unprepared. It is an important accomplishment of Atwell's that

here, in this extraordinary room, he has given a satisfying, if temporary
and aesthetic, resolution to the old theological problem of the existence
of evil in the world. Here, for the moment, it does seem solved, as the

hideous, the grotesque, the painful, the malevolent are made to take
 8o. allen at well. Untitled. Oil on canvas. 1 14 x -S". 196

their place as essential, no longer evil, aspects of a beautiful and benefi-

cent, integrated, spiritual whole.

In psychedelic art we have yet to sec a more turned on and complex

creation than this work. Like the psychedelic experience itself, it would
seem to be, above all, evocative of the individual personality. The
temple is visionary, mystical, religious; it is certainly a psyche-manifest-

ing work of art.

. ii't «V consciousness

Nonetheless, the coming arts of consciousness grounded in neurophysi-

ology and psychedelic phenomenology may eventually bring to near-ex-

tinction the graphic aits .is we have known them. These then would be
integrated into mixed media creations produced not by solitary artists

but b\ teams ol different kinds ol artists working with scientists, en-

gineers, tci hnicians, and others We personal!) find this trend regrettable
is .1 I in t Ik 1 dilution ot the potencj ol the individual; but it appears to be
12 5
in progress. Consciousness, as it now is evolving, is not likely to be satis-

fied with static works of art, with their limited contexts, or with such
particulars as the color and light they may be able to offer as compared
to the mixed-media productions.
We do not have to choose between Conrad Fiedler and Sir Herbert

Read on the one hand, and Holderlin and Martin Heidegger on the
other, to decide whether art or poetry has been, and remains, the es-

sential instrument in the development of human consciousness. The de-

bate soon will be of primarily historical interest. The main determinants

of the future development of consciousness are more likely to be chemi-
cally initiated experience, direct and finely planned regulation of brain
function (enhanced learning and memory, accelerated thought, utiliza-

tion of the eidetic image processes), and the impact of an electronic

environment inclusive of mixed-media art forms and entertainment. In
all of these, great danger is implicit; but then, art and poetry were never
without dangers either.

Cassen and Stern, USCO, Don Snyder, in their very different mixed-

media creations, all point us toward the future. They also suggest at least

a few of the directions multi-media will take. A psychedelic art that

might expand awareness by richly detailed, faithful reconstruction of

sensory phenomena and imagery of psychedelic experience is but one of

these directions. Such reconstruction, if it is to be effective, demands ap-

plications of knowledge, understanding, instrumentation, and technique

going far bevond the immediate capabilities of the present artists. Mas-
tery of this form should provide an art that will elicit responses of signi-

ficant duration from levels of the psyche rarely ever touched by past art,

and then onlv momentarily. It is the duration of the response, including

the intense depth-level emotions, that will profoundly differentiate some

future art from all its antecedents.

Presentlv, some of the mixed-media artists who seek to induce al-

tered states of consciousness are working rather crudely with a concept of

"sensorv overload" that itself is primitive. Sensory overload, sensory dis-

tortion, and sensorv deprivation have produced a few isolated compon-

ents of psychedelic experience. But the effects so produced are rarely

pleasurable and do not constitute a valuable expansion of consciousness.

Stimulation of the senses may be one gateway to the psychedelic world;

but it will have to be more subtle and various, and rest upon much better

foundations of knowledge, than is now possible. In any case, induction

of true psychedelic states requires safeguards and conditions of control

that art alone cannot provide.

Eventually, mixed-media art may be able to activate all of the levels

of consciousness we have described. It will not give a psychedelic experi-

ence, or trigger identical brain chemical changes, but the same psychical
levels will be responsive to it. The mixed-media will provide intense sen- 126 % Art 6- psychedelic
experience
sory experiences, open the gates to the repressed and the forgotten, evoke
a symbolic and mythic consciousness, and finally activate levels that in

psychedelic experience are ones of profound spiritual awareness. Mixed-

media (or neurophysiological ) art thus should come to serve the needs of

religion and therapy as well as those of art and entertainment.

Jonas Mekas, after visiting some multi-media performances, had a
number of perceptive things to say. In New York's Village Voice, he re-

marked:

Very often while watching these shows, I ask myself: What are all these
lights doing? "What is the real meaning of the strobes? Where is all this

coining from or going to? Do any of the artists know the meaning and
effect and power (both healing and damaging) of colors and lights? I

have noticed very often how, suddenly, during certain surges of colors
and lights I became electrified, my nerves became jumpy as if somewhere
deep inside I were pierced with a knife, or, at other times, suddenly the
peace surrounds and takes over me. The same with the new sounds.
Yes, but that's what this is all about — partially: We are over the first,

experimental, private stage. Now we are thrown into the open, to find

out what this is all about, what it's doing to us. Man will find out soon
what the light is all about; what the color is all about; what the move-
ment is all about. The Pandora's box of light and color and motion has
been opened because the time was readv for it. There moments at
are
the Dom [a discotheque], and at the Riverside Museum, when I feel I
am witnessing the beginnings of new religions, that I find myself in
religious, mvstieal environments where the ceremonials and music and
body movements and the svmbolism of lights and colors are being dis-
covered and explored. The verv people who come to these shows have
all something of a religious bond between them. Something is happening
and is happening —and has something
fast it to do with light, it has
everything to do with —and evervbodv
light feels it and is in waiting

often, desperately.

Light, the sense of new religions beginning —visionary experience,

the mind's antipodes — Aldous Huxlev could have contributed so much

to this, and would have been fascinated by it. The mixed-media art is not
so advanced as Mekas suggests; but he has grasped its directions.

The time, he says, is reach- for it. But readv for what? The possibili-

ties arc main-. Consider just one of them.

Mekas mentions that a very old Pandora's box —one that has been

closed for several hundred years — is beginning to open once again, lie
calls it the Pandora's box of light, color, and motion. These, of course,

arc the components of the ritual and the cvokcrs of the ritual conscious-

ness. There is little doubt that the time is ripe for ritual.

Ritual as a viable method for man's catharsis and maturation — that

is. as a psychotherapeutic modality — has been suppressed or drastically
vitiated since tlic Renaissance In the past sixtv years we have witnessed
12'
the progress of ritual procedures from ritual repression (Puritan morals,

the Victorian era) and ritual analysis (the Freudians), to the present ex-

panded-consciousness ritual. Analysis served to exorcise the demons

generated by repression. Now those demons are dead, and the superego
is no longer formidable. The psychoanalytic rite thus is blocked and has
no means of freeing the personality. Now it systematically lavs down
repressions and strictures of its own in terms of its own schematics of
consciousness. The new altercd-consciousness rite is a freeing, a ritual

openness that assumes the death of the old demons and repressions. As
with the archaic rites of transition, its aim is the renewal of conscious-
ness, not just a catharsis. The use of color, light, and motion for such pur-

poses is coming back in our time because, for one thing, we have lived out

the usefulness of the ritual surrogates (old church and analysis) and need

the "true" rites of renewal and rebirth for the new ordering of our lives.

Lacking other means, the emerging new consciousness turns to the old
rituals as the vehicle of completion. The analytic ritual opened the door
to the personal unconscious; media-mix ritual may go deeper to open the
door to the transpersonal and universal.
In all psychedelic art there is excitement, the sense of exploration,
discovery, the opening of new frontiers of mind. The times are readv for

this as well, since in any case all of us stand at one of those crossroads

of history where a crisis of consciousness occurs, old realitv structures

break down, and a new consciousness emerges. This time, however, the

changes may be more drastic and expansive than anv that historv has
revealed to us. Psychopharmacology, psychedelic experience, electronic
communications, multi-media art, neurophvsiological and brain research

— all are advancing swiftly and all have the possibility of effecting the
most profound alterations of mind. The world of a century hence, in

terms of man's awareness of multiple realities, is likelv to differ more

from that of the present dav than does our world from the Egypt of the
Pharaohs.
Even the verv near future is going to reshape drastically our defini-
tions of normal consciousness and the safe limits of awareness. Conscious-

ness is still linked to survival in a world in which the dangers and needs

were different from those of the present. Our progress in the world has
outstripped the evolutionarv development of our bodies and especially

our brains. For instance, the selecting, filtering function of the cortex

screens out more than is required by the pragmatic requirements of

contemporary life. A brain still geared to a primitive world delimits our

reality and impedes many kinds of mental functioning. Now psycho-

chemistrv may be in the process of shaping a new, more desirable brain-

world balance. What is most important is that we thus may alter an
evolutionarv course that seemed headed toward production of an al-
most exclusively logical, rational, neo-cortical man, lacking in imagi- 128 £ Art 6- psychedelic
experience
nation and other necessities of artistic creation, and ever more a robot

or glorified ant at the mercy of his computer-like brain and its mathe-

matical precision. It may be, and we think it possible, that with psycho-

chemicals and bv other means, mankind will interfere with this trend
and create a more desirable interaction between what we now think of

as new and old brain functions while developing and refining the ca-

pacities of both. Normal consciousness then might incorporate elements

nf what todav we call psychedelic, and men would be able to summon
into action multi-leveled awarenesses as now we intentionally remem-
ber or concentrate. Our ancestors, some of them, might have been able

to afford occasional psychedelic experiences; but they could not have

afforded to develop a capacity for having them without time-limited and

place-limited induction and controls.

William James, in a famous passage in The Varieties of Religious

Experience, warned against a premature closing of our accounts with

"realitv." James wrote:

. . . our normal consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but

one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by
the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely
different. We mav go through life without suspecting their existence; but
apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch thev are there in all their

completeness, definite tvpes of mentalitv which probablv somewhere

have their field of application and adaptation.

Modern man, with the help of psvehedelic chemicals, is applving

the requisite stimulus to many of these latencies. He is starting to dis-

cover their "field of application and adaptation." There will be no pre-

mature closing of accounts with reality, but rather an extension of re-

alitv.

What is accepted as "normal realitv" is always a smaller realitv than

the one safely possible. Always there is a "reality lag," with old definitions
dying hard and remaining as arbitrarv constructs in the face of emerging
new awarenesses. Normal realitv is a cultural artifact, differing always
from one society to the next, though they mav coexist in time and may
have approximated similar backgrounds in historv.

When we rccoym/e both the capacities of consciousness and the

contingency of our reality, then the way is prepared for dramatic strides
forward with radical extensions of awareness.
I la- psychedelic artists march with an avant-garde that explores.

maps, and calls tor extension now of the dimensions of awareness

I. ike all frontiersmen, the) are apt to stumble, but their effort is

worthwhile and their direction is .i right one for our time.

R.E.1 M
J.1I.
Context3 value &
direction
BARRY N. SCHWARTZ

It is recovered, see!

What? —Eternity
It is the sea
Fused with the sun!
RIMBAUD

The poet is a light and winged and holy thing and there
is no invention inhim until he has been inspired and is
out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him.
SOCRATES

To the cultural historian the controversy surrounding the psychedelic

experience appears as a bad joke. After 2,000 years of intellectual in-

fatuations and profound visions, wc are still unable to take a new "mind-
manifesting" experience in stride. Western civilization, molded bv the
intensity of Christian transcendentalism and exposed bv the Freudian
view of man, reacts to the psychedelic experience as though never before
in history had some new and deep insight into the human psvche cap-
tured man's consciousness. But in the twentieth century, controversy, as

most things, is short-lived and it will not be long before the accrual of
experience allows us to view our latest expansion of consciousness with

reasonable perspective. WHien we are able to come to terms with the

psychedelic phenomenon, its manifestation in art will likewise become

explicable. What will be understood is that psychedelic art is the sur-

realism of a technological age.

From an aesthetic point of view, psychedelic art must be defined as

that art which deliberately attempts to re-create, introduce, stimulate, or

convey the nature or essence of the psychedelic experience. Unless psy-

chedelic art is defined as the conscious expression of the psychedelic

experience, "anything presented as a work of art that inspires the mind,

emotions and sense with even a glimpse of the total awareness of con-

scious being could be termed psychedelic art," according to Jud Yalkut,

writing in Arts magazine. Which is to say that all art then becomes psy-
chedelic; or that the term is lost to the semantic chaos that already
hovers over much of modern art. This may explain why, for example,
Ivan Karp of the Castclli Gallery in Manhattan says of psychedelic art: 13° • Context, xalue
,„. . , „ . . Cr direction
Itdocsn t exist.

We know that artists who have taken psychedelic drugs do not nec-
essarily produce psychedelic art. We know, too, that artists who have

not had these drugs may create psychedelic art. As Masters and Houston
have noted, the chemical means of psychedelic experience exists in all

of us in varying degrees, so it is possible — if unlikely — that spontaneous

alterations of consciousness comparable to psychedelic experience can
occur. And we must accept the possibility that the awareness of an artist

can be expanded to psychedelic dimensions by nonchemical methods

through the use of mind-altering procedures such as prolonged fasting,
concentration, etc.

Since, then, there may have been artists who have had psychedelic

or psychedelic-like experiences which we cannot know about, and be-

cause there have been artists who have had such experiences without am
desire to relate them to their art, it would be absurd to base a definition

of psychedelic art on the experiences of the artist alone. Historicallv, an

art form derives its identitv from the work created, and not from the
biography of the artist. Nevertheless, it is patentlv impossible to produce

psychedelic art without having had an experience of the consciousness

that is its source, so the circumstances preceding the work of art are

perhaps more significant here than in any art form of the past, even if

ultimately the work must proclaim itself.

Thus we might fairly regard the work of extraordinarilv imaginative

artists such as Bosch, Blake, or Klee —whose works suggest knowledge

of worlds beyond even dreams — as psvehedclic without knowing anv
more about their lives than we do. Yet we cannot call these men psvehe-

dclic artists because we do not know whether they had the requisite

experience. But neither can we say that they are not psvehedclic artists,

for the same reason. For lack of specific knowledge we must be content
to say that they had a "psychedelic sensibility."

If all this seems hopelessly confusing, we may console ourselves with

the thought that there is no need to catcgorizx the artists of the past, and
those of the present and the future can make their relationship to psvehe-

dclic art known if they will.

One might suppose that concentrating on a Mondrian for four

hours would confirm the observation <>t New York's Village Voice art
critic John Perreault that "all art can also be viewed as 'psychedelic' if

the term is divorced from its drug context and used in the wider sense of
**
'mind expanding,' but psychedelic art cannot be divorced from its drug
context, nor can it be confined to it. It is for this reason that the defini-

tion of psychedelic art is based on the conscious artistic expression of the

meaning or facts ot psychedelic experience. Tins is not a quibble over
 '3 1
labels but an important distinction to make if we are to understand the

nature of the work before us. One would think that this problem could

have been solved by analogv to the controversv over "social realism." As

the outcome of that prolonged debate aestheticians fin the Western
world at least) agreed that art must be free of doctrine insofar as it is

to be judged as a work of art, and this is valid whether that doctrine be

Marxism or the beliefs of the psychedelic community. The beliefs of

any viewer will, of course, deeply affect his concept of beauty' but hope-

fully not distort his ability to evaluate a work of art for its execution.

If, at the present time, media flow into other media, everything seems
to be called "psychedelic," and there is almost no commentary by the
artists themselves offering a theoretical basis for what they are doing, we
can only hope that in the future distinct directions will emerge.

A historical context
One direction can be suggested in the relationship between psychedelic
art and surrealism.
While it can be assumed that men's dreams have always been a
81. yves tanguy. Multiplica- source of inspiration for their art, surrealism was the first consciously
tion of the Arcs. 1954. Collection The
Museum of Modern Art, New York.

•snsv
intended expression of the unconscious, and it, like psychedelic art, de-
132 £ Context, \alue
& direction
rives its definition from the experience it explores artistically. Both sur-

realism and psychedelic art have taken place in particular historic situa-

tions, both are deliberate attempts to explore particular experiences; they

arc deeply and profoundly related.

It was Andre Breton who wrote: ". . . all the technical effort of

Surrealism from its origin to the present has consisted in multiplying

the ways of penetrating the deepest layers of the mind." But the surreal-

ist methods for exploring the psyche were inefficient and frequently de-
structive to the individual. In the technological era in which we now
live, all human activity seeks greater efficiency. It is technology which
makes LSD-25 easilv accessible, and it is LSD which provides easier ac-

cess to the inner regions of the mind. Rimbaud said, "I am laboring to

become a visionary." With the products of new technology, one labors

less, and a sugar cube can make all the difference. With proper guidance
and use of the drug, the "trip" becomes a round trip, something many of
the surrealists were unable to achieve. Rimbaud's "long, immense, de-

liberate derangement of all the senses" was a painful and destructive

process. He died at the age of thirty-five, Apollinaire at thirty-eight.

Lautrcamont at twenty-four. Many committed suicide, Vache died from

an overdose of opium, and still others went mad. The surrealists' de-

rangement of the senses was irrevocable, and those who lived long enough
to become seers often didn't live quite long enough to communicate
what they knew and experienced. With LSD and other psvehedelic
drugs, twelve hours is more than sufficient to transcend the kind of aware-
ness the surrealists took a lifetime to achieve, and most can return
from their visions no less able to survive than before their journev.

"What really counts," wrote Miro. "is to strip the soul naked. Painting

P.u'i ki Th* Red Bal-

1

The Solomon
loon. 10,;;. Collection
R. Guggenheim Museum. N.
83. joan mir 6. Landscape.
1927. Collection The Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York.

or poetry is made as one makes love — a total experience, all prudence

thrown to the winds, nothing is held back." The psychedelic drugs have
made possible a more successful embrace of the unconscious.
Though the way of the psychedelic voyager is more efficient than that
of the surrealist, and despite the differences in psychological framework

of the psychedelic artists and the surrealist (as noted by Masters and
Houston), it is to be understood their artistic goals are the same. Breton
wrote that he wanted "to set the imagination free." Redon spoke of "the

docile submission to the uprush of the unconscious." Both the surrealist

and the psychedelic artist question, and in the same way, the notion of
the real. Both accept the idea that the inner recesses of man's imaginative
mind provide a more cogent truth than his mundane experience. The
major difference between them is the depth that the psychedelic traveler

can reach as compared to what now appears as the tamer visions of the

surrealists. The surrealist sought and expected to find "the fullness of

the deep dream"; the psychedelic artist can go beyond dreams. (Paren-
thetically, the psychedelic community is equally optimistic about its own
powers, for most believe that now the ultimate journey to the end of the

psyche is realizable, as though there will not later appear a mind-

expanding mechanism that will make the present ones seem inade-

quate.)

Wallace Fowlie writes of the surrealist: "To become the magician,

or the seer (the 'voyant' . . .) he must learn to follow his inner life, or

his imagination, as if he were an observer." The separation of the self,

the splitting of the ego into both participant and observer, is common
to both the surrealist and the psychedelic experiences. Rimbaud's insight,

"I is another self," seems prophetic in the light of the psychedelic experi-
cnce. The controversies surrounding the surrealist and the psychedelic 134 # Context, xalue
" nec l0n
artists occur because both see their experience as deep and overriding
personal revelation, perhaps the only possible religious experience left

to the modern world.

In execution, psychedelic art is too young at present to compare

favorably with the older and more complete surrealist movement. We

should expect, however, that what eventually emerges as the fruition
of psychedelic art will be more successful in communicating and under-
standing the experience of expanded consciousness than was the surrealist

attempt.

The psychedelic artist is likely to agree with Dali's conception of sur-

realist art: "My whole ambition on the pictorial plane consists of ma-
terializing with the greatest imperialistic rage precious images of concrete
irrationality . . . images which provisionals are neither explicable nor
reducible bv systems of logical intuition or bv rational mechanisms.

Images of concrete irrationality are thus images authenticallv unknown.

. . . They are past the domain of psychoanalyzable phantasms and
virtual representation." But the psychedelic artist can go further with
mind-expanding drugs, making unnecessarv Dali's "imperialistic rage,"
and if he can come to terms with what he experiences, his expression

should be more knowing. This has alreadv been demonstrated concep-

tually. Because the psvehedelic "vovant" penetrates deeper into irra-

tionality, he discovers the paradoxical nature governing all inner search:

that at some point the irrationalitv inside gives way, if not to rationalitv.
then to some thrilling order, some total understanding, which, artificial

or true, makes the most difficult things understandable. Breton elabo-

rates: "Everything leads to the belief that there exists a certain point in

the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the
past and the future, what is communicable and what is incommunicable,
the high and the low, cease to be perceived as contradictory. Vainly one

would assign to Surrealist activitv no other ambition than the hope to

determine this point." Here again, not onlv is it possible under the influ-

ence of psychedelic drugs to confirm Breton's belief, but it is very easv to

linger at this boundary, and, it is claimed bv some, not too difficult to

exceed it. The negative qualities of surrealism, the emphasis on the bi-

zarre and grotesque discussed bv Masters and Houston, are the artifacts

of failure. The surrealist, lacking the assistance of psychcdclics. often

could penetrate only to the point of nightmare. This is not to say that
lie desired to go no further, as Breton's aspiration shows.

The visual differences between surrealism and psvehedelic art can

be partially accounted for by the greater variety of techniques available

to the psychedelic artists. However, there are a number of psvehedelic

ai lists whose work clearly shows a visual relationship with surrealism.

84. Salvador dal i. YoungVirgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity.
1954. Collection Carlos B. Alemany, New York.

The work of Ernst Fuchs created before his experience with peyote is

surrealist in a strict sense. After his psychedelic experience, the imagery

is of an entirely different order. This work is universal in feeling, cele-

brative in effect. His earlier pictures were tortured and characterized a

particular human hell not unlike, those of Bosch. The change in his

pictures demonstrates clearly that his artistic concern, the exploration of

the psvche, remained constant, while the results of his investigation al-

tered significantly because of his psychedelic experience. Frederic Pardo,

Mati Klarwein, and Robert Yasuda are psychedelic artists whose work
also shows a surrealist derivation.

It is more than interesting that the three major artistic devices used

bv the surrealists are of equal importance in the work of the psychedelic

artists: collage, automaticism, and the use of nonrational ordering. The

first technique allows free arranging of materials and textures; the second
eliminates the need for conventional structures and motifs; and the third,
and perhaps most potent, allows the continual but unpredictable pres- [36 % Context, \alue
& direction
ence of non-Euclidian logic and unfamiliar structure in the work.

The outstanding visual difference between surrealist and psychedelic

art is explained as a manifestation of the same changes that took place in

the world — political, economic, and scientific; i.e., the movement from
the static to the dynamic. Renaissance artists discovered space as a di-

mension, to be portrayed in art with the perspective of sight. The sur-

realists discovered space as a medium, to be ordered for its desired effect.

Space became emotion as well as sight. The psychedelic artists explore,

or "explode," both space and time, which are seen as artistic choices, not

limited by our actual experiences of them. Surrealism appears fixed, as if

imbedded in the medium. Psychedelic art is generally kinetic, vibrant,

and filled with a burning restlessness —perhaps the result of a decade of

action painting, the motion picture, and wars of indefinite duration, as

well as the very nature of the psychedelic experience.

The tfirieties of psychedelic €ict

Because the levels of consciousness achieved in the surrealist searching

of the free imagination were realized primarily by contemplation of the
dream experience, surrealist art tends to be fantastic representation or
nonrational symbolism. Psychedelic art tends to be organic, molecular,

cellular, with the ever-present sense of living tissue, as in the works of

Isaac Abrams and Arlene Sklar-Weinstein. The same effect can be
achieved without representing cellular forms, but by using light patterns.
This is accomplished often in the works of Don Snyder, in the Infinity
Machine created by Richard Aldcroft, and is exemplified by luminist Earl

Reiback. Frequently, "sensory overloads," as in the movies of Jud Yalkut,

and inter-media effects as found in the works of USCO create the same
sense of altered consciousness; they may also convey a sense of life proc-

esses and ultimately the feeling of conception, birth, and the origin of
the living organism. In this sense, psychedelic art is the first art move-
ment to make "creation" the content of art, much as Christian art was
the first to make salvation its content.

A characteristic feature of psychedelic art is its rendering in diverse

media. There seems to be some undefined relationship between painting,
sculpture, the motion picture, and lumia art as used in happenings, thea-
ter events, environments, and various inter-media presentations which
make them "psychedelic." All these art forms have at least four major
possibilities m common: the creation of a nonrational situation, the cre-
ation of acceptable illusions, the alteration of consciousness, and the in-

troduction of spontaneity. This, however, does not justify a common

B5 1 k \ n 1 rvCRS, The Citv — I.

Pencil. 1946.
 ,
i L

% III

w%

86. Ernst fuchs. Carmel. Ink on paper. 1963. Collection H. Kann, Vienna.
 - FREDERIC PARDO. Hdtam.
Oil and tempera on wood. ;^ x ;i".
196-. Here is another work by a con-
tempor.irv psvehedelic artist in which
the surrealist influence is apparent.
definition, but shows only the direction of art in our decade. "In the elec-

tronic age," says Marshall McLuhan, "media substitute all-at-onceness

for one thing-at-a-timencss. . . ."It is tins multi-faceted nature and si-

multaneity of contemporary experience we find in all avant-garde art

forms, and by coincidence in the psychedelic phenomenon, and conse-

quently in psychedelic art. The similarity is finally attributable to his

torical accident.

The happening, as Allan Kaprow docs it. is not psychedelic art; it

is its own form, a happening ut \ happening is a heightened group

 .

i?9 involving experience, a theatrical environment, in which the content of

the experience is not the design of the artist but the act of participation.
When it is successful, something important has occurred. Failure results

in, at best, psychodrama; at worst, an unfunny farce.

A happening that allows a passive audience, creating a fourth wall,

denies its own potential. A happening that involves all is a happening

that exercises freedom at the cost of artistic design. What will have to
emerge in happening art is a motif that does involve all, does not stul-

tify spontaneity, and as well reveals in its structure the hand of the

artist, whose role will be as director of human play. The happening

responds not to the psvehedelic experience but to the possibilities of
relived life. They are separate, mutually exclusive, and are erroneously

seen as the same because the effect of both is individual self-discovery.

In a happening a person acts and chooses to act with criteria that exist

inside, are authentically unknown, and are not open, until later, to anal-

ysis. There is a tendency to feci that what happens in a happening is

more real than most individual activitv simply because it is activity which
takes place outside of known role relationships and prescribed social dic-

tates. It is free behavior; and this brings us to why happenings are an

important art form.

88. claes oldenburg. Foto-Dcath. Happening. 1961

 Art is often the transformation of nature into what we would have 14 • Context, xalue

nature be. We arc cautioned by Jean-Jacques Lebel: "Don't worship

art — let it happen to you . . . the truth is that art is just experience.

The way you feel at a happening, the way you evade it or participate in

it — these things make up your portrait, and your portrait is the work of

art." The media of a happening are ultimately the lives of the people

participating, and the participation takes place in a situation that im-

proves on life. The happening, then, like many of the new art forms, is a

method of consciousness expansion in the most direct terms: increased

awareness of the multiplicity of experience affecting individual percep-

tion. It is not, however, "psychedelic" art, because its methods are apart

from the psychedelic experience. It involves the participant bv changing

his external situation, which is different from the psychedelic experience

that opens up what is already internalized. The artist who creates a hap-

pening is the sculptor of experience and may choose the psychedelic

experience as one of many possibilities.

Environments may or may not be psychedelic art. An environment

is psychedelic if it attempts to re-create the effects or induce the feelings
of psychedelic experience. Allen Atwell's total temple is an environment
whose content is psychedelic experience. It is probable that the future of
environments will not be as psychedelic art but as a separate and distinct
art form that concerns itself with diverse human experiences. An envi-

ronment completely removes the individual from any familiar sign of his

known world and thrusts him into a new realitv, in which, if he remains
for some time, he has to live. It is forced imagination; the imagining is

done for the individual bv the creator of the environment. The responsi-
bility to live within and experience the situation rests on the individual.
Environments most often fall within the definition of psychedelic art
because those based on the experience of altered consciousness are the
easiest kind to create, espcciallv for an audience outside the psychedelic
community. It is always easier to portrav the artisticallv grotesque be-
cause there are no criteria for evaluation.

The primarv similarity between happenings and environments is

their alteration of an individual's concept of himself. The individual

must exist in a situation of lived experience which has no precedent in

his life. All the prohibitions on behavior, all the guidelines for choice
inherent in familiar situations, all the consequences of our actions in

the "real" world, and all the inhibitions on sensation tend to be removed.

Sg. I'sco. Tie-dye Cave, iqcici An environment in which the center bench
revolves. Tins photograph, t.iken .it the Riverside Mi iihition N
York, was made with a "< —
"lens which conveys a s Iheal
perceptions tli.it result. Photo b) V.ile Joel, coin:
 ^ *

/A «r
'* t »-t
.X 1-
Both forms arc liberating insofar as they cancel repression. Spontaneity 142 Context, xalue
6- direction
enters necessarily because the individual has no a priori, expected re-

sponses from which to create his behavior. As in the psychedelic experi-

ence, insight is derived because the individual tends to believe that the

way he eventually acts is really his self, freed from oppressive directives.

Both the happening and the environment have in common with psyche-

0,0. y a v <> 1 k v s \ m \. Peep show. Environment made of mirrors .md lights.

The participant in tins case dors not entei the environment but merely puts his
head through one of the openings. The lights flash in eccentric patterns. Photo
Pi t< Moore.
1
2
43 delic art the creation of an illusion which, while it is lived, and perhaps
after, is accepted by the individual as being of greater significance than
daily lived experience. The happening, the environment, and psvchedelic
art are all able to alter the behavior, the orientation, and the habits of
the individual participating in or responding to the art, without physi-
cally altering the person's situation ("the world is just outside the exit

door).

Happenings, environments, and psychedelic art have made human

crisis an artistic situation. The experience of crisis, that stark and pro-
found interruption of our everydav lives, is now created bv artistic design.
Rather than call all these art forms "psvchedelic," it would be more to

the point to respect their differences and see all three as different ways
of creating abrupt rupture with daily experience. In life and in art this is

always a consciousness-expanding experience.

It is important to keep in mind that, at present, happenings and

environments rest on the unspoken assumption that the individual does
not really know himself and will be surprised at the way he behaves in an
unfamiliar and totally encompassing situation. If environments and hap-
penings do not become more sophisticated in their methods, their very
success will destroy the excitement and novel tv of the experience.
Lumia is the art that uses light as a medium. Light becomes a tech-

nique of artistic expression comparable to oils, acrylic paints, or water

color. It, like anv medium, is psvchedelic art if it attempts to deal with
psychedelic experience. It mav as well be impressionism, romanticism,
expressionism, or, conceivably, classicism, which are not media but ar-

tistic styles. It is only because light is a new medium and still to be fullv

explored that we refer to lumia. Lumia will remain an integral form as

long as it is its own content, and this will continue onlv until artists seek

to use the medium of light for expression, for the creation of significant

forms, for the exploration of some human experience. WTien that ex-

perience is psychedelic experience, psychedelic art is produced, as. for

example, in the works of Jackie Cassen and Rudi Stern or Don Snvder.

The potential of light as a medium for artistic expression is very great

and it mav become the most popular medium for happenings, environ-

ments, and psvchedelic art in the future. Light is intrinsically dynamic,

highlv flexible, especiallv conducive to creation of color, and allows the

artist to varv the duration of anv particular pattern — all virtues because

we no longer demand that a work of art be fixed and permanent. It is en-

tirelv a medium emerging from and appropriate to the second half of

the twentieth centurv. This is not to say, as some do, that painting,

graphics, and more traditional forms will be any less desired, but only
to assert that a new medium has been introduced to the artist's possibil-

ities; not a radical innovation, only a necessary one.

 \

. • ^, - . -J

_ o
%*& B <—*
«n " •*•>

gi don snyder. Series of

.

painted color slides. (See color plate

1
1
) . Here two slides coincide, with one
dissolving as the other becomes domi-
nant.

The same point can be made with regard to the film. Film is a

medium first explored for its own possibilities bv the surrealists. The
cinema created by Coctcau and Man Ray is the antecedent of what is

happening in this medium today. From its beginnings, film had been

cincmatcd drama, until the surrealists, when it became a medium of

dynamic images. Film may yet be the most potent of the media avail-

able to the psychedelic artist, if he can create intimate four-wall cinema.

As with light, the film is or is not psychedelic depending on the experi-
ences, if any, with which it is concerned. There is a tendency to call a

motion picture psychedelic if it is innovative (and equally a tendency to

call an innovative one good cinema). The picture Flicker, by Tony Con
rad, which was a continuous flickering of the frame with black inter-

spersed at increasing speed on a white field, was. like the films of Man
Ray, a direct assault on the senses. But it was not psychedelic. The
movie Fantastic Voyage, winch was conceived with Hollywood's usual
MS scarcity of intelligence, in those scenes that recreated cellular existence

was psychedelic. It was a poor picture, but it was psychedelic. Although

Francis Lee, Jud Yalkut, and others have used the film for the explora-

tion of psychedelic experience, the attempts at this time have achieved

only the obvious.

92. don snyder. Projection on figures. Photograph by Ann Douglas. Snyder'

lumia techniques were used in presentation of clothes designed by Jack Lenor
Larsen. 1966.
93- jackie caSSen & rudi stern. Motion picture. 1 967. This film,
which interprets the aspects of a psychedelic experience, was created for a television
show called Mind-Benders, produced by Vision Associates, New York.

04. 95. Astarte. Ballet In Robert Joffrc\. 1967. Photos In Herbert Migdofl.
A 111 nl 1 1 media production which had its premiere .it the Citj Center in New 1 ork,

tins wmk interprets the love goddess nnth in terms of .1 psycbedelk ice.

I he dancing, by Trinette Singleton and Maximiliano Zomosa dinated

with music In the Cioine Swous. films by Gardner Compton, and kinetic -

In liom.is Skelton,
1 he production was supervised In Midge Mackeri
1
 Music is psychedelic when, again, it deals with the psychedelic ex- 14% £ Context, \alue
* nec wn
perience. It is perhaps in music that the term psychedelic is most often
abused.

"No one at the Balloon Farm," reported the freaked-out New York
World Journal Tribune, "seems anxious to comment on the relation of
the drug experience to the creation of the new music." The similarity be-

tween the musical and the psychedelic experience is that thev both

destroy the continuity of daily-life experience in a situation of sensory

overload. John Cale, a composer of the new sound, calls his music "con-
trolled distortion."

Nor is there anything psychedelic in the works of John Cage. His

music and psychedelic experience have in common the elements of non-

rational ordering and unfamiliar, illogical structures. But John Cage's

music is not psychedelic, although it is essentially surreal. One recalls

that Tristan Tzara proposed to compose a poem by arbitrarily choosing

words picked out of a hat. Psychedelic music is music that comments on
and gives voice to the sensations and attempts to capture in sound the
impressions of the psychedelic experience. So far, psychedelic music is

exclusively the domain of the young, but then, the psychedelic experi-

ence is to a large extent the experience of young people. It should be

recognized that no music can fully signify a human experience, because

of the limitations of the medium. Psychedelic music has the same rela-

tionship to the psychedelic experience as program music has to the ex-

perience it hopes to convey musically —there is more suggestion than

signification.

Much so-called psychedelic art is in the form of posters, familiar

objects painted over profusely in bright colors, and the further elabora-
tion of the already elaborate paisley design. This is not, however, psv-

chedelic art, but only the fashion of painting objects in the world in a

style associated with the psychedelic experience. It is poster art in the

true sense: "See us, we are the psychedelics." Its main purpose is to ad-

vertise or signify some event or activity that the creators of the poster

would have us believe is of interest to the psychedelic community.

Posters per se are not art but applied art in a communication medium
that utilizes overt signs of the audience it wishes to reach. There are
exceptions, such as some of the works of Wes Wilson and Peter Max
which are, in fact, fine art objects whose poster function tends to be lost
as they are appreciated aesthetically.

A discotheque is a giant poster; it is not usually an environment.

( )nc docs not enter a discotheque as one enters an unfamiliar reality. One
goes primarily to "dig the sound" and to dance. Discotheques arc de-

signed to entertain and to realize a profit. If psychedelic art. environ-

mental art, ami even happenings occur, thev arc accessories to the main
97- wes wilson. Byrds. Poster.
14 x 23". 1967. Designed for the Fill-
more Auditorium, San Francisco.

function of the discotheque. The use of these art forms is intended to

add dimension to the experience and enhance the commercial prospects

of the endeavor. Associating the psychedelic experience with the dis-

cotheque has the same function as the posters, insofar as it announces

that this is a place to which people with certain already formed tastes,

interests, and curiosities will want to come. People who go to the

Cheetah do not "blow their minds," but socialize, dance, and hear the

sounds. This does not mean that the art forms in a discotheque serve only
the purpose of revitalizing what is essentially a traditional ballroom. The 150 Context, value
6- direction
art does add to the experience; it creates novel situations and provides
great visual excitement. But too often it is like the excellent photo-

graphy of many television commercials: a means to a nonartistic end.

Unlike most, The Electric Circus (color plate 25) approaches being

environmental art. This is due in part to the balance achieved between a

comparatively small dancing area and large visual spaces. The integration

of all the elements — lights, slide projections, mime, rock, strobe effects,

dancing area, and band platform —allows no one aspect to dominate.

The result is a very involving experience. Since the visual display is almost
spontaneous, and always changing, the experience is diverse and unique.
At times, this discotheque becomes a complete environment, particularly
with Mort Subotnick's electronic music blending with visual effects.

At its best, The Electric Circus experience is definitely psychedelic

in effect. The projections are almost always psychedelic in origin, being

molecular, cellular, organic, and capable of rendering psychedelic sensory

distortions. As well, there is an ever-present feeling of fluctuating energy

which seems to take place inside.

With inter-media, mixed-media, and multi-media we get into an

area that is psychedelic or McLuhanesque depending on whom you're

talking to. All these terms are simply descriptive of some art event in
which several media are used simultaneously. It works if the artist

achieves a synthesis; it fails if it lacks unity. There is nothing psychedelic

about inter-media in itself unless, as may happen, the particular inter-

media event bears on the psychedelic experience.

_
i) . i)8, 99, 100. The Electric Circus, New York discotheque. (See color plate
25.) Photos by Malcolm Varon. The visual technique .it The Electric Ckcos
combines spontaneous!} created and prepared imager} using a tree focal plane
concept with Elm, prepared slides, and special projectors. ssentiall) it combines 1 .1

large Geld of abstract movement in which other images Boat in conjunction with the
strong pulsed white light oi strobes The result is an enveloping visual environment
related to people's activitj and also to the accompanying sound environment. The
technique is called "Ultramedia" and wis designed tor The Electric Circus bj
Anthom M.irtiu.
«

«A
 Value and direction

The term psychedelic has so far been used as a descriptive, and not an

evaluative, word. The common failure to use the word in the latter way
accounts for a great deal of the argument which revolves about psy-

chedelic experience and psychedelic art. For one person, the term may
indicate a good thing; for another, a bad thing, instead of just referring

to a thing. While evaluation of art can be meaningful and important, it

cannot reasonably come before understanding. To reject psychedelic art,

as some critics have, because its early forms are not entirely successful, is

to miss the strength of these works. The psychedelic experience is here to

stay, and will increasingly be investigated and used by artists as the con-

tent of their work. What we now see as psychedelic art, regardless of its

merits or its deficiencies, is the beginning of what will continue to be one

of a number of vital directions of artistic expression.

It has long appeared to me that aesthetic judgments are made

against a standard that has two equally important components: an af-

fected response and a judgment of the execution of a particular work.

The latter is based on the skill of realization of the work with regard to

the magnitude of its conception, the technical qualities of forms, color,

space, etc., the degree of innovation and originalitv, the maturity of the
selection and the skillful use of media and forms, and the organization

and unity of the work. The affective factor means simply the degree of

involvement of the particular viewer, the insight felt to be derived be-

cause of the work, and the depth of communication. It is the affective

factor which explains why aesthetic evaluations cannot be objectified,

and why popularity is at once desired and despised by the artist. The
combination of these two elements of aesthetic judgment allows for
both personal evaluation and a reasonably intelligent discussion of a
particular work of art.

On the whole, psychedelic art has not, as yet, achieved a technical

excellence; nor could this be fairly expected at this stage. But it has
divided spectators and participants into two antagonistic camps, those

affected and those not. To many of the uninitiated, some psvehedclic

art will be perceived not as art but as an uglv assault on what they rc-

gard as refined senses. To the already "knowing." psychedelic art will be

beautiful because of previous associations with an inspiring experience

The fust ease demonstrates that understanding often must precede ap

preciation. In the second, we see the collapse of aesthetic distance. Until

Allen Ginsberg puts LSD into the reservoirs, there is going to be much
debate on tins question.
53 It is to be recognized that psychedelic art is in part, as other avant-

garde movements have been, a product of the galleries. Further, it is

appreciated that there are individuals who pass themselves off as psy-

chedelic artists when their onlv commitment is to be thought of as as-

sociated with the current excitement. But it is no less a crime to dismiss

the whole for a few of its parts, and as this book clearly shows, some
very interesting work has been created and some very interesting direc-

tions pursued. In the last analysis, it is the individual work and the in-
dividual artist that must be evaluated, intentional fallacy aside, in the

light of what they claim to be, but never for what others make them.
Psychedelic art seems to be moving in two distinct directions. Most
of it seeks to re-create psychedelic experience. This art, by creating situa-

tions of sensorv overload, visual distortions, illogical symbolism, simul-

taneous image effects, the feeling of being inside one's body, and a pre-

occupation with themes of conception, cosmic forces, and the mysterious

movements of an unknown nature, strives to introduce some of the more
familiar and overt manifestations of psychedelic experience in the viewer.

It is based on an immature concept. Art does not "hold the mirror up to

nature," but ultimatelv transforms nature. As Heisenberg has said, the

human hand contaminates while it records, and when the human hand
is an artistic one, when the contamination is the addition of the sen-

sitivity and response of an individual, art is produced. The psychedelic

art that tends to re-create the psvchedelic experience is analogous to

social realism that attempts to portray the class struggle artistically; they

both tend to become visual doctrine. The other direction, as of this

writing unfortunately not the dominant one, is pursued when the artist

imposes his conception, his consciousness, on this human experience and

therebv creates meaning and assigns value in addition to recording an

objective event. Manv psvchedelic artists today are acting as if they are

messengers who come running back from psychedelic experience to say:

"Look, look at what I have seen," as opposed to "See what I now under-

stand." Will someone invent (or has it already happened?) a mind-

camera, and make that kind of psychedelic art unnecessary?

The alternative to re-creating the psychedelic experience, as USCO

attempts with its "drugless trip," is to convey the essence or insight

derived from the psvchedelic experience. Just as there are two kinds of

Christian art, that which through its iconology and symbolism visually

states Christian themes, and that which dramatizes what Christianity

means to man and how its conception heightens human experience, so

psychedelic art is divided.

The work of Isaac Abrams, for example, is a mixture of both. In his

paintings he is concerned with the gross effects of the psychedelic ex-

perience, using primary, active colors, and organic textures with a pro-
fusion that is somewhat too deliberate and in a manner too similar 54 # Context, xalue
C- direction
throughout his paintings, although his most recent works, such as Cos-
mic Orchid (color plate - i indicate significant progress as he proceeds to

overcome these weaknesses. 1 1 is drawings arc something else again. Here

one finds an undefinablc quality of lyricism and a greater sense of

mystery than in the paintings. The pen-and-ink drawings are, because of

the medium itself, unable to convey all the sensory facts of the psy-

chedelic experience, yet Abrams successfully uses them to interpret the

myriad forms of a personal but universal experience. As we might expect,

they are more precise, better executed, and have a depth that the paint-
ings lack. This is not to say that Abrams is not a painter, but only that
he has yet to reach in painting the depth he has achieved in his drawings.

Another artist, Robert Yasuda, is working in the second direction.

The meaning and essence of the psychedelic experience is his primary

concern. His multiple perspectives and varied shies demonstrate con-

tinuing maturation, and at each stage he has produced some verv suc-

cessful paintings. His most recent works display a kaleidoscope of images

ioi. ioiiii itasuda ftoi h Dedicated to tin- Om / low — JV Oil on canx.is ;: \

1
55 that are both unreal and acceptable. In a structured and formalized
situation, the attempt to condense nonrational consciousness on the
canvas is often very convincing.

There was a time when the words "psychedelic art" meant specifi-

cally the creations of artists Jackie Cassen and Rudi Stern. In many ways
this label was unfair to those psychedelic artists who were working at the

same time, although Cassen and Stern were the innovators of many of
the sensory-distortion techniques familiar today. They have continued
to be stereotyped, inaccurately, by association with a certain kind of
"psychedelic art." Cassen and Stern are serious artists who have not
ceased to explore because their early efforts have become popular. Their
more recent creations have ranged from psychedelic movies to the in-

tegration of psychedelic lumia art with sculptural and architectural

forms, ballet, theater, and opera; they have made three films soon to be

distributed; are creating a theater of light which presents theatrical

demonstrations, mime, dancers, combined in a kinetic light environ-

ment.
Their work tends to present the overt sensorv effects of psychedelic

experience and shows concern for its essence. Thev are uniquelv psv-

chedelic because they delve into nonconscious perceptions to reveal not

the grotesque but the beautiful, particularly in their lumia-sculptural

works. In effect, their work has contributed to a sophistication that takes

for granted media innovation and justifies itself for the qualitv of the ex-
perience they can create. The potential of their work is to use sculpture,

lumia, and environments to transform living spaces.

Any art will be onlv as good as the most skillful of its practitioners.

At present, psychedelic art is probably best as it is seen in the works of

the thirty-seven-year-old Viennese painter Ernst Fuchs, who had psy-

chedelic experiences while in the United States. His works have stature

in conception and execution. Moses and the Burning Bush (color plate

13) is an excellent example of fulfilled art. Control, vision, the capturing

of the profound, and artistic excellence are all in evidence. Everywhere in

his work is the hand of an artist transforming, shaping, and expressing

the forms and images of psychedelic experience with unity and insight.

A number of other artists have shown themselves to be innovative

in their treatment of psychedelic experience. Edward Randel has an
explosion technique in paint which renders his color forms as if they were

animated, albeit rather similar. Tom Blackwell has combined the feeling,

forms, and textures of cellular existence in a way that is quite distin-

guished and individual. Allen Atwell has realized a bold conception in his
total temple (color plates 3 & 4), an environmental painting. The effect

of being inside a painting, of being encased by a four-wall canvas, is not

easilv forgotten. Bernard Saby presents paintings that are characterized

bv an electric, vibrant effect and Arlene Sklar-Weinstcin uses collage and 156 # Context, xalue
1 1 r 1 j v <* direction
construction in her rendering of psychedelic experience.

It is difficult to make any general evaluation of psychedelic art as it

is presented in lumia, environments, and film because the artists are so

different and the individual works so widely varied. This indicates experi-

ment and growth, but it is far too early to say fairly what is good and
what is not. Some projected environments feature magnificent images,

only to have them replaced bv a more superficial rendering seconds later.

The generalization that can be made is that the kinetic psychedelic art

which strives to create images and perceptions succeeds more than the
art which portravs gross sense distortions and visual effects.

The majoritv of the works reproduced in this book are recognizable

as "psychedelic art," which would seem to suggest that psychedelic art

is a style. This is not the case, despite the stylistic qualities many of the

works have in common. Those artists who deal mainly in the visual ef-

fects of the psvehedelic experience will tend to create works that are suf-

ficiently similar to be identifiable as psvehedelic art because, within a

culture, the visual effects of psychedelic experience are to a degree

similar for everyone. Artists who want to express the emotion, insight,

or essence of psvehedelic experience will create works that are highly in-

dividual in their rendering and not always visually recognizable as psy-

chedelic. In this respect, psvehedelic art is analogous to impressionism,

which was not a style but a concept. The impressionists dealt with the

breaking up of light, and conscquentlv there was a visual similaritv in

many of their works. Some were concerned only with the actual visual

effect of light fragmentation; others began to be concerned with seeing

differently, the essence of the impressionist theory. Seurat, Degas, and
Monet were not impressionist stvlists but impressionists. The visual ef-

fects of the psychedelic experience are the primary subject now, but as

the movement grows there will be a more direct concern for that which
is seen differently because of the psvehedelic experience. As the meaning
of and response to the psychedelic experience become the inspiration of

the work, psychedelic art will be rendered in more diverse forms.

Unfortunately, though psychedelic art is still in a state of flux and

becoming, the critics have already done away with it. There is a widely

shared bias among many critics directed not only at psychedelic art but

against the direction in which much of current art seems to be heading.

I Ins rejection is based on a refusal to consider current art as art because
it often does not involve lengthy periods of time, painterly craft, and

human labor, as has traditionally been the case where the artist, solely

by his own physical effort and skill, transformed a medium into the work
he conceived Of course, psychedelic art is not the greatest offender, .is

the technical accomplishments ol Klarwein, Fuchs, Atwell. Yasuda, and

?7 others demonstrate. But the role of the artist in much avant-garde art
has changed from that of craftsman to that of conceptualizer. The use
of technology, and the techniques it offers, has reduced the labor of the
artist. Today some artists conceive a work and do not have much to do
with its execution. Rauschenberg conceives and then gives his concept to

Kluver, who builds it. But the object produced is not any less an art

object or an inferior art object because of the way it comes into existence.

The criteria must be in terms of the work itself. Resistance to this direc-
tion of art seems futile because the direction, one of many, is irreversible.

Much criticism applied to psychedelic art is in actuality applied to

those things called "psychedelic" that, at least according to our defini-

tion, do not deserve the term. The attempt made here to limit the use of
the word to an artistic genre is, of course, a lost cause. "Psychedelic" anv-

things are going to attract the voung, and it probably won't take too long
before Madison Avenue pushes a psychedelic toothpaste. Print magazine

reports: "While it is generally accepted that commercial psychedelics

are 'happening' now, few art galleries will even discuss psychedelic art
as art." It is only because of the selling powers of the word that Print can
speak thus. While many art styles have deeply affected the commercial
arts, their identifying names have only in recent times been so usurped,
with op, and pop, and now psychedelic. It is increasingly the obligation

of the art historian to distinguish between a serious mode of artistic ex-

pression and the no less serious attempts to exploit that expression for
the manipulation of consumers.

But the attempt to preserve the concept of psychedelic art may be a

lost cause also because the psychedelic experience has taken on religious
significance for many, and psychedelic art will, for them, become the
icons. From this point of view, there can be no aesthetic evaluation of
the art itself. One has only to recall that it took thousands of years for the
Bible to be taught in the schools as a literary experience. With such a

bias toward the psychedelic experience, all psychedelic art will become
protected bv reverence, and there is no better way of making an art form
decadent. The artist as messenger will merely deliver the signs to the
already knowing.

The one-time surrealist Yves Bonnefoy helps us to understand the

direction psychedelic art must finally choose if it is to avoid the failures

of the surrealists: "... I believe that the essentially visionary intuition

that released the surreal's marvels to the surrealists always created con-

fusion, in its images and elans, between a desire for participation in the
sacred and a secret love of nothingness. ... I grasped a better under-

standing of the powers and specificity of nothingness; but I also realized

that it too had to be conquered. . .

." As some individuals are passive
spectators when they undergo the psychedelic experience, the artists, too, 1 58 £ Context, xalue

which the psychedelic

& direction
are allowing themselves to he the filters through

experience is being merely recreated.

Is it not vet clear, from the history of man, that inevitably the
man who achieves a higher consciousness from an experience seeks to

transcend and annihilate the same experience that brought him new
awareness?' Biologically, of course, nature has already won — for every psy-

chedelic up, there must be a corresponding down. But here I am speak-

ing more philosophically. The expanded consciousness acquired through

the psvehedelic experience will be used eventually to control and master

that experience, until the next and the next mind-expanding discoveries.

Manv individuals now do this with the weaker psychedelic, marijuana.

At first the experience is unfamiliar and overwhelming. It later becomes

predictable, and finally individuals learn how to maneuver within and
manipulate the experience. If psychedelic art is to be more than the
artifact of another fallen god, its practitioners must apply the rigors of

artistic control and aesthetic judgment to the intensity and diversity of

psychedelic experience. Onlv then can we expect to find an art which

both increases our understanding and pleases our aesthetic sensibilities.

This is not a condemnation of the psychedelic art now being created, but
only a statement of the end to which this new art must aspire. It is worth
remembering that surrealism successfullv passed through this process.

The graphic artist Harriette Frances describes her experience under

the influence of LSD in a way reminiscent of the testimonv of the sur-

realist: "I began to feel the dissolution of my Ego, my sense of self, and
fought for a time against relinquishing control of mv known self to the

103 11 s r r 1 1 1 1 1 1 r \ \ i 1 s ink on paper, 1964

unknown subconscious part of me, and this conflict resolved itself in my
'death,' when I leaped into the unconscious and began the painful ex-
ploration of my subterranean landscape." The drawings of her "trip"
are interesting in that they were created six weeks after her experience

with LSD, at which time she commented: "It would be nice to add that
this state of grace is still with me, but 'the world is very much with me.'
There is a love poem by the surrealist poet filuard which may, as
well, serve as a description of the psychedelic experience:

Fully warm still from discarded linen

You shut your eyes and stir
As stirs a song born
Vaguely but from all sides
Fragrant and redolent
You go without losing yourself beyond
The borders of your body
You have leaped beyond time
And are now a new woman
*
Infinitely revealed.

The psychedelic artist can experience that song, the melodies of the un-

conscious, the muse within, from all sides. The critical question is

whether he can go without losing himself beyond.

At present, psychedelic art is an infant —newborn, eagerly learning,

and providing the anxious pleasure of great anticipation. So far, with

some important exceptions, it has been unable to synthesize the experi-

ence of the unknown with the maturer talents of apt communication

and artistic excellence.

In the meantime we will see a lot of art that is too personal and
incommunicable, or that is designed with a view toward what the psy-
chedelic community will want and consequently support. Bernard Dor-
vial, writing before there was anything called psychedelic art, stated: "A
danger threatens contemporary painting ... it may slip into the merely

ornamental, to become a kind of superior wallpaper," — a danger which

is more threatening to psychedelic art than to any other current form. It

must be appreciated that psychedelic art is attempting to do what we

can agree words fail to achieve, and for this reason it demands our at-

tention if onlv from a psychological, scientific, or historical point of view.

But if it is to be fulfilled as art, then the artist or artists must consider

themselves the creators of art and not the messengers of a new revelation.

There is another area of concern with regard to the psychedelic art

movement, but it can best be stated in personal terms. Psychedelic art

may seek to further distort our senses when actually what wc desperately
need, although we are the last to admit it, is an art which will help us

* Translated by Henri Peyre. Reprinted from Yale French Studies No. 31, Sur-
realism, Yale University Press, New Haven, by permission of the publishers.
to order our perspective in an actuality that is already as distorted, al- 160 # Context, \ due

though not as overtly distorted, as the psychedelic experience. The world

\vc live in, our institutions, our social relationships, the way we love, our
human responses, arc all so twisted out of shape that it may seem easier

to finish the destruction than to create an understanding and direction

which would lead to meaningful structure and viable values.
Breton wrote in 1942: "From one war to the other, one may say
that it is the passionate question of libertv which has been the constant

motive of surrealist action." And it is with the concept of liberty that we

make perhaps the most telling comparison between the surrealist and the

psychedelic artists. Surrealism was born out of a sense of outrage di-

rected at what was conceived to be the criminality of social institutions.

This outrage first took the form of a rejection of social realitv for a

realm of visions and truth far more conducive to personal well-being than

the world at large. "Surrealism after all is not a literary school or a re-

ligion; it is the expression of an attitude, a state of mind, and especially

an open indication of liberty," affirms Philippe Soupault. Later, for

some, this inner world seemed less satisfying, and thev engaged them-
selves in social change through flirtations with Communism and more
serious relationships with Marxism.
Today, when our potential for a sane world is greater because

technology could be used to satisfy the needs of vast numbers of people,

the forces of oppression directed against the individual are of greater

magnitude and subtletv than the relativelv crude pressures felt by the
surrealists. As a result, the psvehedelic experience is the most accessible
domain of unhampered individualitv, free of the contamination of an
abstract "they." If the surrealist found his libertv in the realm of dreams,

the psychedelic artist finds his existence within deeper inner experience.

Today, for most people in the Western world, meditation and the ex-

ploration of the self are possible only in the context of the drug experi-

ence. The artist, perhaps more than any other member of society, seeks

to experience himself, and it is to be expected that the psvehedelic ex-

perience will appeal to him, first for psychological and later for artistic

reasons.

Breton justified his endeavor by saving: "I have laid stakes on what
I thought was n<^ht, on what I judged likely to make the human condi-
tion less unacceptable." But the surrealist was unable really to escape the

world; his aspirations were always higher than the visions he was able

actually to achieve. \ Friend of Soupault's committed suicide, leaving a

note that read: "You can't live in a world where everyone cheats." But
the psychedelic can live in that world because the surrealist belief that

the universe exists inside you is demonstrated satisfactorily in the ps\

chedelic experience
*6i If the psychedelic experience expands consciousness, if it opens up
new human possibilities, if it clarifies what the individual is, then the
more meaningful challenge is not to have a turned -on society but to
bring this insight into the world as it is lived. The failure so far of the

psychedelic experience to bring its insight to fruition in our lives is re-

vealed by the fact that articulation of its insight tends to be in the terms
of Eastern mysticism. But the mandala and the "Hare Krishna" were
around long before Albert Hoffman sniffed the vial containing newly
synthesized LSD. The choice doe? not have to be between a mystical and
starving India and an affluent Western world devoid of spiritual quali-

ties. The great potential of the psychedelic community is not to drop out
but to create a working synthesis between mind and body. For signs of
this, we must look to the psychedelic artist.

The psychedelic artist not only adds to the sum of human knowl-
edge by contributing to our understanding of the human mind and
nervous system, the least understood parts of our anatomy, but stands
before the threshold of a discovery that would add immeasurably to the

quality of our lives. Breton reaffirmed in his later writings a "triple ob-

jective ... to transform the world, change life, remake from scratch
human understanding" —nothing less than the potential of the psy-
chedelic experience.

If McLuhan is correct in viewing the artist as the radar warning

system of society, then the psychedelic artist is the oscilloscope of the

altered consciousness. The direction in which he moves will be pre-

dictive of the meaning of the psychedelic experience.

The psychedelic
artist
STANLEY KRIPPNER, Ph. D.

During 1967 I made a survey by means of interviews and a questionnaire

of 91 artists who were known to have had one or more psychedelic ex-

periences. I knew many of these artists personally and obtained the

names of others through people active in the psychedelic movement.
I avoided interviews with amateurs and "Sunday painters"; the artists

in the survey were professionally committed to the creative life. Their

talents and comparative development as artists did, of course, varv, but
among the 91 were an award-winning filmmaker, a Guggenheim Fellow
in poetry, a recipient of Ford, Fulbright, and Rockefeller study grants in

painting, and others of substantial reputation.

A wide variety of expression was represented by the artists ques-

tioned, and many of them engaged in more than one form of creative

activity. Production of drawing and painting was the most frequently

mentioned (by 47 and 44 of the artists, respectively) . Then followed light

shows or lumia (19), mixed media (19), films (16), prose (15), photo-
graphy(i3), instrumental music (13), poetry (12), collage (4), sculp-
ture (4), theater (4), and happenings (3). Smaller percentages of the

artists were involved with architecture, ceramics, environments, costume

design, dance, fabrics, graphics, interior design, music composition, vocal

music, and weaving.

Most of the artists were from the New York area. However, some of
them lived in other cities in various parts of the United States and Eu-
rope.

Of the group, 78 were men, 1 3 were women. Most of the artists were

in their twenties or thirties, many were in their forties, and some were in

their fifties or sixties.

Those whom I could not interview were sent a questionnaire by

mail. From some, I never received a reply. A few admitted that they
suspected I was an agent for the U. S. Federal Narcotics Bureau or the

Food and Drug Administration. A European painter claimed that I was

working for the Central Intelligence Agency. Many artists cooperated

onlv after it was made clear that thev would remain anonymous.
 "An alceaily < t innuh tf consciousness''

It was suggested to each artist that "the psychedelic artist generally is

defined as one whose paintings or other forms of artistic expression show

the effects of psychedelic experience, usually chemically induced. The
work may have been produced as a result of psychedelic experience,

during psychedelic experience, or in an attempt to induce a psychedelic

experience." The artists were generally in agreement with this definition;

79 answered affirmatively, 6 gave a qualified affirmative answer, and 6

answered negatively.
Those who qualified their answers suggested additional ways in

which art and psychedelic experience might be related. A poet noted that
psychedelic art often serves to remind people of their psychedelic experi-

ences; the play Frankenstein, as mounted by the Living Theater, was

cited as an example. ("Acid rock" frequently was mentioned as well; this

form of music employs a monotonous, harshly amplified drone sound

which sometimes acts as a consciousness-altering stimulus.

One artist proposed a further extension of the definition, saying

that "psychedelic art can be work which helps you turn on." He con-

tinued: "I paint murals for wealthy acid-heads; they look at my paintings

while they're high and they have a more exciting trip."

Two artists agreed with the given definition but pointed out certain
problems involved in defining psychedelic art. Photographer Irwin Gooen
stated that all art can be termed "psychedelic" because art "gives the
viewer a feeling of sharing something with an already expanded con-

sciousness —that of an artist." Poet Allen Ginsberg noted that the type
of consciousness produced by LSD or pevote often resembles the tvpe of

consciousness produced by yoga, religious discipline, or "peak experi-

ence." Ginsberg continued: "All the art that I always have been inter-
ested in —even before my use of psychedelic chemicals — grows out of
that area."

A photographer said that it may be premature to define psychedelic

art because "we have had only about ten years of LSD experience." He
continued: "The artistic products of psychedelic experience were formed
under police oppression; these products may not resemble what will be
demonstrated in a future generation in which psychedelic art represents

a natural way of thinking rather than a variant."

Each of the 91 artists was asked if he considered himself to be a

"psychedelic artist." Six artists did not answer, 11 answered negatively,
oq answered affirmatively, and
9 gave an affirmative answer with qualifi
cations.
 165 In summary, a remarkably large number of the artists surveyed (85

out of 91 ) agreed with a broad definition of the "psychedelic artist," and

74 felt that the term could be applied to them personally.

•'A collective mind'

While working on the survey, I visited Garnerville, New York, home of

USCO ("The Us Company"), a group of painters, poets, filmmakers,

technicians, and weavers who live and work communally in an aban-
doned church. One of the works of art I admired was a nine-foot-high
painting of Shiva, the Hindu god of creation, whose outflowing energy
was symbolized by pulsating light from which brilliant lines radiated.

Superimposed on the Shiva was a painted Buddha; red lights

throbbed at the edges of the canvas in the steady rhythm of a beating

heart. I asked an attractive young weaver which member of the group

had conceived the Shiva-Buddha painting. She replied, with a smile,

"We are all one."
This visit was very much in my mind when I tabulated the results

of a question which asked: "Are you part of a larger group of psychedelic

artists?" Affirmative replies were given by 19 of the individuals surveyed,

and negative replies by 64. Six artists gave a qualified affirmative answer,

being members of loosely organized groups such as New York City's

Psychedelic Showcase, but not members of organizations that work co-

operatively on projects. Two did not respond.

The groups most often mentioned were USCO, the Living Theater,

Fluxus, Mandala (a French group), Sigma (a Dutch group), and the

League for Spiritual Discovery (a religious group headed by psychologist-
turned-prophet Timothy Leary )
Don Snyder, who developed an "organic slide" for projection ma-
chines and who was an innovator in the field of lumia, stated that it is

quite natural for psychedelic artists to work in groups. Aside from the

benefits of shared ideas, Snyder noted that the psychedelics can pro-

duce the notion of "a collective mind." Snyder also reported that he had
often experienced "intense feelings, under LSD, of entering into another

person's thoughts and becoming that person."

-Thousands of doors"

All of the 91 artists in the survey reported having had at least one psy-
chedelic experience. When asked if they had ever taken a psychedelic

substance, 87 answered yes; 4 answered no.

 Costume designer Joseph Felician has never ingested chemicals such 166 % The psychedelic

as LSD but uses self-hypnosis. A Canadian painter has never used psy-

chedelic chemicals but practices yoga. A California artist stated that he

attains alterations in consciousness by means of prayer and meditation;

another claims to have experienced consciousness-alteration spontane-
ously.

Of the chemical substances, LSD is the most popular psychedelic,

being mentioned by 84 members of the group. Marijuana (legally classi-

fied as a narcotic but actually a mild psychedelic) has been used by 78

of the artists, followed by DMT (dimethyltriptamine) (46), peyote

(41 ) , mescaline ( 38 ) morning-glory seeds

,
( 31 ) ,
psilocybin ( 22 ) , hashish

(2i),DET ( diethyl triptamine) (6),andyage (5).

A small number of artists reported trying rarer substances, generally

considered psychedelic, such as kava-kava, ibogaine, bufotenin, Ditran,

the Amanita muscaria mushroom, and the Hawaiian wood rose. In ad-

dition, a few artists claimed to have obtained psychedelic effects from

substances generally not considered psychedelic —benzedrine (an am-
phetamine), methedrene (an amphetamine), opium (a narcotic), ritalin,

kinotrinc, amyl nitrate, and nitrous oxide.

Asked when they took a psychedelic substance for the first time, the

group gave varied responses. Three persons reported taking psychedelics

during the 1940's, 17 during the 1950's, and 65 during the 1960's. All the
artists had taken their first trip before 1967. Two did not respond.
The people surveyed were asked if their psychedelic experiences

(nonchemicallv as well as chemicallv induced) were generally pleasant.

An unqualified ves response was given by 82 artists of the group; 5 gave

a qualified yes. In these five cases, it was stated that some of their initial

"trips" were unpleasant but that their later experiences were pleasurable.
One artist answered this question negatively, and three others did not
respond.

An interior designer described his psychedelic experiences as "always

stimulating artistically, whether pleasant or unpleasant." A painter noted

that his experiences were "alwavs meaningful, no matter what." Simon
Vinkenoog, a Dutch poet, described the reason why his first experience
was unpleasant: "In 1959, LSD was inflicted on me by a team of un-
qualified doctors-to-be who messed up some of my most beautiful experi-

ences ever by having me fill in sillv forms, bv hooking me up to an

electroencephalograph going momomomomomomomo, etc."

Several years ago, Alex Gild/.cn, an Ohio poet, took his first "acid

trip." A New York artist and I were his guides. The artist also took I. SO;
he was the "ingesting guide" and 1 was the "noningesting guide."
As Gfldzen felt the effects of the drugs Coming on. with haqisichord
music pouring from the phonograph, lie recapitulated the evolutionary
104. u s c o. Shiva. Painting with lights. 110x1 10". 1965. Photo by Yale Joel,
courtesy Life Magazine. This is a companion piece to color plate 24. Both are in

the USCO tabernacle at Garnerville, New York.

process, perceiving the artist and himself as flotsam on a wave, as newly 168 £ The psychedelic
artist
hatched serpents, as "astronauts of the mind," and as visionaries follow-

ing in the footsteps of Walt Whitman (who spent many years near the

place in which the session was held ) . Gildzen did not perceive me as an
"astronaut" because I was not "high"; instead, he jokingly threw grapes
at me. Later he wrote a poem based on his experience:

I walked through the door of myself.

I stepped across centuries

into an English harpsichord
& I rolled around
in its music until
I broke open —a wave
shattering against the wall
breaking the gildzen stream
flowing into the cracks in the floor
emerging a stronger wave.

The egg serpent

turned upon himself
& I threw grapes
at the guru.
We orbited ourselves—
we gemini of the mind,
we expanded
expanded
into a new dimension.

And the loaf became manna

& the fruit became jewels
€$• words became ancient oddities
d- I became Bacchus
6- Bacchus died in joy
like Huxley

I penetrated myself
until unbound
I sensed celebration
d- rolling across space
6- beyond time
I celebrated sensation.
It wasn't until
I walked through the door of myself
that I realized Whitman only started.

I was reminded of Gild/en's poem when I asked the artists the most
provocative question of the survey: "How have your psvehedelic experi
ences influenced your art?" None of them felt that their work had suf-

fered as a result of psvehedelic experience, although some admitted that

their friends might disai;rce with this judgment Three of the queried
aitists stated that theii psychedelic experiences had not influenced their
work one way or the other. The others cited a number of effects which
 fell into three broad categories: content, technique, and approach. In
most cases, the artists reported effects that fell into more than one cate-

gory.

"Reassuring proof

Sixty-four members of the group stated that psychedelic experience had

affected the content of their work, the most frequently mentioned ex-

ample being their use of eidetic imagery as subject matter. A Chicago

writer described his fantasies with peyote and mescaline as prime subject
matter for his poems and stories. A sculptor noted that his LSD-induced

visual images "have offered me a limitless amount of subject matter; I

have been reintroduced to a sense of wonder." Don Snyder reported that

his psychedelic experiences often introduced novel conceptual (rather

than perceptual) insights which he has been able to incorporate in his

work. Another artist declared: "I have seen sights more beautiful than
words can describe; I have tried to incorporate these visions into my art."

One artist reported having seen "the most beautiful patterns and
mandalas in a clear sky; these in turn influence the lines of my drawings."

Still another stated: "LSD and mescaline have literally opened mv eyes

wide." Morning-glory seeds enabled one artist to "let the drawing draw

itself; as the pen moved across the page, a picture appeared."

Some artists work while they are high; others do not. A Dutch
writer said: "I work only when I'm under the influence of some psy-

chedelic, as I am trying to turn on the reader without his being able to

resist the process." On the other hand, another artist stated: "I never

paint while I'm high; the imagery changes so rapidly I could not paint

what I see, only what I saw."

"The loosening-up of psychedelic experience has been very useful,"

declared a fabric designer, "but without the balance of persistently di-

rected effort, no art could be produced." A painter added: "It is difficult

for me to produce anything more than sketches during an LSD session;

my mind is too active to maintain a prolonged artistic effort."

I have personally observed a number of artists working while they

were high. Some of them appeared to be in full command of their craft,

demonstrating good muscular control and artistic judgment. Others

merely made sketches and notes, claiming that they were in no mood to

do painstaking work. The personality of the artist seemed to be only one

of several variables responsible for this difference; previous drug usage,

set and setting, the dosage level, and the type of drug were important
factors. For example, many artists were able to work quite efficiently

under marijuana or under 50 to 100 micrograms of LSD. The same art-

 170 9 The psychedelic
artist

# t

£_
d
?.*
105. Doll (Hopi god of the fields) as drawn by an artist undergoing an
experimental LSD session. The drawing at left was made before and the one at
right was made during the session.

ists, however, relaxed completely and "flowed with the stream" while
under the influence of higher drug dosages.
Many artists spoke of using more personal material in their work
since experiencing alterations in consciousness. One writer recalled how,

during a psilocybin session, she remembered a vast number of childhood

experiences; she was later able to use these incidents as material for

novels and short stories. To one painter, "art is a reflection of external

and internal reality: LSD has changed my perception of external realitv

and has increased my awareness of internal reality."
Sometimes a psychedelic session produces religious and mvstical ex-
periences that affect the content of an artist's work. Allen Ginsberg men-
tioned having a number of "visionary experiences" early in his life. How-
ever, he was not totallv convinced that these experiences were valid until
a number of psychedelic sessions "confirmed" them. Richard Yillegas

also described this "reassuring proof that all those forms and shapes
within the mind arc not just relative to one's imagination, but co-exist in

outer as well as in inner experience. Painting, then, becomes neither ab-

stract nor nonobjective but true realitv."

Hugo Mujica noted that "during a trip I discovered the shape that
I am now using. Later 1 learned that it was a mandala." The ancient
mandalic form is a circle within a square representing the unity of man
and his universe. Many artists reported seeing mandalas for the first time
during their psychedelic experiences, and the inandalie form shows up

Frequently in psychedelic art.

1 06. R I C H A R P V I L L E C A S
The transcendence of one's culturally imposed imprints always has
Lift. An example of Vil rk
been a goal foi the ( reatn e person. Manj of the artists surveyed reported prior to psychedelic expend 1
..
 i
7l that they have been able, through the psychedelics, to stand apart from

their culture and that this ability has had a major influence upon the
content of their work. "To perceive in only one way is limiting," stated a

photographer. "Therefore we have art —we use another person's eyes and
ears, a person who perceives the world differently than we do." The pho-
tographer continued: "If the artist's experience has been profound, and if

the artist is able to translate his experience into a communicable form,

the observer can vicariously transcend the single perception. Psychedelic

drugs can help to make the artist's experience profound."

A painter described her ability, with the aid of LSD and marijuana,
to "transcend the ordinary and enter into the limitless intuitions which
are now the basis of everything I do in my work." Another painter stated
that mescaline "allows me to transcend the value systems of a culturally

designated 'reality' which ordinarily encroaches upon what I now know

as true nature."

A worker in mixed-media called his most important LSD-induced

realization "the awesome new sense of the availability of a transcendent

level of experience extraordinarilv different from that of usual conscious-

ness." Allen Atwell stated that psychedelic experience "has made me
more apocalyptic," thus changing the content of his paintings.

A strong desire to communicate these new perceptions and concept-

ualizations characterized many of the artists I questioned. From Paris,

Gerard Rutten wrote: "In my happenings I am trying to reconsider all

my psychedelic experiences and extend them to other people." A film-

107. richard villegas. Un-

titled. Acrylic on canvas. 24 x 30".
1966. Following psychedelic experi-
ence the abandoned the style of
artist
ill. 106 and began painting abstrac-
tions.
maker stated that psychedelics have "enabled me for the first time to 172 £ The psychedelic

communicate my feelings and experiences to other people." A painter

reported that during an LSD session he had "a momentous, compelling

desire to communicate, which has never left me."
In summary, psychedelic experience had reportedly affected the
content of the work of 64 of the artists whom I queried. Their new ma-
terial has ranged from altered sensory impressions to recall of childhood
experiences, from novel concepts about man and the universe to visions

of archetypal figures and the underlying nature of reality. Many of the

artists appreciated an opportunity to see themselves and their world

from unusual vantage points and gave psychedelic experience the credit
for enabling them to do so.

"Enhanved and ejcpfinded

Forty-nine of the artists in the group said there had been a noticeable

improvement in their artistic technique as a result of their psychedelic

experiences; a greater ability to use color was mentioned most frequently.
One California painter told of participating in an LSD research study

directed by Oscar Janiger, a Los Angeles psychiatrist. "I always had been
afraid to use color in my work, but a single LSD session helped me to

conquer that fear." One artist noted that when he first used a psychedelic
substance he had been studying the problem of reproducing in paint the
colors found in microscopic views of butterflies. "One peyote trip," he
stated, "explained so much to me about refracted color that I have not
painted since but have worked only with colored light."

Some artists claimed that the qualitv of their work improves when
they are high. One writer asserted: "I write better stoned." "I prefer

writing when high," declared a poet. "I prefer reading poems to audi-

ences high, I prefer lecturing high."

According to some artists, productivity is enhanced by the psy-

chedelics. A producer of happenings claimed that his LSD, pevote, and

marijuana experiences have made him "far more enthusiastic and pro-
ductive." A filmmaker described his post-LSD work as "not onlv en-
hanced and expanded but increased in quantity." Several others noted
that a light dose of a psychedelic improves their ability to concentrate.

Arlcnc Sklar-Wcinstcin said that LSD helped her to appreciate "the

joy of details." One artist claimed that it had assisted him in the under-
standing of large patterns. A collage maker felt that the psychedelics had
helped him to "integrate" his thought processes. An architect described
a similar benefit, Stating thai LSD enabled him to "make an integrated
statement with 1 building."
o8. hugo mujica. Mandala- H.
nk on paper. 42" diameter. 1967.

"I have added the psychedelic experience to the scope and measure
of myself," declared California writer Ken Friedman. "I in turn use

myself and my experience as the basis of my art." Another described "an

awareness of the universal from which all things come," noting that

"LSD has enabled me to see more clearly the infinite number of forms

in which oneness manifests itself." Still another artist described how she

was able to "see through superficial coverings and perceive universal

structures." To another, "the mightiest truth of all is paradox, a simple

yet universal balance."

While reading over these reports, which were almost uniformly

positive, I was reminded that LSD and its relatives are generally regarded

as psychotomimetic (psychosis-mimicking) and hallucinogenic (hallu-

cination-producing) by psychologists and psychiatrists. Yet, among 91
artists, over half claimed to have become better craftsmen because of the

psychedelics. For some, the utilization of color was enhanced; for others,
productivity had increased. It would seem unlikely that the quality and 174 # The psychedelic
artist
quantity of their work would have so improved if the psychedelics had

exerted a substantial psychosis-mimicking or hallucination-producing

effect upon them. Perhaps these —which certainly are associated

effects

with the use of psychedelic drugs in some — casesoperative among

are less

artists.

Tom Blackwell cited a great many changes in his work due

Painter

to LSD, DMT, and peyote. "They have influenced it," he stated, "in
terms of my use of color, and in the juxtaposition and superimposition

of imagery. They have influenced my work in that they have corroborated

my original intuitive direction and have given me more conviction of the

Tightness of my method." Blackwell continued: "They have provided for

me a 'map' of my interior self and have enabled me to traverse regions of

my mind that I previously was able only to blindly grope after. The psy-

chedelics catapulted me in a direction toward which I was already

headed." He concluded: "As a result, my paintings and constructions are

concerned with the transformation of matter into energy and vice versa,
with the thin line between subjective and objective reality, and with the
work of art as a means of getting out of oneself and hopefully bringing
about something similar in the viewer.

"Contact with the soul'

Forty-seven of the artists attributed a change in their creative approach

to the psychedelics. One artist claimed his work had become more rep-
resentational; two others asserted that their work had become abstract.

Mentioned more often was the claim that psychedelic experience had
eliminated superficialitv from the artists' work and had given them
greater depth as people and as creators.

Some referred to their first psychedelic experience as a "peak experi-

ence," as a turning point in their lives. "My dormant interest in music

became an active one," said one artist, "after a few sessions with peyote
and DMT." Another individual said that a psilocvbin experience "caused

me to enjoy the art of drawing for the first time in my life."

Another painter claimed that LSD, peyote, and marijuana "have
radically changed my view of rcalitv in terms of form, color, and size."

Tom Blackwell noted how the psvchcdelics made him aware of several

new "levels of consciousness." Regarding the validitv of his experiences

with altered consciousness, Don Snyder asserted: "I would rather place
my faith in the reality of my marijuana episodes than in the products of
m\ everydaj state of mind."
Dutch writer Ronnv van den Kerenbccint stated: "When ver\
 75 young, I started writing stories and poems. The older I got, the more I

had the feeling of not being able to find something really worthwhile to
write about. My psychedelic experiences taught me that what I used to
do was no more than scratch the surface of life. After having seen and

felt the center of life, through the psychedelics, I now think I do have
something worthwhile to write about."

109. tom black well. Periphery (series). Acrylic and oil. 48 x 48". 1965.
Collection Ian Bernard, Laguna Beach, California.
 -
A filmmaker commented: "One acid trip doesn't automatically turn i 6 % The psychedelic
artist
someone into an artist. It still takes years to acquire the discipline of the

craft. I had acquired the discipline, but lacked contact with the soul and
spirit which makes art come alive. This the psychedelic experience may
provide. It did for me."
Greater insight and heightened spontaneity were mentioned by
several artists. A writer claimed: "When I am high, I can better under-
stand the motives of other people, can more correctly interpret their

actions, and can better communicate these understandings to my

readers." A composer noted that the psychedelics enabled him to "better

understand my ideas and more accurately communicate them through

the use of music." To him, LSD experience "has brought about a freer,
more spontaneous approach to everything I do." Ronny van den Eeren-
beemt asserted that hashish helps to "clear the debris" and enables him
to "make use of all the available creativity."

(The facilitation of creative effort is not limited to professional art-

ists, according to one California writer I interviewed. Speaking of the

Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco, he commented: "Lots of those

kids are pretty mixed up, but others are quite mature and totallv com-
mitted to their subcultural values. Among these values is a stress on in-

dividuality and decentralization; you might call it a new form of tribalism

because so many of these young people live together in congenial groups.

It is not unusual for the girls to make bread, candles, and their own
clothes. It is not unusual for the men to string beads and carve totems.
This collection of homemade items is often done with such skill and such
care that I sometimes think it is the most genuine form of psvehedelic
art.")

The abandonment of "ego games" was mentioned bv a number of

artists. A writer stated: "I try to transcend the ego, attempting to enter

into an I /Thou relationship through which the ego fades before the
manifest self of the whole person." Another writer claimed: "My work
has become more ego-transcendent than it was before I came into con-
tact with these drugs." An actress told how, through the utilization of
hashish, she gained the ability to "give of myself" during a performance.

Not only did the actress feel that she was able to communicate more di-

rectly with the audience; she gave up "stealing scenes," and was able
to work better with her fellow actors.

The dance of life

The possible impart of psychedelic experience upon an individual is

illustrated in the case <>t Isaac Mm. mis in an interview, the artist de-
l
77 clared that "psychedelic experience has deeply influenced all aspects of
my life."
Upon graduating from college, Abrams got married, toured Europe,
and went to work selling furniture. "I had been taught," he said, "that

the most important things in life were to look neat, act nice, and make
money. Yet I knew that something was missing. There was something to

do that I wasn't doing. I had a sense of mission but no idea what the
mission might be."

Abrams was offered mescaline by a friend but turned it down. Sev-

eral years later he was offered psilocybin and decided to give it a try.
On Washington's birthday, 1962, Abrams and his wife took psilocybin;
he watched the ceiling whirl, turned the lights off, and realized for the

first time that during all the years of his life he had been behaving "like

a person who had no mind." Abrams enjoyed his psilocybin experience

and a few months later had another opportunity to try mescaline. "We
took it in the country," he recalled, "and it was beautiful." His next
psychedelic experiences were with marijuana; once again, these were

pleasant and positive in nature.

The inner life having been opened up by these episodes, Abrams

thought that he might discover his "life's mission." The search was in
vain. He sold more furniture. He wrote a play. He entered graduate
school, but it was not for him and he dropped out. Early in 1965, Abrams
took LSD. During his session, he began to draw. "As I worked," he said,

"I experienced a process of self-realization concerning the drawing.

When the drug's effects wore off, I kept on drawing."
Abrams attended art classes to learn about technique and materials.
His wife went to different classes, took notes, and passed on the informa-
tion to him. The skills developed quickly and he stopped attending
classes.

Abrams entered psychoanalysis with a well-known psychotherapist

who fully understands the creative process. The artist remarked: "Ther-
apy helps me mobilize the psychedelic experience and externalize it.

I think any individual can go just so far on his own. At some point he

needs a spiritual teacher or guru. A good psychotherapist can be a guru."

"For me," Abrams continued, "the psychedelic experience basically
has been one of turning on to the life process, to the dance of life with all

of its motion and change. Before 1962, my behavior was based on logical,

rational, and linear experiences. Due to the psychedelics, I also became

influenced by experiences that were illogical, irrational, and nonlinear.
But this, too, is part of life. This aspect is needed if life is to become
interrelated and harmonious.
"Psychedelic drugs gave me a sense of harmony and beauty. For the

first time in my life, I can take pleasure in the beauty of a leaf, I can find
meaning in the processes of nature. For me to paint an ugly picture 178 % The psychedelic

would be a lie. It would be a violation of what I have learned through

psychedelic experience.

"I have found that 1 can flow through my pen and brush; every-
thing I do becomes a part of myself —an exchange of energy. The canvas
becomes a part of my brain. With the psychedelics, you learn to think

outside of your head. My art attempts to express or reproduce my inner

state."

Abrams concluded: "Psychedelic experience emphasizes the unity

of things, the infinite dance. You arc the wave but you are also the

ocean."

"The rotor of''your dream"

I visited a well-known pop recording artist. He spoke very frankly about

the manner in which psychedelic substances influence popular music,
stating: "The so-called 'acid-rock' groups aren't the only ones who take

drugs. Most of the top rock-'n'-roll groups use marijuana regularly and
have tried LSD at least once. Pot and acid have such a strong effect on
you that they can't help but affect what you write and how you play.

Just listen to the lyrics of the pop songs and you'll catch on to what's

hnppening." He selected a record and played it for me.

Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream

It is not dying, it is not dying.
Lay down all thought, surrender to the void.
It is shining, it is shining —
That you may see the meaning of within.
It is being, it is being.

That love is all, and love is everyone —

It is knowing, it is knowing
That ignorance and hate may mourn the dead.
It is believing, it is believing.

But listen to the color of your dream,

It is not living, it is not living.
All play the game, existence to the end.

Of the beginning, of the beginning.* 1

I remarked that the song sounded like an I. SO session set to music and
expressed surprise that I had not heard the song on radio or television.

"Program directors," 1 was told, "trv to keep this type of song off the air

or they gel static from parents and from pressure groups. Look at the

stir caused bj '

Eighl Miles High, '
'
Lucy in the Sk\ With Diamonds,
-

•'Tomorrow Neva Knows '

bj [ohn Lennon and Paul McCartney. Copj

right ! 1966 l" Northern Songs, I td., -1 75 New Oxford St.. London W.C. 1,

ind I ted by permission. All rights reserved.

no. isaac a b r a m s. Birth Cycles. Oil on canvas. 50 x 50". 1966.
'
Mr. Tambourine Man, ' and '
Sunshine Superman. ' All those songs 180 % The psychedelic
artist
have lyrics that refer to pot and acid trips. And the kids buy them by the
million."

I asked if the psychcdelics were considered beneficial by most young

pop artists. I was told: "When you're high, you get lots of wild ideas for

lyrics. After you come down, some of them still sound pretty good and
you put them on paper. That's the most important way you can use a
high. When it comes to performing, people do different things. Most of

us believe we do better if we go on the stage straight, not stoned. But

there are exceptions."

I inquired about the legal problems that arise in the use of psyche-

delics. "Well, there's always the problem of the police. Last month, one
of the best-known rock-'n'-roll groups left a party just before the fuzz

arrived. Over in England, Mick Jagger and Donovan have been busted
and they say the worst is yet to come."

**/*#f#*e bank'

The police have conventional medical opinion as well as the law on their

side. Dr. Roy Grinkcr, editor of the Archives of General Psychiatry, wrote

in 1963 that "LSD experiences are subtly creating a psychopathology."

Dr. James Goddard, Commissioner of the U. S. Food and Drug Admin-

istration, in 1966 reacted to reports that psychcdelics may produce valid

spiritual, religious, and creative experiences by branding the claims "pure

bunk." Dr. Donald Louria, Chairman of the New York State Council on

Drug Addiction, in 1966 called for a "substantial increase" in the pen-

alties for the illicit handling of LSD, a drug which he said "must be listed

as one of the most dangerous in the pharmacopeia of man." Louria fur-

ther described LSD as "a potent hallucinogen" which may be "even more
dangerous than heroin."
I am sympathetic to the alarm of responsible officials because I have
observed many psychedelic sessions and have seen the variety of effects

produced by these powerful chemicals. I have known hundreds of indi-

viduals who, for better or for worse, have used psychedelic substances on
one or more occasions and I am fully aware of the potential dangers of
these drugs. I have seen individuals develop panic reactions, enter a tem-
porary or long-lasting psychosis, or deteriorate slowly under the influence

of LSD and its relatives.

It is apparent to me that, without proper screening and guidance.

LSD can be .1 psychotomimetic agenl for souk- people — especially for

those who cling tightly to their culturally imposed understanding of

themselves and their world. Furthermore, these drugs can be hallucino-

1S1 genie agents and produce "bad trips" for those who have vested interests

in the socially defined percepts and concepts of reality. In addition, the

drugs can lead to psychosis or suicide for those persons who are suffi-

ciently unstable emotionally before embarking on their trips and are

unable to cope with the dramatic material that may manifest itself dur-

ing a psychedelic session.

Even granting the very real dangers of psychedelic drug use, how-

ever, the reaction of medical and governmental authorities to the prob-

lem has shown more signs of hysteria than of intelligence. Although it is

obvious that these drugs have tremendous potential value, and although
it has been demonstrated that careful screening procedures and well-

trained guides can virtually eliminate the risks, in 1966 the U. S. Food
and Drug Administration drastically reduced the number of government-
approved research projects, claiming that severe measures were needed
to eliminate illicit drug use. As a result, there is at this writing no clinic

in the United States where an artist can go and have a legal psychedelic

experience under the proper conditions, or where the effects of such an

experience can be studied by competent investigators.

Such a clinic did exist at one time. The Psychedelic Research Insti-

tute of San Francisco State College published a provocative article in a

1966 issue of Psychological Reports. The article told how LSD and
mescaline had been administered to a carefully screened group of artists

who brought projects with them to the session. Not one of the artists

reported a bad trip. Half of the artists claimed that they had accom-
plished a great deal more during the session than they would have during
a similar period of time at their studios. One fourth of the group said they

completed about the same amount of work during the session as they

would have at their studios. The remainder of the artists accomplished

less; they abandoned their projects because they were diverted by the en-

riched sensory impressions and vivid visual imagery provided by the drugs.

Psychological tests indicated an increase in certain areas of creative func-

tioning during the experiment.

The results of this study were hailed by many psychologists and

psvehiatrists as ushering in a new era of imaginative experimentation with

the psychedelics. However, shortly after the research stud}- was con-

cluded, the Food and Drug Administration withdrew the institute's LSD
and mescaline permits. As a result, the Psychedelic Research Institute
had to close its doors.

In my experience with the users of psychedelics, I rarely have found

artists among the casualties of drug use. This may be related to the fact

that an artist must stand somewhat apart from his culture in order to

create. To create or invent something new, one cannot be completely

conditioned or imprinted. Perhaps it is this type of individual —the per-

son who will not be alarmed at what he perceives or conceptualizes i%2 % The psychedelic

during a psychedelic session —who can most benefit from these experi-
w

ences.

It must be left to professional critics to evaluate the work of the 91

artists I studied. However, my work with them impressed upon me the

need for more, not fewer, research studies with LSD, DMT, mescaline,

marijuana, psilocybin, and the other chemicals, brews, and herbs that

can make manifest one's mental processes and magnify one's inner life.

This survey was the first of its type to be reported —but the findings

suggest a need for more intensive studies of the relationship between

creativity and psychedelic experience.
It may well be that in the future the most rewarding uses of these

chemicals will be among the artists of a culture, among those people who
commit themselves to a life of discovery and innovation. The exploration
of one's mental processes with drugs, seeds, and plants may have to be
circumscribed and limited, but the current movement in psychedelic art

demonstrates that this exploration cannot be prohibited entirely without

suppressing a vital and growing creative force.
Bibliography

Amaya, Mario. Art Nouveau. New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1966.

Art Since 1945. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1958.

Balestrieri, A. "Hallucinatory Mechanisms and the Content of Drug Induced

Hallucinations." In Bradley, P., Fliigel, F., and Hoch, P., Neuro-Psychopharma-
cology, Vol. 3. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1964.

Barnard, Man.-. "The God in the Flowerpot." The American Scholar, Autumn,
1963.

Barron, F. Creativity and Mental Health. Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1963.

Berlin, L.M., et al. "Studies in Human Cerebral Function: the Effects of Mesca-
line and Lysergic Acid on Cerebral Process Pertinent to Creative Activity."
Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, 122 (1955).

Birren, Faber. Color. New York: University Books, 1963.

Blum, R., and Associates. Utopiates: The Uses and Users of LSD 25. New York:
Atherton, 1964.

Blunt, Anthony. The Art of William Blake. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1959.

Braden, William. The Private Sea: LSD and the Search for God. Chicago:
Quadrangle Books, 1967.

Chang, Chung-yuan. Creativity and Taoism: A Study of Chinese Philosophy, Art,

and Poetry. New York: Julian Press, 1963.

Cohen, S. The Beyond Within. New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1964.

Ellis, Havelock. "Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise." The Contemporay Review,

January, 1898.

Fadiman, J.,
et al. Use of Psychedelic Agents to Facilitate Creative Problem Solv-
ing. San Francisco: Institute for Psychedelic Research of San Francisco State
College, 1965.

Felice, Philippe de. Poisons Sacres, Ivresses Divines. Paris: Editions Albin, 1936.

Fowlie, Wallace. Age of Surrealism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, i960.

Freud, Sigmund. On Creativity and the Unconscious. New York: Harper Torch-
books, 1958.

Ghiselin, Brewster, ed. The Creative Process. New York: Mentor, 1955.

Grinker, R.R., Jr. "Lvsergic Acid Diethvlamide." Archives of General Psvchiatry,

8(1963).
Harman, W.W., et al. "Psychedelic Agents in Creative Problem-solving: a Pilot 184 9 Bibliography
Study." Psychological Reports, 1966, Monograph Supplement 2-V19.

Heard, Gerald. "Can This Drug Enlarge Man's Mind?" Psychedelic Review, In
(Summer, 1963).

Hess, Thomas B., ed. The Grand Eccentrics. Art News Annual XXXI7. New York:
Macmillan Co., 1966.

Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. New York:
Harper, 1963.

Huxley, Aldous. "Mescaline and the 'Other World.' " In Cholden, ed., Lysergic
Acid Diethylamide and Mescaline in Experimental Psychiatry. New York: Grune
and Stratton, 1956.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Modern Li-
brary, 1902.

Jung, C.G., and Kcrdnyi, C. Essays on a Science of Mythology. New York: Harper
Torch book, 1963.

Kliiver, Hcinrich. Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucinations. Chicago: Phoenix

Books, University of Chicago Press, 1966.

Koestlcr, Arthur. The Act of Creation. New York: Macmillan Co., 1964.

Korngold, M. "LSD and the Creative Experience." Psychoanalytic Review, Win-

ter, 1963-1964.

Krippner, S. "The Hypnotic Trance, the Psychedelic Experience, and the Creative
Act." American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 7 (1964)

Kris, Ernst. Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art. London: George Allen and

Unwin, 1953.

Kubic, Lawrence. Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process. New York: Noon-
day Press, 1961.

La Bane, Weston. The Peyote Cult. Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1964.

Le Ajuriaguerra, J.
and Jaeger, F. Le Poefe Henri Michaux et les Drogues Hallu-
cinogenes. Basle: Sandoz, undated.

Leary, Timothy. "Languages: Energy Systems Sent and Received." Etc., Decem-
ber, 1965.

Lewin, L. Phantastica, Narcotic and Stimulating Drugs. New York: E.P. Dutton
and Co., 1964.

Lippard, Lucy R. Pop Art. New York: Pracgcr, 1966.

Louria, D. Nightmare Drugs. New York: Pocket Books, 1966.

I SD: a Design Tool?" Progressive Architecture, August, 1966.

McGlothlin. W.H., Cohen, S., and McGlothlin, M.S. "Long-lasting Effects of

LSD on Normals." Los Angeles: Institute of Government and Public Affairs, 196-
( mimeographed)

McGlothlin, W.H., Cohen. S., and McGlothlin. M.S. "Short-term Effects of LSP

on Anxiety, Attitudes and Performance." Journal of Nervous and Mental DtSMM v

139 (1964).

MacKenzie, Norman. Dreams and Dreaming. New York: Vanguard, 1965.

Mc] nil. in. Marshall Undmtmding Media. New York: McGrav Hill. 1965.
185 Masters, R.E.L., and Houston, Jean. The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience.
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966.

Michaux, Henri. Light Through Darkness. New York: Orion, 1963.

Michaux, Henri. Miserable Miracle, trans. Louise Varese. San Francisco: City
Lights Books, 1963.

Mitchell, S. Weir. "The Effects of Anhalonium Lewinii." British Medical Journal,

1896.

Pellegrini, Aldo. New Tendencies in Art. New York: Crown, 1966.

"Psychedelic Art." Life, September 9, 1966.

Radin, Paul. The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian. New York: Dover, 1963.

Read, Herbert. Icon and Idea: The Function of Art in the Development of Human
Consciousness. New York: Schocken, 1965.

Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti Art. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Psychology of Imagination. New York: Philosophical

Library, 1948.

Schneider, Daniel. The Psychoanalyst and the Artist. New York: Mentor, 1962.

Seuphor, Michel. Abstract Painting. New York: Dell, 1964.

Simmons, J.,
and Winograd, Barry. It's Happening: A Portrait of the Youth Scene
Today. Santa Barbara: Marc- Laird Publications, 1966.

Surrealism. Yale French Studies No. 31. New Haven: Yale University Press,

undated.

Tvler, P. The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew. New York: Fleet, 1967.

Waldberg, Patrick. Surrealism. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.

Wasson, R.G. "The Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico: An Inquiry into the Origins
of the Religious Idea Among Primitive Peoples." Botanical Museum Leaflets,

Harvard University, Vol. 19, No. 7, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Feb. 17, 1961.

Wasson, R.G., and Wasson, V. Mushrooms, Russia and History. New York:
Pantheon, 1957.

Watts, Alan. The Joyous Cosmology. New York: Pantheon, 1962.

Zegans, L.S., Pollard, J.C., and Brown, D. "The Effects of LSD-25 on Creativity

and Tolerance to Regression." Archives of General Psychiatry, 16 (1967).

Index

Abrams, Isaac, 14-16, 38-41, 82, 120-22, Cheetah, 86, 149

123, 136, 153, 176, 179 chemicals, psychedelic,
"acid rock", 164, 178 dosage, 20, 169—70
advertising, 87, 1 57
harmful effects, 19-20, 173, 180-82
Albright, Ivan, 1 1 legal prohibition, 18-21, 180
Aldcroft, Richard, 26, 84, 85 medical opinions, 19, 180-82
Amanita muscaria, 166 sensory effects, 88 ff., 163 ff.
American Scholar, The, 103 synthetic development, 82
amphetamines, 166 types used, 17, 87, 101, 166, 182
amyl nitrate, 166 used by North American Indians, 105-8
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 132 used in Far East, 102-3
arabesques, 86, 91, 109, 148 used in South America, 104-5
Arc/lives of General Psychiatry, 180 see also: psychedelic experience
Architectural League of New York, 35, 72 names of individual chemicals
architecture, 155, 163, 172 and plant substances
art nouveau, 82, 110 Chen, Hung-Shon, 102
Arts, 129 Christian art, 104, 136, 153
assemblage; see collage Clavilux, 84
Astarte, 147 Cocteau, Jean, 144
Atwell, Allen, 11-13, 3^> 37, 82, 122-24, collage, 66, 77, 120, 121, 163, 172

140, 155,157, 171 Conrad, Tony, 144

Aztec; see Indians costume design, 145, 163, 166
creativity, 1, 18, 19, 88-89, 93> 10 3> 21 9>
122, 174 ff.

criticism, 18, 19, 152, 156-57

Balloon Farm, 148
Barnard, Mary, 103
Beatles, the, 87, 178
Dali, Salvador, 134, 135
benzedrine, 166
dance, 21, 43, 44, 84, 149, 150, 155, 163
Bergson, Henri, 98
Davidson, Richard, 23
Bible, the, 1 57 da Vinci, Leonardo, 92
birds, 107-8
Death of the Mind, 10
Blackwell, Tom, 47-50, 99, 155, 174, 175
de Bruijn, Lex, 32, 33
Blaffer, Camilla, 23, 69 definitions, 17-18, 129-31, 136-37, 156,
Blake, William, 82, 109, 110, 111, 130
164-65
Bonnefoy, Yves, 1 57
de Groot, Pat, 69
Bosch, Hieronymus, 90, 114-16, 123, 130,
de Tolnay, Charles, 116
*35 Degas, Edgar, 56
1
Breton, Andre, 132, 133, 134, 160, 161
DET, 166
Brueghel, Pieter, 90, 116
discotheques, 75, 85, 86, 87, 126, 148
Buddha, 81, 99, 165, 167
ditran, 166
bufotenin, 166
Donovan, 180
Byrds, 149
DMT, 166, 174, 182
D.M.T. (motion picture), 83
Dockstader, Frederick J., 23
Cage, John, 148 Dom, The, 126
Cale, John, 148 Dorvial, Bernard, 1 59
Carey, Martin, 65 drama; see theater
Cassen, Jackie, 9-10, 34-35, 82, 84, 86, drawing, 21, 121, 154, 163, 169, 170, 174,
125, 143, 146, 155 177
ceramics, 163 dreams, 17, 93, 96, 131, 133
 cidctic imagery, 90 fF., 96, 99, 103, 105-8, Indians, 104-8 188 Index
109, 119, 125 Innerspace, 23
Electric Circus, The, 75, 86, 150, 151
KlHs, Havelock, 91
Jacobi, Lotte, 116
Ehiard, Paul, 1 59 James, William, 128
environments,
Janiger, Oscar, 172
light, 10, 26, 27-29, 155, 163; see also
JofTrey, Robert, 146
lumia
mixed-media, 35, 43, 71, 72, 75, 84, 86,
126, 140-43, 150, 155, 156, 163
Kaprow, Allan, 1 38
painted, 12-13, 122_2 4> M Karp, Ivan, 1 30
kava-kava, 166
Kazemacher, Jacques, 63
fabrics, 87, 145, 163, 165,169 kinatrine, 166
Fantastic Realism, School of, 82 kincticism; see environments
Fantastic Voyage, 144 Klanvein, Mati, 25, 46, 81, 94, 135, 157
Felician, Joseph, 166 Klee, Paul, 1, 130, 131, 132
Fiedler, Conrad,
1
2^ Kliiver, Heinrich, 91-92
Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, 149 Kluver, William, 1 57
film; see motion pictures Kusama, Yayoi, 142
Flicker, 144
Fowlie, Wallace, 133
Frances, Ilarriette, 158 La farge, Oliver, 107
Frankenstein, 164 Lautreamont, Isidore Ducasse, 132
Freud, Sigmund, 96, 98, 127, 129 laws; see chemicals, psychedelic: legal pro-
Friedman, Ken, 173 hibition
Fuchs, Frnst, 30-31, 44-45, 46, 99, 119, League for Spiritual Discovery, 165
135, 136, 137, 155, 157 Leary, Timothy, 165
Lebel, Jean-Jacques, 23, 85-86, 140
Lee, Francis, 54, 82, 145
Levy, Murray, 23
Gauguin, Paul, 18
light painting, 10, 64, 99, 116
Cildzen, Alex, 166
light projections;
Ginsberg, Allen, 152, 164, 170
see environments: light
Giuliano, Charles, 23, 70
light painting
(odclard, James, 180
lumia
Gooen, Irwin, 64, 99, 116, 164
photography
graphics, 111, 158, 163
Living Theater, The, 164, 165
Grinker, Roy, 180
Louria, Donald, 180
( Guatemala, 104
Lovecraft, H.P., 123
guides, psychedelic, 20, 88, 166
LSD, 17, 82, 87, 88, 92-93, 101, 119, 120,
132, 152, 158, 161, 164, 165, 166,
169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176,
Ilaight Ashbury, San Francisco, 176 178, 181, 182
hallucination, 93, 97, 173-74, 1 7^» 180-81 lumia, 10, 21, 26, 28-29, 34> 43- 5 2_ 53>
Hamilton, Edith, 109 60-61, 69, 71, 73, 74, 79, 83-85,
happenings, 43, 85, 138-43, 149, 163 99, 136, 143-45, 155, 156, 163, 165
"Hare Krishna", 161 see also: environments: light
hashish, io2, 166, 176 light painting
Hawaiian wood rose, 166
I leard, Gerald, 88
Mc I.iihan. Marshall, 85, 138, 150, 161
I leidegger, Martin. 1
25 Mackmurdo, Arthur Heygate, 110
Heisenberg, Werner, 82, 1^3
magic, 18,97, 1;;
hemp, 102
Mandala (French organization), 165
leraclitus, 82,
1
99 mandala (symbolic form), 11, 33, 36, ;-.
1 loffman, Albert, 16]
62, 74, 81, 82. 92, 99, 161. Hv.
hiklirlm, Fricdcrich, 125
I

I louse, Linn, 2^
'
marijuana, i^S, 166. 1-1. 1-:. 1-4. 1-6.
I hixley, Aldous. 1 s,
89, 98, 1 1 s, 1 26
178, 182
hypnosis, S4. 93, 166
Man Ray, 144
Martin, Anthoin . 1 ;

Masters, R.E.L. and Houston, Jean, 98, 1;;.

ibogaine, 106
Imagu (In Monde VitionaJn, 1 is Marxism, 31, 1601

imagination, 103, 1
19, 130, 133, 140 Max, Peter, Ba, 148
impressionism, 1
56 medical opinion, see chemicals, psychedelic
Infinity Machin*; n* Mdcroft, Richard Mekas, Jonas, 1 16
189 mescaline, 17, 87, 91, 118, 166, 169, 171, effect on artists, 17-21, 87 ff., 118 ff.,

177, 181, 182 12 9-3^ 1

34> l6 3 ff -

methedrene, 166 evaluation, 124-28, 152-61, 181-82

Mexico, 105 in art; see name of art form
Meyerowitz, Alvin, 62 levels of awareness, 57, 94 ff., 174
Michaux, Henri, 118—19 psychotherapeutic use, 19, 20, 88-89,
Mind-Benders, 146 96-97, 126-27, 177
Miro, Joan, 132, 133 statistics, 163 ff.

mixed-media, 21, 84-87, 95, 124-28, 131, types,

136, 1-1 archetypal, 17, 81, 86, 97, 99, 107-8,
see also: environments: mixed-media 114, 119, 126-27, 153, 159, 177-78
Modigliani, Amedeo, 18, 90 communal, 86, 165, 176
Mondrian, Piet, 130 non-rational, 135, 136, 153—54, 177
Monet, Claude, 1 56 religious, 81, 82, 86, 87, 97, 98, 100,
Mopope, Stephen, 105, 108 101, 104, 105-8, 109, 122-24, 157-
Moreau, Gustave, 111 58, 161, 165, 166
morning-glory seeds, 166, 169 sensory, 17, 81, 89 ff., 111, 114, 119
motion pictures, 9, 21, 54, 80, 82, 83, 136, Psychedelic Research Institute, San Fran-
•4 5-4 6 . 5?- 156, 163, 171-72, cisco, 181
176 Psychedelic Review, 88
mouchrabieh, 91 psychedelic sensibility, 89, 101 ff., 130
movies; see motion pictures Psychedelic Showcase, 165
Mujica, Hugo, 62, 170 psvchochemicals; see chemicals, psychedelic
mushrooms, 102, 104-5, *66 Psychological Reports, 181
music, 43, 84, 148—50, 163, 164, 166-68, psychotherapy; see psychedelic experience:

74- *7 ( 78-80 psychotherapeutic use

myth, 88, 98—99, 120 psychotomimesis, 173-74

Native American Church, 105-8

Quasar, 43
neurophysiological art; see mixed-media
Quetzalcoatl, 105
neurosis, 88, 96, 109
nitrous oxide, 166

Rake's Progress, The, 34

Randel, Edward, 52-53, 60-61, 84, 99
occult; see magic
Rauschenberg, Robert, 1 57
Okamura, Arthur, 41
Ray, Man; see Man Ray
Oldenburg, Claes, 139
Read, Sir Herbert, 125
120 Minutes Dedicated to the Dhine Mar-
reality, 17, 89, 97, 114, 116, 127-28, 133,
quis, 85
opera, 21, 34, 155 139, 140-43, 170, 174
Redon, Odilon, 133
opium, 102, 166
Reiback, Earl, 69, 79, 86, 136
Ortloff, Paul, 76, 99
religion, 81, 87, 88, 97-98, 100-1, 103,
oscilloscope, 84, 87
107, 112, 122, 126, 134, 157
Rembrandt, 90
research, 19, 21, 119, 181-82
painting, 21, 90, 93, 95, 99, 101, 109,
Ries, Martin, 63
110, 111, 112-16, 119-24, 130,
Rimbaud, Arthur, 129, 132, 133
134-36, 154, 155-56, 163, 164, 166,
ritalin, 166
169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 178
ritual, 86, 87, 98, 106, 126, 127
Palmer, Avne, 70
Riverside Museum, 71, 73, 83, 140
Palmer-Perona, Bruno, 23
Rosicrucian movement, 82
Pardo, Frederic, 68, 78, 82, 135, 138
Rutten, Gerald, 171
Perreault, John, 130
peyote, 17, 44, 87, 105-8, 118, 164, 166,
169, 172, 174
photography, 37, 42, 163, 164, 171 Saby, Bernard, 51, 59, 99, 155
Poe, Edgar Allan, 123 San Francisco State College, 181
poetry, 132, 133, 148, 159, 163, 164, 166, St. Marks-in-the-Bouwerie, N.Y.C., 43
168, 170, 172 Schneider, Margaret, 23
posters, 148-49, 156 Schwartz, Barry N., 98
Print, 157 sculpture, 21, 104, 136, 155, 163, 169
prose, 90, 132, 133, 160, 161, 163, 169, Seghers, Hercules, 111

172, 173, 174, 176 sensory deprivation, 17, 18, 122, 125
psilocybin, 17, 87, 166, 174, 177, 182 sensory overload, 83-85, 86, 87, 125, 136,
psychedelic experience,
critical objections, 18-19, 156-57 Seurat, Georges, 90, 1 56
determinants, 20, 87-88, 169, 180 Sigma (Dutch organization), 165
Sklar W'einstcin, Arlene, 66-67, 77, 82, 99, USCO, 71-74, 83, 84, 123, 136, 141, 153, 190 Index
119-20, 120-21, 136, i;6, 172 165, 167
Snyder, Don, 27-29, 42-43, 84, 125, 136, Us Down by the Riverside, 80, 83
143, 144, 145, 165, 169, 174
so' ial realism, 131
Socrates,1 29
Yache, Jacques, 132
Soupault, Philippe, 160
\an Gogh, Vincent, 18, 89
Spybtick, Ernest, 105
van den F.crenbcemt, Ronny, 174, 176
Stern, Rudi, 9-10, 82, 84, 86, 125, 143,
Village Theater, 10
146, 155
Village Voice, 126, 130
stroboscope lights, -2, 73, 84, 87, 126
Vfllegas, Richard, 170, 1-1
surrealism, 82, 9-, 131-36, 138, 144, 157-
Yinkenoog, Simon, 23, 166
58, 160
see also: names of individual artists
Swann, Ingo, 117
swnbolism, 88, 96, 126, 153 Waldberg, Patrick, 97
synesthesias, 96 Wall Street Journal, 87
Wasson, R.G., 104-;
Watts, Alan, 94
Tangny, Yves, 1 31 W'cinstein, Arlene Sklar-; see Sklar W'ein-
Tchelitchew, Pavel, 90, 111-14 stein, Arlene
technique, 136, 155—57, 1-2 ff. Whitman, Walt, 168
Temple University Medical School, 20 Wilfred, Thomas, 84
Tepantitla fresco, 105 Wilson, W'es, 148, 149
theater, 10, 21, 136, W'ols, 1 11
139, 149, 135, 163,
163, 176
Theater of Light. 9
themes. 82, 83-84, 94, 96, 13;, 136, 153- Xenophanes, 101
33. 169 ff.
Theosophical movement, 82
I'oke, Tsa, 105—7
yage, 166
Tschacbasov, N'ahum, 117
Yalkut, Jud, 80, 83, 129, 136, 145
/'urn Turn Turn, 83
Yasuda, Robert, 33-38, 135, 134, 157
Tzara, Tristan, 148
Yeats. W.B., 92
Yoga, 17, 100, 164

"Ultramedia", 1 ;o
U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 180,
181 Zen. 17, 100
PSYCHEDELIC ART

This book was produced for the publisher by Balance House,

Mcmington, New Jersey.

The type was set by H. Wolff Book Manufacturing Company, New York, using
Linotype Electra for the text. The display type is Stephenson and Blake's Thoro-
good. The text and monochrome illustrations were printed by offset lithography bv
Connecticut Printers, Inc., Hartford, Connecticut, on Warren's Patina. The color

plates were printed in Zurich, Switzerland by Offset & Buchdruck in association

with Chanticleer Press, Inc. The endpapers are Lindenmeyr Multicolor and the
cloth is Bancroft's Kennett. The binding was done bv H. Wolff.
continued from, front flap

particularly to surrealism, and comments on the work of several

psychedelic artists.

Dr. Stanley Krippner reveals the results of a survey in which"

91 artists who have had, or claim to have had, psychedelic ex-
periences answered questions such as: "Do you consider your-
self a psychedelic artist?" and "How have your psychedelic ex-

periences influenced your art?" Not only are the statistics given
and interpreted, the artists' replies are frequently quoted. This
valuable study is the first of its kind.
The authors and contributors all speculate on the directions
likely to be taken by psychedelic art in the future.

The works themselves are presented in 32 pages of full color

reproductions and 1 10 illustrations in monochrome.

Whatever else is eventually published on the subject, Psyche-
delic Art will remain an important document in the literature

of this movement.

ROBERT E. L. MASTERS and JEAN HOUSTON are

the directors ofThe Foundation for Mind Research, New York,

are co-authors of The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, and

have published many articles in this field.

Jean Houston is associate professor of philosophy at Marymount
College, Tarrytown, New York, and has taught philosophy, psy-
chology, and religion at Columbia, Hunter College, and the New
School for Social Research. She has trained psychiatrists and psy-

chologists in the techniques and management of psychedelic drug

sessions.
Robert E. L. Masters is the author of more than a dozen books
in several areas of the behavioral sciences. A pioneer researcher with
psvchedelic drugs, he is also recognized as a leading authority on
sexual behavior.

BARRY N. SCHWARTZ teaches at Pratt Institute, New York,

where he is an Instructor in Humanities of the School of Humani-
ties and Social Science, and a lecturer in the Department of Graphic
Arts and Design of the Art School. He writes widclv on manv sub-
jects and is the creator of "The Examined Life," a radio program
which was heard weeklv on WBAI in New York and other stations.

His programs frequently investigated trends in the contemporary

arts.

DR. STANLEY KRIPPNER is Director of the Dream Lab-

oratory of Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York.
He has written and lectured extensively on psychedelic drugs and
their use in creativity, and is a consulting editor of The Psychedelic
Review.

A Balance House Book

GROVE PRESS, INC.

80 University Place, New York, N.Y. 10003

JACKET ILLUSTRATIONS
front: is a AC abrams. All Things Are Part of One Thing
back : mati k la r we i n . A Grain of Sand
Printed in Switzerland