Psychedelic art was considered dangerously subversive 50 years ago. A new exhibition in London called Reflections from Damaged Life asks whether anything of aesthetic worth came out of the genre.
Psychedelic art is a phrase now quaintly evocative of the late Sixties, conjuring up memories of trippy-hippy album covers lurid with swirls of colour: the bolder, cleaner new visions opened up by CGI and computer games now make it all look as weirdly innocent as a child’s kaleidoscope.
Yet 50 years ago, it was considered dangerously subversive: an attempt to glamorise the experience of hallucinogenic drugs and suggest insight into deeper realities beyond the phenomenal world – an extreme version, one might say, of the larger enterprise of Romanticism, carrying with it all sorts of dangerous delusions and folie de grandeur. But like so many counter-cultural phenomena, it soon slipped into the mainstream and became the norm (the musical Hair and the Beatles’ later albums being the turning point) before things moved on, and along with wampum beads and bell-bottom trousers, it became merely passé.
An excellent new exhibition at Raven Row, Alex Sainsbury’s beautiful gallery in the heart of Huguenot Spitalfields, explores the phenomenon with a commendable lack of moralising hysteria or special pleading and asks whether anything of aesthetic worth came out of the genre.
