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An Appreciation of Bonnie Maclean and Wes Wilson

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An Appreciation of Bonnie Maclean and Wes Wilson THE SIXTIES BOOK REVIEW Pioneers of psychedelic art: an appreciation of Bonnie MacLean and Wes Wilson The worlds of psychedelic posters, the history of art, and the counterculture suffered a major blow early this year with the passing, within just days of one another, of two of the formative and superlative artists of the psychedelic poster movement of the 1960 s: Robert Wesley Wilson (July 15, 1937–January 24, 2020) and Bonnie MacLean (December 28, 1939–February 4, 2020). Wilson and MacLean were central to the formulation and dissemination of the psychedelic style in poster art during the second half of the decade. Wilson is rightly credited as the principal pioneer of the psychedelic poster movement, but Bonnie MacLean was another pioneer whose influence is less recognized due to the more ephemeral nature of her work. Both were critical in the early development of the psychedelic style in the visual arts, particularly in regard to posters. The psychedelic poster movement can be seen as first emerging with two posters from the summer of 1965. George Hunter and Michael Ferguson’s poster for the Charlatan’s residency at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada, is known as “The Seed,” thus named for its seminal role in formulating an artistic aspiration for rock posters. The other poster is Wilson’s Are We Next, which he printed himself to distribute at anti-war rallies in the summer of 1965. The poster depicts a combination of the stars and stripes with a swastika and the words “Are We Next? Be Aware” as though warning of the country’s potential slide toward fascism. Its bold colors and political immediacy would resonate with the counterculture’s development of its own esthetic discourse, largely through the poster form itself. Wilson was the principal artist and initial architect of the early psychedelic poster style, which eloquently echoes the pulsing distortions of the LSD experience. His designs possess a dynamic fluidity and vibrant linear sensibility, largely drawn from Art Nouveau. Wilson was particularly influenced by Jugendstil (German Art Nouveau) master Alfred Röller, whom he encountered in the catalog to a 1965 exhibition in Berkeley. Impressed by Röller’s swelling letters, Wilson soon began to explore the animate potential of dynamic epigraphy. He was able to consciously develop his artistic ideas due to his involvement in the nascent rock poster scene. The most consistent series were Bill Graham’s (BG) concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium and the Family Dog-sponsored shows at the Avalon Ballroom. These spawned the two largest series of posters within the formative years of the movement. The consistency of these series enabled artists like Wilson, who for stretches produced a poster each week, to concen- trate on particular ideas and artistic challenges, developing them over a series of successive posters. Wilson was at the very beginning of both series – indeed the poster artist at the onset. Both poster series began in February of 1966, with relatively tepid designs. However, this soon changed, as Wilson’s posters from the spring of 1966 most dramatically demonstrate his pioneering developments in fluid line and dynamic text. By April of 1966, Wes Wilson was exploring spatial illusion created with dynamic lettering that was initially somewhat architectonic, but eventually evolved to 2 BOOK REVIEW a pictographic state in its use of text to suggest imagery. Beginning with the mild animation of his early lettering, Wilson pushed his epigraphy to new levels, conveying form, space, and even motion through dynamic text. Over the spring and summer, he tackled these particular challenges with concentrated effort and aplomb. Beginning in earnest with his April 29–30, 1966, poster for Graham, Wilson executed the curving forms and green-black inversion of the “Jefferson Airplane” and “Lighting Hopkins” lettering so that they seem to bulge and swell in space – an effect both augmented and complicated by the bright pop of the pliant white letters (BG-4).1 Space and form are simultaneously implied and rendered ambiguous, purely through the ministrations of lettering. Taking this idea further in the following week’s poster, Wilson began to push his exploration of text’s potential to fashion images, here offering what looks like a combined eyeball and nesting doll sequence of opening lips, suggesting both form and motion (BG-5). When the English band the Mindbenders brought their “groovy kind of love” to the Fillmore on July 8–9, Wilson fused text and image, providing a suitably mind-bending poster (BG-16). He channeled his increased skills in dynamic lettering and spatial ambiguity to visually bend the mind with a richer and more fluid melding of text, image, and pattern. The tension between the suggestion of mass (and space) and the planar linear emphasis is dynamic, with a breath-like pulse that both suggests form and asserts its inherent instability. Wilson’s poster looks back at us with the very face of tangible intangibility. It is psychedelic ineffability incarnate. Wes Wilson is rightfully considered the principal pioneer of the psychedelic poster movement, providing the public face of the Fillmore with his widely distributed posters. He developed much of the esthetic, dominating the Fillmore series throughout the spring of 1966 and well beyond. His posters shaped and proliferated the style. But Bonnie MacLean helped continue this esthetic within the concert venue itself – the inside presentation, as it were. While Wilson’s creations were widespread and perma- nent, MacLean’s were localized and fleeting. After each weekend, MacLean was respon- sible for painting the wall in the lobby which announced upcoming concerts. This was ephemeral art, being repainted every week as the shows changed. Thus, MacLean’s work is considerably less known in regard to its early role in expressing the psychedelic esthetic. It is only with her ascendancy to the role of Bill Graham’s principal poster designer, after the promoter’s acrimonious split with Wes Wilson, that MacLean’s role is generally acknowledged. But she was on the scene, designing its visual culture, from the very beginning. While the Fillmore was not the only venue for concerts (and posters), it was the most prominent and lucrative artistically. Both Wilson and MacLean were there at the beginning, Wes in a more obvious way as the clear founder of the style and designer of the earliest posters. But Bonnie was there too, already designing a poster in April of 1966. Her greatest early contribution was in painting the “coming attractions” board for each week’s show, in a manner redolent of Wilson’s work, with its fluid lettering and dynamic line. Some of this fluid quality can be found in MacLean’s unusually early poster from April 1966, presumably made to fill a gap in Wilson’s work on the series (BG-0) for April 22–23, 1966. As seen in Wilson’s posters from the weeks before and after MacLean’s, he was just then developing the pliant Art Nouveau-inspired lettering for which he would be known. For April 15–17, 1966, his lettering is just beginning to form faces (BG-3). Two weeks later, Wilson was further exploring dynamic lettering and its ability to conjure space and form (BG-4). Meanwhile, MacLean was furthering this esthetic on the Fillmore advertisement board. This is the real turning point in the origin of the “classic” psychedelic style with its dynamic lettering, color juxtapositions, and fantastic forms. THE SIXTIES 3 Together, their styles worked to shape the early esthetic of the Fillmore and by extension the larger hippie counterculture. When Wilson acrimoniously parted ways with Bill Graham in May of 1967 over poor recompense for his work, MacLean stepped in as the principal poster designer in the Fillmore series. Wilson’s split is memorialized in his poster for May 5–6, 1967 (BG- 62), in which Graham is caricatured as a capitalist fascist snake, with swastika on the nose – a detail that proved too much for Graham. (Graham was a European Jew who had survived the Holocaust through the Kindertransport, and much of Grahams’ family was killed.) The offensive imagery notwithstanding, Wilson’s gripe seems legitimate, as he had asked for additional payment for last-minute changes to a design. This would not be the last time that Graham “fired” an artist for daring to ask for fair compensation. Fortunately for Graham, MacLean was spousal free labor. With her fluid lettering and dynamic line, honed on the advertisement board, she was the perfect artist to take Wilson’s mantle. MacLean’s posters are stylistically unique, particularly her early ones for Graham in May of 1967 (BG-63, 64, 65), but the powerful quality of line and dynamic epigraphy was there. By June of 1967 (BG-66), she had adopted an even more Wilsonesque sensibility, one that echoed her own painted advertising board at the Fillmore. The fluidity of the transition is testimony to MacLean’s key role in the early shaping of the psychedelic esthetic. From here, she went on to produce some of the most memorable designs in the poster movement. Wilson’s and Maclean’s careers and art were closely connected from the beginning, with their visual dialogue in the posters and lobby paintings. Wilson was formative in fashioning the ongoing style of psychedelia through his posters, which could be spread far and wide. His dynamic lettering would come to virtually define psychedelic epi- graphy. His sensuous, fluid line similarly embodied the psychedelic spirit. MacLean’s lettering and embellishments on the Fillmore announcement board helped brand the Fillmore as a nexus in this countercultural revolution. The counterculture partly self- identified through its politics and modes of recreation – drugs, rock music, light shows, clothing, long hair.
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