The Joint Show: High Art in the Summer of Love
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The Sixties A Journal of History, Politics and Culture ISSN: 1754-1328 (Print) 1754-1336 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsix20 The Joint Show: high art in the Summer of Love Scott B. Montgomery To cite this article: Scott B. Montgomery (2018) The JointShow: high art in the Summer of Love, The Sixties, 11:2, 183-222, DOI: 10.1080/17541328.2018.1532171 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17541328.2018.1532171 Published online: 14 Nov 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 24 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rsix20 THE SIXTIES 2018, VOL. 11, NO. 2, 183–222 https://doi.org/10.1080/17541328.2018.1532171 ARTICLE The Joint Show: high art in the Summer of Love Scott B. Montgomery University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA ABSTRACT KEYWORDS The Joint Show was the first significant exhibition of posters Big Five; counterculture; Rick and counterculture art in a reputable art gallery. Held July- Griffin; Joint Show; Alton September 1967 at the Walter Moore Gallery in San Kelley; Victor Moscoso; Francisco, it showcased artwork by Wes Wilson, Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse; poster; psychedelic art; Wes Wilson Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, and Victor Moscoso. Examining the conception, preparation, contents, opening, and press coverage, this article pieces together the details of this significant, but unexplored exhibition. Its role as manifesto of counterculture art and the psychedelic poster movement is argued and its legacy is explored, particularly the formula- tion of a cannon of Big Five poster artists. Introduction “The Hippies made their deepest penetration of the current campaign on Monday night . (but eventually were thrown back without loss of faith on either side). By the hundreds, they poured into the heart of Straightville – by foot, via bus, on hogs, in psychedelically painted VWs, in buses so ancient they might have seen service in the First Battle of the Marne. Bells tinkled, beads jangled, beards bristled, plumes waved in the salubrious evening overcast. In all, a brave sight, and no fuzz around to tighten up the scene (San Francisco, I Love You). Their target: The Moore Gallery, an Establishment institution on Sutter between Mason and Powell. The reason: a preview of a show by the leaders of the Hippie Academy of Applied Art – Wes Wilson, Mighty Mouse, Moscoso, Griffin, Kelley.”1 Thus observed the San Francisco Chronicle’s Herb Caen in his coverage of the July 17, 1967 opening reception of the Joint Show. Characterizing it as a Hippie invasion, Caen’s cheeky commentary reveals the tension at the heart of the Joint Show: the artists’ close alignment with the irreverence of the counterculture set against their aspiration to artistic recognition within the mainstream artistic world. This dance between a counterculture antiestablishment sensibility and the desire for success within the art establishment was complicated. The Joint Show was the boldest and most fully articulated expression of this split personality of the poster CONTACT Scott B. Montgomery [email protected] © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 184 S. B. MONTGOMERY movement. It was not only hippies invading the downtown art world, it was psychedelic art occupying the gallery. In January of that year, a column in the San Francisco Chronicle had observed “When posters survive 50 years, they become works of art and are then solemnly displayed in museums.”2 Made in reference to the 1965 exhibition of Jugenstil work held at the UC Berkeley art gallery, the remark could just as well apply to the 1960s psychedelic poster movement in San Francisco. Indeed, 2017 – the 50-year anniversary of the fabled Summer of Love – saw now-classic posters prominently displayed in a number of august Bay Area museums and institutions, including the De Young Museum.3 A sampling of the posters is part of the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Louvre, to mention but two. The psychedelic poster is increasingly recognized as a form of countercultural high art of the later 1960s and early 1970s.4 The posters have become highly collectable, with some commanding astronomical prices at auctions from Ebay to Christie’s. This belated acclaim is partly the legacy of the Joint Show. Early manifestations of the style appeared in 1965 with sundry Acid Test fliers and most famously George Hunter and Michael Ferguson’s “The Seed” design for the Charlatans residency at the Red Dog Saloon in June 1965. But it was not until early 1966 that the phenomenon of culturally distinct poster art began to bloom. In February 1966, both rock promoter Bill Graham’s concerts at the Fillmore and the Family Dog’s events inaugurated two poster series that would come to define the movement. By late 1966, both the Family Dog and Bill Graham realized that these were not merely advertisements; they were commissioning works of art. Thus began the “classic phase” of sophisticated, engaging, and artistically aspirant psychedelic poster art. This art movement entered its mature stage by 1967. The popular, but critically ignored Joint Show made the most vociferous case for this new art form. It was the psychedelic equivalent of the famous 1913 “Armory Show,” which brought daring modernist works by Marcel Duchamp and others to New York City audiences, for the new art movement.5 As I argue below, the Joint Show proclaimed the ascendancy of the poster renaissance, capping its initial evolutionary phase with an insurgent push into the establishment art world. Equally important, its impact on the study of poster art was profound, as it helped to canonize the “Big Five” poster artists featured in the show. Given its key role in the evolution of the psychedelic poster movement, it is striking that the Joint Show has received only cursory mention in the literature on psychedelic poster art and the counterculture’s artistic aspirations.6 Mixing praise and condescension, Caen refers to the poster artists as an art academy (“Hippie Academy of Applied Art”). Joking aside, the moniker does THE SIXTIES 185 emphasize the Joint Show’sunified artistic vision, akin to an academy. The show’s implied statement that this was a legitimate art movement led by its own academy does not seem to have been lost on Caen. Defining an art movement is aslipperything.Doingsomaybeeasywhenaself-defined movement pens a manifesto to spell out its vision, but such instances are rare. More often, notions of artistic unity are inferred or attributed. Most artistic movements define themselves less through words and more through visual characteristics, working methods, and even exhibition history. Perhaps we can agree on a general definition of an art movement as a group of artists working within a specific time and place (with an identifiable hey-day and center) pursuing common aesthetic and cultural goals with similar tendencies of subject and style. By this common-sense standard, the psychedelic poster renaissance qualifies as a legitimate art movement. A discernible group of artists within the San Francisco countercultural scene during the mid-to-late 1960s (and onward) worked closely together (and sometimes in direct collaboration) to formulate a rich, sensuous, vibrant psychedelic aesthetic. Seen in this light, the Joint Show was itself something of a manifesto – an experiential declaration of the identity and goals of a group of similar artists. No written statement was necessary. The poster renaissance defining this movement spoke for itself. At least that seems to have been the implicit argument of the Joint Show. In concept and execution, the Joint Show presented itself as a bona-fide art event – an exhibition of New High Art. In doing so, it valorized a countercultural aesthetic in the same language and ritual of display that the older, dominant, “straight” culture used to assert and legitimize its own hegemony – the art exhibition. Psychedelic imagery was not wholly unknown in the art world, as it infused aspects of Dada, Surrealism, and postwar American Pop Art. But the art of the emerging psychedelic counterculture was yet to be noticed within the greater world of art galleries and criticism. The Joint Show was not just the art world going psychedelic, but was also the psychedelic world going art. High culture was infiltrated and appropriated in the service of a countercultural imperative, and an exhibition of mostly graphic work became not only a media-based assertion of legitimacy (poster artists as artists and posters as art) but also a countercultural aesthetic manifesto. Origins The Joint Show was initiated by the Moore Gallery, which approached the five poster artists with the idea of a collective exhibition.7 Wes Wilson, one of its central artists, recalls: “[T]his fellow who was a friend of the Moore’s. I can’t recollect his name. I think he knew the people who wrote the article in the California Living magazine about the 186 S. B. MONTGOMERY posters. He thought it would be a good idea to have a show at a gallery. I think I was the first person he contacted. He kind of decided on who would be in the show, all of us together. This fellow thought it would be nice to have the five of us. We were kind of the main poster artists at the time.”8 If the idea for the show came from the art world, its clever, punning title came from the drug-infused counterculture. “Joint Show” was suggested by Gail Moscoso, wife of the artist Victor Moscoso. “We were like fringe people,” he explained. “That was a straight gallery. The gallery would never have come up with anything like that.