The West Coast Maximalist Lightshow and the History of Art*

ABSTRACT

This investigation of the immersive West Coast lightshow considers its place within a larger trajectory of light art and argues that the lightshow was a significant force in the evolution of light-based art. Examining how lightshow artists were interfacing with Modern art concepts as well as establishing new multimediated manifestations, the West Coast lightshow is viewed as an interface between embodied performance and a total mediated environment. As art, performance, and happening it represents a crossroad of artistic intermedia and the somatic experience. The collaborative nature of the artform as well as its distinct practitioners are considered as both countering and applying the modernist mythos of the heroic solo artist. These artistic collectives embodied the counterculture spirit of collaboration, even involving the audience as an essential collaborative element. Possibly due to its countercultural associations, as well as its West Coast origins, the maximalist lightshow has been largely ignored within the history of art. Its prominence and seminal role is argued here.

KEYWORDS:

• Lightshow
• trips festival
• counterculture
• Bill Ham
• Ben Van Meter
• Roger Hillyard
• san francisco tape music center
• fillmore auditorium

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. On the Trips Festival, see Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury: A History (New York: Wenner Books, 2005), pp. 42–48; Jill d’Alessandro and Colleen Terry, “A Trip Without a Ticket,” in Summer of Love. Art, Fashion, and Rock and Roll (San Francisco: University of California Press, 2017), pp. 107–115.

2. Perry (2005), p. 43.

3. David W. Bernstein, ed., The San Francisco Tape Music Center. 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 5.

4. “Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft” (1849), in Richard Wagner, The Art-Work of the Future, and Other Works, trans. and ed. W. Ashton Ellis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). For the application of Wagner’s terminology to intermedia practices, see also Boris Groys, “A Genealogy of Participatory Art,” in The Art of Participation 1950 to Now (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008), pp. 21–23.

5. Barbara Kiensherf, “From the ‘Ocular Harpsichord’ to the ‘Sonchromatoscope:’ The Idea of Color Music and Attempts to Realize It,” in Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960’s, ed. Christoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press and Tate Liverpool, 2005), pp. 177–199.

6. See Bernstein, 2008.

7. Perry (2005), pp. 64ff.

8. Robert R. Riley, “The Evolution of the Projected Image Lightshow in San Francisco,” in Bernstein, 2008, pp. 21–23, p. 22.

9. Perry (2005), p. 65.

10. David W. Bernstein, “The San Francisco Tape Music Center. Emerging Art Forms and the American Counterculture, 1961–1966,” in Bernstein, 2008, pp. 5–41, p. 20.

11. Chrissie Iles, “Liquid Dreams” in Grunenberg and Harris, 2005, pp. 67–83, p. 68.

12. Iles (2005), p. 69.

13. Bernstein, 2008, pp. 10–12.

14. Bernstein, 2008, pp. 12ff.

15. See Alastair Gordon, Spaced Out. Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties (New York: Rizzoli, 2008), pp. 33–59.

16. The Family Dog held its first dance concert—A Tribute to Dr. Strange—on October 16, 1965. It was followed by several additional concerts in late 1965. On November 6, 1965, the first S.F. Mime Troupe appeal concert was held, followed by several more, which would launch Bill Graham’s career. By February 1966, both the Family Dog and Bill Graham had begun promoting their regular concert series. These environments were soon echoed in dance clubs across the country. Life magazine’s May 27, 1966, issue ran a cover story, “New Madness at the Discotheque,” about new “total environment” dance clubs such as the Cheetah and the World in New York (both opened 1966).

17. Bernstein, 2008, pp. 5–41, p. 20.

18. Tony Martin, The Variable Place (New York: Ab-Sens Press, 2012), p. 17.

19. The Charlatan’s June 1965 residency at the Red Dog Saloon also spawned what is arguably the first artistically inclined rock poster – George Hunter and Michael Ferguson’s The Seed. See Paul D. Grushkin, The Art of Rock: Posters from Presley to Punk (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987, p. 89.

20. Ben Van Meter, “The Sixties in San Francisco. Not Just Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll,” in Jill d’Alessandro, Colleen Terry, et al., Summer of Love. Art, Fashion and Rock and Roll (Berkeley: University of California Press/Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young, 2017), pp. 315–319, p. 318.

21. Van Meter, 2017, p. 319.

22. Van Meter, 2017, p. 318.

23. Interview included in The Tale of the Dog (documentary film, by Dan Obarski and Scott Montgomery, 2019).

24. As the first major successful band of the San Francisco psychedelic sound, the Jefferson Airplane pushed this connection to the point of bringing a (back-projected) lightshow with them to the first Isle of Wight Festival on August 31, 1968—the only case of a lightshow used at any of the three iterations of this festival. Though lightshows existed in England by this time, none were brought to the festival, other than the one imported by the Airplane. See Ray Foulk, When the World Came to the Isle of Wight. Volume 1: Stealing Dylan from Woodstock (Surbiton: Medina Publishing, 2015), pp. 46ff.

25. At this point, Ben Van Meter had joined Roger Hillyard as one of these “many other sights.”

26. Among the artists working with Marton was Marc (Richardson) Arno, who would go on to mastermind Denver’s Diogenes Lantern Works. Personal conversation with the authors.

27. Interview included in Eric Christensen, Trips Festival 1966: The Movie (2007).

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

30. Iles (2005), p. 73. Iles is referring to the Acid Tests held by Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in 1965–66, another early fusion of live music (Grateful Dead) and various sound and visual effects.

31. Iles (2005), p. 73.

32. Iles (2005), p. 77.

33. Gregory Zinman, “The Joshua Light Show,” American Art 22, no. 2 (Summer 2008), 17–19.

34. Robin Oppenheimer, “Maximal Art: The Origins and Aesthetics of West Coast Light Shows,” Rhizome, April 15, 2009, pp. 1–7, p. 2.

35. Edwin Pouncey, “Laboratories of Light. Psychedelic Light Shows,” in Grunenberg and Harris, 2005, pp. 155–162, p. 156.

36. See Edwin Pouncey, “‘I never stopped loving the light.’ Joshua White and the Joshua Light Show,” in Grunenberg and Harris, 2005, pp. 163–178.

37. Pouncey, “Laboratories of Light … ,” p. 157.

38. Quoted in Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1970), p. 398.

39. Edward Shanken, Art and Electronic Media (London: Phaidon Press, 2009), p. 20.

40. For a discussion of the interface of music and art in the synesthetic experience, see Jeremy Strick, Ari Weisman, and Judith Zicker, Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music since 1900 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2005).

41. Jan Butterfield, The Art of Light and Space (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993). On Turrell, see Nancy Marmer, “James Turrell: The Art of Deception,” Art in America, May 1981, pp. 90–99; James Turrell (Guggenheim Museum, New York, June 21–September 25, 2013), http://web.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/turrell/#earlyworks.

42. Wolfgang Metzger, “Optische Untersuchungen am Ganzfeld,” Psychologishce Forschung 13 (1930), pp. 6–29.

43. This postmodern notion finds parallels in the psychedelic posters created at the time. See Kevin Moist, “Visualizing Postmodernity: 1960s Rock Concert Posters and Contemporary American Culture,” The Journal of Popular Culture 43, no. 6 (Dec. 2010), 1242–1265.

44. Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground first appear together on February 8, 1966, at the Cinematheque in New York. This precursor to the much-touted Exploding Plastic Inevitable took place over three weeks after the Trips Festival.

45. See Brandon W. Joseph, “’My Mind Split Open’ Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” in Grunenberg and Harris, 2005, pp. 239–268; Greg Pierce, “All Here and Now and the Future … Then: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” in Warhol Live (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2008), pp. 140–167.

46. Pouncey, “Laboratories of Light … ,” p. 158. See also Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol ’60s (London: Hutchinson, 1981), pp. 162ff.

47. Personal conversation, September 19, 2014.

48. Van Meter “convinced Graham to hire both me and Roger to fill the screens he had put up for the Exploding Plastic Bummer.” Personal correspondence, June 2018.

49. Grunenberg and Harris, 2005, p. 32.

50. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970), p. 387.

51. Martin (2012), p. 7.

52. Similarly, Joshua White (Joshua Lightshow) would later work with artist Yayoi Kusama.

53. Paik’s major debut was in 1963 at the Exposition of Music-Electronic Television exhibition at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany, in which he arranged televisions scattered about everywhere and used magnets to alter or distort their images. Paik moved to New York in 1964, initiating this phase with his TV Cello piece.

54. Christoph Grunenberg, “The Politics of Ecstasy: Art for the Mind and Body,” in Grunenberg and Harris, 2005, pp. 11–59, p. 13.

55. The interface of somaesthetics and the embodied experience of lightshows is addressed in Lauren E. Hartog, “Into the Light” (MA thesis, University of Denver, 2018).

56. Robert R. Riley, “The Evolution of the Projected Image Lightshow in San Francisco,” in Bernstein, 2008, pp. 21–23, p. 23.