Psychedelic art always had a strange presence in art history. Or rather, to some of us it seems strange that it was never included in any serious considerations of the art of the 1960s - because drug and protest art it may have been, but it did realise its vision with a disregard for genre and media principles only equalled by recent contemporary art. In true avant-garde fashion psychedelic art beamed its promise of social and scientific togetherness across all art forms; from music, film and graphic design to architecture, fashion and literature. And then, of course, a big part of the underground culture went and blew it all on mystical agendas and notions of harmony and oneness. And what was left was swept up by the advertising industry or driven away in the flower-power luxury cars of the pop stars. But still, how come the maximalized aesthetics of psychedelia remains so academically underrated in relation to the relatively more Protestant projects of minimalism and conceptual art?

For good reasons the summer of love, along with its images and after-images, is a perennial topic in San Francisco. This is also to say that when the Historical Society dedicates an exhibition to the poster work of Rick Griffin, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, Wes Wilson, and the photos of Gene Anthony, it is not necessarily to show a range of art objects: the works on display might as well function as cultural artefacts that document (local) history. As such, it was just a great show for a psychedelic art head like myself: I got to see many of the Bay Area prints of that mindblowing '66-'67 vintage - as well as some of the ones that were just too weird to even make it into obscure rock poster catalogues that typically are the available literature on the subject.

Beyond that, however, the euphoria promised by the exhibition's title is a trip of the kind that tends to run cold, as does any consideration of the counter-cultural revolution that follows this upbeat track: looking back on the Summer of Love from today's Winter of Money, it is easy to feel disappointed. Where did all the fun go? Where did all the politics go? From an (art) historical point of view, the problem with the summer of 1967 was that it is so redolent with revolutionary and narcotic myth that it easily collapses in historical anecdote ("We were this close to making it happen, dude"). Similarly, what typically becomes a problem with the art (or artefacts) of the psychedelic culture is that they are considered to translate directly as the visual face of the Summer of Love: 'look at this - this was just how good it felt like to be there'. So from our place in history, which on many counts is getting more and more distant from the vibes and agendas of 1967, it can be difficult to feel encouraged by photos of the turned on, the tuned in and the dropped out. In fact, the poster in the exhibition that gripped me the most was a small black and white flyer in a simple design, advertising the Trips festival in 1966. Without art nouveau lettering and technicolour halo, it didn't imply any great historical presence, but conveyed a sense of direct involvement, even danger or unlawfulness, in what was by then a new thing - before psychedelic art and culture had become a spectacle.

Interestingly, art museums too are getting hip to psychedelic art. Presently an exhibition takes place at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, also called Summer of Love. Here they aim for art historical vindication of psychedelic art but, again, don't get much deeper than its shimmering visuality and alluring promises. One can't help but think that there is a lot more to learn from this highly complex (counter-)culture which - in many cases against its own wishes - ended up informing a great part of the capitalist culture we know today. The first step will be to get the questions right, and figure out what we want to know from it.

http://www.californiahistoricalsociety.org/