Kevin M. Moist, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Communications
Penn State Altoona

Abstract

This article focuses on the influence of Eastern “ways of liberation” such as Buddhism and Taoism on the creative activity of a vibrant visionary subculture in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district from 1965-1969. Part of a larger study of psychedelic rock concert posters, this paper addresses the particular influence of Eastern mystical philosophy on the visual rhetoric of these San Francisco posters and its cultural impact as it radiated outwards from there. In addition to visual elements such as iconography and visual style, the posters are seen as attempting visually to represent the paradoxical logic central to the “enlightenment” experience of those and other mystical religious traditions.

Introduction

[1] For a brief moment in the mid-1960s, the eyes of the world focused on a small district of the city of San Francisco called the Haight-Ashbury, where a group of energetic dropouts was engaged in rewriting the rules of their society and culture. All sorts of accepted conventions in music, art, literature, lifestyles, religion, social patterns—all seemed up for grabs, as the given world was treated by this subculture as so much raw material, capable of being recombined into new forms whose limits were only those of the imagination.

[2] While the superficial trappings of the scene would go on to influence the world of style and popular culture, many of those who were there have argued that the deeper import is often missed. Gary Duncan, guitarist for the Quicksilver Messenger Service, one of the most influential rock bands to come out of that “scene,” points out that “What was really going on in San Francisco […] was a whole other thing most people don’t know about. The underground scene was really a lot heavier than what was publicized and what people think happened—you know, hippies playing music with flowers in their hair, all that crap.”1 The “heavier” aspects of the Haight’s cultural expansions were in several crucial ways tied to a wide-ranging engagement with philosophies and wisdom traditions that lay outside the Western canon, and with the modes of thought that went along with them. As Zen poet Gary Snyder put it in a 1967 San Francisco public group discussion with Tim Leary, Alan Watts, and Allen Ginsberg, “The drama is changing. What people are interested in is not things but states of mind. That is the cultural shift that is taking place” within this “visionary” subculture.2

[3] While the local rock bands were at the time felt to be at the forefront of the various reorderings being undertaken in the Haight, many of the underlying philosophical changes can be seen even more clearly in the body of posters produced by local artists to advertise concerts by those groups. Indeed, rock historian Joel Selvin points out that this small and busy group of artists “turned out a rich series of images that encapsulated the social, musical and cultural inventions taking place.” On the one hand, the posters “re-wrote the language of contemporary graphic arts”; to this day, the swirling and unreadable lettering characteristic of the posters carries “psychedelic” cultural associations to whole new generations. But the posters did a lot more than just serve as advertisements. They were, Selvin argues, “nothing less than part of the socialization process themselves”3 in that they embodied the very beliefs and experiences of the subculture in which they were created.

[4] As will be shown below, some of the central aspects of those beliefs grew from a dialogue with and influence from Asian art and thought, and in particular from Eastern mystical philosophies such as Zen, Taoism, and Vedanta. I should note right from the start that I will not be making any case for broad-based immediate influence on the “whole culture” (whatever that is) of American society, as I have a sense that intercultural dialogues take place not all at once or in toto but in specific terms within situations that allow or call for them. What I am looking for are certain points of contact—in the electrical sense of the term, spots where currents are transduced, energy Zap!ped from one place to another—in the ongoing dialogue between American culture and Eastern ways of thought. These cultural currents are visualized in this body of poster art at a number of levels, including style, iconography and visual rhetoric. These will be discussed in turn below, after a brief discussion of the general theoretical approach that informs my project, and a whirlwind tour of this visionary subculture and its activities.

Theory/Method

[5] Over the past few years, the study of art and culture has opened up some new lines of possibility for the consideration of images as part of their social context. More specifically, the field of “visual culture” has developed as an interdisciplinary terrain that stretches across the fields of art, media studies, art history, rhetoric, and other previously separate scholarly areas. The point behind this critical response involves undermining the assumed distinctions between these disciplines’ objects of study, reconceptualizing the role of images in the process.

[6] In a recent reader devoted to such work, editor Nicholas Mirzoeff observes that contemporary Western culture can be characterized by its “tendency to picture or visualize existence.” This process of picturing our world is not limited specifically to art galleries, television programs, or billboards; it “is not created from one medium or in one place as the overly precise divisions of academia would have it.” Rather, “visual culture directs our attention away from structured, formal viewing settings like the cinema and art gallery to the centrality of visual experience in everyday life.” The reason for this reframing of the role of images, according to Mirzoeff, is that our visual culture is composed of “visualization(s) of things that are not in themselves visual”—ideas, concepts, identities, philosophies.4 Similarly, rhetoric scholar Bruce Gronbeck points out that, “What we come to know about the world visually is conditioned by how we are taught to see and what we are taught to look at—that is, by culturally based formalizing processes and by culturally contoured content.” Thus, “while seeing and comprehending are in fact cognitive processes, yet that cognitive processing is a psychocultural activity”—that psychological act takes place within an already existing system where certain norms and perceptive patterns are already in place, and the act of creative visualizing then further contributes to or alters those systems and norms.5

[7] In general, this is the ground on which my larger study operates. However, my interest also extends to the ways that images actually produce these impacts, how they “work” in particular situations. The field sketched out above by Gronbeck and Mirzoeff provides a fine vantage point on systems and structures, but is perhaps not so strong in considering action. I wish to consider images not as objects or reflections, but as actions, as events in the world created in particular situations with particular motivations. My general approach here draws from a reconsideration of the work of the great rhetorical scholar Kenneth Burke. Burke views rhetoric as necessarily concerned with issues of power—rhetoric as an act that attempts to make something happen, a social event designed to produce some outcome. Images would then be seen as expressive of attitudes toward the world, with the implied component of a plan of action (and a theory of images that places them as social acts), a way of doing things, that goes along with those attitudes. A given image attempts to have an effect by marshaling socially meaningful visual components in a certain distinctive way, presenting a particular culturally located picture of the/a world. Images thus can be considered as representations of a “visual community”—a social grouping that shares certain ideas and modes of expression, and that expresses/“visualizes” those in some way.

Context

[8] With that in mind, we can consider the nature of the visual community of this body of posters, the Haight-Ashbury subculture that they represented. Entire books have been written about this group and their activities—about subsets of the group even—such that a full presentation would be far too large for this space. Instead I will try to highlight some salient elements of the subculture’s activities and ideas about what they were doing, ones relevant to the topic at hand.

[9] No one is completely sure how or why, originary causes being so hard to fix, but for a few years in the mid-1960s an incredible amount of cultural creative energy erupted from a small neighborhood in San Francisco called the Haight-Ashbury district. The most publicly visible face of this creative activity was the exploratory improvisatory rock music played by several waves of groups living there at the time. Collectives with surreal designations like the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, and Moby Grape presided over weekly psychedelic rituals centered around two primary venues: the Avalon Ballroom, run by a communal collective calling itself the Family Dog, and Bill Graham’s famous Fillmore Auditorium. These concerts were fully interactive, involving elaborate experimental light shows that subsumed band and audience in a collective swirl of activity. The patrons were part of the experience as well, dressed in bizarre costumes seemingly drawn from some sort of archetypal historical consciousness. Concerts were usually scheduled for three or four days each weekend, and often involved an out-of-town touring artist (running the gamut from Jimi Hendrix to jazz musicians such as Roland Kirk and Miles Davis, to bluesmen like Albert King and Buddy Guy) as well as a selection of local groups.

[10] These new rituals needed some way of calling the faithful in off the streets, and the promoters turned to the time-tested format of poster announcements. The posters were a crucial way to get the word out to the hip community about upcoming events. Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart remembers that “One of the great things about San Francisco in the ‘60s was walking down the street, and looking up and seeing these amazing posters by Stanley Mouse, Rick Griffin, Alton Kelley, Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso and David Singer. […] There were no [commercial] radio spots, no newspaper ads. We spread the word by posters.” An important factor here is that the posters were produced from within the subculture; none of the poster artists were such by trade, but were simply creative people with some visual talent who were connected to the community in various ways. As such, the posters were a direct expression of community ideas and spirit, which made them instantly identifiable. In Hart’s words, “The posters looked like what we were playing. They were an open call to come and have fun, which is what we were all about anyway. The posters didn’t just announce the concerts, they resonated with the styles of the times and described visually what the Grateful Dead, Big Brother, Quicksilver and the Airplane were doing at the Fillmore and the Avalon the following nights.”6

[11] Over the next few years, a rotating, fluid group of a dozen artists produced at least a design a week for the two ballrooms, and many other projects besides (concerts in other regional venues, posters for plays, other local events, and so on); a full count of just the posters for the ballrooms and related venues would tally upwards of 350 images. The artists came from a variety of backgrounds: Rick Griffin had drawn a popular comic strip for surf magazines, Stanley Mouse (who with his partner Alton Kelley made up the Mouse Studios poster team) had done auto detailing and hot rod cartoons, Bonnie MacLean did management and on-site design for the Fillmore before stepping into poster design, and so on. Only one of the artists, Victor Moscoso, had formal art school training. Other notable artists included Wes Wilson, David Singer, Lee Conklin, Randy Tuten, and Jim Blashfield; a number of other artists designed but one or two posters before moving on.

[12] The posters were basically distributed as advertisements, hung on telephone poles and store windows, wherever there was a space. They instantly proved quite popular; by mid-year Graham discovered that people were making off with the posters as soon as he hung them. Soon afterward both he and the Family Dog started up a poster division of their operations, printing extras each week to sell in local shops in order to meet public demand. As the images spread, as is well known, they would go on to influence everything from advertising to high art within the next few years. 

[13] In addition to music and poster art, the Haight also saw creative ferment in terms of literature (with a thriving poetry scene carried over from the 1950s Beats), fine art, and theatre. But holding it all together was the street scene, which any local would acknowledge as the real center of the action. The Diggers or someone else were almost constantly stirring up some sort of surreal community event, and apparently anything could happen at any given moment. A number of stores run by members of the hip community also opened, the most prominent of which was the Psychedelic Shop, which specialized in posters, paraphernalia, and especially reading material. Social historian Jay Stevens observes that an early 1966 visitor to the Psych Shop would likely have been struck by the eclectic esotericism of the books available in the store. “Among fiction, Herman Hesse was the obvious best-seller—sales of A Journey to the East, Steppenwolf, and Siddhartha would make Hesse the largest-selling German author in America by the end of the Sixties”, closely followed by imaginative science fiction novels of various stripes. In addition, “balancing the fiction was a section of technical works on the psychedelic experience, Leary, Huxley, Watts, plus a variety of Eastern and occult texts, ranging from the Tibetan Book of the Dead to the Zohar.”7 The Psych Shop became a central gathering place for the local tribes.

[14] As suggested by a number of examples above, the Haight-Ashbury became a hot spot for growing interest in a variety of the world’s mystical traditions. Scholar and historian Rick Fields observes that the Haight “was just a short stroll from a Soto Zen mission, and its American offshoot, the San Francisco Zen Center,” which was being run at the time by the revered Shunryu Suzuki Roshi.8 A significant amount of the hip underground was also involved in the Zen community in a significant way, and many others were at least familiar with it, to the extent that there was a strong Zen presence and influence on the subculture right from the start. This can be seen in a November 1966 benefit concert for the Zen Mountain Center, another local zendo, held at the Avalon Ballroom and featuring the cream of the local rock bands. The poster for the event is probably as close as the poster images came to directly adapting the general characteristics associated with Zen and Taoist art—misty landscapes rising out of fog, mountainous and indefinite.

[15] While Zen was a central ingredient in the local philosophical stew, it was not alone. Fields notes that the community interests encompassed “North American Indians, Shiva, Kali, Buddha, tarot, astrology, Saint Francis, Zen, and tantra”,9 all shot through with the energy of intercultural dialogue as the young people expanded outside of the secular scientism within which most of them had been raised. As noted by editor Jesse Kornbluth in a late-1960s compendium of writings from the underground press, the Haight was distinguished by its “ability to accept differences. It is this love of diversity within the subculture as it struggles for life that is most seductive to those who seek the renewal of spiritual affinities.”10 For this reason, it is probably not accurate to refer to this subculture as a “counterculture” in the conventional sense of the word, since they were clearly not defining selves solely or even primarily in opposition to (“counter”) the wider culture. In fact, the local community was often as critical of the New Left and protest movement as they were of the mainstream, feeling that the protestors were caught in a limiting dualism, defining themselves only in the negative.11

[16] And of course one must also make note of the central catalytic role in these cultural-philosophical developments of LSD and other consciousness-expanding substances, which the community, as influenced by a number of cultural observers—Aldous Huxley, Andrew Weil, Leary, Alan Watts—interpreted in terms of mystical experience. However, neither were all of the locals totally in line with the public face of the psychedelic revolution, Timothy Leary and his followers—though the Haight crowd was certainly not against psychedelics. The difference lay within their approaches to putting the influence into action. Leary had been drawing fairly literal parallels between the LSD experience and the experiences of Asian mysticism, publishing books that actually rewrote classic texts in “hip” sixties argot, recasting Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, the central expression of perennial Chinese philosophy, as a book of “psychedelic prayers”, and turning the Tibetan Book of the Dead into a manual for psychedelic experience.

[17] Many in the Haight subculture were not so sure that was a wise option, to try and give up their own cultural background and simply step into another culture’s belief system. A more significant inspiration for the Haight group was the surreal antics of author Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, whose three-month tour across America in a psychedelic schoolbus in summer 1964 was the stuff of legend in the community. Kesey’s gang disdained an over-scholarly attitude towards the eternal mysteries—they called such approaches the “crypt trip”—though supposedly they all studied the Chinese I Ching carefully. As a group, they wanted to transcend through their American cultural background, warts and all, rather than by running away from it. Thus, as lovingly detailed by their chronicler Tom Wolfe, there were

no water spouts of Acadmie Francaise cherubim and water babies here, and no reverent toga-linen-flapping Gautama Buddha Orientals breathing out the spent Roquefort breath of spiritual detachment. Instead, somehow they’re going to try it right down the main highway, eight lanes wide, heron-neck arc lamps rising up as far as the eye can see, and they will broadcast on all frequencies, waving American flags, turning up the Day-Glo and the neon of 1960s electro-pastel America, wired up and amplified, 327,000 horsepower, a fantasy bus in a science-fiction movie, welcoming all on board, no matter how unbelievably Truck Stop Low Rent or raunchy…12

Working with such materials, it is no surprise that the cultural output of the community did not bear a direct resemblance to the surface aspects of the various Eastern spiritual traditions. As will be discussed below, the influence came more in terms of how the materials were dealt with.

[18] So what sort of goals did the subculture seem to have? Helen Perry, an older sociologist who was living in the Haight at the time and wrote a book about her experiences in 1970, captures the community spirit in terms evocative enough to be quoted at length. She compares the subculture’s activities to what James Joyce did with written language, freeing its action by smashing some of its old patterns. In much the same way, she suggests, the young people of the Haight were

freeing behavior, for they separated all the values and the actions of the core society and spread them out on their huge work table alongside the values and the actions of various peoples from every corner of the earth and from all periods of history. And in the process of separating out all these pieces and trying to fit them back together again, they smashed some of the behavior of the middle-class society, and all of us have been affected. For the values-by-words and the values-by-action of the core society did not fit together when one looked at them closely, so new action was necessary to fit some of the revered values from the past; and some values from other cultures were found that seemed superior to some of the values of one’s own culture and that required further experiments in new action. And bending over their huge work table, still sorting, still fitting, the seekers sometimes seemed disorganized and their task chaotic, for they had literally scrambled hundreds of huge jigsaw puzzles. But a new and often beautiful pattern was slowly emerging; and some of the old pieces of the puzzle, which had once seemed to form such a polished and unbroken unit, now seemed only tawdry and misshapen pieces in the bright light.13

[19] This can certainly be heard in the music that formed such a large part of the subculture’s life, as the local rock bands all enthusiastically hybridized elements from a variety of sources. With a repertoire that drew heavily on older blues and country songs and stylistic elements, those basic sources were elaborated into lengthy arabesques influenced by the improvisatory methods of jazz and Indian classical music, plus the energy of early rock’n’roll and the Beatles, all amplified to the point where the sonic waves could produce physical effects. Such eclecticism was also part of the moving light-shows that accompanied the bands’ performances in the ballrooms, as a rich panoply of cultural icons from America and beyond swirled in and out of flashing strobe lights, liquid oil projections, experimental films, and so forth. This ongoing process of cultural collage shows up in the posters used to advertise those shows as well, especially in the iconographic elements the posters draw upon. Before exploring those however, it is worth discussing a bit further some of the broader stylistic elements of the posters, especially since some of these also trace back to Eastern influences.

Style and Iconography

[20] The body of posters draws on a remarkably wide range of stylistic influences—or rather, appropriations might be a better term, since the concept of artistic influence implies working within or extending a particular tradition. However, the Haight poster artists rarely treated their visual resources with undue reverence.

[21] Believing that the main goal of a poster is to grab people’s attention, their designs usually involved a strong central image, in many cases a “found” image lifted directly from some other source. The artists became noted for their wide-ranging disregard for proprietary values, seeing the history of visual production as basically a graphic flea market. According to critic Dominy Hamilton, “Reproductions of old masters, movie stills, and comic books were all considered potential visual material. [They] applied the same criteria to the finely wrought artifacts of ancient civilizations as to the homely or poignant truths revealed by the camera.”14 Poster historian Walter Medeiros writes that their “use of established images was not a matter of plagiarism or poverty of imagination,” but rather an expression of the “openness and freedom” at the heart of the Haight philosophy, and also of the “age of media with its heavy dosage of visual input, especially from television. For them, all images were part of a common visual vocabulary,” as trademarks and other commonplace images were used to create a “flash,” a “‘hit’ of fun [or] beauty” by appropriating and recontextualizing “references to experiences common to their peers.”15 An additional important factor is that, as mentioned above, these visual references were rarely “played straight” by the artists—rather they were almost always given a sharp twist through being creatively juxtaposed and recombined, and also usually through being enfolded by bright, flashing colours and swirling visual patterns that recalled both the ballroom dance concerts and the perceptual effects associated with psychedelics. The implications of this mode of presentation will be dealt with further below.

[22] One aspect of the posters that displays most clearly the scrambling and reconstruction of cultural jigsaw puzzles mentioned above by Helen Perry involves the choices of iconographic elements. Given the approach to the world of images as a “graphic flea market” waiting to be plundered, combined with the wide-ranging philosophical openness of the community, it is no surprise that the specific sorts of images appropriated ran the gamut from the ridiculous to the profound. It is also no surprise that symbols of the world’s mystical traditions—including a great preponderance of Eastern derivation—were among the most common elements, though again usually given some sort of spin.

[23] The poster artists’ central concern here was clearly not how the borrowed images fit in with conventional Western cultural hierarchies. They were as likely to steal popular images such as the “Zig-Zag Man” rolling paper logo or Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Newman as they were to burgle classic pieces of Western art such as the Venus de Milo or Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. And, just by way of suggesting that they were totally aware of what they were up to, a small legend at the bottom of Mouse Studios’ Zig-Zag Man design reads, “What you don’t know about copying and duplicating can’t hurt you.”

[24] Many of the images were, however, unabashedly spiritual in derivation. In working out their intercultural puzzle, the artists showed no trepidation about drawing from their own society’s belief systems, photomontaging famous statues of Christ or incorporating the familiar Christian “fish” symbol, as in a 1967 poster that rock band Country Joe & the Fish used to advertise their first LP—though in keeping with the recombinatory tactics the fish ends up being juxtaposed with a Chinese Tai Chi symbol, a psychedelic pinwheel, and an all-seeing eye. The artists did not limit themselves to the “official” Western tradition either, drawing on images from Medieval alchemy and its extension in Freemasonry—the “eye-in-the-pyramid” that found its way onto U.S. currency due to the Masonic associations of the “founding fathers” made its way into several posters, greatly psychedelicized of course. The historical roots of the Western tradition were fair game too, and mythological figures from Neptune to Mercury (occasionally used as a verbal punning representation of the local rock group Quicksilver Messenger Service) were popular elements for recontextualization. “Western” tradition also took on a different spin through the popularity of Native American imagery—both images of Native Americans and also enthusiastic incorporations of the imagery of totem poles, Inca icons, and the like.

[25] And, as mentioned above, a great number of the posters took their inspiration from cultural dialogues involving Eastern images. To some extent, this direction had also been being explored by other local (fine) artists such as painter Michael Bowen, whose incorporations of mystical symbols in works such as “Yantra! India” and many others were instrumental in influencing an East-West visual dialogue since the late 1950s. The sorts of imagery drawn on by the poster artists could be every bit as esoterically obtuse, as seen in a 1967 Randy Salas design that seems to combine Kabballistic and Egyptian icons, though they could also be much lighter in tone, as in Victor Moscoso’s eye-grabbing 1967 design for a “Sphinx Dance”. One of the more famous mystical images in the posters was another “second-generation” engagement. Mouse Studios’ “skeleton and roses” design, a recontextualized illustration from The Rubayyat of Omar Khyaam, became visually synonymous with the rock band the Grateful Dead, in spite of the fact that the band at first resisted its use. The group had supposedly taken its name from an ancient Buddhist text they had been reading that described enlightened beings as “grateful dead” and they favoured those associations; for that reason they were resistant to becoming associated with images that might be seen as popularizing death or the macabre. After learning where the image came from however, they took to it and utilized it and similar images often thereafter.

[26] Of course, many images did refer directly to Asian mystical traditions. One of the most famous posters was a collaboration between Stanley Mouse and Michael Bowen for the massive January 1967 “Human Be-In” event in Golden Gate Park. The Be-In brought the local underground way out in the open, drawing more than 30,000 attendees ranging from hippies to Buddhists to police to Hell’s Angels to young children, and received much national and international media coverage. The image the artists chose to encapsulate the spirit behind the event was a photo of an Indian fahkir, third eye wide open and projecting light, framed by ornate Victorian scrollwork. Other Indian imagery showed up occasionally, but by far the most common iconic borrowing in the whole body of posters was the Chinese Tai Chi symbol. Both instantly recognizable and open to a variety of meanings and applications, the icon could be reworked in a wide range of settings. In a 1967 poster advertising an exhibition of the community’s posters all the way east in Texas, Victor Moscoso symbolized the output of the whole gang of artists in the form of a floating Tai Chi symbol vibrating with a pattern simultaneously Victorian and densely optical. Mouse Studios worked the symbol into their work often, and generally somewhat lightheartedly, as in a metaphorical August 1967 image involving a huge suspended Tai Chi icon towering over five Old Western old-timers stuffed into a small rowboat. It was also a symbol that allowed for cross-cultural pollination, as in the Country Joe poster discussed above, or a famous 1968 Rick Griffin/Victor Moscoso collaboration that involves a gaggle of Tai Chi symbols dancing around a giant Egyptian scarab beetle that seems to be holding up the sun. Further creative ways the artists found to integrate this icon will be mentioned below.

Pattern

[27] Another element of cultural interface that can be seen in the posters also arises from the questioning of certain aspects of Western thought as it entered into dialogue with beliefs and ideas of other cultures. These influences are more philosophical in nature, and expressed themselves in the posters at the level of form and pattern.

[28] The basis of this engagement flows from a question of the philosophical presumption, current in Western thought since at least Descartes, of a dualistic split between mind and body, individual and world. For Western thought, philosopher Alan Watts notes, the “‘nub’ problem is the self-contradictory definition of man himself as a separate and independent being in the world, as distinct from a special action of the world.”16 The latter view, he observes, is a central part of philosophies such as Taoism and Vedanta, which take a more holistic approach to particular situations, rather than the Newtonian billiard-ball mechanics or Cartesian dualisms that long predominated in Western thought. This holistic picture, he notes, “is not to say only that things exist in relation to one another, but that what we call ‘things’ are no more than glimpses of a unified process. Certainly, this process has distinct features which catch our attention, but we must remember that distinction is not separation.”17 These Eastern philosophies, Watts argues, tend not to think in terms of action and response, cause and effect, subject and object, but rather “think of situations as moving patterns, like organisms themselves. […] As the Chinese say, the various features of a situation ‘arise mutually’ or imply one another as back implies front, and as chickens imply eggs—and vice versa. They exist in relation to one another like the poles of the magnet, only more complexly patterned.”18 Thus the perceived “relation between and organism and its environment is mutual, neither one is the cause or determinant of the other since the arrangement between them is polar.”19

[29] For obvious reasons, an engagement with these sorts of ideas could and did significantly alter conventional Western thinking about everything from psychological issues of identity formation to broader concerns about the natural environment. These engagements continue vigorously in our contemporary culture.20 Perceiving individuals as smaller processes within larger and more complex processes calls for a move away from Newtonian billiard-ball thought, and also from the mind-world split put forth by Descartes, a move in the direction of process-oriented thinking, complex pattern, and moving form. Whether flowing directly or indirectly from the East-West engagement, this seems to have been the direction of much contemporary science, philosophy, and cultural theory.

[30] One type of influence such thoughts might have on visual creativity can be seen clearly in a number of the Haight-Ashbury concert posters as well. While many of the previously discussed posters drew on and recontextualized iconic images, an even more common element of the poster graphics was the human form, presented in a manner that reconfigures the basics of Western portraiture in the direction of the philosophical engagement discussed above. These posters rarely involve any sort of naturalistic perspective, elements are not arrayed in any kind of three-dimensional frame; and rather than standing out strongly against the environment they dominate, the human forms in the Haight posters flow with their surroundings, figures interpenetrating with grounds, organisms swirling into environments.

[31] One mode of visualizing this was to place a human form not as a dominant form against a surrounding background, but instead as a stylized element in a swirling and morphing flow, playing up an interpenetration between individual and world. In both a June 1967 Bonnie MacLean design, and a February 1967 Wes Wilson creation, a female form emerges from optically swirling eddies even as her hair and other bodily elements become part of those swirls, which also include the information about the musical acts at the concert. This both plays up the transactional nature of organism and environment discussed above, (one that was also felt to be part of the LSD experience), and also makes reference to the ballroom dance concert environments in which the outlines of the individual would become subsumed into the pulsating patterns and liquid flow.

[32] Another way of approaching the visual representation of these concepts was to utilize clashing patterns to create perceptual confusion as to figure and ground. An October 1966 Mouse Studios design shows this clearly, problematizing the organism-environment relationship via optical patterning and contrasting colours forming an electrically pulsating human head, also again perhaps recalling the ballroom light shows. Such images reconfigure the individual human form as patterns of energy rather than substance or stuff, flashing electric vibrations that interpenetrate with an environment of the same.

[33] Probably the epitome of this approach in the ballroom posters can be seen in a September 1967 poster by Victor Moscoso, one that I would like to consider in a bit more depth to tease out the material references and philosophical resonances visualized. On the surface, this image has a material reference in the local dance concerts, a man and woman grooving ecstatically (and nakedly) to the sound. Underground press editor Jesse Kornbluth wrote in the late 1960s of these electric rituals that, “although it is nothing if not impermanent, there are moments when the audience and the band fuse in a continuum of light, sound, and motion,”21 and this image seems on one level to suspend in time just such a moment. The bodies themselves have actually become the flashing, pulsating patterns of energy.

Victor Moscoso:  "Mist Dance," Family Dog/Avalon Ballroom, September 1967. 
Image appears courtesy The Family Dog.

[34] Continuing to meditate on the image, another connection with the music can be found in the patterning that charges the bodies. The lower part of the dancing forms is filled with a rolling, regularly repeating rounded rhythmic pattern—just like the driving danceable rhythms that formed the foundation for the music of the local bands. The torso/midsection area also features a regular pattern, here more of a natural plant-like blossoming that grows out from the rhythmic pulsations below—a representation perhaps of the organic old blues and folk songs that formed the repertoire of many Haight bands, songs with their roots in the earth. The heads of both figures form windows onto flashing floating stars arrayed in no set pattern, just like the starry spaceward improvisations that danced overtop of the music played in the ballrooms.

[35] Such a description of the patterns also begins to suggest some of the deeper mystical nature of the image. Both bodies are constituted from patterns that seem to represent earth, organic natural growth, and infinite sky all within the same form, recalling the mystical tenet that the human body works as a microcosm of the universe—as above, so below. This connection can be explored further in relation to Chinese philosophy, in particular the teachings of esoteric Taoism. Ancient Taoist philosophy held that all things in the universe—and of course humans are things in the universe—are imbued with three different forms of life-giving energy; enlightenment lay in harmonizing those energies as they occur in one’s body with the larger cosmological processes in which they also occur. As translated by philosopher and scholar John Blofeld, these energies are ching, or essence; ch’i, or vitality; and shen, or spirit.22 The first of these, ching, has to do with bringing form into the universe, creative energy that gives matter tangible substance; at the coarsest human level, it also refers to the reproductive processes. Ch’i refers to cosmic vitality, the “breath” of the universe; at the material human level, it is closely associated with breathing, and the natural processes of heart, kidney, and pores, all of which bridge the individual essence with the cosmic spirit. It is also worth noting that Chinese philosophy locates the seat of individual consciousness in relation to these processes in the heart-and-lungs area, in contrast to Western convention, which usually places consciousness in the brain or mind. Finally, shen refers to cosmic spirit, pure undifferentiated being, or at the human level, mind; the ideal state of mind for Chinese philosophy thus has to do with a unity with cosmological being, not with rationalized thought processes, which are considered to be a helpful but often neurotic add-on.

[36] Thus the ideal state of enlightened being for Taoism involves the integration of these energies at the human level with their more subtle and cosmic forms. This seems to find a strong visual representation in Moscoso’s poster image—generative rhythmic pulsations of ching, flowering organic growth of ch’i in the torso (it is also significant that the band information is placed at this level, as the personalities of the groups would be located at that conceptual level of consciousness), and starry (improvisatory) cosmos of shen for the mind. The connection seems to be completed by the dance of the male and female figures. The Chinese Tai Chi symbol, as mentioned above, represents the harmonious interplay of conceptual opposites, one of which at the material level is male and female. Thus this image can be seen in terms that are both material and cosmic, the mystical integration of levels of being, worldly opposites reaching a higher state through voluptuous cosmic interplay, actualizing their shared energies by losing their selves in the pulsating swirl of the dance.

[37] Was Moscoso directly aware of such comparisons? It would be difficult to say, probably even by him (since, as the old saw says, “If you can remember the sixties you probably weren’t there.”). It would likely be a stretch to suggest that he created the image with a book of Chinese philosophy open in front of him, as simple illustrated philosophy. I might even suggest it to be somewhat of a moot issue as to how relevant such specifics are in terms of the study of culture. But my larger point is that the image was made within and appeals to a socio-cultural milieu in which such forms of thought were common, in which the problematizing of the relationship between individual and world was an issue that was on the table for discussion, reconceptualization, and public (visual) dialogue.

Koan

[38] A final area of East-West engagement I would like to address has to do with an even subtler element of the posters’ construction, one that has to do with what we might call their “mode of enunciation,” their way of “speaking.” It applies to a large number, perhaps even most, of the images that made up the body of posters, and could be considered as a fundamental aspect of their visual rhetoric. Rhetorically speaking, we might consider the preceding elements at the same level that a scholar of verbal or written rhetoric might consider such elements as word choice, figurative language, and so on. But it is also worth considering some broader issues involving the modality in which these posters speak.

[39] Clearly, a significant aspect of the posters is that the elements and motifs discussed above only very rarely occur in isolation. Rather, they are overlaid, hybridized, or simply piled on. Even within individual posters, discontinuous elements are combined, juxtaposed, played with. Not to mention the sheer semiotic density of the posters—lettering becoming decorative, images imparting information, illegibility a conscious strategy rather than an accident, a transactional interplay of elements conventionally considered categorically separate. In some ways, this density is directly in keeping with the basic experiential reality of the subculture: flashing patterns in an old-timey setting, subsuming the human form in elaborate whorls, surrounded by vintage Americana and enigmatic icons from mystical other worlds—this could be a basic description of a night at the ballrooms. But equally clear from the above examples is that the mode in which these elements were used, their combined references and unreadability and symbolic overload, were conceptualized within a visionary framework: a move to Zap! the perceptual system to a higher level of functioning, engendering a state of higher consciousness through confounding the normal modes of sense-making just as the ballroom concerts, street theatre, and visionary poetry also aimed to do. 

[40] However, these posters are not unreadable chaos; in fact, many are quite classically ordered, with a surprising amount of formal clarity and symmetry. And as we’ve seen above, they also utilize extensively what might be called “vernacular” images—commonplace forms and styles that resonate strongly with the Haight’s cultural and historical environment. Unlike the high Modernist art of the period just preceding the posters, but in some ways quite consistent with 1960s Pop Art, the posters retain and reinvigorate the use of recognizable forms from a variety of sources. Rather than the pure expression of a heroic individual, these posters announce their stake as social/rhetorical objects by utilizing familiar styles; what is significant is the mode in which they are used, the way they are expressed. Just as the rock bands drew on familiar musical bases, so did the visuals of the posters often adapt cultural readymades and familiar icons to quite new uses and expanded sorts of significance. By drawing on commonly recognizable materials, they opened up further possibilities for that “zap” of insight by juxtaposing opposites—expressing the transcendent in a commonplace format, a shared mode of speech of mystics throughout the ages.

[41] My point here is not to do a detailed analysis of the posters, breaking them down and categorizing them along the lines of various paradoxical figures of speech. Rather, I want to use them in a metaphorical sense, to suggest that the posters “work” in similar ways, the mode of expression employed in the ballroom concert posters setting up modes of audience engagement with similar intent. The posters “speak” in such a way that they, like the riddles of classical Greek philosophy and myth, challenge the viewer “to combine impulsive leaps of intuition with caution, playfulness with serious reflection, and a child’s openness of mind with the knowledge and wit of an adult.”23 The caution comes from the pure semiotic overload of the images, as a slow deciphering process is often necessary to make out any of the informational content in many of the posters; however, intuition is spurred onwards by the associative (il)logic of the posters’ construction and (dis)organization and the allusiveness of the imagistic content. Clearly the posters are created in a playful frame of mind, as can be seen in all of the visual puns and appropriated icons, and they call forth such attitudes in “reading” them. At the same time, as we’ve seen above there is often a more serious, or rather profound, meaning that grows out of the way those potentially silly elements are used—the goof, that is to say, is often a cosmic one. And while the knowledge of an inquisitive adult is called for in recognizing all the references within the posters and in considering the varied levels of meaning, the posters also clearly speak with a childlike sense of wonder and freshness in their gleeful reconfigurations of accepted “reality” (from the conventions of advertising design to the commonplaces of everyday logic). Philosophical scholars David Hoffman and Sharon Hoffman write that the riddles of Greek philosophy “demand openness of the minds they confront, an ability to think beyond the habitual usages of words and objects and to approach the matter at hand as if for the first time.”24 This seems remarkably close to the visual imagination expressed in the posters.

[42] Of course, Greek philosophy and culture is hardly the only source of such paradoxical rhetorical forms. The Asian traditions of Taoism and Buddhism, especially Zen, abound with oxymorons. Japanese Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki notes that visionaries of all stripes have long been fond of expounding their views via “mystic irrationalities,” though differences can be noted among the traditions. While the Greeks, for example, were fond of playful riddling, Zen Buddhism is “more daringly concrete in its paradoxes than other mystical teachings. The latter are more or less confined to general statements concerning life or God or the world, but Zen carries its paradoxical assertions into every detail of our daily life.” Instead of expressing its principles via lofty abstractions, Zen “has no hesitation in flatly denying all our most familiar facts of experience.”25 The characteristic form of this speech within the Zen tradition is the koan—a sort of riddle designed to produce the enlightening Zap! known as satori by being completely insoluble within the bounds of normal linear logic.  

[43] The koan, as discussed by Suzuki, takes a number of different forms historically, but all share certain psychic elements. The basic impulse behind the koan is “to bring about a highly wrought-up state of consciousness” through confounding normal thought processes. In attempting to process the koan, an individual’s “reasoning faculty is kept in abeyance,” the superficial activities of the mind tied in knots so that the “profounder parts which are found generally deeply buried can be brought out and exercised.”26 Finally the mind reaches its most “stumped” state through the total concentration of one’s attention on an object that simply refuses to make “normal” sense. Here, Alan Watts writes, the individual is brought to a point of feeling completely stupid, as if encased in a huge block of ice. But then, for no obvious reason, “the block of ice suddenly collapses, this vast lump of unintelligibility comes instantly alive. The problem of what it is becomes transparently absurd—a question which, from the beginning, meant nothing whatever.” The tense knot produced by linear thought trying to grasp the impossible is suddenly loosed, at which point “there is no more sensation of a hard core of selfhood standing over against the rest of the world”, bringing about the state of consciousness known in Zen as satori or enlightenment.27 Rather than attempt the impossible task of explaining the concept of satori through the limited medium of conventional linear logic, the goal of the koan, according to Suzuki, is “to unfold the Zen psychology in the mind of the uninitiated, and to reproduce the state of consciousness, of which these statements are the expression.”28

[44] Given the position and role of Zen in San Francisco, I believe we can certainly see some of this paradoxical logic in the posters, though in a much different style from the Asian traditions. Japanese and Chinese art is historically often minimal and suggestive, allowing the mind to fill in details, drawing in the viewer by subtlety and seeming incompleteness. In keeping with the Pranksters’ embrace of dirty electric neon eight-cylinder warts-and-all mid-1960s America, however, the posters necessarily “speak” in a more densely overloaded tone. However, the concreteness of expression shines through. Dr. Suzuki further explains the logic behind Zen’s “graphic irrationalities”, and the mystical significance behind their use:

“The flower is not red, nor is the willow green,” is one of the best known utterances of Zen, and is regarded as the same as its affirmative: “The flower is red and the willow is green.” To put it in logical formula, it will run like this: “A is at once A and not-A.” If so, I am I and yet you are I. An Indian philosopher asserts that Tat twam asi, Thou art it. If so, heaven is hell and God is devil. To pious orthodox Christians, what a shocking doctrine this Zen is!29

The influence of this kind of thinking shows up in a large number of the posters; many of the above examples base their free-wheeling appropriations and recontextualizations in just such direct (il)logic. It is worth noting that this aspect of the posters was actually noticed at the time, though not necessarily approvingly. Many commentators and art critics remarked negatively on the head-stumping confusion the posters produced, and a 1967 article in Time magazine derided them as flatly “irrational” (most likely without realizing that such an evaluation would be high praise for someone attempting to design a visual koan).

[45] While the koan-logic can be seen across the body of posters, it is worth mentioning a few of the modalities it took within the images. One way of scrambling normal sense-making might be to take a familiar image and suggest a completely different meaning or context (just as verbal koans would do with words). One of the most famous and audacious instances of this was an October 1967 Mouse Studios poster that directly lifted the central image from a famous Art Nouveau design by Alphonse Mucha advertising “Job” brand rolling papers. Due to the revival of Nouveau, this image would have been familiar to many of the general public at the time. Mouse and Kelley strip away the original lettering and dainty patterning in the background in favour of wide flat areas of dayglo red and hot pink, giving the woman nuclear green hair to boot! Suzuki’s assertion that the willow is not green would be on the same level of paradoxicality as Mouse Studios’ suggestion that the hair of the woman in Alphonse Mucha’s “Job” ad actually is green—a flat and funny denial of a basic fact of conventional perception, here given an electric-age further twist by the playful recontextualization of a recognizable image.

[46] The reworking of familiar types of cultural communication provided endless possibilities for the production of viewer confusion. A 1967 Rick Griffin poster for the Family Dog looks exactly like the front page of the Sunday newspaper comics section—until one gets close enough to realize that the titles of the funnies are the band names, and the comic strips bring together Mickey Mouse (wearing the stars’n’stripes), Griffin’s old comic character Murph the Surf, the back of a Camel cigarettes pack, word balloons filled with runes and invented characters, and a sense of design and placing that would not be out of place in a Salvador Dali painting. The whole thing keeps threatening to make linear sense, winding the viewer tighter and tighter by playing on the expected in a narrative comic format, until a Pop Art explosion in the penultimate panel leaves the viewer with nothing but a big Zap!.

[47] Other types of puzzles were more obvious and more optical. Victor Moscoso was especially fond of op-art patterning, often turning the informational content into dense geometrical designs in viciously clashing colours. In one 1966 poster the lettering becomes the entire image, bending and swirling into a large Tai Chi form that takes shape in the center of the poster—the lettering makes up the icon, the icon is the lettering, the eye-gouging colours twist and flash the viewer’s normal faculties of perception until the whole thing begins to twirl… and only then does the information become readable.

[48] One particular Stanley Mouse solo poster takes the koan concept to heart directly. Inside of a cleanly classical Art Deco-style frame Mouse placed a series of apparently unconnected images including yellow flowers, a shining sun, and an X-ray of a human hand. The goal, he said later, was for the images to work together in an allusive fashion to suggest meaning rather than provide it: “I called it my Haiku poem,” he said, “because I saw it as a series of visual syllables.”30 This apparently senseless, yet evocative and potentially profound, poster also came to be known by fans and collectors as the “Cosmic Collage”.

Stanley Mouse, "Haiku Poem," Fillmore Auditorium/Winterland Auditorium, December 1967. 
Image appears courtesy Wolfgang's Vault (www.wolfgangsvault.com).

Conclusion

[49] In conclusion, I would just like to make note of a few potential criticisms of these posters and of the type of cultural dialogue represented in them. In 1968, reporter Nicholas Hoffman published a book expanded from his news stories about the people of the Haight. He paid particular attention to critiquing their attempts at intercultural engagement, seeing it as little more than a juvenile flight from good honest American Liberalism, not to mention messy and confusing as well. The community’s artistic experiments, and especially their interest in a variety of non-Western philosophies, in Von Hoffman’s words, “strikes outsiders as irrational, internally inconsistent, and so devoid of programmatic content as to be useless for any kind of application.”31 The subculture was critiqued from the political Left as well; committed protestors tended to see all this mystical mumbo-jumbo as evidencing little but a fearfulness to get involved in the inevitable revolution that was destined to sweep the land. Even some of the more pious American adherents of Buddhism and other Eastern religions weighed in, seeing this Westernizing of the eternal mysteries as too crass, too tacky, diluting the purity of the form as it should properly exist.

[50] I’m afraid I have little response to such arguments; I believe that the posters (and the music, and so on) speak clearly for themselves. And whenever possible, I try to avoid arguing with purists anyway. However, it may be worth noting a few words from those wiser than myself who have engaged in such debates. Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche (also known as Khyentse Norbu), one of the living masters of Tibetan Buddhism, argued recently that if the central experiences and ideas of Buddhism are “found in a path or a philosophy, it doesn’t matter if you call it Buddhism or not […] You could have a surfer giving you teachings on how to sit on a beach watching a sunset”; if what she says contains those truths and experiences, it expresses the heart of Buddhism.32 Similarly, Alan Watts notes that in situations outside of Japan or China, teachers have been known to use books germane to those cultures to illustrate the paradoxical nature of Zen logic and the koan: “the late Sokei-an Sasaki, working in the United States, found that an admirable manual for this purpose was Alice in Wonderland.”33 Khyentse Rinpoche argued in a recent interview that the real point is the point, however it is expressed, rather than the external appearance:

As long as the fundamental view of Buddhism is not lost, there is no problem. We may try for sentimental reasons to preserve the traditional aspects as much as possible, but they will eventually change.  Don’t forget that the customs and traditions that we are trying to preserve today were once modern and progressive. […] I see Westerners wearing chubas and showing off their malas. But I think the more people do that, the more they forget the essence, the actual point of Buddha’s teaching. It’s amazing to see how eager some people are to adopt what is not essential, and throw out what is essential!34 (Roberts, 32-33)

As part of an ongoing dialogue between Eastern and Western modes of thought, the Haight posters seem to make a similar argument, focusing not on the trappings but on the experience—and equally importantly the sharing of that experience through the re-imagination of popular art forms.

Note on Image Copyrights

We would like to thank the copyright holders for permission to use the images included in the article:

The Family Dog, Chet Helms, d.b.a. Family Dog Productions, 786 Bush St., P.O. Box 42, San Francisco, CA 94108, 415-391-2423

Wolfgang's Vault, Bill Graham Presents Archives, (415) 543-4530, www.wolfgangsvault.com

Notes

1 Quoted in James Henke and Parke Puterbaugh, Eds, I Want to Take You Higher: The Psychedelic Era 1965-1969 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997), 25.

2 Quoted in Jesse Kornbluth, Editor, Notes from the New Underground: An Anthology (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), 170.

3 Joel Selvin, foreword to Stanley Mouse, Freehand: The Art of Stanley Mouse (Berkeley: SLG Books, 1993), 10-11.

4 Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Visual Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998), 4-5.

5 Bruce Gronbeck, “Reconceptualizing the Visual Experience in Media Studies”, in Judith S. Trent, ed. Communication: Views from the Helm for the 21st Century (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998), 292.

6 Mickey Hart, foreword to Stanley Mouse, Freehand: The Art of Stanley Mouse (Berkeley: SLG Books, 1993), 7.

7 Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 303.

8 Rick Fields, “A High History of Buddhism.” Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Fall 1996, 48.

9 Fields, "History," 48.

10 Jesse Kornbluth, Notes from the New Underground: An Anthology. (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), 121.

11 For more on the problems of the “counter”-culture concept, see Stephen MacEdo, Editor. Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997); and Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1969).

12 Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), 148.

13 Helen Swick Perry, The Human Be-In (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1970), 111. 

14 Dominy Hamilton, quoted in Paul Grushkin, The Art of Rock: Posters From Presley to Punk (San Francisco: Artabras, 1988), 76.

15 Walter Medeiros, quoted in Ted Owen and Denise Dickson, High Art: A History of the Psychedelic Poster (London: Sanctuary Publishing Limited, 1999), 62.

16 Alan W. Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 88-89.

17 Watts, The Book, 90-91.

18 Watts, The Book, 96.

19 Watts, The Book, 99.

20 For more on how continuing changes in spirituality affect the wider culture, see Eugene Taylor, Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in America (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1999);or peruse any issue of periodicals such as the Shambhala Sun, Tricycle, or The Empty Vessel.

21 Kornbluth, Notes, 99.

22 John Blofeld, Taoism: the Road to Immortality (Boston: Shambhala, 1978).

23 David Hoffman and Sharon Hoffman. “Enigma, Paradox, Parable.” Parabola: Myth, Tradition, and the Search for Meaning, Summer 2000, 21.

24 Hoffman and Hoffman, "Enigma," 14.

25 D.T. Suzuki, “’Empty-Handed I Go’: Comments on the Zen Koan.” Parabola: Myth, Tradition, and the Search for Meaning I (Summer 2000), 82 (originally published 1927).

26 D.T. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D.T. Suzuki (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1956), 149-150.

27 Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (New York: Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1999 [1957]), 166.

28 D.T. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism, 135.

29 D.T. Suzuki, “Comments on the Zen Koan”, 82.

30 Stanley Mouse, quoted in Gayle Lemke, The Art of the Fillmore: 1966-1971 (Petaluma, CA: Acid Test Productions, 1997), 93.

31 Nicholas Von Hoffman, We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against. (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), 136.

32 Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, “Buddhism in a Nutshell: The Four Seals of Dharma.” Shambhala Sun, March 2000, 40-41.

33 Alan Watts, The Way of Zen, 167.

34 Kelly Roberts, “Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche: What Changes and What Doesn’t.” Shambhala Sun (November 2000), 32-33.

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