"Psychedelic Language" continued

These Psychedelic posters were hung on the street, but that’s not really where they lived. They were really designed to be carefully removed and hung on bedroom walls to be contemplated. The deliberate illegibility required the extra time to read them as well as read into them.

At the time that these Psychedelic posters were being created, the predominant Western graphic design language was the International Style. This is a poster by Swiss designer Armin Hofmann from 1967. The Swiss basically refined early Constructivist and Bauhaus tenants into their own visual language. It was clean, legible design, and corporate America truly embraced it.

American designers followed suit speaking this Swiss visual language, and it became the cannon of graphic design. This is New York designer George Tscherny’s poster from 1968 for General Dynamics. The approach is very much in line with an overall Modernist belief system that includes concepts like timelessness, and “less is more.”

Now think of this formal system next to the Psychedelic posters being created. The posters weren’t going to convince its audience by speaking the language of legibility, or, the language of “the man.” People reading with another visual language might have thought this was a poster for a crazed optician?

The previous eyeball poster and this piece were created by Rich Griffin. Griffin brought his cartooning ability and wit to the Psychedelic language, fitting it within the coordinates. And what I’d also like to point out is that his posters maintained the same high level of draughtsmanship that you see in all this work. Not everyone could do these posters—you had to be artistically inclined to create at this level and speed.

Now I’d like to show another visual language that also reads as a code, and has a particular set of coordinates of its own. The difference is that anyone can do this.

It’s a simple, street expression called tagging—one of which mars the front door of the building I live in. They’re names of kids who all know each other and communicate in a “I was here” graffiti sort of way.

One of the aesthetic rules within tagging is that you never lift your marker off the wall, or your finger off the spray can, until the tag is complete. And so when you see the tags ganged together, you don’t see the names anymore, but more the gesture, all speaking a particular visual language, and blending into a unified whole against the urban environment.

The Psychedelic posters played with this idea, but within the confines of the poster itself. Type and image became one, unified into a “gestalt pattern.” It may seem strange for an announcement to have gestalt as part of its agenda—to be deliberately indecipherable. Camouflaging is a great use of gestalt theory, but not posters. Yet the artist’s knew their audience were not only willing, but preferred the coding and the requirement to spend time with each piece. I read that when they’d hang the posters on the street, they’d come back an hour later and 90% of them would be gone.

This is another Victor Moscoso. A complete gestalt blender. Moscoso is one of the only Psychedelic poster artists who was formally trained in graphic design. Most of the others were fine artists. He arrived in San Francisco with a BFA from the Cooper Union, and an MFA from Yale in graphic design. Moscoso said that he had to unlearn all the rules to make this kind poster.

Yet, he he did learn how to use the vibrating or ”hot" colors through intensive study with Josef Albers, chair of Yale’s design dept. Albers himself was a student of the Bauhaus school in Weimar where he began his color studies, specifically opposite colors, and the ambiguities of visual and spatial perception. Josef Alber’s work heavily influenced the Optical Art movement, and by the mid 60s, color exploration was in the air. A show at MOMA in 1965 confirms this. The show was called The Responsive Eye and dealt with this new Op Art work.

The idea of vibrating colors became part of the language because they visually reproduced the effects of hallucinogens.

I mentioned this presentation to a friend—Kathy McCoy. Kathy was the 2-d design chair for twenty-plus years at Cranbrook Academy of Art where I received my master’s degree in graphic design.

Kathy said that in the summer of 1967, after graduating from Michigan State University, she created a few Psychedelic posters in the basement of her house in Birmingham, Michigan. I asked for a set of them, and I’m going to click through them here.