I'm on a roll here: three posts in one day. Of course, all I'm doing is repurposing archived articles I have just stumbled across on the web, which I wrote years ago. So really I'm just preserving or, archiving, for myself. (2008 update: Jesus. I almost gagged on this preface. "I'm just preserving or, archiving, for myself." Man, so gay. But I guess I'll "archive" to remind myself that's it's easy to write like a pretentious-sounding fool.)
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Anyone who has attended a concert at San Francisco's famous Fillmore Audito-rium can't help but admire the collection of 60s rock posters that line the walls of the upstairs lounge. Posters featuring legendary musical artists and bands such as the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Santana, and Jefferson Airplane make up the iconographic wallpaper. The 60s posters' eye-catching imagery, with their psychedelically shaped outlines, seemingly illegible lettering, and vividly schemed stylistic traits, artistically document a revolutionary time in rock history.
Opening September 16th, the Visual Arts Gallery brings a piece of this psychedelic rock history to City College.
"The show is comprised of 20 to 30 of the earliest rock posters, but we will also include a few contemporary posters," said Jim Torlakson, the Gallery's coordinator, and participating member of CCSF's Outlook program, whose function is to promote visual education throughout the campus. "The advent of technology plays a large role in the progression of rock poster art, and it's important that we include newer posters in the show so that viewers can see where rock poster art is today," he added.
The rock poster today serves as the most tangible identity of the psychedelic rock era of the 60s.
The term "psychedelia" was applied to the drug culture, a lifestyle that concertgoers began to embrace around 1965. Those willing would regularly partake of hallucinogenic properties such as LSD and mescaline while attending performances, an activity labeled as the "psychedelic experience."
The rock performers, to aid in this experience, would play protracted sets against elaborate backdrops, featuring mind-tripping lightshows.
Event producer, Bill Graham, played an instrumental role in fostering the dance-psychedelic-rock-concert movement. Gra-ham got his start in San Francisco in 1965 promoting loft parties. Using flyers, the soon-to-be music industry magnate commissioned artists to create straightforward promotional literature: date, time, place, and performer.
What Graham got instead was an artistic piece of free-spirited expression of the capricious, experimental Haight-Ashbury community. Realizing the potential power of such posters, Graham capitalized on the idea, and began promoting dance concerts at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium in January of 1966.
Sixties poster art soon developed its own unique stylized aesthetic; and, similar to 19th century French artist Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec, who drew imagery of the spirited Moulin Rouge dancehall, the imagery depicted was convincingly hallucinogenically influenced. Vis-�-vis Toulouse-Lautrec, who sought inspiration through bottles of Absinthe liqueur, rock poster artists often kindled creativity through the use of mind-altering substances. The rock poster installation, running through October 11th, will also feature guest lectures by poster artist Chet Helms, collector Mark Powers, and others TBA. For further information or comments log onto www.trps.org
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