What do you think about when you hear the phrase “psychedelic art?” If your first association is pulsating mandalas, adventurous guitar solos, and legions of hippies dropping out of college to follow the Grateful Dead around the country — think again.
Psychedelic art has always had a counter-cultural sheen, but it’s also sometimes been written off as eccentric or frivolous — a relic of the Vietnam era that doesn’t resonate so much anymore.
A new magazine wants to change that perception. Elastic is a new print magazine that looks to move past the so-called “first era” of psychedelia, and define a new, more relevant era of art that permeates traditional boundaries and definitions of visual art and literature. The first issue of Elastic is available now.
Senior editor Meara Sharma and editor in chief Hillary Brenhouse joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
HILLARY BRENHOUSE: The studies that are coming out about these substances and PTSD, postpartum depression, all kinds of mental health issues are really encouraging and at the same time this entire realm of art and culture has sort of been neglected.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah, well, do you think psychedelia has lost its countercultural juice with this shift in the cultural conversation towards psychedelics as a modality for like mental health and wellness?
BRENHOUSE: I think psychedelic art still has this political component that might not be apparent when you first consider it, but if you look at writing, for example, that plays with time, it's like, why might you decide to not use like an easy linear narrative structure when you're writing, it could be to challenge like Western colonial story structures.
It could be to capture alternate histories that have been very deliberately overlooked or to conjure other worlds.
DINGMAN: Yeah, that's interesting. Psychedelics as a way of not just taking on political power structures but political story structures perhaps.
Meara, what about you? Do you feel like we're in a different psychedelic era than what has come before when it comes to art?
MEARA SHARMA: You know, the term is sometimes applied loosely to writing and art, but what we're trying to do with Elastic is kind of curate and define, OK what does this mean for now and why is it useful to talk about things in this language. I think the first psychedelic era was obviously a time of radical social change, and I think we're similarly in a moment of rupture and transformation.
There's kind of an outpouring and a hunger as well for art that feels mind expanding and feels like it offers new ways of seeing the world, new ways of talking about the world.
BRENHOUSE: This seems just like a perfect moment for something like speculative nonfiction. There's a reason why there seems to be a need in the literary community for that kind of form or non form.
DINGMAN: I have to ask you more about the phrase speculative nonfiction because it's very trippy in its own right. Can you give me an example of what speculative nonfiction might be?
Would it be like a memoir infused with dream logic or what might we be talking about there?
BRENHOUSE: Yeah, I think absolutely it might be a memoir using dream logic. It might be a piece that deals with climate change, for example, three-quarters of which is like rooted in our present and then suddenly skips forward to 200 years into our future and paint some kind of grim picture or brings us to some future that just hasn't arrived yet.
SHARMA: I think it could also be a piece of writing where the facts are facts, but the orientation is fantastical or impossible.
So for instance a cultural history of a landscape from the perspective of a mushroom.
Or a sort of piece of reportage from the perspective of a miscarriage, so really thinking how do we talk about reality but put ourselves in positions that help us see what's right in front of us in totally new ways.
DINGMAN: So far in our conversation, we have been talking about looking towards the future frontiers of what might be, but I don't want to move past the fact that there is, in one very important sense, a backward looking element of Elastic's mission, which is to acknowledge artists of color from that first psychedelic era that perhaps haven't gotten their due.
So, tell me a little bit about who some of those artists are.
BRENHOUSE: I'm thinking of, for instance, Sam Gilliam, who was part of what was known as the Washington Color School, and whose work was overlooked for a very long time until well up into his 80s.
He was making what were called drape paintings, so you have these sort of paintings that are no longer in canvases, these really massive, massive abstract canvases that were sort of like draped and hung in the middle of a room or sort of across a wall.
There’s this combination of scale and mystery because it's draped there are parts of the canvas that you can't see and so you have this like massive work that's sort of mysterious in the way that it hangs, and I think that that is really bound up with the idea of psychedelic art.
SHARMA: And I think what's interesting is the idea of putting some of these more overlooked artists of the 60s and 70s in conversation with contemporary artists whose work is sort of distinctly of that tradition.
I think of somebody like Tomashi Jackson, who makes these kind of mixed media paintings that are full of vivid colorful geometric textiles, but sort of hidden within these like very constructed visceral works are black and white stills of news footage of protests, police brutality.
You have this kind of atmospheric, kind of mysterious experience encountering the work, but then the more you look at it, the more you see this reality kind of flickering through, and I think somebody like Tomashi is really in conversation with artists of the first psychedelic era.
DINGMAN: Well, as a last question, to whatever extent you're both comfortable with, I'm curious to know if psychedelics have played any role in your own artistic practices. And how much that informs your work on Elastic.
BRENHOUSE: I can say yes, psychedelic substances and the role they played in my life, have encouraged me to think more expansively about my work, to think about multi-genre collaboration.
DINGMAN: Meara, what about for you?
SHARMA: I think for me, my relationship to psychedelics and psychedelia is a bit more oblique and possibly more sort of conceptual.
I mean, I think what really appealed to me about Hillary's framing of this project was the kind of broadening of this term and thinking about this term as an orientation, as a sensibility.
In my own work I've always been really interested in dreams and have used dreams and the dreaming, sleeping experience as like a generative space. So, the novel that I'm working on sort of arrived in my mind during a period of insomnia over the course of many sleepless nights, and I think that there is something about the sort of dream space that connects to the sort of experience of being on psychedelics. That scene between the material world and the dream world feels very rich for me.
DINGMAN: Yeah, OK. Well, Meara Sharma, senior editor and Hillary Brenhouse editor in chief of Elastic, a magazine of psychedelic art. Thank you both so much.
