Psychedelic Art: what it is and characteristics of this artistic movement

In the 1950s, the United States government was very interested in knowing the effects that the LSD provoked in the mind. The drug was of a new design and was going to be the main cause of the emergence of what is known as psychedelic art, the multicultural movement that took over artistic creation around 1960.

The psychiatrist Oscar Janiger (1918-2001), known for his studies on the effects of this substance, injected a controlled dose of LSD to an artist with the aim of analyzing his production while under the influence of the drug. The result, embodied in nine drawings, was surprising. As the hallucinogenic substance took over the man's mind, his drawings became more delirious, until they reached the purest abstraction. At the same time, the subject began to speak in an apparently incoherent way, to walk around the room and to be frightened by "things" that were on the floor and that the doctor obviously did not "see".

Paraphrasing the language of psychedelic artists, man was "opening the doors" of the mind and entering other worlds. That is the path followed by many creators, and not only in the 20th century: the use of psychotropic substances to produce.

What is psychedelic art? Why did it have such a resonance with the artists of the 1960s? What influences did he have on the cultural scene of the time? In this article we are going to find out.

What is psychedelic art? A history of drugs and art

Although psychedelic art is known as art that developed in the 1960s from experimentation with drugs (especially LSD), actually the name refers to any art that captures the life of the psyche human. In this sense, we could say that the German expressionism of the beginning of the 20th century or the later surrealism are also psychedelic art.

In fact, the word psychedelia (specifically, the English term, psychedelic) comes from two Greek words and comes to mean something like "manifest the soul." It was coined in 1957 by the psychologist Humphry Osmond (1917-2004) to refer to the manifestations that occurred based on the effects of certain substances. Soon, the idea materialized and he began to name the art that proliferated in those years and that based its inspiration on the hallucinogenic effects of some drugs. These effects (the famous psychedelic effect) went through causing phenomena such as synesthesia and alteration in perceptions and in the sense of time and place.

The conjunction of art and drugs is as old as time. There is evidence of many cultures that created their art in psychotropic states, and in the West many of the artists consumed narcotics such as laudanum or opium to "unleash" their his creativity. The use of other types of drugs, such as alcohol, was also common; At the end of the 19th century, absinthe, a very strong alcoholic drink extracted from the absinthe, which caused similar disturbances and was the rage among bohemian artists Parisian.

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LSD or lysergic acid: the great phenomenon of the 60s

In the case of the psychedelic art of the mid-20th century, a rather novel drug, discovered in 1938 by the chemist Albert Hoffman (1906-2008), had a lot to do with its appearance. The scientist was in the middle of research to find a substance that stimulated the circulatory system, which is why, at first, LSD was used in a strictly medical setting.

The unpredictable effects of the substance soon became apparent. The main component of LSD is extracted from ergot, a parasitic fungus of these cereals that, when consumed, produces hallucinations. In fact, during the Middle Ages there were cases of "possessed" who were nothing more than peasants who had consumed infected rye and who had suffered its terrible consequences.

LSD has in its composition lysergic acid, one of the substances in ergot. That is why psychedelic art is also known as lysergic art, because it is so connected to the consumption of this type of drug. The hallucinogenic effects of this component soon aroused scientific curiosity, and there were not a few "official" experiments that were carried out, such as the one carried out by Dr. Oscar Janiger (quoted in the introduction), who dedicated a large part of his professional career to studying the effects of LSD.

In the 1960s, lysergic acid spread like wildfire among “counterculture” artist communities.. Singers, writers, painters and various artists launched into the obsessive use of LSD to spur their creativity. Therefore, psychedelic art is not only a plastic art, but also encompasses other fields such as writing and music.

Famous is the case of the group The doors, whose peak occurred precisely during the time of greatest consumption of this substance. The name of the group already speaks for itself: The doors, a very clear reference to access to other worlds that only the consumption of substances could allow. Specifically, the name is inspired by the work that the British writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) published in 1954, entitled The doors of the perception, in which he analyzed precisely the effects of drug use; in this case, mescaline.

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Access to dream and unreal worlds

William Blake (1757-1827) already left in writing, as early as 1793, some famous verses that made reference to doors that open to reveal other worlds. In this case, the British artist was referring to the need to open the mind to other realities that would allow the human being to perceive the true infinity of things. In other words; men and women live locked up in their mental prison, and the only way of liberation is to open up to these worlds that they don't even suspect exist.

Without knowing it, Blake was defining what psychedelic art would be. This initiation into the infinite, into worlds beyond everyday human perception, was also the basis of 19th century Romanticism and other movements such as Pre-Raphaelism, Symbolism and surrealism. However, 20th century psychedelic art pushed this “opening of doors” to the limit.

The psychedelic art of the 1960s goes beyond the dream worlds that the Romantics could create, or the nightmarish images that the Surrealists captured on their canvases. The artists of the 60s and 70s convey sensations, altered states of consciousness, in which nothing has a shape, meaning, or meaning.

Thus, Kaleidoscopic patterns and fractals are typical in the plastic works of these artists., represented with colors that, being so bright, often hurt the eye.

Phosphenic motifs are also very popular, that is, those inspired by optical effects, especially caused by mechanical or electrical stimulation, which will later be the basis of other currents As the op art. The idea was to stimulate the viewer's retina and make it travel, as if they were suffering from hallucinations typical of LSD consumption.

But, as we have already said, psychedelic art was not only reflected in the plastic arts. The world of music was inspired, and a lot, by this idea. The psychedelic musical groups of the 60s and 70s tried to recreate, through music, the experiences derived from the use of drugs. To do this, and with the aim of capturing the "evasion" that their consumption represented, they introduced musical elements non-Western, like the Indian sitar, and the lyrics of the songs were often encrypted and surreal. This is the case of the last stage of the Beatles, heavily influenced by psychedelia, from the group The Jimi Hendrix Experience or the aforementioned The doors.

In literature, the psychedelic world also left its mark. Not that it was anything new; writers had been publishing their experience with drugs for more than a century. In 1822, Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859) published Confessions of an English opium eater. Four decades later, it was the turn of one of the cursed poets, Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) with his artificial paradises (1860). And, more recently, and in a clear precedent of the psychedelic era, we find the aforementioned Aldous Huxley (the inspiration for the name of The doors), and Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), with his Trip to the country of the Tarahumaras (1948), in which he recounted his foray into peyote.

In all works, in all artistic disciplines, a leitmotif: the desire to flee to other worlds and find creativity in them (and perhaps also the peace of soul) so eternally longed for by the human being.