ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This thesis deals with psychedelic of rock posters which emerged from Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco around the mid- to late 1960s, with a special reference to poster artists such as Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, Lee Conklin. With the birth of ‘psychedelic rock’ music, rock posters emerged as a means of promoting regular concerts in dance halls. However, rock posters were characterized by obscure lettering, primary colors, decorative styles, and the use of images which had nothing to do with concerts, and did not function as informative commercial poster; instead, they absorbed the newly emerging hippie culture, i.e. hippies’ inner consciousness and philosophy. In particular, the hallucinatory culture of the hippie had a direct implication for the styles of rock posters. Hallucination provided hippies with inner freedom rather than indulgence in pleasures. In addition, it enabled them to dream about their own ideals. The social atmosphere of the United States in the 1960s was increasingly characterized by confusion and anxieties from the Vietnam War, assassinations, and civil rights movements. The young generation thought that human selfishness and materialism had created these phenomena, and began to value the inner, spiritual world. They believed that hallucination could offer ‘immediate enlightenment’ and ‘instant Nirvana’, and sought to change the world through ‘love.’ Thus love of human beings, nature and world was expressed in rock posters as well. The sublimation of human love was sought in the liberation of physical pleasure. It was to transform the preexisting norms of sexuality and to avoid hypocrisy, in order to experience orgasm intrinsic to sexual intercourse. Here Americans Indians’ life provided an ideal model. The posters portrayed American Indians with aureole and inward eyes, and it shows that they were considered as divine existence. The sublime love of the world was expressed in hippies’ yearning for the ‘peaceful world.’ The rock posters visually expressed the world of psychedelic. Artists depicted their personal experience of illusion in their posters, and the viewer too wanted to have secondhand experience of hallucination through the posters. I suggest that there are three elements in the psychedelic styles of these posters. There is a visualization of the initial hallucinatory effects such as colorful lights and turbulent flows of energies. Victor Moscoso expressed hallucinatory lights through simultaneous contrasts and periodic structure, and visualized the world of illusion through fluorescence colors. Wes Wilson used obscure lettering and flowing spirals to create the dense and saturated spatiality of hallucination as well as the effects of turbulent energies. There are figures derived spontaneously from the subconsciousness of the hallucinated. These figures are characterized by combinations, fusions, condensations, collapses and extensions of the contradictory and contrary, and are most frequently observed in Lee Conklin’s posters. In this way, hallucinatory motifs of rock posters in the 1960s visualized the aspirations for an ideal world within the hippie culture, and their significant contribution lies in the creation of the ‘psychedelic style,’ a new and unique American style.

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