Whitney Museum of Art
945 Madison Avenue @75th St. NYC
Website: www.whitney.org
Subpage: http://whitney.org/www/exhibition/SOL_exhib.jsp

Has it really been forty years since we—the cultural “we”—hit our height of love and creativity? What was it that made 1967 so special, special enough to look back upon one particular summer over a generation later with equal parts wonder and regret for its distance?

Having been there, albeit very young at the time, I have to say the selection of ‘67 may be slightly arbitrary, after all, Woodstock would not be for another 2 summers. So while ‘67 may not have been the height of our new cultural awareness, it was indeed the tipping point where the new underground movements first came above ground and the mass media of the day took notice.

Not only would the media take notice, but they would soon co-opt everything for use in movies, advertising and marketing. There would soon be a name for this, we would call it: The 70’s. But for a brief time, maybe from ‘67 to ‘69, the movement was pure and real. And so was its art.

It is this brief moment in time when the movement was pure and the art was fresh and new, that the show “Summer of Love” at the Whitney tries to capture. On the two floors dedicated to this show they have done just this. All of the media of the day is represented, paintings, photographs, abstract experimental films, LP album cover art, and posters-posters-posters! The exuberance of the day is undeniable. The energies, passions and goals of all the work come spilling out onto the museum floor all these 40 years later.

What struck me most was the level of technical and sometimes artistic expertise—by today’s standards many items could be accused of lacking on one or both counts. But to judge such a body of work by our standards today would be sourly missing the point of not only the art and its retrospective, but of the 60’s movement itself.

The 60’s was about youth taking control of its own destiny and wanting to move away from the sins of its parents. Remember that these boomers grew up in the shadow of the big war, and its formative media was the slick Hollywood machine and still new television set. To break away from this meant forging your own directions, even if some of these new directions were less than polished.

And most 60’s art was less than polished. It took a very conscious step away from the imagery of refinement and conformity. Instead it moved into the areas of harsh lines, abstractions, and never seen before amounts of color. This last leap may very well have been an outgrowth from the release of color TV the year or two before. Or it may have been an intentional and visual break from its more laid back roots in the beat generation.

Whatever its cause, the hippy generation created a visual style that permeates all of our art and aesthetic sensibilities even today. It is the reason why many clothes look the way they do, why covers of magazines look the way they do, and in large part why we as creatives are free to move off in so many directions and explore our creative worlds as we do today.

No, the 60’s artists often didn’t have our level of craftsmanship. They didn’t have Adobe Illustrator’s perfect line, Warhol didn’t have Photoshop’s high resolution output for his screen prints, and the abstract filmmakers couldn’t turn to the latest After Effects plugin for salvation. They were forced to use tools that we today would think of as nothing short of primitive. And yet…look at what they created.

When we look at art, we must see it as part of its time and place of creation. And understand what the point of its creation was. Many if the items seen in this show were commercial endeavors—promoting a new band seemed perhaps the single most popular reason for the creation of art at the time. After all, music was the king of the day.

Most of the art in the show was never intended to be seen as “high-art”. And I am quite sure few of its creators would have imagined that their rock poster created one stoned weekend in 1967 would end up hanging in the Whitney. But as a body of art representing a time and place, the work certainly deserves this level of recognition. The work not only brings those of us who were there back to a time of remembrance, it also exposes younger minds to a visual feeling we do not get to see much today.

I saw the show with my young son who was about the same age I was in 1967. As we walked through the galleries of art and mini-theaters of abstract films, his jaw simply hung open in amazement. Yes, that was how we all felt about 1967, the Summer of Love, when we first saw it as well.