Looking for Mushrooms: Art and Counterculture

Looking for Mushrooms - Beat Poets, Hippies, Funk and Minimal Art:
Art and Counterculture

http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=27089

COLOGNE.- Museum Ludwig presents Looking for Mushrooms - Beat Poets,
Hippies, Funk and Minimal Art: Art and Counterculture in San
Francisco 1955 - 1968, on view through March 1, 2009. Forty years on
from 1968, the year that spelt radical change for society, it is time
to turn our minds back to the art scene in a city that was regarded
in the 1960s and 1970s as the Mecca of experimental culture and
lifestyles (beat poets, hippie movement, counterculture).

Not New York, but "at the end of the world" – the area around San
Francisco on the West coast of the USA – saw the taboos of a
work-oriented post-war modernism being broken in a way that opened up
an intense exchange between all of the arts. Looking for Mushrooms is
the name of a film made in 1959-1967 by Bruce Connor, which has been
taken for the exhibition title. Here tiny film particles melt
together to form a virtuoso abstract play of light and colour. The
title not only awakens associations with "magic mushrooms" and
sixties drug culture. Bruce Connor is a person who draws together all
the threads linking art, film, dance, beat and pop culture. This is
not typical of him alone, but for the whole of the fifties and
sixties in San Francisco and the Bay Area. The boundaries between the
arts were broken down, leading not only to a politicised
counterculture, but also the mingling of theatre, dance, the visual
arts, literature and film.

Any number of the artists experimenting in this milieu have had a
telling influence on the developments in the international art scene
since the 1960s. Their art can no longer be grasped by the
traditional categories of the creative subject or of a discrete
artwork that reflects on its own particular medium.

For this reason the exhibition - which will feature a synchronous
cross-section of some 200 works and documents that highlight the
interweaving of the arts and artists and bring them to life – is
planned to be accompanied be a densely-packed film programme and a
richly documented reference book. The exhibition is curated by
Barbara Engelbach (Museum Ludwig) together with Friederike Wappler
(University of Bochum) and Hans Winkler (freelance artist and curator).

The exhibition is backed by the Kunststiftung NRW.

Artists in the Exhibition: William Allan, Bruce Baillie, Ruth-Marion
Baruch, Wallace Berman, Stan Brakhage, James Broughton, Bruce Conner,
Robert Crumb, Ron G. Davis / San Francisco Mime Troupe, Jay DeFeo,
Walter De Maria, Emory Douglas, Terry Fox, Allen Ginsberg, Rick
Griffith, Anna Halprin, Wallace Hedrick, Jess, Pirkle Jones, Lawrence
Jordan, Steve Kaltenbach, Alton Kelley, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary,
Bonnie MacLean , Michael McClure, Christopher MacLaine, Victor
Moscoso, Mouse Studios, Bruce Nauman, Gunvor Nelson, Robert Nelson,
Sidney Peterson, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Reich, Ron Rice, Terry Riley,
Peter Saul, ruth weiss, H.C. Westermann, Dorothy Wiley, William T.
Wiley, Wes Wilson, and La Monte Young.

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