| Psychedelic art - the art which is created at changed conditions of the consciousness of the artist. More often psychedelic art affects the artifacts which are meant to have arisen under the influence of drugs or artifacts which describe the narcotic effects. However it can be connected with other practices, for example, with glue sniffing. Its background is situated in extreme antiquity. There is Marquis de Sade among the art forerunners of psychedelic art.
The aesthetic specificity of Psychedelic art consists in the delegation of the prerogatives of authors-professionals to nonprofessionals: the hallucinatory effects are identified with flashes of inspirations; there is an illusion of creative abilities indivisibility creative abilities. The greatest popularity was gained by psychedelic musical and literary practices. The subcultures of the hippie, punks, "generation X" and ravers had the essential influence on the formation of Psychedelic art. The leaders of the "chemical generation" in the nineties were writers Irvine Welsh, Jeff Nun and Gavin Hill.
The sign of the psychedelic literary style is a combination of naturalism and expression, tragicomedy and a melodrama, transgressivity and irony; the splintered topic, a considerable quantity of characters (basically marginal persons, both Europeans, and the colored immigrants united by the term "euro stuff"); an abundance of jargons, dialecticisms and non standard lexicons (very often screen versions on a source language are accompanied by subtitles), black humor, elements of social satire; an aesthetic shock, and a heightened interest to the ugly. The basic problems of the works are narcotic visions, the physiological sensations of addicts, the changes occurring in their life owing to narcotic dependence, ecstasy as self-sufficient, absolute life experience, chemical love, potlatch, AIDS and death.
However these general lines do not testify to the existence of a united “narcotic culture”. It breaks up to a great number of subcultures: various psychoactive substances attract and form artists which are different in temperament and way of life of the artists and the generational fashion on psychoactive substances is changing.
Opiates (crack, heroin, opium), stimulators (cocaine, amphetamines), hallucinogens (acid, psilocybin mushrooms, ketamine), marihuana (the grass, hashish) are different on the ability to cause addiction and the demand dose increase, on the character of the "trip" and "gapper". Marihuana and acid were drugs of the hippies; heroin and amphetamines were drugs of the punks; ecstasy (MDMA), combining the action of stimulators and hallucinogens, were a favorite drug of the rave-culture. Marihuana and acid allowed people to peep into the inner world, to find harmony and to feel the strongest mystical experiences. Amphetamines gave an exit to latent aggression, heroin lead up to a limit of the principle "the worse, the better". Ecstasy - the crowning drug of the 90s - is rather soft: it stimulates, but it is not as strong and sharp as cocaine; it gives a feeling of a unity and love, but does not threaten such bad trips as acid.
Psychedelism, along with other alternative life styles, was an organic component of the rock music of the 1960s, punk music of the 1970s (its theorist M.Maklaren, the group founder of the "Sex pistols"), the music "rave" and "techno" of the 90s with their forced perception of a sound, loss of time sense and space.
Psychodelic art is associated also with a religious-mystical connotation in a range from divine revelation to leaving in an astral form. In this context the art associates with the mystical power over an audience, a collective communion with "wonderful ecstasy".
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Alton Kelley, one of the founding fathers of psychedelic art, died this Sunday at the age of 67.
Alton Kelley was most known for creating psychedelic posters and psychedelic album covers for rockers in the 60s, including such big names as the Grateful Dead (famous "skull and roses" poster), Journey, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, and
Steve Miller. Kelley's works greatly influenced the leading artists of Psychedelic Art movement such as Rick Griffin, who moved to San Francisco after seeing Kelly's psychedelic posters and soon started producing his own.
