There is no doubt about the recent revival of interest in psychedelic aesthetics and themes in western pop culture. From the latest film clips by Ke$ha, to the stocking of vintage outdoor festival get-up at mainstream fashion stores, youth cultures across the globe have gravitated towards the aesthetics of psychedelia and re-appropriated them as their own. Contemporary art around Australia has been no exception to this trend. ‘New Psychedelia’, a survey exhibition of such art at the University of Queensland Art Museum, attempts not only to elucidate the existence of this trend within art making but also to articulate its meaning for a generation of artists who would be, in the majority, too young to have experienced (and thus truly understood) the original psychedelic movement. Why, in such modern, technological times, would there be a push towards alternative consciousness of the mind? In a youth culture which does not find its power in gurus, LSD trips or flower power, what is it about these themes which resonates with artists? ‘New Psychedelia’ attempts to answer these questions.
Curator Sebastian Moody identifies three factors he believes constitute the motivations for expanding consciousness, which he sees as the objective of this new movement: neo-shamanism; technology and perception; and spiritual capitalism. These concerns are what distinguish the new psychedelia from its original form, ‘The new psychedelia may not directly mirror this earlier style or the 1960s experiment with hallucinogenic drugs, but it borrows from its aesthetic and is, similarly, popular in the wider youth culture’.1 In this way, Moody argues that this new movement attempts to transcend the restraints imposed on the individual by technology and capitalism through subversion born of the ‘
1. Sebastian Moody, ‘Total Reality: The Influence of Psychedelia in Contemporary Australian Art’, New Psychedelia, ex. cat., University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 2011, p.35.
2. Sebastian Moody, ibid, p.40.