“Putting the Culture in the Counterculture”: Michael J. Kramer on Thomas E. Crow’s *The Artist in the Counterculture: Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Other Tales from the Edge*

Most studies of the 1960s counterculture focus more on the “counter” than the culture. They want to know what did—or did not—make the phenomenon oppositional to the dominant structures of power in American and global life. What were the politics of the counterculture’s strange effort to reimagine, and even possibly revolutionize, both self and society through experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs, a freer sense of sexuality, ecstatic experience, unconventional spirituality, and new configurations of kinship, family, and social relations?[1] Others point to something more like a store “counter” in the counterculture. They concentrate on how institutions of corporate capitalism cleverly diverted dissent into expressive style, channeling rebellion against the system back into the system itself. Counterculturalists may have thought they could have their acid and eat it too, or, later in the twentieth century, as they came of age and became what David Brooks called “bobos in paradise,” that they could have their organic wellness and think they were changing the world too, but all they were doing, in fact, was forming a new market segment of hipness within the existing economic order.[2] There was not much revolution in that.

For art historian Thomas Crow, these two perspectives, which treat the counterculture as either a straightforward social movement or, alternatively, a devious economic legerdemain, pay too much attention to the first half of the term. Which is to say, they tell us a lot about the counter, but not enough about the culture. He believes that if we turn to high art (pun intended), we can begin to better understand the content of the counterculture, which social critic Theodore Roszak first named in 1968 after borrowing the two-word term “counter culture” from sociologists of 1950s juvenile delinquency.[3] Crow wants to know what the actual culture of the counterculture was as well as who created it and what they were up to in doing so. While many assume that the counterculture was “LSD-consuming, motley-garbed, guitar-bashing wastrels” who “could never have had significant bearing on the serious enterprise of advanced visual art” (4), Crow notices a largely submerged world of more fierce and fascinating activity in avant-garde artmaking. Beyond the “rainbow-hued accoutrements of the counterculture in its flamboyant hippie phase” there was a less sunny, but more profound underground culture (3).

The artist Bruce Conner, in particular, becomes a talisman for Crow. When Conner died in 2008, one of his acquaintances, the poet Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, memorialized the artist as giving “the so-called ‘counter-culture’ its, well…culture” (7).[4] Tracking Conner’s “restless appetite for adventure and his impatience with boundaries” (35), as well as the daring artwork of fellow travelers such as Wallace Berman, Wally Hedrick, Jay DeFeo, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, David Hammons, Corita Kent, Martha Rosler, Rupert García, Senga Nengudi, Chris Burden, and Mike Kelley, Crow contends that behind the “retrospective fascination with the gaudier displays by 1960s free spirits” was a serious and gritty aesthetic and ethical engagement with two key factors: the nature of the self beyond normative definitions of it and a persistent rejection of militarized, Cold War American imperialism (3).

Conner is the main subject of the first five of the twelve chapters in The Artist in the Counterculture. From the late 1950s, when he arrived in San Francisco from Wichita, Kansas, to his fervent documentation of the 1970s punk scene in that City by the Bay and into the twenty-first century, Conner often refused the spotlight, at one point assigning authorship of his work to various other Bruce Conners he found in the phonebook. Here was an effort to deconstruct the self, to question assumptions about coherent, independent individualism in an America mostly focused on constituting it as the end goal of the society. In what Crow wants us to understand as a bold countercultural move, Bruce Conner mystified who Bruce Conner was, refusing to become a commodified brand, even as a symbol of individual rebelliousness (of course, in doing so, one could argue, that is exactly what Conner became, ultimately).

The suspicion of a stable self was not merely an anticommercial move. It was also, Crow argues, fundamentally linked to Conner’s fear of being conscripted into the US military. By way of the draft, the problematic nature of US foreign policy during the Cold War connected directly to questions of individual autonomy and dissolution. Out of this entwining of world and self, the counterculture’s culture began to take shape. For instance, when Conner showed up in San Francisco in the late 1950s at the apartment of his Kansas compatriot Michael McClure, who was at the time forging his own Beat poet career, Conner was disheveled in appearance, looking himself much like the set of dirty, canvas-covered, rusty-nailed, rope-twisted, feathered, stretched nylon, mangled paintings he was in the process of creating. Called The Rat Bastard series, these featured “found” photographs of cadavers or recreations of ancient forms of torture, among other disturbing elements.

Along with other sculptures and paintings such as Child (1959), Temptation of St. Barney Google (1959), Black Dahlia (1960), The Bridge (1960), Crucifixion (1960), Resurrection (1960), Partition (1962), Senorita (1962), Suitcase (1962), and Couch (1963), The Rat Bastard series out-junked the junky assemblages of New York stalwarts such as Robert Rauschenberg. They were not happy or light or easy or playful. Instead, they wanted to present the self as abject and broken, tarnished and suffering, but also open to a bold, authentic confrontation with the difficulties, stresses, and strains of the world. In making these dramatic pieces, Crow argues, Conner connected the two crucial aspects of the counterculture that the art historian recognizes at the core of its aesthetics and ethics: the urge to dismantle conventions of the self and a rejection of the post-World War II military-industrial complex.

Even in the interregnum between the Korean and the Vietnam Wars, during the later years of the Eisenhower administration at the end of the 1950s, Conner found the possibility of being forced into the American Armed Forces intolerable. His art conveyed an abjection of the self under pressure from the larger geopolitical context. As Crow writes, The Rat Bastard series reflects how, for Conner, getting drafted was “deemed by him a force inimical to his personal survival.” Therefore, “he resorted to the artificial cultivation of extreme states of mind and body, self-transformation projected onto an uncomprehending world with extravagant outward dramatics: key traits in any definition of the counterculture” (16).

Conner’s artworks were also about experimentation with drugs such as peyote and, later, LSD. These were not for partying, however, in any simplistic sense of the term. They were methods of investigating the self within Cold War American empire. Drugs inspired a mode of countercultural artmaking that has been mistaken for seeking states of innocence and utopian naïveté. That was, and remains, the hippie cliché. For Conner, by contrast, they were about grappling with fragility and danger. As Conner put it about a sculpture, Snore, made in 1960 after a particularly fraught peyote vision: “I experienced myself as this very tenuously held-together construction—the tendons and muscles and organs loosely hanging around inside—and it seemed like at any moment disaster could strike and you could fall apart. I mean, you were just held together by this thin skin and strings of flesh” (24). The self, for Conner, was not imprisoned by social conventions, it itself was a construction, a social convention, and one always under attack.

No wonder the artist also selected references to Old World masterpieces such as Matthias Grünewald’s Temptation of Saint Anthony (1512–16). Not only did it portray a moment of the self in agony, using the same sort of dense, monstrous, almost overwhelming piles of details that Conner worked into his sculptures and paintings, but additionally, this particular painting, Crow notes, resided in a monastery hospital in the Franco-German Alsace that was famous for treating “St Anthony’s Fire,” the gangrene that came from ingesting the very same ergot fungus on grain that “would yield the refined hallucinogen LSD, lysergic acid being the molecular core of ergot” (22). Drugs were not merely ecstatic releases to peaceful, euphoric freedom. In the culture of the counterculture that Crow wants us to notice, they were also tools for perceiving a self in trouble. This trouble was not only personal, it was public and political. Who else, after all, used LSD in the 1960s to test out ways of destroying and destablizing the self: the Central Intelligence Agency! A suffering self and a Cold War gone mad: the counterculture in this book is far less a utopian, Woodstockian Garden of Eden; it is much more a dystopian Dr. Strangelove black comedy.

Conner not only spent time living in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood long before it became ground zero for the Summer of Love in 1967 and he not only resided close by important San Francisco artists such as his fellow Kansan Michael McClure and painters such as Jay DeFeo, about whose monumental painting/sculpture of going mad, The Rose, he made a powerful film, The White Rose (1967), but he also worked in a studio next to where the important street theater group the San Francisco Mime Troupe rehearsed. In short, look to origins of the counterculture in Northern California, and one almost always finds Bruce Conner not far from the center of the scene (like Crow, artist Ami Magill once made this point to me in an oral history interview[5]). Additionally, Conner made his way to Mexico as well as Boston, where he influenced LSD guru Timothy Leary while resisting both Leary’s huckster opportunism and the cultish bullying of the creepy Mel Lyman. Conner also spent time in Los Angeles, where in his mysterious but charismatic way, he exerted an influence on another of the Kansas City-to-California bohemia set, the actor and director Dennis Hopper.

Not only had Conner started creating his sculptures and paintings by the 1960s, he also took up the mantle of another key artistic format of the era, experimental filmmaking, through engagement with figures such as Harry Smith and Stan Brakhage. In pioneering works of avant-garde film such as A Movie (1958), Cosmic Ray (1962), Breakaway (1966), and Report (1967) Conner used “found” footage to splice together startling proto-music videos about hallucinogenic trips, dancers (featuring a young Toni Basil, later of 1980s pop song “Mickey” fame), the JFK assassination, and nuclear apocalypse. From psilocybin mushrooms to nuclear mushroom clouds, his films asked audiences to see vexing connections, the fragmentation of consciousness, the body as a kind of war zone, and the dizzying, speed-up whir of modern life. Droll and suggestive without being didactic or pedantic in the least, Conner’s films proposed a counterculture far more complex and fraught than that of figures such as fellow psychedelic traveler, novelist Ken Kesey. Kesey and his group of “Merry Pranksters” ingested LSD and extolled the multitudes that freedom was to be found simply by “being in your own movie.”[6] Freedom was not so easily achieved in Conner’s films.

Conner also got involved in the early development of the light shows that began to appear behind rock bands in San Francisco’s psychedelic ballrooms. He made mandala drawings for Haight Ashbury’s underground newspaper, The Oracle, and for the programs accompanying historic events such as the Trips Festival in 1966. His imprint is less clear than Kesey, Leary, and others who found fame as spokesmen for the counterculture, but overall, Conner lurks almost constantly in the background of key countercultural scenes and moments. His cutting-edge work even presaged the performance art of the 1970s when he put himself, his wife Jean, and a woman named Vivian Kurtz on display for hours at a time, often naked, in a long jewel box vitrine in a show at San Francisco’s Batman Gallery in 1964. By the 1970s itself, he embraced the burgeoning punk rock scene, playing harmonica and photographing bands and audiences at San Francisco’s famous Mabuhay Gardens club.

Later chapters in The Artist in the Counterculture expand upon themes that Crow associates with Conner. The escalating Vietnam War produced potent counterculture art by San Francisco figures such as Wally Hedrick (Jay Defeo’s partner when she was making The Rose and Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia’s art teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute), particularly a set of black paintings and an enclosed box that entrapped audiences. Like Conner, Hedrick brought together the themes of a pressurized self and the expansive reach of US foreign policy. David Hammons, Corita Kent, Martha Rosler, Rupert García, and others in the “mother ship of California,” as Crow calls it, similarly connected queries into the nature of the self to the politics of the Cold War and did so with hallucinatory intensity. In their art, they portrayed individuals trapped by the stars and bars of the American flag or mixed banal scenes from middle-class American homes with horrible images of the war in Indochina (6).

Other artists such as Terry Fox, Michael Heizer, and Robert Smithson began to make Earth Art, which Crow wants us to notice was grounded, as it were (or perhaps, better said, floated on), in the “largely forgotten occultism” that was “woven through much of the conceptual, performance, and process art” of the late 1960s and into the 1970s (146). Earth Art itself was not named for “any prosaic acknowledgment of excavated matter,” he points out, “but rather as an analogue to the status of Earth as one of the four ancient elements (along with Air, Fire, and Water), which mapped onto the four bodily humors and in turn the four temperaments (Melancholic, Sanguine, Choleric, and Phlegmatic)” (146). Hippie-dippie astrological musings swirled together with serious, industrial-scale interventions into place and power. Architectural blueprints merged with zodiac charts. Bulldozers moved loads of dirt by way of starry-eyed, supernatural rhetorical flourishes.

This kind of “atavistically analogical thinking” cracked open epistemological boundaries, messed with time, and sought to rethink the world. It did so not to escape reality, but rather by building things within the real world, things that were of it, in conversation with it, around it, and often under it (146). One look at Smithson’s famous Spiral Jetty gives a sense of this mysticism. It was submerged at the remote northern end of the Great Salt Lake for many years and was meant, eventually, to dissolve into the briny waters in which it had been placed. With drought, Spiral Jetty came to the surface, but a visitor still had to embark on a pilgrimage to see it. The experience is, to Crow’s point, one of solidarity and awe, the feeling of becoming an isolated self lost in the vast, sublime expanse of the North American West.

Yet, in line with Crow’s argument, this self is quickly linked to larger social and political matters at Spiral Jetty. Next to the artwork are the hulking, rusty remnants of extraction equipment from an old effort to locate oil. On the other side of the lake is restricted land that turns out to be a US Air Force testing site (when I visited Spiral Jetty, a fighter jet actually dropped a bomb on the site, just to bring the point home that war and violence were never far from hippie mysticism’s explorations of the self in the world). Here is precisely Crow’s point about countercultural art: the trippy derangement of the ego was always profoundly linked to the violence and terror of American conquest by militaristic or other means.

Crow ends his book with an homage to Los Angeles-by-way-of-Michigan artist Mike Kelley. Kelley’s influences included Sun Ra, the Afrofuturist band leader, Archie Shepp, and other African American free jazz musicians who inspired a more cross-racial counterculture than has typically been acknowledged by historians (Bruce Conner was also involved with the radical theater activists group The Diggers, an offshoot of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, who in turn forged alliances with the Oakland-based Black Panthers, who in turn borrowed ideas for their free breakfast program from the Diggers’ free food programs in the Haight Ashbury[7]). These messier connections speak to a more unruly counterculture, one less easily pigeonholed as only a superficial, white, middle-class, bourgeois rebellion.

Kelley’s work from the 1970s also carries forward a more tangled and intricate countercultural legacy. His Catholic Birdhouse (1978), for instance, presents a workmanlike carpentry project: a birdhouse. While the bottom hole, labeled “the easy road,” is large and seems undamaged, the top hole is smaller and shows dents and nicks all around it, evidence of a more fraught and suffering path to self-salvation and collective liberation. It is labeled, of course, “the hard road” (237). This is the counterculture into which Crow wants us, following Conner, Kelley, and other artists, to enter. Not the easy way to innocence and bliss, but the tougher path to confronting reality in all its grim, challenging ways, and responding accordingly.

There, following Kelley’s work into the 1990s, Crow discovers a counterculture persisting just below dominant institutions of Cold War society, but also inextricably connected to them. The counterculture continued to manifest itself in shadowy, mysterious, and submerged ways, never quite apart from, but typically just below the mainstream, the dominant, the powerful, the hegemonic. As an example, Kelley’s Educational Complex (1995) features what at first appears to be a conventional architecture model of a typical postwar modernist academic building. It is sleek and modern. If the viewer crawls underneath the table upon which the model rested, however, and lies down on a solitary mattress on the floor to gaze upward, a catacomb-like basement of rooms and hallways appears below the typical architectural model.

This underside to the artwork looked much like the studio spaces in which Kelley and his students in fact were working in the minimalist art building at CalArts itself. Educational Complex signaled that the trendy Minimalism of the 1960s and 70s was a coverup. It tried to white out the messy, dense clutter and refuse of countercultural art. In fact, there was, in Crow’s words, “a mutually dependent convergence between an august institution of higher learning and networks of drugs, protest, and body-shaking music” (242). You could build order on top, but underneath, within, and below was a strange kind of anti-foundational energy always eating away at the thing. Something far more molten, fiery, and volcanic bubbled away down there in the belly of the beast. It needed the structure above to exist, but the structure above also somehow needed it too by the 1960s and thereafter.

If The Artist in the Counterculture wants us to discern anything it is this tethered quality of the institutions of power and of oppositionality in the 1960s and thereafter. The point is neither that the hegemonic forces commodified and conquered the resistant, nor that an oppositional movement overcame the dominant powers of the society, but rather that the two could not be cleaved apart from each other. The counterculture, in this art, by these artists, was always an encounter, an effort within the self and within postwar American and global life to locate counter-flows, to generate or to catch them, to cluster and clot them into gritty artifacts, to cut and cull them out of the very mainstream society itself and refashion them into meaningful messes, to enter, from below, into the main currents of the culture and pull them down into the murkier depths on which they moved, or maybe to cause something to erupt from deep within them, or perhaps to try to crawl toward something new and better, or at least to face up to the horrors as well as the pleasures of the world with greater honesty and go from there. The counterculture as portrayed here was indeed slouching toward Bethlehem, as Joan Didion, borrowing from Yeats, put it, but maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.[8]

This was not an artistic movement about creating eternal masterpieces; it was more often about immediacy and intensity, what art critic Dave Hickey called the attempt to “actually peek into the emptiness” of the world. “Psychedelic art takes this apparent occasion for despair and celebrates our escape from linguistic control by flowing out, filling that rippling void with meaningful light, laughter, and a gorgeous profusion,” Hickey contends.[9] Crow does not quote Hickey in his book, but The Artist in the Counterculture certainly follows Hickey’s recollections and characterizations of the micro-generation to whom figures such as Bruce Conner were central. They thought of themselves as “freaks” (“We called ourselves freaks,” one Haight Ashbury participant explained to historian Alice Echols, “never hippies…hippies were people who borrowed your truck and didn’t return it”).[10]

Sandwiched between the Beats of the 1950s and the bubblegum hippies of the late 1960s, freaks turned to tools such as hallucinogenic drugs to dive into experience, to grasp how the personal consciousness of the self related to the politics of a postwar world dominated by militarized US imperialism in atomic bomb overdrive. They did not use drugs to escape into holy nirvana or naive innocence, but rather to confront both the deepest interior questions and the broadest exterior issues of being human during the Cold War. The “culture” they created in rock music, poster and album art, comic books, and other forms of expression, including the high art that Crow studies, “was a culture,” Hickey insists, “and a surprisingly social and public one.” While known “for all its apparent celebration of interior vision,” Hickey contends, “this art was always about the extension of that vision into the culture as a form of moral permission. It was a communal, polemical art, vulgar in the best sense and an international language.”[11]

It can be difficult to see this art and its historical significance through conventional means. For intellectual historians, Crow’s The Artist in the Counterculture serves as a good reminder that art history as practiced by the likes of Thomas Crow can help us glimpse ideas at play when they get embedded in artifacts beyond the conventional source base of the written word, philosophical tract, theological text, legal ruling, or economic transaction. Ideas also lodge themselves in visual materials. In this book, these are not even the “classics” of the 1960s artworld, but they nonetheless have many revelations to offer. Yet intellectual historians often do not pay enough attention to art. Nor does intellectual history engage enough with the methods of art historical inquiry. To do so, following Crow, would be to see not only the culture in the counterculture, but also the ideas rapidly agglomerating below the surface of 1960s America, taking form in the edgy work of Bruce Conner and other artists who left traces of light in the mucky crust of the terrain that reaches right up to our own soiled times.

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[1] Among too many books to name, see Damon R. Bach, The American Counterculture: A History of Hippies and Cultural Dissidents (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020).

[2] One could think of this interpretation as one big elaboration of Frankfurt School thinking found in Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; reprint, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002) or in Herbert Marcuse’s perceptions of “repressive desublimation” in One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1991). See, also, George Melly, Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts (London: ? Allen Lane, 1970); Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (New York: Harper Collins, 2004; and David Brooks, David, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

[3] Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (1969; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Often portrayed as a countercultural cheerleader, Roszak was in fact nothing of the sort. He was an older veteran of the Peace Movement who was hopeful, but was often quite critical and skeptical of the growing disillusionment with Cold War hyper-rationalism found among young Americans in the 1960s.

[4] Quoted from Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, “On Bruce Conner,” presented at the Memorial for Bruce Conner and published at Beats In Kansas: Beat Generation in the Heartland, http://www.vlib.us/beats/bconnermemorial.html.

[5] Ami Magill, phone conversation with author, 17 July 2007.

[6] On Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, see Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Macmillan, 1968).

[7] See Black Panther David Hilliard’s comment about this, quoted in Timothy Hodgdon, Manhood in the Age of Aquarius: Masculinity in Two Countercultural Communities (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 25.

[8] Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1968).

[9] Originally published as Dave Hickey, “Freaks Again: On Psychedelic Art and Culture,” Art Issues 31 (January/February 1994), expanded form gallery notes written to accompany “The Contemporary Psychedelic Experience,” Chapman University Guggenheim Gallery (March 17-April 27, 1993), revised for publication in Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues. Press, 1997), 65.

[10] Quoted in Alice Echols, “Hope and Hype in Sixties Haight-Ashbury,” Shaky Ground: The ’60s and Its Aftershocks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 30.

[11] Hickey, 64.