Boomers, Beau, Hansel and Gangi
Beau Chamberlain, You First, acrylic on panel, 16" x 16", 2007
Beau Chamberlain creates environments using a wide range of visual influences. Most prominently, the paintings refer to naturally occurring environments such as underwater scenes, jungles and thick forestry. But within the abstract shapes that create these scenes, textiles such as batik, modern day plastic products, and typical psychedelic imagery is sophisticatedly woven and layered throughout.
Chamberlain says that the paintings reflect scenes where time, place and scale remain undefined. And with the subtle references to items from our material world, and use of bold colors appropriated from our commercial culture, they become disorienting, amalgamations of our visual stimuli that simultaneously provide an alluring escapism.
It's significant that Chamberlain also mentions the "chemicals needed to manipulate our mood and behavior" when discussing our decisions and how we, as humans, are products of our environment to a degree more so than we often realize. Important to Chamberlain's work is how fantasy and the altering of ourselves and minds is used for adaptation.
When looking at explicitly psychedelically inspired works such as these, the mind altering drugs and optimism of psychedelia's heyday is immediately connoted. The dissonance that's created in looking at contemporary works that use psychedelia, is in part caused by the act of relating its historical connotations to the contemporary realization of the downfall of the 1960's counterculture and its optimism. As mass culture acknowledges this downfall the consensus is that fantasy and the act of altering one's state of mind serves in no way as a tool for adaptation or as any sort of functional element in society. Individual use for personal adaptation, however, remains effective for many.
Matt Hansel, The Mundane and the Magic, oil, acrylic and dye on canvas, 52" x 80", 2007
Realist painter Matt Hansel deals with this cynical undercurrent characteristic of a contemporary psychedelic perspective. Countless young Americans who grew up in the suburbs can relate to the hoodies and clandestine, wooded after-school activity sites that Hansel depicts.
As pointed out by Jack the Pelican Presents in Brooklyn, where Hansel is shown, his stylization recalls early mid-century realists such as Thomas Hart Benton. This furthers the All-American tone of the work.
The way that Hansel focuses on the displacing environments of these adolescents says everything about where hippy culture has ended up. The paintings evoke loneliness. On an individual level, they incite sympathy for the hooded adolescents who are using this form of escapism to stabilize (adapt?) during a time of hormonal and psychological upheaval. As Hansel uses references to 60's psychedelia such as tie-dye colors as well as the simulacra that are his depictions of American youth imitating the youth of 20 years before, another type of loneliness is felt for the failure of the counterculture - once so optimistic and successful in fighting the good fight. That hippy culture is now pushed to the field of obscurity in the American landscape.
This escapism and psychedelia, in Hansel's work, can be seen as a symbol for the individual adolescent mind, wandering, searching for a comfortable condition. And such escapism can in general also be seen as a symbol for the transitory youthfulness of America, from the physical "silver tsunami" to the notional American culture, all grown up and facing the harsh realities that come with maturity. Artists use these themes to be expressive of the unsettledness that now accompanies something once bright and gleaming.
Matt Gangi (who recently headlined at Kenny's Castaways for the CMJ Showcase in New York with band members Lyle Nesse and Andy Jordan) uses this dissonance, contrasting sun-shining optimism with a harsh reality by juxtaposing dream-like vocals, guitar playing and melodies (at times echoing fractured pop of the 60's and 70's) with darker toned samples. Some of the samples are appropriated from news sources and others are sounds or musical elements that often give the song a harsh edge.
Gangi's lyrics are loose narratives and ponderations that involve a random variety of situations, cohered by what's ostensibly a politically significant tone. As mentioned in an earlier post, "in a world of excess and of constant interconnections, psychedelia can be more easily found within the kaleidoscope of this intricately fragmented reality than in the complete abstraction of imagined, subjective form that lent itself more to the purist mind-set of modernism". Gangi's music achieves a transcendent abstract quality not by disorienting the audience to the point of incomprehensibility or complete subjectivity (which is something many other contemporary experimental bands do), but by sophisticatedly disorienting through avoidance to define era, instrumentation and source.
Eclecticism is being even further pushed and explored in the music with the recent introduction of new instruments, including the African drum and saxophone, at their CMJ showcase performance. Excessive eclecticism to the point of abstraction is clearly the new psychedelia.
