West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977 ed. by Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner (review)

Work on the counterculture of the 1960s era usually doesn't do a lot with the art that accompanied and enriched the cultural upheaval of the time. The counterculture was spectacularly visual, what with the flamboyant clothing and exultation of the body that were everywhere, and yes, there were some notable artists such as the whimsical Peter Max, but the great creativity that was so much the engine and product of the counterculture has rarely received its due. At the same time, the fact that the rise of countercultural art had more than a little to do with moving the American art scene westward from New York has hardly been noted until now. As the editors write in their introduction, "The unfortunate fate of the counterculture is that its story doesn't blend well with either the narrative of the New York avant-garde or the political histories of the 1960s. While its commitment to social transformation divorced it from the histories of the avant-garde, its emphasis on culture and lifestyle alienated it from political histories of 1960s radicalism" (xviii). Those overlooked happenings—the art of the counterculture and its movement out of New York—have finally been resurrected with this hefty book. Indeed, the wildly creative architecture of Drop City, so long written off as some kind of aberration, is right on the book's cover. In addition, it introduces a genuine appreciation of the art of this new time and place, showing how it influenced what would come later in the art world. It should be noted early on that the book was the volume that accompanied an exhibition first mounted at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Colorado, and, appropriately, is lavishly illustrated.

As for utopianism, the whole 1960s-era counterculture could easily be seen as a utopian project, but the diversity of the twenty chapters of this work makes them vary quite a lot in their utopian content. The utopian focus of the first four chapters is not in doubt: they survey Drop City, the pioneer American hippie commune whose geodesic domes covered with car tops recovered from junkyards influenced a whole era of countercultural communitarians; the wide-ranging experimental workshops of Anna and Lawrence Halprin, which sought new ways of approaching design involving such art forms and exercises as dance and building structures from driftwood, always involving "a communal participatory encounter" (37); the Crossroads Community, an early experiment in living in harmony with nature in San Francisco that recovered wasted spaces under a freeway and used them for gardens, orchards, and animal husbandry, putting new environmental concepts into action; and that city's video collectives, which took an emerging technology and made it usher in new art forms, working in collaboration with each other.

Part 2 also has a solid utopian center, with its chapters on queer costumes in San Francisco, especially the creations of the flamboyant Cockettes and their spin-off group, the Angels of Light, costumes that were typically assembled from clothing and decorations dumpster-dived or found in cheap thrift stores; Libre, the Colorado artists' commune that pioneered creative ways of hand-building homes, with structures ranging from domes and zomes to a home built around a huge boulder; the visionary Italian-born artist Paolo Soleri's communal settlements, Cosanti and Arcosanti, the latter conceived by him as a utopian city that would integrate human needs, physical, intellectual, and spiritual, in one radically environmentally sound created city and both embodying, in the Arizona desert, "archology" (architecture plus ecology); Pond Farm, the summer craft enclave that centered on pottery making from 1952 to 1980 under the direction of Marguerite Wildenhain, who had earlier learned her craft at the Bauhaus; the groundbreaking L.A. light shows of the Silver Wing Turquoise Bird collective, known for...