'60s rock posters are a real trip
The 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco was a time of utopian dreaming, seemingly endless youth, and abundant sex. It was also a time of bad rock posters.
''Light My Fire: Rock Posters From the Summer of Love," a small show up at the Museum of Fine Arts, takes us back. The psychedelic posters, advertising concerts at two San Francisco clubs in 1966 and 1967, are relics of an era. There's art, and then there are artifacts, and these fit in the latter category.
They are bad in a strictly utilitarian sense. They're hard to read and could give you a headache if you looked at them too long. At the time, that was OK -- they were aimed at an audience that wanted the retinal buzz of clashing, saturated colors, an audience that when stoned didn't mind gazing for a half-hour at a single poster, trying to figure out what it said.
Graphic art has a different agenda than fine art, which tends to raise questions and challenge assumptions. Graphic art uses assumptions to its advantage; it packages a cogent take-home message. These posters, mostly by Victor Moscoso and Wes Wilson, all essentially say, ''This concert is going to blow your mind, man!"
They do it with bright colors: Pinks, blues, greens, and oranges set your brain humming. Moscoso studied color theory with Josef Albers at Yale and applied it here, just as Op Artists such as Bridget Riley and Kenneth Noland applied it in painting. Moscoso even designed some posters so that images would shift or disappear under black lights. A colored light setup here inadequately illustrates the effect.
The other tool, Wilson's specialty, was swirling typography that broke a cardinal rule of graphic art: The text must be clear and readable. Wilson forgoes other imagery and smashes all his text illegibly into the shape of a candle flame in his poster for ''The Association, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Grass Roots, Sopwith Camel at the Fillmore Auditorium."
To the sober eye, this quickly palls. The imagery, even when borrowed from art history, has little weight or interest, and only occasionally a tie to the music it advertises. Moscoso uses an image of a statue by the 18th-century sculptor Clodion for a show headlined by The Cloud. It looks randomly pasted on over a big graphic of a small bird with outstretched wings. The effect is cluttered. The nudes in the statue might be a vague reference to free love, but it's a stretch.
The exception is Moscoso's ''Neon Rose 10: The Doors at the Matrix," which borrows a detail from a painting by the 17th-century Dutch artist Pieter de Hooch. It shows in blue monochrome a woman standing in an arched passageway, looking away from us. Already, the image features doors within doors; Moscoso accentuates the theme by overlaying pink pinstripes that echo those lines. All told, he describes real and metaphysical doorways, an apt metaphor for Jim Morrison's band.
The MFA has other posters in its collection -- ones designed by artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Kandinsky. Developments in graphic art reflect and inform those in fine art, and it's worthwhile to see how great artists put the tools of the graphic trade to work. ''Light My Fire" notes the heady, Op Art design trends of the 1960s, but Moscoso is no Kandinsky. It's not an art exhibit. It's a trippy trip down memory lane.
