Are You Experienced?

San Francisco, the west coast American city that drew young people seeking alternate experiences in the 1960s and early 1970s, was a mecca for what became known as the counter-culture. Rock music was an integral part of this scene, and many of the leading bands of the period played in or around San Francisco at venues such as Bill Graham's Fillmore West and Family Dog's Avalon Ballroom. It was at these large-capacity auditoriums that the acid rock of Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, and The Grateful Dead suggested to tuned-in audiences the mind-expansion and distortion sometimes induced by hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD.

The posters announcing these rock events were commissioned from young artists, among them Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse and Wes Wilson. Posters were specially designed to be pasted to the lamp-posts of San Francisco - a space not previously used for billposting and one which was now exploited.

The majority of the San Francisco posters showed the influence of psychedelic art - the style that played on visual perception and created illusions comparable to the heightened sensations usually associated with drug-taking. Psychedelic artists obtained their effects by juxtaposing discordant colours such as orange and pink, or green and purple, and made liberal use of fluorescent inks to create sensations of flashing colour. In order to make forms appear to pulsate, revolve or mutate, psychedelic art drew on formulas from the Op Art and Kinetic Art movements of the early 1960s.

The cultural eclecticism of a period which freely borrowed and adapted the modes and values of alternative lifestyles is vividly expressed in these posters. References to other cultures, particularly the culture of the American Indians, are evident, as are images from mythology and from children's fairy-tales.

The San Francisco poster artists also appropriated earlier art styles, notably the sinuous and swirling forms that characterized the work of Jules Chéret (1836–1932) and Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939), two great European artists working in the Art Nouveau style at the turn of the century. Art Deco, the severe geometric style of the 1920s and 1930s, was another source for the San Francisco artists, who incorporated into their work visual quotations of the famous silverscreen heroes and film vamps of the period.

The posters of San Francisco capture the energy and experimentation of the 1960s and early 1970s when mind-expansion, the sexual revolution and the celebration of alternative lifestyles were all the rage. The Australian National Gallery acquired its unique collection of almost six hundred posters in 1978, at a time when little interest was shown in the 1960s, let alone in ephemeral rock posters. While the rock concert was a transient event, the posters survive as an evocative legacy of that exciting period.