Blotter The Medium is the Art that Melts in your Mind

Marc McCloud: Other than LAGNAF?— the old saying, 'Let's All Get Naked And Fuck'

MM: (ignores question). What I was thinking was it was the 20th anniversary of the Summer of Love. My proposal was to the arts board — the San Francisco arts commission. I thought “Let's do a show of the San Francisco underground artists,” And it was unanimous. All 33 members of the commission said, “Yeah, let's do that. “ I  was given control over a gallery in San Francisco, across from city hall. It was called the San Francisco Art commission Gallery. So we would do a thing there. I'd hired Carlo McCormick to be the curator, since he was the art director at High Times. He said, “we'll do all the old psychedelic guys -- the poster artists.” And Alex Grey showed his first painting in that show. And Rick Griffin the great rock poster artist did the poster.

At the SFA, we brought out the blotter art. It was a separate show I was doing. So it was all during the same summer but the blotter art was later in the summer. Erik writes in the book about the relationship between psychedelic art, poster art… rock art…  and what came to be blotter art. So there is a marriage of sorts with rock art guys like Mouse and Kelly being originally engaged in the art that went on the blotter LSD... peripherally of course. Just to be clear.

Erik Davis: Part of the inspiration for doing this book was discovering that the fuzz and the courts refer to the "carrier medium" when talking about drugs. This is no longer true, but for some time, when you were caught with LSD, your sentence would be partly dependent on the weight of the carrier medium. This phrase, 'carrier medium,” got me thinking about how these artistic blotters are a medium— a medium like a comic book or a poster or a bumper sticker. There's all  kinds of  media. So I started to think about the way that the physical medium and the image medium are kind of layered on top of one another. It's like Mondo 2000. It was a magazine. Magazines are a medium. But then it's got a specific kind of twist that takes it a certain direction that blows out beyond the form because of the way the images are used and how the ideas strike people. On the one hand, blotter is a medium before you put an image on it, right? Then you put an image on it, and it’s like a doubled medium, because it's a carrier medium that has become a kind of print medium. And it's an underground print genre as well, something in the style of  underground comics or psychedelic posters... and it’s doing the same kind of thing, but just really small. 

ED: That’s a fascinating thing about drugs: they end up being an effect inside your head. You think that the physical form that it comes to you in doesn't really matter. I'm gonna get high one way or the other. But actually, it does make a difference. It makes a difference in terms of your experience. It makes a difference to the dealer—in how it gets transported and how you package it and how you think about it. It’s like weed. Weed is a great example. It's flower versus the gummy versus shatter. Those are really different drugs but, in a way, they're just different “media” for THC and related chemicals. So it’s a fun way to think about drugs: how does their material media form influence your experience once it's in your body and inside your brain?

Ultimately, where does it stop? Like, we're always mediated. We're mediated by the way our brains are structured—by all of the cultural filters that we've taken in over our lifetimes. Think about language. I myself am not just language. I just use it. But it sort of uses me too. It sort of made me too in a way weird way. The more you look at the metaphor, the idea of media, it gets super trippy. It's a fun way to look at drugs for that very reason. Ultimately, where does it stop? In a way, it's like turning up the knob on a media deck. You can imagine the sensorium of normal life is just a bunch of knobs. On a  given day you think, “I’m kind of awake and I'm kind of anxious, and I'm kind of thinking.” And then you take a compound and the knobs start getting twisted. Everything kind of shifts. In a way, you're kind of like modulating the knobs, like you were playing with a synthesizer.

ED: That’s an interesting distinction. Because it’s kind of unfair to call some media a technology. Think of a comic book. Yeah, you need technology to make it, but it's dumb to call it a technology. So I think there is a distinction there. I actually think media is a better term than technology, because there's something kind of  empty about technology as an idea. Whereas when technology is filled with what we now call “content”, you have something else happening, something where form and content come together.

ED: One of my favorite blotter stories I came across in Brian Barritt's book The Road of Excess. He writes about laying out acid in the mid 60s in London, putting it on sugar cubes, which was an early, very iconic acid medium that is now seen as quaint. He describes that there was a British sugar cube company that has a little cartoon logo. And as he gets a little high from the liquid hitting his skin, he notices that the logo guy is starting to dance. That moment for me is incredibly profound because it shows how the world becomes animated as part of psychedelic experience.(Pointing) It’s like this glass starts to melt, and then it starts to dance and It looks like an eye, you know? Everything becomes animated. You're suddenly an animist living in an animist world where everything is a different character that's doing their own thing.  Suddenly the world is alive. That’s one of the most wonderful things about psychedelics.

ED: So putting the drugs aside for a moment, when you look at 20th Century Media, at all those cultural artifacts, where do you see the ancient indigenous animist vision appear? You see it in animation. You see it in Disney where the teapot starts singing or the skeletons start dancing. So the medium of animation is an animist medium. And when you add  acid, those two things slam right up to into each other.

So when blotter makers  use characters from animation for their wares, it’s like an inside joke about that whole psychedelic realm of experience. Because if you've never had that experience, and you look at  blotter and ask, why is Goofy on this? Or  Mighty Mouse or whatever. But if you’re experienced, you’ve seen the world get goofy and animated…

MM: It’s a wink any acidhead will immediately recognize on those blotter images. The images could articulate themselves in motion across a sheet too. And acid made me sensitive to nature for the first time. I could appreciate the beauty of nature for the first time. And I claim that that's what brought us peace as the products of a war…. a war baby like me. I  didn't know any inner peace until acid showed us the delicate composition of life and made us realize that love and beauty were the factors we were missing. And we felt that peace was a possibility.

I was a hood, and I had come from a West Side Story kind of background. There were a lot of hoods converted by acid.

MM: Yeah. They ripped off some acid and became religious! 

ED: There are so many sources of blotter imagery. As I thought about presenting the categories, I wondered, how do I deal with all these images? How do I even think about them? It’s crazy. They don't make sense. Some are abstract. Some are sort of highbrow. Some crude. So what do they have in common? One of the most interesting categories for me— because it was the least expected—was all the animals on blotter… tons of animals! Including  lots of bugs…

ED: Some are straightforward, sure—like birds. Definitely doves. Then there are the mythical animals—griffins, dragons, dancing unicorns. And some are related to the animated characters, like Snoopy or Mickey Mouse. But why so many animals?

I think it’s because these are the nonhuman intelligences that we deal with in our lives. That cool cat that we just got to see in your apartment. These amazing nonhuman beings who are going through the world in this amazing way and they're right here. And we don't usually think about it that way. But from a psychedelic perspective, the animal becomes kind of a portal into another way of seeing. You don't have to go out to fucking Mars and meet the aliens. You don’t have to go to heaven to find other ways of seeing and being in the world.

MM: Yeah. LSD sensitizes you to the magic and the nonhuman amazement of this world. And I think that's a very psychedelic message.

ED: That’s a very interesting way of thinking about it. Maybe initially, it's just an expectation… “oh, the green ones are peaceful.”  But then, enough people do it with that in mind, maybe it starts to really be that way. I mean, even if you're real hard-headed and you're not being woo, I’d say there are still some serious mysteries around LSD. If you read some of the earlier experiences with LSD, like say pre-1965, they're different from the experiences after psychedelics started to develop a whole world of pop culture references. By the time I first took LSD in the early 1980s,  it's like I was popped into a world that was populated with all sorts of fucking weird shit. The “set” was out of hand—cartoon characters and conspiracies and rock albums—a very populated media space. It would seem that  taking it in, like 1953 on a psychiatrist's couch, it wasn’t very populated. But for me, I’m like in a fucking parking lot of some cosmic weird swap meet.

ED: Yes. The medium makes a difference, not just the printed image, but even just the physical carrier. Medium makes a difference, because it's part of the set and setting. You know, if I drink Ayahuasca out of a goblet it’s likely to be different than chewing a gummy.

ED: Windowpane functioned that way for me.  It's so clear, It was like I wasn’t  even hallucinating. It produced that clear light that the material itself was sometimes called.

If you really pay attention to the diverse sheets of blotter in Mark’s collection, you learn something about what the message of LSD is. It’s this recursive thing. How you see the world is how the world becomes. And the world can be seen in different ways. And there's different ways of constructing how you see it. It loops around. And that’s kind of the message of acid as a medium.

ED: Some people are susceptible to that.

I wanted the book to reach the art nerds so they would think this is an important media studies thing. That's my one disappointment, that the art and media studies world didn’t take the book more seriously.  But I don't really care, because the people who will discover this book will like it for whatever reasons… remembering their youths, whatever. Its also hard to write countercultural history, as you know.  We made some mistakes. It’s not like a super rigorously researched double-triple checked thing. There’s a lot of lore. 

(Gesturing at Mark McCloud) So this guy's got a fucking amazing memory, and I always described the book as  a skeletal formation that you could hang more on. And we've already gotten more information. So it would be cool to have some additions and corrections.

MM: I remember when I got invited to lecture to the geeks… the Geek Club. It was their 100th meeting. I told them about this guy at the Art Institute. He decided one day to put on his eye of horus t-shirt and take a big hit of Eye of  Horus acid and run down to the pyramid building that was being finished. And he broke into the pyramid building, at which point he was seen by the security guards. He started running up the stairs. They tried to stop him. And he thought, “I've got to go to the top and talk to the big guy (god).” The guards followed him all the way to the top, and they scared him. He jumped into the elevator shaft. And here was no elevator to land on. He fell all the way down the pyramid building and that’s how became the world's record holder for surviving the fall in the elevator shaft.

ED: Let me tell you that I looked up the story. It’s true.

MM: He shattered ankles and knees. And he's left his scrotum in the shaft while trying to grab things on the way down. But he was singing “Camptown Races” the entire way down! So I’m telling the Geek Club this story… that he’d never have survived and become the world record holder if not for the Eye of Horus. The geeks loved it. (Laughter)

MM: It also was a familiar image at all the dead shows. There were psychedelic chocolates early on with the image which they took from a liquor store in North Beach. It made it to the Grateful Dead Egypt show where they performed at the  pyramid.

ED: These days, psychedelic culture is really up for grabs. Or rather, there are many different agendas, players, and cultural styles vying to retell the history, purpose, and dominant narratives around psychedelics. I believe that, for all its flaws, there were a number of really crucial elements to the psychedelic underground that we are in danger of losing. These include the ideas of fun and celebration, of eroticism, of taking drugs with friends rather than priests or therapists or other so-called experts. And maybe especially of humor, of not taking your experiences so seriously, but also seeing the cosmic giggle in everything, even your own traumas. Enjoying and understanding blotter art gives us a very immediate, fun, and deeply informative way to tap into the richness and multiple faces of the LSD underground.

ED: I’m not so sure. Yes there is probably even more opportunity for art with today’s psychedelic market, certainly in terms of packaging. I recently gave a talk in the UK looking at contemporary packaging for mushrooms and DMT vapes, and you get the whole range: sophisticated images, crass dumb stuff, and of course the recourse to cartoons and animation. There are 5-MEO-DMT pens being sold with lifted Rick and Morty images. Is that subversive, funny, or at this point just banal? I can’t tell anymore, partly because obvious and recognizable psychedelic styles and references are so pervasive in mainstream popular culture these days. On the other hand, I think similar things could be said about a lot of classic blotter art, which was rarely super-artistic, and more often some weird mix of in-joke, expediency, theft, and temporary branding. In that sense contemporary psychedelic packaging is a unique world because it is still largely underground and very commercial at the same time. In a way that’s where psychedelic culture is: wearing the garments of the underground, of raver ware and tie-dyed t-shirts, the new psychedelic users are also storming the mainstream, for better and also for worse.