A "trip" to the museum
One literary entrance to the psychedelic sixties is Tom Wolfe’s seminal nonfiction book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1969). Wolfe, however, was from New York, and his take on counterculture was distinctly East Coast—as opposed to, say, Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), who saw himself as a bridge between the Beats and the hippies, and who wrote and died in Oregon. In Acid Test, Wolfe interviews Kesey while in a San Mateo jail on drug charges. As Wolfe recounts, “He talked about something called the Acid Test and forms of expression in which there would be no separation between himself and the audience. It would be all one experience, with all the senses opened wide, words, music, lights, sounds, touch—lightning.”
This is part of the background to consider as you step through the door of the Victorian on 20th Street in the Mission District known as the Institute of Illegal Images. It’s also the home of Mark McCloud, who has assembled one of the world’s largest collections of psychedelic art. The walls are jammed with 350 framed pieces, each displaying an illustrated blotter paper containing tabs of LSD. In its heyday, liquid LSD was poured in tiny amounts onto these absorbent perforated sheets and then individual “tabs” were placed under the tongue. The tabs here, however, have little or no potency left.
Info
Address 20th Street & Mission Street, San Francisco, CA, 94110, www.blotterbarn.com | Public Transport Bus: 14, 49 (Mission St & 22nd St stop) | Hours By appointment only; send an email to mark@blotterart.com| Tip Stop for a drink at Laszlo Bar, 2526 Mission Street.
McCloud , who has been endlessly hounded by federal authorities, feels an obligation to portray the drug legacy of the 1960s “so maybe our children can better understand us” and to undo government stigmatization. Asked by Vice magazine how he got into collecting acid art, he told the interviewer, “See, I was a very difficult 17-year-old. Hendrix had just died, so I took 300 mikes of Orange Sunshine, and basically the fabric I existed on changed. I vibrated myself out of this world and into a different thing, and that’s when I really started collecting.”
Back
To the online map