{"id":166879,"date":"2024-03-04T10:26:38","date_gmt":"2024-03-04T15:26:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=166879"},"modified":"2024-03-04T10:26:38","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T15:26:38","slug":"the-institute-for-illegal-images","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/04\/the-institute-for-illegal-images\/","title":{"rendered":"The Institute for Illegal Images"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Alien Embrace<\/em>, ca. 1996. Amsterdam, Netherlands.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Institute of Illegal Images (III) is housed in a dilapidated shotgun Victorian in San Francisco\u2019s Mission District, which also happens to be the home of a gentleman named Mark McCloud. The shades are always drawn; the stairs are rotting; the door is peppered with stickers declaring various subcultural affiliations: \u201cAcid Baby Jesus,\u201d \u201cHaight Street Art Center,\u201d \u201cI\u2019m Still Voting for Zappa.\u201d As in many buildings from that era, at least in this city, the \ufb01rst \ufb02oor parlor has high ceilings, whose walls are packed salon-style with the core holdings of the institute: a few hundred mounted and framed examples of LSD blotter.<\/p>\n

The III maintains the largest and most extensive collection of such paper products in the world, along with thousands of pieces of the materials\u2014illustration boards, photostats, perforation boards\u2014used to create them. Gazing at these crowded walls, the visitor is confronted with a riot of icons and designs, many drawn from art history, pop media, and the countercultural unconscious, here crammed together according to the horror vacui that drives so much psychedelic art. There are \ufb02ying saucers, clowns, gryphons, superheroes, cartoon characters, Escher prints, landscapes, op art swirls, magic sigils, Japanese crests, and wallpaper patterns, often in multiple color variations. <\/p>\n

Balancing this carnivalesque excess, at least to some degree, is a modernist sense of order. This announces itself principally through two core features of the blotter form: repetition and the grid. Many frames house full \u201csheets\u201d of blotter: square or rectangular pieces of cardstock, printed and often perforated according to an abstract rectilinear grid demanded by the exigencies of blotter production. These grids are made up of individual hits or tabs, generally a quarter inch square or so and numbering anywhere from one hundred to four hundred to nine hundred units per sheet, depending on block size and design. While some sheets are illustrated with a single image that cloaks the entire grid, many assign the exact same \ufb01gure to each hit, resulting in sheets that loosely resemble Andy Warhol\u2019s canvases of Campbell\u2019s soup cans. Other framed exhibits contain mere fragments from larger designs, sometimes nothing more than a single, hairy hit, perhaps the last extant example of a run from the eighties that has otherwise been literally swallowed up.<\/p>\n

How to refer to all this paper? Users have called the stuff \u201cblotter\u201d or \u201ctickets,\u201d while police have used terms like \u201cpaper doses.\u201d These days such pieces are often known as \u201cblotter art,\u201d a term that in many ways re\ufb02ects the III\u2019s own efforts to reframe this illicit ephemera into aesthetic objects (which is why I will stick to the more neutral \u201cblotter\u201d). There is another factor: over the last few decades, the blotter format has become a genre of popular art and a perfectly legal collectable. Though formally resembling their illegal forebears, editions of so called \u201cvanity blotters,\u201d undipped in LSD and frequently signed, are produced for collectors and casual fans rather than drug traffickers\u2014who nonetheless can and do dose such wares when they need or want to. Though ignored by the larger art world, the vanity blotter market keeps on trucking, despite (or because of) the low cost of entry and a lack of critical valuation or collector apparatus.<\/p>\n

I am interested in meditating on blotter not just as art, or as a historical artifact, but as a kind of media, even a \u201cmeta medium.\u201d I add the meta<\/em> here because, phenomenologically speaking, LSD is known to stage fantastic visual performances that, for all their novelties, recirculate images and motifs drawn from the history of art, the modes of fashion, the icons and architectures of religious myth and esoteric tradition, and the advertisements, comic books, design styles, and signage of commercial modernity. Here, for example, is part of an experience report included in R. E. L. Masters and Jean Houston\u2019s The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience <\/em>(1966). S, a forty-year-old editor and former medical student, took two 125 microgram doses, staggered one hour apart. Later,<\/p>\n

S is told to look at the \ufb02owered fabric on the couch on which he is sitting and to relate what he sees there. He perceives a great number of faces and scenes, each of them belonging to a different environment and to a variety of times: some to the American Gay Nineties, some to the nineteen twenties, some later. There are Toulouse Lautrec caf\u00e9 \ufb01gures, Berlin nightlife scenes and German art from the late twenties and mid-thirties. Here and there, a \u201cBlack Art\u201d appears and he recognizes the world of Felicien Rops and drawings like those of the artist who has illustrated Michelet\u2019s Satanism and Witchcraft<\/em>. There are various Modigliani \ufb01gures, a woman carrying a harpoon, and persons such as appear in the classical Spanish art of the seventeenth century. Most interesting to him are \u201cpaintings\u201d like those of Hieronymus Bosch . . .<\/p>\n

1:00 p.m.: S imagines a number of additional cartoon sequences including a rather lengthy one set in Harlem that has to do with \u201ca Negro making a cartoon about how a Negro would make a cartoon about a Negro making a cartoon about Negroes.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here LSD is already a media machine, a \u201creality studio\u201d or animation shop cranking out video mixes that sample from visionary art, bohemian styles, and astrological symbolism. While we can\u2019t know what signi\ufb01cance a Black artist in Harlem held for S, we should recognize the crucial and deeply psychedelic element of recursion that characterizes his \ufb01nal vision here, a self-reference across scale that not only recalls the fractals or paisley designs that mark acid perception but embeds the framing and production of imagery into the imagery itself\u2014imagery that, for perhaps signi\ufb01cant reasons, not infrequently resembles cartoons.<\/p>\n

LSD\u2019s particular and peculiar relationship to technical mediation is historically situated. First synthesized in 1938 but not tasted until 1943, acid is essentially a creature of the postwar era. As such, it enters the human world alongside an explosion in consumer advertising, the rapid development of electronic and digital media, new polymers, and a host of increasingly cybernetic approaches to the social challenges of control and communication. For many of its early enthusiasts, acid was like a cosmic transistor radio. As Lars Bang Larsen writes, \u201cHallucinogenic drugs were often understood as new media in the counterculture: only machinic and cybernetic concepts seemed sufficient to address vibrations, intensities, micro speeds, and other challenges to human perception that occur on the trip.\u201d To paraphrase Timothy Leary, LSD seemed to \u201ctune\u201d the dials of perception, altering the ratios of the senses, \u201cturning on\u201d their associational pathways and gradients of intensity. These vibrating modulations in turn catalyzed transpersonal peaks that bloomed as insights, revelations, satoris, \u201cgroks.\u201d The actor and author Peter Coyote, who was a member of the visionary Diggers collective in the Haight during the sixties, wrote that ingesting LSD \u201cchanged everything, dissolved the boundaries of self, and placed you at some unlocatable point in the midst of a new world, vast beyond imagining, stripped of language, where new skills of communication were required\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. [because] everything communicated in its own way.\u201d Similarly, Marshall McLuhan, the pop media prophet of the era, told Playboy<\/em> that LSD mimes the \u201call at onceness and all at oneness\u201d of the new electronic media environment. All this set the stage for a kind of technical mysticism that recalls the media theorist Alexander Galloway\u2019s notion of \u201ciridescent\u201d mediation: \u201ccommunication as luminous immediacy.\u201d Alan Watts, commenting on the question of how often to take LSD, also turned to media metaphors, arguing that when you get the message, you hang up the phone.<\/p>\n

But what if the medium is<\/em> the message? In other words, what if the self-referentiality of acid consciousness\u2014which can nest chains of Harlem cartoonists like Russian dolls, or loop the act of seeing back into the seer\u2014also absorbs the material medium that delivers the LSD to your nervous system in the \ufb01rst place? Of course, the primary medium of this consciousness is the LSD molecule itself. But unlike macroscopic drugs like cannabis, LSD is so small and so powerful that its consumption almost always requires an inert housing\u2014the water, tablets, sugar cubes, bits of string, or pieces of paper that transport the drug from manufacturer to tripper. In the law, this vehicle is described as the \u201ccarrier medium,\u201d an object impregnated with drugs, one that can be sold, seized, presented as evidence, and dissolved into the hearts, minds, and guts of consumers.<\/p>\n

When you print images onto a paper carrier medium, you are adding another layer of mediation to an already loopy transmission. Hence, a meta medium, a liminal genre of print culture that dissolves the boundaries between a postage stamp, a ticket, a bubble gum card, and the communion host. This makes blotter a central if barely recognized artifact of psychedelic print culture, alongside rock posters and underground newspapers and comix, but with the extra ouroboric weirdness that it is designed to be ingested, to disappear. Blotter is the most ephemeral of all psychedelic ephemera. It is produced to be eaten, to blur the divide between object and subject, dissolving material signs and molecules into a phenomenological upsurge of sensory, poetic, and cognitive immediacy.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

But there is something vital to establish \ufb01rst about the overall LSD trade, and we might as well hear it from one of that industry\u2019s most important students, the Drug Enforcement Agency. In a report entitled LSD in the United States<\/em>, which came out of the San Francisco Field Office in 1995 and is available on the internet, the authors make the following crucial observation:<\/p>\n

In contrast to the trafficking of other drugs, in which profit is the sole motivating factor, LSD trafficking has assumed an ideological or crusading aspect. The influence of\u2014and probable distribution by\u2014certain psychedelic generation gurus has created a secretiveness and marketing mystique unique to LSD, particularly at the higher echelons of the traffic. Their belief in the beneficent properties of LSD has been, over the years, as strong a motivating factor in the production and distribution of the drug as the profits to be made from its sale.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bear in mind, this isn\u2019t written by some bangled Haight Street nostalgist but by the DEA, and in the nineties to boot, decades after the era of hippie idealism was put on ice. The message is clear: as a criminal enterprise, acid is its own kettle of \ufb01sh, its \ufb02uids dosed with more than market forces. Similarly, while blotter takes shape in response to illegal commerce and the pragmatics of smuggling, it can never be reduced to the business of trafficking or \u201cbranding\u201d because the acid trade was and is about more than money. Full stop.<\/p>\n

The countercultural drive to the turn on the world is perhaps best captured by historian Christian Greer\u2019s notion of \u201cpsychedelic militancy.\u201d With this term, Greer reminds us that many psychedelicists were not lazy hippies but conscious combatants in the emerging culture war; as such, their desire to propagate LSD was as idealistic and even messianic as it was wild and hedonistic. As Greer\u2019s own work shows, while psychedelia\u2019s most militant days lay back in the sixties, the current of psychedelic militancy continued to animate the subcultural milieu at least into the eighties, which is basically the same era that blotter became the dominant carrier medium for LSD. Such idealism does not cancel out the pro\ufb01t motive, but nor does it entirely dissipate into it. After all, the intensity and commitment required for cultural militancy are also useful values in criminal enterprises. In fact, by continuing to function as a dangerous outlaw zone while other facets of the counterculture were \u201cco-opted,\u201d the LSD trade paradoxically helped keep such higher motives alive. Whether they were ignited by gnostic revelations, a partisan belief in cognitive liberty, or a mischief maker\u2019s desire to keep the in\ufb01nite game going, the individuals and networks who kept and keep LSD circulating throughout the world were and are not just selling things but also dreaming dreams. Blotter re\ufb02ects this imaginal and communicational excess, its images and designs marked by the same magic the drug provokes in so many of its celebrants. You can call such enchanted trafficking a \u201ccrusade\u201d if you want, but to judge from its icons, it is a curiously undogmatic one, at once lowbrow and sublime, beautiful and satiric, pragmatic and metaphysically aware.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

A photographer, sculptor, and former art professor, as well as a deep and crusty bohemian with subcultural affiliations from freak to punk, McCloud began collecting acid blotter around 1980, and mounted the \ufb01rst gallery show of the stuff, at the San Francisco Art Institute, in 1987. The aim of that show, he says now, was to demonstrate \u201cthe beautiful lesson that comes with eating art that changes your mind.\u201d McCloud\u2019s fanaticism and informed curation later helped develop the market for signature and vanity blotter. But his collecting mania also gave him access to the secretive acid underground, where McCloud himself would eventually set up shop, designing, printing, and perforating new blotter sheets used for the illegal distribution of LSD.<\/p>\n

By producing printed artifacts in the gray margins of a black market, McCloud opened himself up to two frightening arrests and one major jury trial, which resulted in an acquittal based in no small measure on the designation of his holdings as art. But his blotter making also gave him unparalleled access to other blotter makers, which enabled him to signi\ufb01cantly expand his collection, and to understand it and those makers more thoroughly. Today the Institute for Illegal Images, which has no actual institutional support, and is in many ways indistinguishable from a hoard, stands as one of the most singular and extraordinary countercultural archives in existence\u2014a ramshackle hall of paper mirrors that mediate and superimpose cosmos and commodity, consciousness and crime.<\/p>\n

In the late seventies and early eighties, which were also the years when blotter rose to dominance as a distribution medium, McCloud made his cultural home in San Francisco\u2019s hippie-mocking punk milieu. In other words, blotter became big at a time when psychedelia was no longer a visible part of popular culture. But here\u2019s the secret: Acid never disappeared. Though no longer a countercultural icon, LSD became a subcultural fuel by the end of the seventies, melting into a variety of often highly regional scenes of weirdness and exuberant transgression, including disco, funk, and the freakier edges of punk and post punk. LSD deeply scrambled the DNA of groups like Devo, Black Flag, and the Butthole Surfers, whose \ufb01rst 45 cover was printed on Nick West\u2019s machine in San Francisco. In other words, even as psychedelia faded, acid just went further underground, and many blotters from the golden age of the eighties carried the new weirdo iconography: demented clowns, J. R. \u201cBob\u201d Dobbs, Zippy the Pinhead.<\/p>\n

In 1983, McCloud won the second of his two NEA grants and purchased the building that currently houses the Institute of Illegal Images. When he moved in, he decided to more emphatically preserve his growing blotter collection by encasing the LSD papers in picture frames. \u201cThat changed everything,\u201d he says. \u201cWithin the frames, they became more than the sum of their parts. They glowed together.\u201d The frames also helped him keep his hand out of the cookie jar.<\/p>\n

McCloud lived across the street from the artist David Ireland, who helped the sculptor land a spot on the artist board at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). In 1987, with the twenty-year anniversary of the Summer of Love coming up, McCloud suggested that SFAI mount a show drawn from his blotter collection. The board agreed. There were \ufb01fty pieces or so in the show, which was called \u201cThe Holy Transfers of the Rebel Replevin\u201d\u2014a replevin<\/em> being a legal maneuver to restore illegitimately seized property. In later years, McCloud began to amass full sheets of undipped street blotter, but the Holy Transfer exhibits mostly consisted of single hits and four ways (large, perforated units meant to be torn or cut into four smaller hits): pyramids, stars, \ufb02ying saucers, soccer balls, and the like. Any LSD in the material had been intentionally burned away through exposure to light and air, which deconstructs the magic molecules. Magnifying glasses were provided to appreciate the detail.<\/p>\n

In an essay that appeared in the show\u2019s fanciful catalog, the New York art critic Carlo McCormick, who covered the cultural fringes of downtown and beyond, underscores the kaleidoscopic quality of these objects. What acid blotter \u201cis\u201d depends on what lens you are bringing to the table, or the gallery. From a sociological perspective, McCormick saw McCloud\u2019s show as an \u201cillicit history\u201d of subversive images\u2014the sort of icons that magnetize subcultural identities, like hippie buttons or biker insignia. He also underscored the economic logic of printed blotter, a rare example of a commercial art form aimed entirely at a black market. Since the quality of acid is rarely known by the purchaser beforehand, McCormick suggested, the presence of tiny labyrinths or golden dolphins on the hits re\ufb02ects the same \u201c\ufb01ne art of persuasion\u201d that applies vibrant swirly waves to detergent boxes. Plenty of LSD was (and is) distributed on blank white cardstock, but the pictures brashly announce that this is no ordinary piece of paper, even if, as always, the advertising was sometimes false. At the same time, it is not quite accurate to think of blotter images as brands or trademarks\u2014the relationship between these signs and the psychoactive signi\ufb01ed is more playful and open-ended than in the case of, say, M&Ms or Advil. Along with announcing the presence of goods, the images also function as a kind of insider promise, a knowing wink or a Masonic grip. McCloud calls them \u201csymbols of a secret society.\u201d<\/p>\n

McCormick also offers up the notion of blotter as a folk art. There are good reasons for this designation. As with other aspects of the youth movement, psychedelic commerce possessed an organic, collective, and DIY quality that reproduces and sometimes explicitly mimics aspects of more traditional folk cultures. That said, the anonymous craftspeople behind blotter art were, like most LSD users, white, college educated, and drawn from the middle or upper class. Like McCloud, they were often refugees or defectors from privilege, and their work re\ufb02ects an elite or at least educated understanding of art traditions, media politics, and social critique. These were not the sort of structurally marginalized populations, of color or not, who are usually associated with outsider or folk art. But acid has a way of scrambling categories, a point McCormick makes in his conclusion: \u201cThose unable to acknowledge the LSD prints as \u2018art,\u2019 but willing to credit them as \u2018craft,\u2019 or \u2018folk art,\u2019 would bene\ufb01t greatly if they all re-examined such a cultural hierarchy after taking some LSD themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

On that note, a selection of works from McCloud\u2019s Institute of Illegal Images:<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"

Bunny Birthday<\/i>, ca. 1976. 2\u2157 x 2\u2157 in. One of the first full-color blotters, possibly removed directly from an illustrated book.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"

Gilfeather, Crazy World<\/i>, 1977. San Francisco, California.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"

Horus<\/i>, 1979. San Francisco, California.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"

Father of LSD<\/i>, ca. 1984. San Francisco, California. This is one of the first pieces that McCloud decided to commit to a frame.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"

Japanese Crests <\/em>(reissue), ca. mid-eighties. Single-hit with gold flake trim, \u215c \u00d7 \u215c in.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"

Fritz, Surfing Swami<\/em>, ca. mid-eighties. San Francisco, California. Image drawn from Ram Dass, Be Here Now<\/em> (1971).<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"

Rx<\/em>, ca. 1991.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"

Mark McCloud, Through the Looking Glass<\/i>, 1995. San Francisco, California.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"

Stevee Postman and Jon Hanna, LSD 60<\/em>, 2003.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"

Tina Carpenter, Anonymous Bosch Flower Power<\/em>, 2021.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"

Patrick Turk, Reincarnating no. 2<\/em>, 2021.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"

1XRUN, Tales of the Tube<\/em>, 2022. Licensed reproduction of Rick Griffin\u2019s cover art from Tales of the Tube <\/em>(1972).<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
Adapted from<\/em> Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium<\/a>, out from MIT Press in April.<\/em><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Erik Davis is the author of six books, including <\/em>High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Information Age.\u00a0He writes the Substack publication Burning Shore.\u00a0<\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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