Book Review: Edible Art and Psychedelic Expression

Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium, by Erik Davis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press

Most art is meant to be seen, not eaten, and our immersion in visual imagery usually ends at the surface of a substrate – but the sheets of paper printed with vegetable inks which are the subject of this fascinating book are soaked in lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), a molecule which causes extraordinary visions and heavenly revelations. This art is created to be consumed with excited anticipation by people inspired to explore the overwhelming liminal boundaries of their perceptions, in sublime states where the aesthetic experience is truly awe-inspiring, and hyperbole unlimited by the ordinary conventions of color, dimension and chronology.

LSD is exceptionally potent and must be measured in tiny amounts. In the 1960s, when millions of true believers imagined the revelations which acid offered would save the world, idealistic chemists produced vast amounts of it, which were easily distributed in large quantities, resembling a small bottle of water. But the strength of the drug made it harder to circulate it in the tiny quantities which would carry individual users off into wonderland. To solve this problem, LSD was eye-dropped from little bottles onto sugar cubes or mixed with powdered lactose and compressed into diminutive barrel tablets or put into gelatine capsules. But these methods were all borrowed from commercial drug manufacturers or hospitals, while dripping it onto perforated sheets of blotting paper was entirely an innovation born of the acid underground and carried with it, a street credibility the other forms lacked. At first, the cardstock blotters were blank, but soon, dealers were decorating their stash with hand pressed stamps. Each sheet of blotter was divided into square doses, each containing enough LSD for a day-long trip, or by the 1990s, a weaker night out at a rave. Each square contained enough medicine for a life-changing trip into a usually beautiful and sublime experience, and the image on each square suggested the tone starting the trip. Inevitably, the imagery gradually became increasingly sophisticated, and similar to the cascading visuals of the psychedelic experience. Medium and message were intertwined.

It is hard to collect art that is made to be consumed, but beginning in the 1980s, Mark McCloud, an artist, occasional professor, and full-time furry freak from San Francisco’s lingering psychedelic scene, realized that LSD blotters were important icons and sacraments of underground art which would literally disappear at the same rate that they induced the ethereal aesthetic of the psychedelic spectacle. And it was disappearing fast. He began collecting the perforated sheets, framing and displaying them on the walls of his deteriorating 19^th-century San Francisco home in the Mission District, which he named “The Institute of Illegal Images,” now exhibiting an estimated 33,000 miniature works of acid-eater art. By 1987, the collection had become imposing enough to merit an exhibit at the San Francisco Art Institute, obscurely titled The Holy Transfers of the Rebel Replevin, a title replete with the obscure insider inclusivity and joyous excess that characterized the fraternal acid subculture. Most of the artefacts in this early stage of the collection were single hits and four-ways, which were later joined by full sheets of undipped paper. Drawing public attention to the Institute proved to be a high-risk enterprise, and McCloud became the defendant in two trials, each threatening the collection and McCloud’s liberty.

Author Erik Davis spent many hours at the Institute, grokking in fullness the extent of the collection. Blotter isn’t Davis’ first trip into the open-ended territory of mind expansion – he is also the erudite author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary Experience in the Seventies and TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, and writes the newsletter Burning Shore. Davis has an elegant style, writing with the detail and care of an affectionate anthropologist enamored with his subject, and he has treated the clarity and sight of his new and colorful topic with a similar blend of wry humor and intelligent analysis. He is self-conscious of the necessary limitations of the book – it is not possible to write a detailed and definitive history of blotters, because the sources are obscured within the necessarily clouded silence imposed by criminalization, and deliberately remain undocumented. But his treatment of the subject is colored by his obvious pleasure in his subject. Acid has always been an unusual part of the underground, made by pragmatic idealists rather than exploitative mafias – an aspect of the trade noted by the authors of a 1995 San Francisco Drug Enforcement Agency Field Office report titled LSD in the United States. The DEA understood that LSD distribution was inspired by “an ideological or crusading aspect,” which 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.”

Which came first? The acid or the art? Blotter increasingly imitated and appropriated the commercial art of logos and cartoons. Davis compares the necessary grids of blotter art to the reductive minimalism of the art world, like the capitalist screen-prints of Andy Warhol’s 1962 grid of Campbell’s Soup Cans. Sometimes the avant-garde was referenced, like the 1985 grid of Yoko Ono’s Yes, embossed into rice paper. Bridget Riley’s Op Art was co-opted and lent itself well to the grid. Yet, an irreverent strain of comedy and kitsch also permeated the scene. In 1967, three of the “Big Five” poster artists of the San Francisco scene collaborated on a flier known as Trip or Freak which was printed over a background grid of images of The Phantom, a popular American comic character. Mickey Mouse was a frequent flier. By the 1990s the imagery became reflective of a specifically psychedelic art scene – the young people of the 1970s were middle-aged by then, with enough accumulated wealth to collect art. McCloud used Alex Grey’s painting of Jesus for a sheet which was distributed in 1992. Davis’ consideration of the interplay between the gallery and the street is thoughtful and perceptive, recognizing the significance of McCloud’s acquittal as the significant marker of the beginning of a new market for “vanity blotter.” McCloud’s defense rested on the fact that he made blotter sheets but possessed no LSD. The sheets were in the form of a vehicle for the drug, but he had no proven connection to the actual impregnation of the paper – he was an artist.

Wisely, Davis avoids being drawn too deeply into the tempting entanglements of straight-laced law enforcement cats and their pursuit of the elusive psychedelic mice that worked behind the art, and untangles three threads from the knotted mess of the history of the subculture to weave into the tidy braid that ties the book together: the previously untold and inevitably incomplete story of the first days of blotter in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; the story of McCloud’s collection and involvement in the LSD trade; and the emergence of “vanity blotter” in the 1990s, when artists began creating images in the form of blotter specifically made for collectors, selling them as works of art in their own right, while adopting the clandestine aura of real blotters’ position on the illicit fringe of art, beginning with limited editions celebrity-signed by heroic luminaries of the old and illegal acid underground like Allan Ginsberg, the iconic Beat poet who wrote Howl, and Timothy Leary, the self-promoting saint of psychedelia, and Albert Hoffman, who produced the compound in 1938, and rode his bicycle home while tripping on April 19 (Bicycle Day) and lived to see his strange and delightful synthesis become his peculiar problem child. A blotter signed by Leary and Hoffman sold for $10,000 in 2016. But Davis sees these moves toward legitimacy dogged by the stain of criminality – as Matthew Rick said, “it functions like a felony.”

Excellent! Blotter is truly a superb introduction to the authentic art of the underground – emergent, subversive, super-kitsch, edible art leading to the most powerful pyrotechnics of the imagination.

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