As a teenager growing up in the late Sixties, in suburban America, I had, like teenagers have always had, certain ways of speaking. I'm thinking specifically of certain words we used that while authentic at the time, have since become codified, and clichéd as stale emblems of that generation. Far out, psychedelic, cool, and even wow (uttered reverentially) stood in for the experience of being impressed, amazed,… (or simply stoned). In retrospect, though quaint by today's standard I think this vocabulary also exemplified a way of thinking (and seeing) that I miss, and still desire. We put up aluminum foil on our bedroom walls, hung our black light posters, plugged in the lava lamps, and cranked up the Hendrix. Looking back, I am convinced that, although unknowingly, those light shows, posters, and lava lamps recall a moment when the concept of the sublime was perhaps most alive as a living thing at work in our culture. Unconsciously, and supremely unaware we were paying tribute to ideas that Malevich or Mondrian would have understood. The transformative power of visual symbols aligned with a redemptive Philosophy of the Utopian Ideal.  

There is currently a good deal of critical interest surrounding the meanings and importance of those artifacts and signifiers that seemed to swirl around that peculiar cultural moment, which occurred some thirty years ago. While I am not interested in the redeployment of any signs associated with that time, I am still asking myself questions about how a way of looking at the world that was both intensely idealistic and oddly naïve, intensely retinal, and coolly conceptual could be re-imagined.