Tomorrow is the Problem: A Podcast by Knight Foundation Art + Research Center at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami · ICA Miami

12: Art as Trance: Lucy Bull and Psychedelic Countercultures

·28 min·2 clips

Historian Joanna Goss uncovers the hidden atomic bomb imagery in a 1960s psychedelic film that viewers might miss.

A studio practice opens the door. The episode begins with the strange work of thinking, where self awareness can feel like climbing and falling at the same time before anything makes sense. Lucy Bull's paintings hold the center. They are treated less like puzzles to solve than encounters with perception, trance, and forms that seem to follow their own rules. The sublime matters here. It means beauty and fear pressing together, a charged kind of terror that stays aesthetic instead of simply scary. Psychedelia enters through history rather than mood. The episode follows its visual language into 1960s counterculture, especially posters and light show concerts around the Avalon and the Fillmore ballrooms. That history is not clean. Goss points to how psychedelic art kept borrowing from non-Western sources as artists and filmmakers pulled altered state imagery into their work. Bruce Connors becomes one of the main figures. Looking for Mushrooms gathers footage from San Francisco and Mexico, then turns it into a rush of speed, pattern, and disorientation. Mexico City is part of the story. After Connors moved there in 1961, the film began to form around a search for psilocybin mushrooms with Jean and Timothy Leary. The ritual stays partly hidden. Viewers see mushrooms handled, but ingestion is only implied, so the film leans away from proof and toward sensation. Oaxaca enters through footage too. Goss identifies an Indigenous shaman connected to visiting botanists and researchers, putting the film inside a history of extraction, ceremony, and mediation. The film never settles down and explains itself. It jumps between city footage, a rural village, and bomb explosions, so psychedelia comes across as pleasure with a political bruise. Bull's paintings carry that same tension. Their pull is in what they show, but also in what making and looking at them does to the body. The episode ends by widening the frame, asking listeners to keep following Indigenous roots of psychedelic medicine and culture and to think with Stuart Hall's work on historical legacies.

As heard by us

Lucy Bull, psychedelia, and a patient account of how altered perception is shaped in art, film, and time.

This episode moves through the slippery boundary between Lucy Bull's paintings, psychedelic countercultures, and intellectual work, keeping altered perception at the center.

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Why you'd press play

You get Lucy Bull, psychedelia, and a careful look at how art can shift perception and time.

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