These photos of The Dome Show, an exhibition by art collective Intermedia at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1970, are all from the web archive Ruins In Process: Vancouver Art in the Sixties. (See another post on this absolutely amazing site here.) The Dome Show was an experimental art show involving architecture, sculpture, performance, music, improvised happenings, a giant public dinner party, bonfires, public home movie nights and many other things over the months of its exhibition. Above, Installing the Dome Show at the VAG.

From the site: “The unifying structure of the Dome Show was Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome. Each Intermedia member who was interested was invited to build domes individually or communally for the exhibition. Before the exhibition installation Intermedia members constructed their domes in a variety of public spaces, including the Maplewood Mud Flats, at 4th and Arbutus, Kitsilano Beach, in front of the Bentall Center in Downtown Vancouver, and outside of the Vancouver planetarium.”

Buckminster’s geodesic dome was obviously at the height of its popularity then. Now, forty years later, there seems to be a revival of interest in its utopian promise or its grooviness or its sheer architectural difference or what, exactly? It reappears during times of environmental crisis, war, or general turmoil? Or when staid protestantism makes you want to flee to a stately hippie pleasure dome? Whatever it is, I like looking at these structures and I’m grateful to Ruins in Process for the documentation. The website is particularly valuable not just because of the beards and the fashions, but because it covers a period of art that for all its notoriety is actually not all that well known, not just because it was pre-internet, but also perhaps because of the tendency of the work to be temporary, performative, process-based and dependent upon happenings, and in so many other ways difficult to document. Also, as Carole Itter says in her interview on the site, if you were present at a happening and were documenting, it meant you weren’t in the moment, and that wasn’t cool. Her comments on the role of women in Intermedia are also pretty interesting.

Above, an art insert in the Vancouver weekly The Georgia Straight. Below, construction of a dome in the Mudflats, Vancouver.

Above and below, dancers in a dome near the Burrard Street Bridge.

Above, meeting of Intermedia on Beatty Street. Below, “100 flutes” performance in aluminum dome.

Above,”Bingo,” an event at City Feast, a city-wide public dinner to close The Dome Show. Below, End of the Dome Show – burning of a dome out in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery, on the night of City Feast at the close of the show. A bonfire on one of Vancouver’s main arteries could so not happen now.

Vancouver curator Scott Watson’s essay Urban Renewal: Ghost Traps, Collage, Condos and Squats is part of the impressive and totally compelling Vancouver Art in the Sixties website project. It’s a well-organized archive of Vancouver’s 1960s art production and it’s far too large a topic for one post. What I found immediately interesting though was Watson’s historical contextualization of residential architecture and interior aesthetics in the 60s, especially its turn away from modernist minimalism and toward more baroque historical styles. He suggests that the Edwardian bric-a-brac and Art Nouveau styles that were adopted by Vancouver’s arts and hippie communities in the 60s were a reaction against the City of Vancouver’s move to demolish the crumbling inner-city Edwardian houses, which housed its art and social protest, and replace them with corporate architectural brutalism and strata-controlled condos. This was no doubt replayed in cities all across North America. Watson’s essay is particularly interesting in light of the current revival of Edwardian/Victorian granny chic in interior design and craft. It seems to me this is revival without any politics, but I could be wrong. In many cases it seems the farthest thing from radical, however you understand that word, but it could also be an echo of a similar problem in urban planning. Photo above by Michael de Courcy shows a screening on December 31, 1969 of a collaborative video at Vancouver’s Intermedia art centre.

The following are excerpts from Watson’s essay (click the link at top for the whole text).

“At the advent of what we now call postmodernism, the doomed Edwardian building inventory that provided bohemia’s living, studio and event spaces also provided an aesthetic opposed to Brutalism, the heavy concrete fortress style of public buildings that had arisen in response to the riots and demonstrations of the 60s. Late Victorian and Edwardian furniture and bric-a-brac furnished communal houses. In these spaces Art Nouveau was revived and deployed to advertise concerts and events. Rejection of the “brutality of the new” was, in essence, a very real concern about the disappearance of places to live, eat, congregate, exhibit and perform. In defnse of a crumbling inventory of modest, poorly built pioneer-era wooden and brick structures, the art community of the day rejected not only the Brutalist idioms of the 1960s and 1970s, but the gentler suburban modernism of the 1940s and 1950s. Or to be more precise, the authoritarian, normalizing, “design for living” modernism, with its unarticulated suppression of libidinal circulation, was an anathema for the generation of the 1960s and 1970s. The hippie movement as appropriated by fashion and popular music adopted Edwardian and Art Nouveau as its style of protest and renunciation of consumer/spectacle society.” [This excerpt was the last paragraph of several excerpts below. Click for more.]

Art Nouveau-influenced Doors poster by Bob Masse, Vancouver, 1967. Below, Bob Masse, William Tell & the Marksmen Great White Light, Vancouver, 1960s.

Will your home be next? Poster by Don Gutstein, poster, Vancouver, 1975

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These evocative photographs of the abandoned Rishikesh ashram of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi – celebrity yogi to the Beatles and an inextricable part of late 60s counterculture – are by Paul Prudence, the author of the beautiful blog dataisnature. The Beatles stayed at this ashram in 1968 to study with the yogi. He apparently disapproved of their potsmoking, though you can’t believe everything you read. John and George eventually left the ashram amidst rumours the yogi had made sexual advances on Mia Farrow, though apparently these rumours were discounted much later on. But by the time the accusations were retracted the much-publicized 60s melodrama was already mostly forgotten. The disintegrating ashram is now minimally monitored by a security guard, but an image search online shows that many travelers and photographers trespass on the place regularly, either out of homage or just curiosity. It’s a beautiful place. The Maharishi died last year at age 90 in the Netherlands, John and George are long gone, and it’s unclear exactly when the ashram was abandoned and the bees started to move in. I’m not a Transcendental Meditationist, unlike David Lynch and Clint Eastwood, but I find the architectural remains of the yogi’s ashram very beautiful and a reminder of the pervasive influence of Indian design and thought on 60s aesthetics in the west. Thanks to Paul Prudence for permission to reproduce these superb photos here.

If tumblr is a bellwether – and it may not be but it’s fun to speculate – then the sixties & seventies are back. In style, if not in substance. So many of tumblr’s weird little blogs, each of them a kind of eclectic personal bulletin board, feature this kind of rock and roll Hair: The Musical meets back-to-the-land handmade-house thing. More than a bulletin board, actually, since each one also exists as a sort of complete photo essay and a sustained non-verbal argument. In this case it’s an argument for a simpler yet groovier style of living, and you get a feeling there may actually be a politics behind the aesthetics. Thanks to the way tumblr makes it simple to re-post an image from someone else’s tumblr blog in your own tumblr stream, while providing you with a link back to theirs, each tumblr collection instantly leads you on to many others with a similar world view. I’m not sure how I first came upon cosmic_dust, possibly it was here, but it led to alaskaneyes and self_romance which led to endless numbers of strange little worlds. These images are a tiny sample from the superb cosmic_dust.

Every time I see this Todd Merrell Antiques magazine ad, which I find weirdly compelling, I invariably end up at his website and am suddenly transported into some dark Middle Earth underworld, where I feel I might be asked to retrieve an amulet with the help of a talking dog with eyes as big as saucers or something. Normally, dark, blocky, pseudo-primitive  furniture doesn’t appeal to me, but this particular antiques dealer collects pieces that are so well-made, so uniformly amazing, so farfetched, and – despite their number and diversity – so consistent in their level of fantasy, that I find it hard to resist any of them. Of course none of these objects is the slightest bit affordable. But together they point to something really funny about the early 70s – something that perhaps had its roots in the 50s or earlier – that brought together vague tribal fantasies, Middle Ages sci-fi, Beowulf, some sort of odd minimalist baroque, the rustic, the pagan and the just plain weird. Maybe what’s appealing about the dark, fantastical solidity of this stuff is that it’s a welcome relief from the relative spindliness and occasional prissiness of all those Danish teak settee legs and arms, or from the over-hygiene of minimalism, I don’t know. But these objects undoubtedly originate in some sort of rebellion against the disenchantment of a tamed machine-age aesthetic. I think that everyone, especially every midcentury-modern purist and every fussy 60s minimalist, desperately needs one mad, pagan piece of furniture, just to work against whatever it is you’ve got going on, and also, you know, to open an enchanted portal into the underworld. Details and many more pieces on Flickr.

The chair above includes lamp, bookshelf, ottoman, heads of deer to rest your hands upon, as well as dominion over a mountain forest kingdom.

And for your queen, this rocker. (Both wooden chairs above are by Jack Rogers Hopkins, USA, 1970s.)

A bronze wall-mounted chest by Paul Evans, USA, 1969, provides storage for vintage board games, 1970s Playboys, your fur cape, bottles of mead, your sword, whatever.

If I had the Paul Evans credenza above, I’d store the anti-Voldemort amulets (the ones my nephew requires to go to sleep) in it.

Forget Narnia! This wardrobe opens onto candlelit forest groves full of bacchanalian dancing all night long, and no martyr-y lions. Serving Cabinet, Phillip Lloyd Powell, 1960’s, USA

Pair of Room Dividers by Monteverdi Young, 1950’s, USA

Exeunt all, through the doorway to Valhalla.

This fantastic house at the intersection of modern and 60s hippie is the Greene Residence, built in 1961 by architect Herb Greene in Norman, Oklahoma. Greene built the house for himself and his family. It was dubbed the “Prairie Chicken” house by Life magazine shortly after it was built, and the name just stuck. Greene was influenced by the organic architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and by architect Bruce Goff, and in turn it seems obvious that Greene’s wavy forms have influenced the work of Frank Gehry. The photo was taken by Julius Shulman, the photographer most famous for his photos of the Case Study Houses in LA but who has also photographed thousands of buildings all over the US, including many more in Oklahoma. The photos are taken from Taschen’s Modernism Rediscovered, now also a 4-part series of Shulman’s photos of forgotten modern masterpieces, including many previously unpublished photos from Shulman’s own archives. Totally worth buying if you’re a modernism person. Julius Shulman is still working. He’s 99 years old.

More photos of the house, by Lynne’s Lens on Flickr, here.