Electric Circus
Ivan ChermayeffIn the mid- to late 1960 s, the East Village
in Manhattan, especially St. Mark’s Place
between Third Avenue and Avenue A, was
the epicenter of the East Coast hippie
movement. Bars, coffee houses, dance and
concert halls, and headshops, with names like
Psychedelicatessen and Peace Eye, mixed
politics, drugs, and rock and roll with art and
culture. Alternative theaters, like Channel
One, radiated a kaleidoscope of sounds. On
Second Avenue and Sixth Street the Fillmore
East, the East Coast branch of Bill Graham’s
rock palace, headlined a youthful Grateful
Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin.
Psychedelia stimulated by drugs like LSD
and peyote was transplanted from Haight-
Ashbury and acquired a New York accent.
On the West Coast, Victor
Moscoso, Wes Wilson, Rick Griffin, and
other rock poster artists translated music into
images. Encrypted by hand, nearly illegible
type became a signpost, a code that conveyed the message to the young and
confounded the Establishment. Hallucinogens slowed the passage of time
and rendered it plastic. They transmogrified sensory modes. Feel orange!
Taste purple! The psychedelic posters spoke the same undulating dialect in
holistic compositions whose chromatic vibrations nonetheless took
advantage of Albers’s color theory.
The Electric Circus was a popular rock club in an old Ukrainian
social club with a huge dance floor. Chermayeff (b. 1932 ) and Geismar (b.
1931 ) first designed the interior of the club then the poster announcing its
grand opening on June 28, 1967,with words strung together in a stream-of-
consciousness, “... darling daughters sweet mothers dance black light
dynamite acrobats astrologers jugglers freaks clowns escape artists... .”
Chermayeff was intrigued by the rambling, poetic language written by the
owners of the club. Did the words describe the entertainment inside or
invite the neighbors in by name?248