HISTORICAL EAST AND WEST COAST 1960s

GLENN MCKAY HEADLIGHTS Glenn McKay, a painter, began performing light shows after attending one of Ken Kesey's Acid Tests at the Fillmore Auditorium in January of 1966, where Martin had provided the visuals. The Acid Tests featured bathtubs full of LSD, a light show by Tony Martin, and performances by the Grateful Dead. McKay did hundreds of shows with the Jefferson Airplane and the Dead, mostly at the Winterland Ballroom. In 1968, his group staged "An Evening with Glenn McKay's Headlights" at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The San Francisco Museum of Art held a retrospective of his work in 1999. Using slides, 16mm film, and overhead projectors, McKay and his cohort combined photographic and liquid media so that, according to McKay, "it was like painting with three or four hands." Describing the aims of his project, McKay has said, "I'm providing a new door to the consciousness of sound and color--to be so in touch with the emotion and the rhythm of the experience losing any sense of separation between the color, moving images, and the sound." In other words, McKay hopes to elicit a synaesthetic response in his beholder in which the elements of his light play, combined with sound, result in a Huxley-like movement that invigorates or transcends quotidian perception. ANDY WARHOL EXPLODING PLASTIC INEVITABLE The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, sometimes simply called Plastic Inevitable or EPI, was a series of multimedia events organized by Andy Warhol between 1966 and 1967, featuring musical performances by The Velvet Underground and Nico, screenings of Warhol's films, and dancing and performances by regulars of Warhol's Factory, especially Mary Woronov and Gerard Malanga. Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable is also the title of a 18-minute film by Ronald Nameth with recordings from one week of performances of the shows which were filmed in Chicago, Illinois, in 1966. In December 1966 Warhol included a one-off magazine called The Plastic Exploding Inevitable as part of the Aspen No. 3 package.[1] Performance of Exploding Plastic Inevitable in Ann Arbor The Exploding Plastic Inevitable had its beginnings in an event staged on January 13, 1966 at a dinner for the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. This event, called "Up-Tight", included performances by the Velvet Underground and Nico, along with Malanga and Edie Sedgwick as dancers.[2] Inaugural shows were held at the Dom in New York City in April 1966, advertised in The Village Voice as follows: "The Silver Dream Factory Presents The Exploding Plastic Inevitable with Andy Warhol/The Velvet Underground/and Nico."[3] Shows were also held in The Gymnasium in New York and in various cities throughout the United States.