By Adam Brody
Editor
San Francisco is the veritable birthplace of psychedelic blotter acid art, and The Beat recently had the opportunity to sit down with its Godfather and preemminent collector, Mark McCloud, at his house in the Mission District – known unofficially as the Institute of Illegal Images.
A native of Argentina, McCloud grew up in the same tough neighborhood of Buenos Aires as guerilla revolutionary Che Guevara. By the time he was 12, McCloud had seen 18 revolutions in his country.
“In the 1960s Buenos Aires was already having a war on terror,” he says. “I survived despite the government.”
He first came to San Francisco in 1966. He then made the permanent move to the city in 1977, and was able to buy his 100-year-old house in 1983 after receiving a National Endowment for the Arts grant under president Reagan.
McCloud has been taking psychedelic trips and collecting and designing the tiny square paper artworks they are distributed on for more than 30 years. His collection boasts over 33,000 sheets of blotter art – the largest and most diverse collection on the planet.
Covering almost every inch of the pale blue walls of the living and dining rooms of the old two-story victorian are framed sheets of blotter art, depicting every kind of pop culture icon you can imagine.
There are the famous ones: Felix the Cats, red and orange sunshines, Mad Hatters, Beavis and Buttheads, and McCloud’s most famous personal design: Alice Through the Looking Glass, a double-sided sheet with Alice climbing through the window into the psychedelic realm.
McCloud traded a copy of the Alice sheet to artist Shepard Fairey during a show for a hand-framed edition of one of Fairey’s early poster series,’ which displays a four-part picture of Andre the Giant wearing a Marilyn Monroe wig titled “Andre Warhol.” The poster hangs proudly above the stairwell.
His collection also contains rarer blotter art like the ones signed by Tim Leary and Albert Hoffman, ones with images of former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and the inflammatory series with the FBI seal stamped on it. Some of these sheets even came with elaborate envelopes designed to match their contents.
A California license plate with the letters “CY KDLC” hangs against one wall next to a 1973 Michigan plate reading “LSD-770.” In one corner stands a large wooden machine reminiscent of an old-fashioned scrub-board laundry. A closer look reveals that it is in fact a perforating machine, used to cut those handy markings across the blotter sheet.
In 2000 McCloud’s house was raided by the DEA, and in 2001 he went before a Kansas City jury who would decide whether the 33,000 sheets of perforated paper found in his backyard shed (and some that supposedly found its way near a school in Missouri) was the largest collection of this type of pop culture art, or whether they represented a delivery system for 33 million hits of acid.
The jury ultimately decided that McCloud’s collection did indeed represent a legitimate new emerging art form, and he was acquitted. He had prevously beaten a similar charge after a blotter art exhibit he participated in back in 1991 in Houston.
A bit eccentric, yet sharp as a tack, McCloud is full of colorful tidbits about the psychedelic origins of religion and society. He waxes poetic about how the Christian communion wafer is round to symbolize a psilocybin mushroom cap, and how the sport of golf was invented to search for such shrooms. He also suggests that even the modern computer was spawned by LSD users.
He tells of how the first acid was put on litmus paper, and had to be secured by metallic inks. “Otherwise the sauce would run,” McCloud explains. He was also a pioneer in the use of soy-based inks. “At that time there wasn’t a shortage of ink or acid,” he says, slyly.
Being heavily involved in the blotter art scene has introduced McCloud to numerous iconic figures. His stories include dropping acid with infamous LSD producer Owsley Stanley III and hanging out with Timothy Leary.
Other stories and references include Karla LaVey (Anton’s daughter), Brian Eno, David Byrne, Iggy Pop, Ed Hardy, Sky Saxon of the Seeds, Ray Bradbury and L. Ron Hubbard, Julia Child, Andy Warhol, Alex and Allyson Grey, and San Diego’s psychedelic tribal phenomena Crash Worship.
At one point he pulls out an original photograph of a young Jimmy Page hanging out with William Burroughs inside Aleister Crowley’s house. McCloud also loves the movie Wild in the Streets, in which a young kid is elected president and requires all adults to spend two weeks in LSD camp.
Another story includes the Blue Unicorn Café, now the site of Braindrops Piercing and Tattoo on Haight Street, which is “where the beats took acid and became the hippies,” McCloud says. “Where would The Haight be without LSD-25?”
Every so often during the conversation McCloud turns and gives a sly, knowing look to his guest. This is his life’s work, and he know’s quite a lot about it.
He designed the artwork for 1980s era punk band RKL’s (Rich Kids on LSD) third album, and his blotter collection won second place at the SF County Fair in 1987.
Recently McCloud has began celebrating his most beloved blotters by making huge Giclee reproductions of them, many as large as 30 square inches.
Some of the more famous art in McCloud’s collection was immortalized in the making of the Cure of Souls poster, in which various blotter art was collaged together and then photographed at extremely high definition by a gigantic, room-sized camera.
After more than four hours inside McCloud’s psychedelic den I break for lunch and say “goodbye.” He walks me to the front door and invites me back for a more informal visit sometime in the future. Just as I say “I would love to,” McCloud shoots me another one of those sly, knowing glances.
abrody(at)haightbeat.com
