MUSEUM GIVES HIPPIE STUFF THE ACID TEST

SHE is no longer a lithe hippie goddess. But as she sits by the fire in her
rhinestone-encrusted living room, the colors quivering, it's clear that the
spirit of Lotus Carnation still dwells inside Lois Anderson.

It was Lotus, as she was known in the late 1960's -- as opposed to Lois,
now a 72-year-old part-time librarian, who created "The Throne" (1973), a
resplendent creation born of acid and epoxy, designed to transport the
sitter into another realm. "We saw patterns everywhere," she recalled the
other day, lounging barefoot.

"We sat and listened at the feet of every Indian guru, glommed on to every
microcosm and macrocosm, then we looked at their art. I got up one morning
and just like you say, 'I think I'll have a ham sandwich for lunch,' out
came 'The Throne.' "

"The Throne," a bejeweled roach clip, two wooden electric guitars, some 40
rock posters, hand-embroidered bluejeans and a hash pipe made from a copper
toilet bowl float are a few of the objects on view at the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art in "Far Out: Bay Area Design 1967-73," an eclectic
retrospective of hippie material culture -- or what Ruth Keffer, a
curatorial associate, calls "the flip side of the Tricia Nixon aesthetic."
The show, which spans the psychedelic experience of Haight-Ashbury and the
back-to-the-landers' earthy furniture, runs through Feb. 20.

"Far Out" couldn't come at a stranger moment. Though the hippie artists are
approaching seniorhood -- they complain of poor eyesight and memory lapses
and gave up inhaling and worse long ago -- many remain fierce keepers of
the 60's flame, even as new symbols swirl relentlessly around them. (Glitzy
dot-com headquarters spring up daily in the city, as young Webmeisters, or
"twerps with 'tude,' " as Salon magazine dubbed them, cruise the city of
gongs, flowers and beads in freshly minted BMW's.)

Like the old lady who refuses to sell her home to the evil developer, some
of the hippie artists behind the relics are holed up in handmade hippie
houses at the end of unmarked dirt roads in the wilds of Marin County. They
still call each other "baby," and their city Frisco. Their houses can often
be identified by the cars parked outside, replete with bumper stickers like
"My Karma Ran Over My Dogma."

Many, like Ms. Anderson, pine for the hallucinogenic heritage of their
youth. "You could disappear for days and have incredible life experiences,"
she wistfully recalled. "I gave up drugs, but the outlook stays.

I get nostalgic because it's so weird now. Very weird."

The 100 or so objects in the show, including organic wooden furniture that
transcends water beds and futons with madras spreads, speak to a moment in
which making things by hand was an important personal and political
statement. "The emphasis on handmade was a development of do-it-yourself,
which has a long line in American history," said Todd Gitlin, the social
critic.

"There was belief in the glorious capacities of every human being, whether
it came to tying beads or writing poetry, most of it highly perishable."

Garry Knox Bennett, 65, who retains his Golden Gate Park beard, is a
well-known maker of sculptural art furniture and lights in Oakland. He
started his career as a crafts entrepreneur by forming a company called
Squirkenworks that provided peace symbols and roach clips to head shops on
Haight Street. He still keeps prized ones on a glass shelf.

"Everybody was making stuff, whether you could paint or not," he said. "For
me, the 60's were the last time an entrepreneur could make a good living
with his hands."

"Thank God for hippies," he added. "You could sell them anything." The
exhibition, curated by Aaron Betsky, is rather hallucinatory, putting
forgotten jewelry and clothes behind plexiglas and hoisting chairs and beds
onto pedestals, the kind of treatment often reserved for Egyptian scarabs.
Many of the objects, created to be anti-establishment, look like they don't
want to be there. "It's ironic," said Paul Krassner, the author and
satirist. "The main thing about the 60's was its spirit, which was
nonmaterial. But you can't put spirit in a museum."

There are some mysterious omissions -- among them, record album covers, Zap
comics and underground papers like The Oracle. Taken together, objects like
Al Garvey's stained glass and cedar Dutch door and Wavy Gravy's patchwork
jumpsuit form a peculiar blend of the natural and the plastic-fantastic.
Mr. Betsky's premise is that, with the counterculture now 30 years old, it
is time to re-examine its aesthetic, which he sees as an extension of the
Bay Area Arts and Crafts tradition. The big news may be that contrary to
popular belief, psychedelic art and craft was not produced while under the
influence. As Ms. Anderson put it, "No way could you do picky-picky work
with your mind blown."

Stewart Brand, the founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, called much of the
work "bright and swirly and filled with meaning." But it sometimes led, he
said, to "pretty dreadful graphic art."

The period's devil-may-care zest is evident in the boots and shoes by the
Apple Cobbler, a k a Mickey McGowan, a longtime vegan, who after
apprenticing with a Laguna sandalmaker, began fashioning over-the-top
footwear out of fabric like brocade. Inspired by assemblage artists like Ed
Kienholz, Mr. McGowan's shoes integrated rubber duck decoys and toys,
creating soles so bouncy, as he put it, "it was like walking on Super Balls."

Today, the former Apple Cobbler makes a living from the past, working as an
estate liquidator and selling extras from his archive of some 15,000 record
albums -- his specialty is strange, neglected music by folks like Jim
Backus -- kept in a warehouse. And then there's what he calls the Unknown
Museum, an indescribable welter of some 100,000 pop-cultural artifacts
(from lunch boxes to board games) in his modest home overlooking the 101
Freeway ramp in San Rafael. ("I never got into the real estate thing," he
said ruefully.)

It can be difficult to separate some creations from their creators. Mary
Ann Schildknecht, now 52 and still painting T-shirts, made her intricately
embroidered blouse and skirt, a collage of blue sky, mountains, Janis
Joplin and other images, during a two-year prison sentence in Italy for
smuggling hashish. "I had a lot of time left," she said.

The artist Clayton Lewis, who died in 1995, hand-built what may be the
quintessential hippie bed, a heroic bohemian masterpiece of wood and paint.
It was found in an abandoned Miwok Indian cottage on an obscure cove near
Point Reyes, where he lived. What the exhibition implies is how central the
bed was to 60's culture. "It wasn't simply a place to put in your eight
hours," said the artist's son, Peter, who is leading an effort to preserve
the cottages. "My father loved women -- what can I tell you?"

David McFadden, chief curator of the American Craft Museum in New York,
noted that cultural artifacts like beds and blouses "may become touchstones
for memory in a way that some fine arts can't."

He added, "Objects like this may look stupid, but they're not mute."

High in the Marin hills, where humble hippie shacks now fetch
mid-six-figure prices, Al Garvey and his wife, Barbara, now 67 and 65
respectively, live the life they lived 34 years ago, when Mr. Garvey, a
professional door carver, stumbled upon a wooden wine fermenting tank on
the side of the road in Sonoma and decided to build a studio out of it. The
studio, now part of his house, "smelled like wine for five years
afterwards," he recalled somewhat mistily.

Like a skip in a record, "I kind of got stuck in the period," Mr. Garvey
said cheerfully, adding, "I can't bear to think of leaving it." His house
is an evocative time warp, with a big fireplace made of Mexican river
stones and relief sculptures made from madrone wood off the forest floor.

He continues carving doors. "I still get great elation out of creating
something," he said. "What I loved about that period was the extemporaneous
expression." His two daughters, now grown, were less enamored of the
spontaneity. "They're yuppies," he said with affection. "They make more in
a year than I've ever made in my whole life."

Other woodworkers rejected the hedonism of San Francisco's hippie culture,
opting to move to places like Bolinas, on the Marin coast. "This is where
the flower children landed when they hit 50," said the furniture maker Art
Espenet Carpenter, 79.

Mr. Carpenter continues to influence generations of California artisans.
His smooth rounded corners and soft edges in pieces like the Shell Desk, in
the exhibition, were copied so widely the style became known as "California
roundover."

"I'm hung up on round," he said, giving a tour of the hand-built
five-building compound he created in a dense thicket of trees; it includes
a round kitchen and library composed of 4-by-8-foot bays, and an oculus
ceiling encircled by wooden beams. The paths snake through Asian dogwood,
revealing a working privy covered in vines with a magnificent burled seat.

J. B. Blunk, 73, is known for his freeform redwood sculpture and furniture
that bring out the character of trees.

His house, built by hand in the 1960's on the Point Reyes peninsula, is
reached through a graceful sculptured arch of 1,200-year-old redwoods.

Like him, the house is refined and gnarly. It is artfully built of
driftwood, telephone poles, schoolhouse windows and whatever other
materials were at hand.

Mr. Blunk, who is perhaps best known for a three-ton curving redwood
outcropping of connected tables designed for the restaurant Greens in San
Francisco, studied stoneware and ceramics in Japan, befriending the artist
Isamu Noguchi and the California surrealist Gordon Onslow Ford, a neighbor
and patron. His kitchen table is a piece of redwood, vaguely whale shaped.

Perhaps no one has consciously held on to hippie culture more than Wavy
Gravy, who was unofficial ringmaster of the hippie movement before he
became a Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavor. Founder of the Hog Farm commune,
which ran a pig for president in 1968, Wavy Gravy, 63 and formerly Hugh
Romney, lives in Berkeley in a cottagey compound of redwood bungalows that
could someday become the hippie Williamsburg. A platform bed is built into
the living room, ready for crashers.

"They'll probably bury me a hippie," he said, sprawling on his bed in a
meditative pose, surrounded by artifacts from the era, including a plaster
sculpture of Jerry Garcia turning into a bear.

Wavy Gravy, who runs a children's clown camp north of San Francisco,
learned the power of objects early on: when he walked a plastic fish on a
leash and wore a red nose, it seemed to prevent the police from arresting him.

"It's hard to beat up on a clown," he said.

At a show like "Far Out," it still is.