The groovy: an everyday aesthetic of the sixties

In Christine Brooke-Rose's novel, Out (1964), we are introduced to 'Mr Blob', a 'filmy monster' known for rearranging his molecular constitution on live television into a soft ensemble 'of different wriggling shapes'. Mr Blob's spectacular wobbles are quintessential of a Sixties moment and its everyday aesthetic of the groovy, which once salvaged from post-modernist irony can be said to function at the complex intersection of black jazz and second-order cybernetics, space age kitsch and trippy post-capitalist desires. Moving between the 'groovy […] sociable atmosphere' of the Jolly Dollar in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) and the 'groovy TV' imagery of Nam June Paik's Global Groove (1972), the essay presents a novel theory for an overlooked aesthetic of immense significance to twentieth-century culture. Throughout, the essay homes in on an increasingly powerful synthetic chemicals industry hellbent on the formal excavation of a molecular lability that seduces almost every aspect of everyday life, rendering almost every surface cartoonishly susceptible to the insidious grooves of a new kind of injection-moulded reality.