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| Haus-Rucker-Co (Günter Zamp Kelp, Klaus Pinter, and Laurids Ortner): Environment Transformer / Fliegenkopf (Environment Transformer / Flyhead),1968. (Hippie Modernism/BAMPFA) |
The utopian vision of the 1960s is the subject of a new exhibition
by Rian Dundon, photography editor at @Timeline_Now for MEDIUM
The legacy of California’s counterculture is so much more than just Burning Man and bongs.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a nexus of artistic and social movements were searching for new forms of expression. Anti-war protests raged, hippies made love, artists and architects broke the molds of convention. Radical experiments — in the studio and in the streets — were challenging traditionally held beliefs about communal living, ecological awareness, gender, and politics. And American form was undergoing a paradigm shift, too, from midcentury austerity to acid-trip chic. Art and design would never be the same. Nor would the ways we communicate: personal computing and the World Wide Web both trace their origins to LSD-inspired revelations of human connectivity in a pre-silicon Santa Clara Valley.
In the 1910s, the horrors of the First World War had pushed disillusioned creatives to invent new ‘modernist’ modes of expression. Fifty years later, Vietnam, civil rights, and their political backlash had radical thinkers again refusing to get in line. Frustrated hippies grew their hair and took psychotropic drugs to expand their minds beyond the rigidity of a society seen as stagnant in fast moving times. We all know well the profound musical heritage of this period. But the influence of countercultural aesthetics on the graphic design and architecture of the era is far less recognized, even as its impact continues to ripple some half a century on.
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| William Lloyd and Gary Anderson with the recycle symbol at the Container Corporation of America, 1971. (Hippie Modernism/BAMPFA) |
A new exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum, Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, celebrates the legacy of the free love era on art, design, and activism a half-century from its 1967 inception. Works in the show range from photography and film to architecture and graphic design. But running through them all is a shared commitment to a new kind of consciousness fomenting, inextricably, alongside that period’s charged political climate.
Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) through May 21, 2017.
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| Angels of Light: Portrait of Debra Bauer and Rodney Price, early 1970s. (Hippie Modernism/BAMPFA) |
TOP: Barry Shapiro: Handmade Houses, early 1970s; digital images from slides. (Hippie Modernism/BAMPFA) BOTTOM: Barry Shapiro: Handmade Houses, early 1970s; digital images from slides. (Hippie Modernism/BAMPFA)
“Hippies were modern not because they believed that the world could be different than it was, but because they made that difference real.” — Lawrence Rinder, BAMFA director
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| Ira Cohen: Jimi Hendrix, 1968; photograph from the Mylar Chamber series. (Hippie Modernism/BAMPFA) |
Isaac Abrams: Hello Dali (detail), 1965; oil on canvas; 60 × 84 in.
Clay Geerdes: Cockettes Go Shopping, 1972; digital print; 42 x 28 in. (Hippie Modernism/BAMPFA)
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| Frances Butler: Quilted Coat, 1969–1970; fabric, dye. (Hippie Modernism/BAMPFA) |
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| Archizoom Associati: Superonda Sofa, 1966. (Hippie Modernism/BAMPFA) |
(T) Chicago Womens Graphics Collective: In Celebration of Amazons, 1974. / (B) J.B. Blunk: Stool #2, 1965; redwood. (Hippie Modernism/BAMPFA)
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Women in Design: The Next Decade, 1975; diazo print on paper. (Hippie Modernism/BAMPFA)
Judith Williams: Payne’s Gray, 1966; watercolor, gouache and ink on paper. (Hippie Modernism/BAMPFA)
Untitled (Park Here Any Time), 1969; offset lithograph on paper. (Hippie Modernism/BAMPFA)
Robert Sommer: Emeryville Mudflats, c. 1960s-1970s; digital image from slide. (Hippie Modernism/BAMPFA)
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