6 March 2008, 19:00 / Amsterdam
Joining up the dots between Purple Haze and Prozac, the love-in and the rave, the commune and the gating of communities, this performative mixed-media presentation explores the legacy of the US 60s counterculture and its implications for the future of American Dreaming. Covering subjects relating to psychedelic art, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Vito Acconci, Robert Smithson, Stanley Milgram, Ken Kesey, the Black Panther Party and Gregory Bateson’s frame theory.
Dick Hebdige has taught in art schools in the UK and USA since the 70s and has published extensively on contemporary culture, art and music. In 1992 he moved to the States where he served as Dean of the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts before moving in 2001 to the University of California, Santa Barbara where he teaches in the Art, Film and Media Studies Departments. He co-directs the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (with installation artist, Kim Yasuda) at the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts. No cultural studies book has been more widely read than Dick Hebdige’s 1979 Subculture: The Meaning of Style, which taught a whole generation how to read personal fashion.
