AMSTERDAM.- In partnership with the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision and EYE Filmmuseum, the Rijksmuseum is to hold a dynamic symposium open to the public on 12 September 2014. The symposium will include film footage never seen before as well as interviews with eyewitnesses, plus columns and lectures. Freek de Jonge, Wim T. Schippers, Louis van Gasteren, James Kennedy and many others will take a look back at the massive changes in the Dutch society of the 1960s.

Exhibition of rotaprints by Aat Veldhoen 1964-1965 and Luuks Laboratorium 1966-1967
Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1964, the Netherlands was on the eve of a playful revolution. The country became famous as a progressive laboratory of free love, drugs and new forms of art. Art had to be happening, not something just hanging on the wall of a museum; it had to be on the streets and be for everyone.

Laboratorium Holland symposium
Together with a new exhibition of so-called ‘rotaprints’ by artist Aat Veldhoen (1934) and the Dutch counterculture ‘Provo’ art of Luuks Laboratorium, the Laboratorium Holland 1955-1970 symposium will be part of the Rijksmuseum’s 20th-Century presentation.

The symposium will include a look back at this period of history by Freek de Jonge, along with interviews by Aukje Holtrop with renowned eyewitnesses from the 1960s: Wim T. Schippers and Louis van Gasteren. The experimental film Gyromorphosis (1957) will be screened, as will a recently rediscovered Le Corbusier film excerpt from Le Poème Électronique (1958). Archive TV footage of ‘anti-smoking magician’ Robert Jasper Grootveld (1932-2009) and the ‘Provo Konsilie’ in Borgharen in 1966 will be shown. There will be lectures from people such as Bart van Heerikhuizen (formerly of Provo, sociologist) and historian James Kennedy (author of Building new Babylon: cultural change in the Netherlands during the 1960s).

Aat Veldhoen
It is 50 years ago this summer that artist Aat Veldhoen brought his art to the streets with his ‘rotaprint plan’. The rotary or offset press allowed Veldhoen to print off his work quickly and in vast quantities. The stacks of prints were sold for three guilders from a carrier tricycle by Robert Jasper Grootveld in Amsterdam. Veldhoen wanted everyone to be able to hang his rotaprints on their walls and did not want to see them disappear into the folders of art collectors.

Luuks Laboratorium
The art created by Maastricht-based Luuks Laboratorium was also intended for a wide public. Now the ‘anarcho-playful’ print by Luuks, also known as the Breakfast in bed group, has become the first to hang on the walls of the Rijksmuseum. Experimentation and provocation were designed to unsettle the established order in the late 1960s.

• Symposium Laboratorium Holland 1955-1970, the rise of the Playful Man in film, television and in museum objects

• Date: Friday, 12 September
• To sign up, go to rijksmuseum.nl/nl/laboratorium

• Rotaprints by Aat Veldhoen from 1964-1965, 22 August 2014 – 5 January 2015