“This is not a show of ‘Surrealism’ proper, with a capital ‘S,’” Whitney Museum Director Scott Rothkopf mentioned through the press preview for Sixties Surreal. “It’s a show about the surreal ways of picturing a world that had itself become surreal.” As Rothkopf flicked by his PowerPoint slides, Hyperallergic Editor-at-Giant Hrag Vartanian leaned towards me and whispered, “How exactly is this surreal?” To not get all Jaden Smith about it, however therein lies the issue: Can something be surreal if every part is surreal?
Sixties Surreal recontextualizes American artwork between 1958 and 1972, arguing that Surrealism, not Cubism, was its guiding postwar aesthetic philosophy — in different phrases, content material over kind. An expanded model of Rothkopf’s 1999 undergraduate thesis (much less White and New York-centric, he notes in his catalog essay), the exhibition gathers the work of 111 artists throughout a variety of media as proof that the sexual, fantastical, and unconscious undercurrents of the psychologically fractured Sixties surfaced in artwork. This was the period when the recognition of tv launched a brand new and insidious relationship with photographs to the American public; the postwar financial growth spurred us to base our identities on the merchandise we bought; and america/Vietnam Battle devastated not solely that nation and its individuals, however our sense of what it meant to be American, spurring the countercultural motion in response. The exhibition roots its argument in and attracts various its works and artists from a number of touchpoint exhibitions of the period, notably The Different Custom on the Institute of Up to date Artwork Philadelphia in 1966, curated by Gene Swenson; Eccentric Abstraction on the now-defunct Fischbach Gallery in New York Metropolis, curated by Lucy Lippard in 1967; and Funk on the College Artwork Museum at College of California, Berkeley, curated by Peter Selz the identical 12 months.
Set up view of Sixties Surreal, feauturing Claes Oldenburg’s “Soft Toilet” (1966, heart) and Alex Hay, “Paper Bag” (1968; again left)
That is an formidable remit, laudable for its try and unite disparate actions from throughout the nation beneath the aegis of a single American impulse. Befitting such a formidable job, nevertheless, the result’s removed from neat. Within the premise alone, cracks start to indicate: The Bay Space’s Funk motion, for example, which might (largely) be mentioned to concentrate on the bodily or tactile, gross, humorous, and lowbrow, is commonly characterised as a response towards Summary Expressionism — a motion straight impressed by capital-“S” Surrealism. Clearly, a practice shaped in response to 1 impressed by Surrealism can itself be surreal — nevertheless it begins to get just a little bit messy and an entire lot mindfucking.
There’s loads to love about Sixties Surreal. It emphasizes have an effect on, inducing a way of uncanniness or disorientation by way of odd juxtapositions, vertiginous shifts in scale, and the slippage between topic and object. Step out of the elevator on the fifth ground and also you’ll instantly end up earlier than a trio of fuzzy lifesize camels made out of an unholy pastiche of wooden, metal, burlap, animal pores and skin, wax, and oil paint (Nancy Graves, 1968–69). Enter the dimly lit first gallery, and also you’re met with what seems like a consumerist nervousness dream. Claes Oldenburg’s “Soft Toilet” (1966) — precisely what it appears like — sags impotently, inducing the lurching feeling of an object meant to serve you all of a sudden buckling. In the meantime, Alex Hay’s six-foot-tall brown paper bag looms imposingly over you, and Martha Rosler conflates the patron object with flesh by way of photomontages splicing physique elements onto kitchen home equipment — a dishwasher turns into “Damp Meat,” an oven “Hot Meat” (each c. 1966–72).
Set up view of Sixties Surreal, that includes Andy Warhol, “Marilyn” (1967), screenprint (left); and Luis Jimenez’s “Blond TV Image” (1967) (proper)
It’s a lovely, sensuous present. One of many rooms is painted a beautiful, bloody plum; its rounded partitions and a dense sectioning curtain create the ambiance of a real theater of the thoughts, becoming for a piece devoted to the destabilizing affect of tv on the American psyche. In Luis Jimenez’s sculpture “Blond TV Image” (1967), a bulbous face bursts out of the tv body as if intruding into the area of actual life. This sense is heightened by the images of Lee Friedlander, that are titled after particular places — “Galax, Virginia” (1962), for example — however depict distorted faces on tv units in thresholds of nondescript rooms that may very well be wherever, mixing fiction and actuality, the far and the native. The inclusion of Andy Warhol’s “Marilyn” (1967) on this part startled me in the easiest way: Here’s a girl who was flattened into a picture and circulated mercilessly by this very medium. What a strategy to reframe one of many touchstones of American artwork; I purchase it.
Elsewhere, custom-built cabinets with rounded edges home lovely, unusual objects and items of furnishings with delightfully shocking textures and options, typically evoking a showroom or an odd home setting. Lee Bontecou’s gaping apertures (“Untitled,” 1961), Jeremy Anderson’s espresso desk outfitted with a digestive tract (“Riverrun,” 1965), Louise Bourgeois’s tortured chrysalis (“Fée Couturière,” 1963), and Yayoi Kusama’s chair bursting with larva-like growths (“Accumulation,” c. 1963) make up a really abridged record.
Set up view of Sixties Surreal, that includes Jeremy Anderson, “Riverrun” (1965) within the heart foreground
Nevertheless, the countercultural fringe of the Sixties feels prefer it’s been neutered. The mindless violence, the lack of religion sooner or later, the prevailing sense that the previous establishments — the college, the federal government, marriage, the church, the very thought of a nation — had failed us, the ensuing fury. The tradition that got here together with it — the music, medication, model — isn’t absent, however its affect is dulled. Partly that’s as a result of prevailing inventive tendencies of the day: the cool intellectualism of Pop Artwork, the chilly surfaces of the End Fetish motion. Partly it’s a function of surrealism itself. Mix Swensen’s comment that the motion was about “turn[ing] feelings into things so that we can deal with them” — additionally a trademark of capitalism — and Suzanne Césaire’s declare that it’s about “expressing the forbidden zones of the human mind to neutralize them,” and it is sensible that the ensuing objects can really feel inert.
Moreover, it’s an issue of easy methods to convey a sense into the museum area. Album covers and sketches, for example, merely can’t seize the best way that music pulsated within the charged air, grew to become anthems to revolution. And it’s additionally a shortcoming of curatorial emphasis. Although the curators compiled a playlist, I’m advised by my extra musically schooled colleagues (particularly, Critiques Editor Natalie Haddad) that there may have been some deeper cuts (see Natalie’s recommendations right here). Furthermore, the present’s playlist appeared completely deemphasized, because it was talked about neither within the introductory remarks nor the wall textual content nor the (excellent and thorough) 400-page catalog — a shocking omission given the centrality of music to Sixties tradition. And when it comes to particularly artwork historic angles, what about some documentation of and even allusions to happenings — artwork that grew particularly from the social adjustments of the interval, and was made on the market on the earth?
Set up view of Sixties Surreal, with Romare Bearden, “Pittsburgh Memory 2/6” (1964) at heart (© BFA 2025; photograph by Quadir Moore/BFA.com)
Relating to the disconnect between the worlds outdoors and throughout the museum, the exhibition’s strategy to artists of marginalized identities can vary from the nonsensical to the deeply problematic. The wall texts quote Romare Bearden: “As a Negro, I do not need to go looking for ‘happenings,’ the absurd, or the surreal, because I have seen things out of my studio window on 125th Street that neither Dalí nor Beckett nor Ionesco could have thought possible.” Equally, thinkers like Amiri Baraka have argued that Black life itself is surreal (the catalog essays wrestle with this topic extra completely).
My drawback isn’t with this conceit. My drawback is that all through the remainder of the present, the sociopolitical info that made the American sixties really feel surreal — the Vietnam Battle, the appearance of tv, the postwar consumerist growth — had been tied to that particular period, whereas the surrealism of the Black expertise depicted right here is rendered timeless, unchanging, according to a for much longer historical past of categorizing the “other” as such. In consequence, the rationale for together with sure works by Black artists feels much less developed — working example, the Harlem-centered quote above bears little relevance to the Dadaesque silver print “Pittsburgh Memory 2/6” (1964) that it ostensibly accompanies. In the meantime, the Civil Rights Motion — which strains up with the present’s dates practically to a tee — is scarcely talked about within the present’s wall texts: not as soon as within the part texts, and solely glancingly in labels for particular objects. Is there presumably something extra “surreal” than having to persuade a rustic fairly actually constructed by these you lay declare to that you just deserve supposedly “inalienable” rights?
In consequence, the present lays out an implicit definition of “real” that skews White, Christian, and Euroamerican, advancing it as a impartial expertise from which others diverge in “surreal” methods — reproducing a longtime drawback completely thought of by students comparable to Claudia Rankine. As an illustration, a wall textual content for artist Ed Bereal’s “Focke-Wulf FW 190” (1960), an assemblage sculpture consisting of detritus impaled right into a steel physique labeled with a swastika, tells us that he “rejected the embrace of the predominantly white art world in search of a more sociopolitical mode of artmaking.” Hmm. “Sociopolitical” simply refers to social and political elements of life, which fairly actually apply to all of us. What does the Whitney imply by a “sociopolitical mode of artmaking,” and why does it not apply to the predominant White expertise?
Oscar Howe, “Retreat” (1968), casein on paper (© Oscar Howe Household; photograph courtesy the Whitney Museum)
Subsequent, take the framing of Yanktonai Dakota artist Oscar Howe’s summary casein on paper work “Retreat” (1968), by which thorny purple, blue, and black kinds coalesce right into a whirling kind. First, the wall textual content positions the work largely as an try and reframe the visuality of Indigenous artwork within the outdoors world — “countering ethnographic approach[es]” and “market pressure” and “expanding the visual language of Native modernism” — quite than the inward flip towards the unconscious on which the present is supposedly predicated. Subsequent, it compares the expertise of the work to being “caught directly within the action of a traditional Dakota ceremony.” But is it actually surreal for an artist of a sure background to take part in its already well-established traditions? The part textual content teams these works beneath “alternatives” to “organized religion” — however isn’t taking the transubstantiated physique of Christ in your tongue fairly surreal as properly? Certainly, I want this exhibition on surrealism had targeted extra on destabilizing the idea of “real” than reifying it.
By the tip of the exhibition, I felt like I’d misplaced the plot on what “surrealism” even means — a reasonably surreal expertise of the unintentional sort. What makes Don Potts’s barebones sculpture “My First Car: Basic Chassis” (1970) surreal, apart from the truth that his work was included within the Funk and Eccentric Abstraction exhibitions? The wall textual content states that the work “could stand in for that other locomotive machine: a human being,” presumably to argue for its surrealist bent, however I’m not sure of the case it’s even making an attempt to make. If the melding between the “organic and mechanical, exposed and invulnerable” marks the surreal, had been the Futurists surreal? From that perspective, what’s decidedly not surreal?
Set up view of Marisol, “Women and Dog” (1963–64), wooden, plaster, artificial polymer, and taxidermic canine head
I wish to be clear right here: What Sixties Surreal is making an attempt to do right here is extremely formidable. It was by no means going to be a straightforward argument, and I’m satisfied by a lot of it. But it surely’s due to the very significance of its goals that it wants to raised outline and operationalize its phrases. What constitutes the “real,” and subsequently, the “surreal”?
I’m reminded of a typical remark I see on TikTok, often beneath some video of a rat combating a pigeon or somebody dressed like a large milk carton on the subway, or one thing ridiculous like that: “New York isn’t real.” On the L practice after the press preview, showtime started. Music blasted, and a performer began flipping on the heart of the automobile earlier than leaping onto the steel handrails on the ceiling, dangling upside-down; his co-performer walked by the automobile, hat in hand, amassing payments. I thought of limbs twisting into the armature of machines, the natural and the mechanical. The absurdity of the methods we make ends meet. The arbitrariness of what we rely as artwork and what we don’t. It felt, properly, surreal.
Don Potts, “My First Car: Basic Chassis” (1970), wooden, steel, and rubber (photograph Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)
Lee Bontecou, “Untitled” (1961), metal, canvas, wire, and cord (photograph Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)
Religion Ringgold, “The American Spectrum” (1969)
Sixties Surreal continues on the Whitney Museum of American Artwork (99 Gansevoort Avenue, West Village, Manhattan) by January 19, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Dan Nadel, Laura Phipps, Scott Rothkopf, and Elisabeth Sussman, with Kelly Lengthy and Rowan Diaz-Toth.
