The 20th century produced only a handful of things that are universally beloved in the 21st. One is Surrealism, the art movement any tween can recognize. Another is “the Sixties,” a decade so mythologized that its music is probably reverbing in your head as you read this.
What, then, could possibly be wrong with “Sixties Surreal”? The Whitney’s 111-artist, six-curator crowd-pleaser is packed with loud, wild stuff—a cackling wig! a mutant pencil-bird! penis-shaped gravestones! camels!—to the point where each new delight starts to dazzle a little less than the last. Fascinated gazing gives way to glazed looking. The shift itself could be the most fascinating thing about the show.
We begin on a note of “At last!” The Sixties were boom years for American Surrealism, the introductory text concedes, but bad ones for Surrealism in New York. When not ignoring it flat-out, curators and critics dismissed the style as the babbling grandparent of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and other sprier avant-gardes. Anything repressed for long comes back with a burst, though. Those camels, sculpted by Nancy Graves to little fanfare in 1969 and later shipped to the National Gallery of Canada, stand by the entrance, announcing that Surrealism’s decades of desert-wandering are done.
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It’s clear right away that this will not be an exhibition about Surrealism strictly defined, or defined at all. None of the artists with work hanging in the first gallery, titled “An Other Pop,” were card-carrying members, but then, neither was Magritte. What they share instead is an obsession with the twinkling junk of consumer culture: billboards, magazines, vapid smiles, smooth curves, bright colors. Deadpan juxtaposition, flaunting what ads deny, is their weapon of choice: Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley’s film pairs beauty pageantry and baby shit, Robert Arneson’s ceramic telephone offers two genitalia for the price of one, and Martha Rosler’s photomontages turn breasts and buttocks into kitchen appliances. It’s Pop for people tired of Warhol—slimy and pungent where Pop is hard and sterile, surreal-ish if not always Surrealist.
The second and strongest gallery doubles down on “funk,” the title of an influential 1967 show in Berkeley in which some of the pieces appeared. Sculptures of wire, wood, metal, nylon, fabric, and plaster are united in a single squelch: a dangling cocoon by Louise Bourgeois; a pair of bulbed, bug-like pods by Michael Todd; a green egg by Kenneth Price; one of Yayoi Kusama’s phallus-feathered chairs. The curation in this section, loose but persuasive, gives even an apparent outlier like Miyoko Ito’s striped abstract oil painting a mucous glisten I wouldn’t have picked up on in a solo show. Surprisingly few of the works have gone stale, possibly because art museums, sweet-talk about inclusivity aside, remain cold, antiseptic places on the whole. A little mess is welcome.
A bigger surprise in “Sixties Surreal” is the third character who keeps the titular two company. Television, the medium that attracted more midcentury eyeballs on any given night than art galleries got all year, is sometimes a villain and sometimes an ally in the show, but it’s always there. TV excites and exhausts. TV brings news of Vietnam and Watts. TV makes the world feel close and far. Most of all, TV is a rival for artists to beat or, failing that, mimic, hence the high number of works that explicitly reference it: photographs by Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Shawn Walker; one of Paul Thek’s “Television Analyzations” paintings; a Luis Jiménez fiberglass sculpture of a face bulging through a phosphorescent screen à la Videodrome.
Around this time in the exhibition—barely halfway, mind you—my feet began to hurt. Not that I have anything against a 134-work show if there is some point to develop, but “Sixties Surreal” seems to be starting over with every wall. The net has been cast so wide that nothing much gets caught. Ask yourself, what Sixties artwork couldn’t be shown here? What wasn’t surreal, somehow? Street photography? No, there’s an Adger Cowans shot of three figures on the sidewalk. Street film, surely? No, behold Jack Smith’s Scotch Tape (1959–62), here for no other reason than the title’s nod to a camera accident that the curators have repackaged into an allusion to “Surrealist strategies of chance.” Familiar Warhol Pop? Also here. A Klimtian painting of female nudes, by the nonagenarian Martha Edelheit, appears in a later gallery; when the New York Times asked how she felt about her Whitney debut, Edelheit said, “I don’t know why I was asked to be in it … I don’t think of anything I do as surreal.”
Amid the cacophony, it’s a pretty paradox that some of the quieter artworks in “Sixties Surreal” are the ones that echo longest after the show’s end. A few minutes in front of Christina Ramberg’s Shadow Panel, painted in (I know, I know) 1972, were enough to remind me that she was one of her era’s most undervalued talents. The female figure, cropped so that we see a profiled torso and a dark thicket of undergarments but not a face, could almost be lifted from a Look magazine ad, but there’s a tautness to the pose, a little erotic and a little sinister, that refuses to explain itself. Unlike so much of “Sixties Surreal,” the image gets more, not less, shocking the longer you stare.
Shock is a risky tactic, then as now. If there is a final irony to the Whitney’s show, it may be this: In responding to TV’s prodding, too many artists wound up re-creating TV’s weaknesses, producing work that caught the eye but faded fast, banged but whimpered, tried to out-weird one of the weirdest times in American history and came up short. Two years after Peter Saul painted his X-rated cartoon Saigon (1967), news of the My Lai massacre broke. “Reality,” the wall text says with a sigh, “was even more shocking than the nightmare Saul had conjured.” But when, in the long run, is it not? And which artists, in our own era of numbing media and bloodthirsty stupidity, are up to the task of conjuring something of-the-moment in ways more than momentary?
