The Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition “Sixties Surreal” looks, on paper, like a winner. It surveys a dynamic decade of art, during a tumultuous political era that birthed many of our freedoms, fissures and discontents. It showcases artists who have become not just canonical but Instagram famous, including Yayoi Kusama, Faith Ringgold, Robert Crumb and Andy Warhol.
But it’s a big mess of a show, full of both first-rate and third-rate work, strung together with little cohesion or argument. In a typically turgid essay, one of the catalogue writers refers to “the elasticity of the word surreal during this period,” and by this period, she means the “long Sixties” — 1958 to 1972 — which squeezes in a few more years on either end of the decade.
Elasticity seems to be the basic curatorial strategy, squeezing in a little more everywhere possible. Thus, the show is geographically inclusive (artists associated with Chicago are particularly well represented) and demographically inclusive, with chapters devoted to Black surrealism, feminist surrealism, Native American surrealism and LGBT surrealism. But it offers no broad or definitive sense of what surrealism meant to the artists of the 1960s at a time when the word was becoming merely a label, a catchall descriptor for wacky assemblage, freaky collage … and almost anything vaguely idiosyncratic in its expressive language.
Surrealism originated in Europe after the First World War, when artists, writers and critics were fascinated by dreams, the Freudian unconscious, and the astonishing rapacity for blood and sexual domination lurking just beneath the supposedly civilized surface of politics and culture. For artists like René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí, surrealism offered a brief redemption of figurative art from its senescence, allowing artists to render with realistic rigor all the things that photographs could not document: distortions of reality, paradoxes of space, phantasmagoria, time and representation, dreams and nightmares.
But by the 1960s, surrealism was no longer the stuff of artistic manifestos and coffee house conversation; it wasn’t an art movement, or a viable aesthetic “ism,” but rather a general tonality or valence of culture. The word registered little more than a general sense of estrangement, as mass media invaded private space, consumerism exposed the tawdriness of needs and desires manufactured by capitalism, and patriarchal hierarchies disintegrated under the stresses of their own hypocrisy.
Giving the idea renewed vigor today is even more difficult. The Freudian unconscious is about as real to people as the fantastic beasts on the margins of a medieval map. Anyone with access to a computer and AI tools can invent, manipulate and distort reality with greater ease than the marquee surrealists of a century ago. Our politics are darkly absurdist, and if power is a form of theater, it is more like the ridiculously venal and relentlessly vulgar Ubu of Alfred Jarry than the bumptious non sequiturs of Ionesco.
Even in the 1960s, surrealism was more of a joke than an aesthetic force. Ed Ruscha rendered the word “surrealism” in a bath of soap bubbles, which suggests the general sudsiness of the idea. He used a related image for the cover illustration of a 1966 issue of Artforum, which focused on surrealism. The journal’s editor acknowledged the idea of devoting an issue to the subject was itself a bit of a soap bubble: “I don’t think there was a new Surrealism about to happen or that anybody was particularly interested in Surrealism,” he said in a book published decades later.
The Whitney exhibition, apparently years in the making, originated with an idea, or a question, about the history of art in the 20th century. In an interview in Art News, curator Dan Nadel says he was pursuing a basic query: “What if subject matter, not form, had dominated postwar art?” By that, he meant, what if the standard history of the 1960s wasn’t about pop art or conceptualism or minimalism but about painting and sculpture and other means of representing rather than abstracting the world? What if the concerns, fantasies, nightmares and aspirations of people who fell outside the usual artistic categories were the actual substance of art after Hiroshima and Auschwitz? What if art had been direct and emphatic rather than smooth and sibylline?
It’s an interesting question, and one that critics have been asking for a long time, across all the arts. What if tonality and melody mattered in music rather than academicism? What if meter and rhyme mattered in poetry? What if we studied the continuities rather than the disruptions in the history of human creativity?
But an exhibition devoted to everything that wasn’t favored by museum curators and gallerists from 1958 to 1972 would be a very large and unwieldy exhibition, like this one. So, we get a huge range, from the concise poetry of Vija Celmins’s “House No. 1,” a box covered with clouds and scenes of locomotion, violence and war, which grapples forthrightly with the preoccupations of the original surrealists, to Peter Saul’s 1967 “Saigon,” which uses Day-Glo colors and the language of psychedelic art to hammer away at the psychosexual connections between war, colonialism and desire.
Throughout much of the exhibition, you can hear a slightly befuddled, fuzzy-thinking voice lost in a marijuana fog, expressing all the reductionist, simpleminded political truths of the age. Like, missiles are really phallic. War is a bummer. Big Brother is watching. Love is so … so … like, wow.
But you also get more rigorous documentary evidence of the profound changes in society that were disrupting thought and certainty, sometimes for good and sometimes not. As the line between obscenity and dispassionate candor about the naked body was blurred, artists like Martha Rosler were warning about new forms of objectification. Photographer Lee Friedlander captures the uncanny weirdness of mass media and its invasion of private space in a series of images in which televisions appear to be watching us, rather than vice versa. In Robert Colescott’s 1968-1970 “Assassin Down,” we see a cartoon rendering of the killing of John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. To the side, a Black man depicted as if he’s a minstrel figure, holds a broom and looks on the scene a bit like an accidental anthropologist, watching some inexplicably violent ritual unfold without understanding its purpose or meaning.
In 1968, the poet John Ashbery wrote: “Revolutions happen only once. The Surrealist Revolution cannot happen again because it is no longer necessary.” The Vietnam War, American politics and the commercial institutionalization of contemporary art seemed more surreal to the poet than anything the surrealists could dream up.
But that’s a fundamental misreading of the problem. The revolution isn’t over when the whole world feels surreal; it’s over when the things that prompt surrealism — the violent fantasies of men with power — have been tamed or eliminated. The first surrealists looked at a world that felt weird and responded with paintings and sculpture that made that weirdness more tangible and palpable. But at some point, responding to weirdness with more weirdness just exacerbates the problem. Art is a powerful diagnostic tool, but once you have a diagnosis, it is medicine one wants, not a more emphatic statement of what ails you.
Too many of the artists on view in “Sixties Surreal” are unable to make that distinction. And not surprisingly, their art often feels superheated, ineffectual and dated.
Consider two of the most memorable works in the show. Nancy Graves’s 1968-1969 trio of life-size camels, “Camel VI,” “Camel VII” and “Camel VIII” — made of wood, steel, wax and animal skin, among other materials — are convincingly lifelike, which makes them surreal in the general sense of being a dreamlike incursion into ordinary reality. They are the first works that visitors to the exhibition encounter, and they look as if they have accidentally lost their way to some secret caravansary in Lower Manhattan.
H.C. Westermann’s 1963 “The Big Change” is a meticulously crafted wooden sculpture that seems to show a knot tied in a thick, smoothly polished rope of plywood. It is an impossible object, rendered with the realistic rigor of the original surrealists.
Both these works, which come at surrealism from very different directions, feel at least as much about form as subject matter. One admires their craftsmanship, the ability to render wood into something sinuous, the psychological observation that makes fake camels feel like a real, living presence.
These are substantial, engaging, compelling works, but they don’t feel particularly connected to the longer history of surrealism and its origins in violence, dreams and desire. “Sixties Surreal” is an interesting idea, but the exhibition might better have been called “14 years of art that doesn’t fit in any of the usual buckets.”
Sixties Surreal At the Whitney Museum of American Art through Jan. 19. www.whitney.org.
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