At Whitney, ‘Sixties Surrealism’ casts wide net, but with limited success

The 20th century produced only a handful of things that are universally loved in the 21st century. One of them is Surrealism, an art movement that any teenager can recognize. The other is the “Sixties,” a decade so mythologized that its music may be playing in your head as you read this.

So what might be wrong with “Sixties Surreality”? The Whitney Museum’s 111 artists, six curators, and crowd-pleasers are filled with loud, wild stuff—a giggly wig! Mutated pencil bird! Penis-shaped tombstone! camel! —so that each new pleasure begins to be more dazzling than the last. The fascinated gaze gave way to a glassy stare. This transformation itself may be the most intriguing aspect of the show.

We started with “Finally!” The introductory text acknowledges that the sixties were a prosperous time for American Surrealism, but a bad time for Surrealism in New York. When curators and critics didn’t ignore it entirely, they viewed the style as the mumbo-jumbo grandparent of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and other edgy avant-gardes. However, anything that has been suppressed for a long time will burst out. The camels, modestly sculpted by Nancy Graves in 1969 and later shipped to the National Gallery of Canada, stand at the entrance, announcing the end of Surrealism’s decades of desert wanderings.

It is clear that this will not be an exhibition about surrealism strictly defined, or that there will be no definition at all. None of the artists whose works hang in the first gallery, called “Another Pop,” are card-carrying members, but neither was Magritte. Instead, what they have in common is an obsession with the flashing junk of consumer culture: billboards, magazines, bland smiles, smooth curves, bright colors. Deadpan juxtapositions, showing off what advertising denies, were their weapons of choice: Gunvor Nilsson and Dorothy Wiley’s films combined beauty pageants and baby poop, Robert Arneson’s ceramic telephones offered two genitals for the price of one, and Martha Roesler’s photomontages turned breasts and buttocks into kitchen utensils. For those who were tired of Warhol, this was Pop Art—gooey, pungent, and Pop Art was cold, sterile, and if not always surrealistic.

The second and strongest gallery doubled down on “Funk,” which was the title of an influential 1967 Berkeley show in which some of the works appeared. Sculptures in wire, wood, metal, nylon, fabric and plaster are unified in a single stillness: a hanging cocoon by Louise Bourgeois; a pair of bug-like spherical pods by Michael Todd; a Green Egg by Kenneth Price; a phallic feather chair by Yayoi Kusama. The curation of this section is loose but persuasive, with even obviously outliers like Miyoko Ito’s striped abstract paintings taking on a slimy sheen that I wouldn’t find in a solo show. It’s surprising how few pieces become dated, probably because of art museums, sweet talk inclusive Also, generally keep the place cold and sanitized. Welcome to a bit of chaos.

One of the bigger surprises in “Sixties Surrealism” is that a third character joins the titular two. Television, a medium that attracts more eyeballs on any given night than an art gallery attracts in an entire year, is sometimes the villain of the show, sometimes its ally, but it’s always there. Television is exciting and exhausting. The TV shows news from Vietnam and Watts. Television makes the world feel both close and far away. Above all, television was a competitor for artists who had to beat it or imitate it, hence the wealth of works that explicitly referenced it: photographs by Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Shawn Walker; a “television analysis” painting by Paul Thek; a fiberglass sculpture by Luis Jiménez, whose face bulges out of the phosphorescent screen of a videotape.

Around this time in the show—only halfway through, mind you—my feet started to hurt. Not that I have anything against an exhibition of 134 works, if anything, but “Sixties Surrealism” seems to start from scratch on every wall. The net is cast too wide and nothing is caught. Ask yourself, what art from the sixties cannot be shown here? Somehow, what’s not surreal? Street photography? No, it’s AJ Cowans’ photo of three figures on a sidewalk. It must be a street movie, right? No, look at Jack Smith Scotch tape (1959-62), there is no other reason here than the title’s nod to a camera accident, which the curators repackaged as an allusion to “Surrealist strategies of opportunity.” Familiar with Warhol’s pop music? Also here. A Klimt-esque female nude by nonagenarian Martha Edelheit appears in a later gallery. when new york times When asked how she felt about her Whitney debut, Edelheit said: “I don’t know why I was asked to be a part of it…I don’t think anything I did was surreal.”

Amid the hubbub, it was a rather paradoxical phenomenon that some of the quieter works of art from “Sixties Surrealism” resonated longest after the exhibition ended. Minutes from Christina Ramberg Restaurant shadow panel, (I know, I know) This piece from 1972 is enough to remind me that she was one of the most underrated talents of her era. The female figure is cropped into a contoured torso and dark underwear, but the face is not visible and can almost be seen from look Magazine ad, but there’s something tense about this pose, a little erotic, a little sinister that can’t be explained. Unlike much of the “Sixties Surrealism,” the images become more shocking, not less, the longer you stare.

Shock is a dangerous tactic, then and now. If there’s a final irony to the Whitney show, it’s this: In responding to the stimulation of television, too many artists ended up reinventing its foibles, creating work that was striking but quickly faded, work that was grand but lamentable, an attempt to transcend one of the strangest eras in American history, with unsatisfactory results. Two years after Peter Saul created X-rated comics Saigon (1967), news of the My Lai massacre broke out. “Reality,” sighs the wall text, “is more shocking than the nightmares Saul conjures.” But in the long run, when isn’t it? In our age of media-numbing, bloodthirsty stupidity, which artists are up to the task of creating something of the present in a way that transcends the moment?