We all know the familiar story of art in the 1960s \u2013 pop art, conceptualism and minimalism ruled the decade, dominated by the likes of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Sol LeWitt, and Jasper Johns. Bringing a welcome dose of counter-narrative to this calcified story, the Whitney\u2019s bold new show Sixties Surreal, aims to introduce a new cohort of 60s artists who channeled the chaotic id of the decade, but only got a fraction of the acclaim.<\/p>\n
\u201cA generation of artists who were young in the 60s increasingly looked for artistic vocabularies that they could use to explore the weird and wild time they were living in,\u201d said show curator Scott Rothkopf, who has longed to curate this exact show since his student days in the 1990s. \u201cThe 60s was a time of so much change \u2013 the fear of the atom bomb, multiple sexual revolutions, the civil rights movement, drug culture. These days felt to many young people like surreal days.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sixties Surreal is ambitious, collecting the work of a cool 111 artists, many of whom simply didn\u2019t fit into any of the dominant narratives governing the 60s art world, and others who worked far from the established centers of tastemaking. It\u2019s a loud, in-your-face experience with screaming colors, laugh-out-loud humor, bodies galore, and even three full-size camels made of wood, steel and burlap.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you walk off the elevator, you immediately find yourself in a room with these camels, which are very realistic,\u201d said Rothkopf. \u201cIt becomes this surreal encounter.\u201d<\/p>\n
The show is also replete with marginalized demographics that, even in the freewheeling 60s, were sidelined against the largely white male headliners of the era. That includes a selection from Martha Edelheit\u2019s swirling, psychedelic chorus of women\u2019s bodies Flesh Wall and Joan Semmel\u2019s impressionistic and abstractly erotic untitled collage.<\/p>\n
Barbara Hammer \u2013 Schizy, 1968. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist<\/p>\n
\u201cWomen artists are such a huge protagonist in this story, because they were looking for new ways to explore the life that they were living and throw off dominant ideologies,\u201d said Rothkopf. \u201cThat\u2019s also why you\u2019ll find lots of queer artists and artists of color in this show. They were looking for these liberatory impulses.\u201d<\/p>\n
The show collects two snaps by feminist photographer and director Barbara Hammer, as well as her first film Schizy, about which she has said: \u201c[It] was about learning how to see double. What was the reality I saw? And what was expected of me? And how did other people see me. So, schizophrenic.\u201d Shooting through bifocal lenses, Hammer offered a deeply personal sense of her fractured experience as a woman in the 60s, launching a wildly successful career in film, albeit one that did not receive due recognition until decades later.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are works of sexual exploration and discovery,\u201d said Rothkopf. \u201cYou see women taking control of their depiction of their own bodies rather than being viewed by male artists. It offered them a possibility to imagine these spaces of liberation and self-determination.\u201d<\/p>\n