\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n
\n\tWe begin on a note of \u201cAt last!\u201d 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\u2019s decades of desert-wandering are done.<\/p>\n
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\n\tIt\u2019s 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 \u201cAn Other Pop,\u201d 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\u2019s film pairs beauty pageantry and baby shit, Robert Arneson\u2019s ceramic telephone offers two genitalia for the price of one, and Martha Rosler\u2019s photomontages turn breasts and buttocks into kitchen appliances. It\u2019s Pop for people tired of Warhol\u2014slimy and pungent where Pop is hard and sterile, surreal-ish if not always Surrealist.<\/p>\n
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\n\tThe second and strongest gallery doubles down on \u201cfunk,\u201d 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\u2019s phallus-feathered chairs. The curation in this section, loose but persuasive, gives even an apparent outlier like Miyoko Ito\u2019s striped abstract oil painting a mucous glisten I wouldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tA bigger surprise in \u201cSixties Surreal\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cTelevision Analyzations\u201d paintings; a Luis Jim\u00e9nez fiberglass sculpture of a face bulging through a phosphorescent screen \u00e0 la Videodrome.<\/p>\n
\n\tAround this time in the exhibition\u2014barely halfway, mind you\u2014my feet began to hurt. Not that I have anything against a 134-work show if there is some point to develop, but \u201cSixties Surreal\u201d 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\u2019t be shown here? What wasn\u2019t surreal, somehow? Street photography? No, there\u2019s an Adger Cowans shot of three figures on the sidewalk. Street film, surely? No, behold Jack Smith\u2019s Scotch Tape (1959\u201362), here for no other reason than the title\u2019s nod to a camera accident that the curators have repackaged into an allusion to \u201cSurrealist strategies of chance.\u201d 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, \u201cI don\u2019t know why I was asked to be in it \u2026 I don\u2019t think of anything I do as surreal.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\n\tAmid the cacophony, it\u2019s a pretty paradox that some of the quieter artworks in \u201cSixties Surreal\u201d are the ones that echo longest after the show\u2019s end. A few minutes in front of Christina Ramberg\u2019s Shadow Panel, painted in (I know, I know) 1972, were enough to remind me that she was one of her era\u2019s 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\u2019s a tautness to the pose, a little erotic and a little sinister, that refuses to explain itself. Unlike so much of \u201cSixties Surreal,\u201d the image gets more, not less, shocking the longer you stare.<\/p>\n
\n\tShock is a risky tactic, then as now. If there is a final irony to the Whitney\u2019s show, it may be this: In responding to TV\u2019s prodding, too many artists wound up re-creating TV\u2019s 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. \u201cReality,\u201d the wall text says with a sigh, \u201cwas even more shocking than the nightmare Saul had conjured.\u201d 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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 20th century produced only a handful of things that are universally beloved in the 21st. One is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70732,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69,56180],"class_list":{"0":"post-70731","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz","17":"tag-whitney"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70731\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}