The Surreal Sixties —

I’m beginning to feel bad—the Whitney has become my institutional whipping boy; it seems to have an ingrained penchant for generating good curatorial ideas that, in the end, it proves to have misunderstood, or lacks the resources to fulfill. The press material for "Sixties Surreal" makes a forceful claim: the exhibition aims to supplement the dominant narrative of late modernism by offering a fresh perspective on “the long sixties”—the period spanning 1958 to 1974. The era is defined by disorientation, abjection, social protest, irrationality, and nontraditional spirituality. To this end, the artist roster is notably weighted toward practitioners from the Midwest—especially Chicago—and California; as such, it foregrounds these regional perspectives. Yet, many of the best-known artists also overlap with the  canonical history.

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For clarity, the “surreal” in the title does not refer to Surrealism proper. Instead, the curators use it to describe how these artists responded to  rapid political, social, and technological change by seeking to connect art to an increasingly dreamlike or unreal lived reality. This premise is not wholly original—art historians and critics have long explored the period’s radical pluralism and have attempted to integrate it into the standard art history. Accordingly, the curatorial team—Dan Nadel, Laura Phipps, Scott Rothkopf, Elisabeth Sussman, Kelly Long, and Rowan Diaz-Toth—seemingly set themselves a thankless task.

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Rather than re-staging the formative exhibitions—Funk (1967), Hairy Who (1966), Nuclear Vision (1967), and Human Concern/Personal Torment (1969)—that served as their source materials, the curators opted for the more standard strategy of establishing a thematic structure of their own. If I’m not mistaken, this approach mirrors art historians’ standard methodology of imposing a stable exclusionary interpretative framework onto a period whose nature was inherently contradictory and recursive. The show is organized around five intersecting themes: the mutation and Americanization of Surrealism; the psychosexual as both liberation and trauma; the fantastical as escape and confrontation; revolutionary politics in all their tragic intensity; and a spirituality or mysticism unbound by doctrine. What they have  foregone any attempt to link them together.

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Nowhere in the exhibition are archival materials available to contextualize the works on view—outside of the standard wall labels, which are badly placed and confusing. This absence obscures the era’s capriciousness and severs the art and artists from the insurgent energies and lived experiences from which they were originally forged. It is not merely an oversight but signals the curators’ broader reluctance to acknowledge the most generative sources of the era’s creative unruliness and experiment. Especially striking is that Beat culture—arguably the most authentically surreal and disruptive force shaping American daily life—receives little to no representation. Despite its profound influence on the period’s spirit, aesthetic experimentation, and opposition to cultural norms, Beat culture is overlooked. Recall Maynard G. Krebs on TV’s The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959–63), whose embrace of beatnik style both turned rebellion into a household joke and signaled the growing impact of alternative culture on postwar American society. Also missing are posters and other ephemera that would provide a visual record of the activism, social critique, and alternative politics of groups like the Yippies, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, and Redstockings within the 1960s counterculture. Equally conspicuous is the absence of Post-Minimalism, whose materially experimental, process-oriented practices—including those of Eva Hesse, Lynda Benglis, Alan Saret, Barry Le Va, Bill Bollinger, and others—defined much of the late 1960s and early 1970s.