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\n Art: Kiki Kogelnik Foundation, New York. \u00a9 Kiki Kogelnik\n <\/p>\n
We\u2019ve been swimming in the 1960s for decades, replaying the era like a classic-rock album. The artistic movements that came out of that time remain as fixed as the stars: Pop, minimalism, conceptualism, Land Art, feminism. Over the years, curators have mounted endless tributes to Warhol and his circle, Judd and his boxes, Hesse and her synthetic materials. Many of these artists are good, some great. But most of the shows border on boring.<\/p>\n
The electrifying first sight when you emerge onto the fifth floor of the Whitney declares that the museum\u2019s new show, \u201cSixties Surreal,\u201d is not the same old same old. Three enormous double-hump camels by Nancy Graves stand in the gallery. All the tired vocabularies have been thrown out, replaced by a mad, post-minimalist openness and pluralism. In 1969, when these sculptures were first displayed, Time reported that \u201cmore than a few museumgoers suspected that Nancy Graves\u2019 camels were part of an ingenious put-on.\u201d They were onto something: an opening of the orthodoxy. This blast of fresh air only intensifies as you make your way through the rest of the show.<\/p>\n
Here, the 1960s are surprising, powerful, and all over the place. The surreal part of the show\u2019s title is a bit of a misnomer. This isn\u2019t Freud-Breton-Dal\u00ed but visionary improvisation, erotic caricature, countercultural magic, fevered politics, and psychedelia. The usual suspects are here: Warhol, Ruscha, Oldenburg, and a great visionary painting by Robert Smithson. But this ends up turning the decade inside out, putting half-forgotten works and received histories cheek by jowl.<\/p>\n
Many of these artists have been sidelined. Chicago Imagists such as Barbara Rossi and Roger Brown are here; Jeremy Anderson, Joan Brown, William T. Wiley, and Mel Casas too. Karl Wirsum\u2019s retina-burning Screamin\u2019 Jay Hawkins is in the gallery following Graves\u2019s shot across the bow. Nearby sits Paul Thek\u2019s 1966 masterpiece, Untitled, an acid-colored transparent box reminiscent of Judd\u2019s, except the box is not empty: It contains what looks like a tipped-over paint can oozing sludge, or maybe it\u2019s a severed bone revealing marrow. This is less a parody of Judd than a reckoning with flesh and other grotesqueries. Judd and Warhol are so clean and repressed by comparison.<\/p>\n
Messiness is one of the themes of \u201cSixties Surreal.\u201d There are worlds built from papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9, clay, thrifted leather, and junk. Refusing sculpture\u2019s decorum, Noah Purifoy turns neighborhood rubble into Johnsian abstraction that predicts his ramshackle desert sculptures. Kiki Kogelnik paints a woman split open in electric greens and pinks, an elongated washboard descending from between her legs \u2014 part Pop joke, part feminist shriek. Martha Edelheit reimagines Gustave Courbet\u2019s studio as a pandemonium of female bodies spilling across beds and fields. Sex in this painting isn\u2019t subtext; it\u2019s out-there and wall-size eroticism. Bruce Nauman\u2019s Mold for a Modernized Slant Step looks like an object from another planet, while H.\u2009C. Westermann\u2019s immense knotted column of carved wood is an abstract middle finger. The implacable formalism of much 1960s art strikes a different note beside such pieces.<\/p>\n
Jean Conner, Peter Saul, and Mel Edwards form a jagged triangle: Conner rewires pulp into an imagined arcadia; Saul detonates the id with carnivalesque depictions of the Vietnam War; Edwards welds steel into stark memories of lynching and torture by way of Giacometti. Together, they show how the decade merged pleasure with terror. Meanwhile, Harold Stevenson\u2019s The New Adam (1962) is a 39-foot painting of bisexual heartthrob Sal Mineo, conceived as a tribute to a lover. It feels both insurrectionary and unapologetically queer, and it\u2019s still overwhelming.<\/p>\n
Together, these works demand a reevaluation not just of individual artists but of the very frame through which the 1960s has been seen. Beyond the discoveries (I\u2019d never heard of Kay Sekimachi, Michael Todd, or Franklin Williams), \u201cSixties Surreal\u201d pulls the decade out of its glass case and creates a chaos of life. The curators seem surprised at what they found; this jolt is half the pleasure. The show insists on showing how the marginalized upend the neat stories we\u2019ve been fed.<\/p>\n
This matters for the present. Purifoy\u2019s debris points straight to Theaster Gates; Kogelnik anticipates Cindy Sherman and Nicole Eisenman; Edelheit\u2019s bodies prefigure today\u2019s queer figuration. The revisions make history crackle again.<\/p>\n
There are gaps. I miss Ray Harryhausen\u2019s skeleton armies, Ed \u201cBig Daddy\u201d Roth\u2019s monster hot rods, Basil Wolverton\u2019s drooling grotesques, Al Hansen\u2019s cigarette-butt Venuses. But their absence matters less than knowing that someday they\u2019ll be included in surveys as well. Rather than embalming the decade, this show revitalizes it. \u201cSixties Surreal\u201d makes the decade weird again. In weirdness, things live.<\/p>\n
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