Making the '60s Weird Again

"We've 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."

"The electrifying first sight when you emerge onto the fifth floor of the Whitney declares that the museum's new show, "Sixties Surreal," 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 "more than a few museumgoers suspected that Nancy Graves' camels were part of an ingenious put-on.""

"Here, the 1960s are surprising, powerful, and all over the place. The surreal part of the show's title is a bit of a misnomer. This isn't Freud-Breton-Dalí 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."

The exhibition replaces familiar 1960s artistic vocabularies with a mad, post-minimalist openness and pluralism. Monumental works, like Nancy Graves's double-hump camels, disrupt expectations and signal an opening of orthodoxy. The presentation emphasizes visionary improvisation, erotic caricature, countercultural magic, fevered politics, and psychedelia rather than strict Freudian surrealism. Canonical figures such as Warhol and Ruscha appear alongside sidelined artists from the Chicago Imagists and others, creating striking juxtapositions. The arrangement turns received histories inside out and foregrounds half-forgotten works, generating a surprising, powerful reconsideration of the decade's artistic breadth.

Read at Vulture