Why Sixties Surreal at the Whitney is not Surrealism

John Outterbridge, No Time for Jivin', 1969, From the Containment Series Assemblage, 56 x 60 in. (142.2 x 152.4 cm), Mills College Art Museum, Northeastern University, Oakland; museum purchase, Susan L. Mills Fund. Photo by Mark Bloch.

By MARK BLOCH, October 2025, There are a few shows in New York that point to Surrealism at the present moment. There is the magnificent Man Ray show at the Met. For fans, it exudes Surrealist purity, thankfully. Then there is the large—I mean really, really large—photograph of Andrè Breton, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington and Marcel Duchamp at the Morris Hirshfield show at Ricco-Maresca which specializes in self-taught artists. The photo links the giant photo blow-up to a beautiful Hirshfield painting across the room of a nude surrounded by an odd folk art curtain. Finally there is this Sixties Surreal show at the Whitney which, to me, is only marginally Surrealist. Some works upstairs at the Whitney's Shifting Landscapes show by Carolina Caycedo (b. 1978) and Dalton Gata (b. 1977) screamed more what I love about Surrealism than the 60s show did. Gordon Matta-Clark, the son of an actual (Chilean) Surrealist, Matta, is seen crawling around in a tree in a film projected near a bunch of unrelated fake tree stumps in two installations in that show. Together all these images and others embody something a New York Times article said about Dada and Surrealism: “irrational juxtapositions and the unconscious mind were the wellspring of art.” That is what I have always loved about Breton’s movement—non-sequiturs and plain nonsense—different from the ordinary. But it requires a certain kind of nonsense and certain kind of not ordinary. Not just anything will do. Even Dada original Tristan Tzara was quoted singing the praises for Man Ray’s creations in the article about the Rayograms at the Met: “Objects that dream and talk in their sleep.” One of the great writers on surrealism, the wonderful Mary Ann Caws, has insisted that, among other things, Surrealism was different from but always necessarily “absorbing the energy of Dada,”  its immediate predecessor. 

Robert Crumb,  Burned Out, cover of the “East Village Other” 5, no. 10, 1970, Ink on paper, 16 x 10 in. (40.6 x 25.4 cm,  Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles. Photo by Mark Bloch.

The recitations and incantations heard on TV prescription drug commercials of possible side effects that viewers should be aware of have become a single never-ending poem to us that would make Antonin Artaud jealous, a litany of loss capable of decimating human bodies at much greater levels than anything Dante or Hieronymous Bosch could have imagined. Meanwhile a King Ubu-like imbecile trudges amongst us, dominating real life like a triumphant, treacherous George Grosz painting come to life. Then there is the endless Gaza Guernica we must endure daily, reducing our hopeful hearts to sorrowful pulp followed by an endless normalizing parade of smiles on news programs between words from their sponsor that cannot disguise our collective filthy underbelly of calamity that pierces and squeezes the ozone layer of our souls. But not to worry, other than that, everything is fine. Not only does it happen daily but it’s unfolded for some 70 years with increasing magnitude and we are intimately used to it. 

T.C. Cannon, “Andrew Myrick - Let Em Eat Grass”, 1970, Acrylic on canvas, 46 x 40 in. (116.8 x 101.6 cm), United States Department of the Interior, Indian Arts and Crafts Board, Southern Plains Indian Museum, Anadarko, Oklahoma. Photo by Mark Bloch.

So when the Sixties Surreal exhibit wall text at the Whitney quotes John Ashbery: “We all grew up Surreal without even being aware of it,” and cites surreality as “among the most important forces shaping… the United States,” it represents not just a significant understatement, but a giant mandatory bite out of an unidentifiable maggot-infested Surrealist fruit we can only call life in this ingrown toenail of an era we call postmodernism—for lack of better language.

H.C. Westermann, Memorial to the Idea of Man If He Was an Idea, 1958 Pine, bottle caps, cast-tin toys, glass, metal, brass, ebony, and enamel, 56 1/2 x 38 x 14 1/4 in. (143.5 x 96.5 x 36.2 cm), The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Susan and Lewis Manilow Collection of Chicago Artists. Photo by Mark Bloch.

The “psychosexual, fantastical, spiritual, strange, and revolutionary qualities” of Surrealism was proclaimed by its creators as a way to “explore dreams and the unconscious,” while its fans are now bragging it “had influenced everything from film and dance to design, fashion, and advertising.” But given the totality of the subsequent malaise, already in progress, is this exhibition, singling out a prescient art movement against the swinging psychedelic sixties, the best way to cure what ailed us then and what tortures us even more today?

H.C. Westermann, The Plush, 1963-64, Cotton pile shag carpet with latex backing, cast iron, paint, wood, and metal casters, 59 × 29 × 21 in. (149.8 × 73.7 × 53.3 cm), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Corcoran Collection (gift of Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr.. Photo by Mark Bloch.

In retrospect, it seems the Surrealists were preparing us for mysterious quotidian horrors now commonplace. More wall text further reminds us that the 1960s were about “challenging the status quo,” citing “racial segregation, and the under-recognition of women” as forces to oppose with progress to herald, presumably. And they are. But I always saw Surrealism’s “psychosexual, fantastical, spiritual, strange, and revolutionary qualities” as ways to oppose more than just particular injustices but opposing rather the all-encompassing totality of tedium that began hypnotizing us since around the time Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound merged with Salvador Dali’s fantastic and nightmarish visions and Surrealism went mainstream. But since then we have basked in cringe-y episodes of Mad Men and The Morning Show not to mention MSNBC that provided actual insights into societal programming that we caught while enthusiastically numbing ourselves out.

 Nancy Graves, Camel VI, 1968–1969, Wood, steel, burlap, polyurethane, animal skin, wax, and oil paint, Approximately 90 x 144 x 47 5/8 in. (228.6 x 365.8 x 121.9 cm), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo by Mark Bloch.

We have all become sophisticated connoisseurs of what is described in yet more wall text: “found objects—often gathered from the streets and flea markets.” Um, and the media. We now are fluent in mashups of all kinds—physical and cerebral “founds,” as Bern Porter called them, in the 1960s— alike. Our culture has made us experts of the combinatory. Yes, “collage was commonplace” for the Surrealists following Cubism and back to that gasp-inducing Cezanne, who chopped the world up and pasted it back together, paving the way for 1960s jingles, sound bites and the resulting “short attention span theatre” that led us to our “scratch-your-manifesto-on-a-bullet,” speed-metal True Crime present: non-stop assaults on the senses that would offend even Arthur Rimbaud, our patron saint of synapse derangement. We even have a word for it: we now call anything decadent or over-the-top porn, a word seemingly created to transcend the sexual.

Vija Celmins, House #1, 1965, Oil on wood, fur, and plastic House, 7 1/2 x 6 1/2 x 10 in. (19.1 x 16.5 x 25.4 cm); roof, 2 1/4 x 7 3/8 x 10 1⁄2 in. (5.7 x 18.7 x 26.7 cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of Edward R. Broida. Photo by Mark Bloch.

This exhibition includes works from 1958 to 1972. The Surrealists’ had no idea what would follow their nod, in polite society, to the cute virtues of “erotic art” and other Surrealist recommendations. Even as they included a good number of Surrealist sisters in their ranks, the largely male Surrealists were accused of objectification for not including them in their group photos. Deborah Solomon in her Times review of this show also pointed out their professorial advertising exec-like visages in these buttoned up woman-less portraits. (A couple do include Peggy Guggenheim.)

 Karl Wirsum, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, 1968, Acrylic on canvas, 48 × 36 in. (121.9 × 91.4 cm), The Art Institute of Chicago; Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize Fund. Photo by Mark Bloch.

Going deeper reveals more wall text reminding us that in 1966 curator Gene Swenson organized The Other Tradition, an unusual exhibition by an unusual man in Philadelphia that “might be said to objectify experience, to turn feelings into things so that we can deal with them.” Or I'd say more correctly, “sell them”—if we are honest about what happened in the ensuing decades during which Swenson was forgotten. We are also informed that two other shows, Eccentric Abstraction in New York and Funk in Berkeley, California also attempted to readjust culture with varying degrees of success. Not mentioned is the elephant celebes in the room, New Forms-New Media at the Martha Jackson Gallery by the American art dealer and collector who exhibited the art and artists that became Pop. It was that show that projected a now-familiar visual language into our late capitalist future, mostly not art that was “rigorously abstract” that “retained a sensuous quality” like Eccentric Abstraction or Funk art’s “guts, fingers, and anthropomorphic forms” to familiarize us with “the anxieties and the ecstasies of our physical being.” Because of or despite these shows, many artists in the 1960s presented “everyday American life as being off kilter, uncanny, or unexpected—in other words, surreal.” No surprise there. But yes, maybe it was surprising that  “the artist and filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek even suggested ‘the Social Surreal’ as the title for a 1967 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, ultimately called New Documents, of young photographers who took (a) new documentary approach.” The 60s were a time of great upheaval in art and in culture and we all deserve to examine the ensuing nuances more closely. Surely reducing it all down to a single word like “hippie” cannot do that job yet that is precisely what we have collectively done in our culture’s subsequent trance state. No wonder mistakes keep repeating. So while this is not the end-all and be-all, it is a chance to reflect.

 Jim Nutt, Running Wild, 1969-1970, Acrylic on plexiglas and enamel on wood frame 46 x 43 1/2 in. (116.8 x 110.5 cm), Collection of Lawrence and Evelyn Aronson. Photo by Mark Bloch.

So, in summary, this is a terrific show but I would not call it Surrealism. Yes, it might serve as a beginning for investigating Surrealism’s impact on the sixties and that is what the curators seem concerned with, so Hallelujah. That is a good inclination and they hit some of the key points but more shows would be necessary to truly get a complete picture of the interesting question of where Surrealism and the Sixties did actually collide. But this is just a beginning. Where are the playful visual-text hybrids of 1960s vintage Ray Johnson, who often actually called himself a Surrealist? Where are the distorted cartoon figures of Bill Copley, a direct link to the Surrealist legacy? Where are the fantastic objects of May Wilson, Mary Baumeister and Sari Dienes, three underrated female artists that this show seems made for? And though there are many females here, what about Charlotte Moorman and her entire legacy—not of feminism, but of time-based art? Where is Fluxus in this overlap story? The layering of Surrealism with its direct continuation in Happenings and Performance Art and Events is implied here and there almost nowhere to be seen. Shigeko Kubota provides a bow to Video Art but her husband, Nam June Paik is missing, as are his Fluxus contemporaries who directly inherited the Surrealist mantle of surprising art, if nothing else.

Paul Thek, Untitled, 1966, From the series Technological Reliquaries, Wax, paint, polymer resin, nylon monofilament, wire, plaster, plywood, melamine laminate, rhodium-plated bronze, and acrylic, 14 × 15 1/16 × 7 1/2in. (35.6 × 38.3 × 19.1 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee. Photo by Mark Bloch.

Duchamp, Richard Huelsenbeck and Hans Richter and yes, Matta (Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren), provided continuity from Dada to Surrealism to Happenings which they attended. Joseph Cornell and John Cage, later than the Surrealists but before the 60s, interacted with the 60s artists too, each in their own way. But not in this show. It’s just one of many expectations I had and not the end of the world that a more literal version of Surrealism might have been provided.

Kay Brown, The Devil and His Game, 1970, Collaged paper and mixed media on canvas 48 x 36 in. (121.9 x 91.4 cm), Collection of Tina and Larry Jones. Photo by Mark Bloch.

Yes, Happenings by a new American generation of avant-garde artists were birthed out of earlier Surrealist and Dadaist theatrical practices and a few Surrealists, then older, attended them. While Yves Klein and Daniel Spoerri were emerging in Europe, Breton, Ernst, and Dalí were still active but fading out in New York, having influenced the Abstract Expressionists and later Allan Kaprow, the Happenings originator, who focused on chance, irrationality, and the blurring of art and life. Rauschenberg, Johns and Ray Johnson had also absorbed it—slightly before Kaprow. The experimental composer Cage and others shepherded those ideas at Black Mountain College after WWII and at The New School in the late 50s.

Wally Hedrick, HERMETIC IMAGE, 1961, Oil on canvas, 84 x 60 in. (213.36 x 152.4 cm), Mills College Art Museum, Northeastern University, Oakland; museum purchase. Photo by Mark Bloch.

Spirituality and mysticism eventually broke through at Black Mountain as well as around Columbia University and in California via the Beat generation. I wrote about Surrealist Kurt Seligmann's interest in magic late last year, the Surrealist Centennial, here. Carl Jung comes to mind and Jung reminds us of Freud, who was still alive when Surrealism was coined.

Meanwhile, if the first wave of feminism was Seneca Falls in 1848 and in the mid-90s the third wave, the post modern wave, the push-up bra wave, the riot grrrrls wave, the Camile Paglia wave, rocked our world, then the second wave lasted from the 60s to the 90s. The ERA wave, the New Left wave, the National Organization of Women wave, the Ms. Magazine wave, the Miss America protests of 1968-69 wave, the Mary Tyler Moore wave, for that matter. My mother was in that wave I am proud to say. And I am still in that wave despite constant warnings of toxic masculinity that lingers around us like Duchampian cigar smoke. The second wave never ended, did not disappear, but just blended into academia and combined itself with other stuff. Everything got mashed up between the 60s and now. And that might even be a good thing if the results weren’t so damn bad sometimes. 

Carolee Schneemann, Body Collage, 1967 16 mm film transferred to video, black and white, silent; 3:30 min Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from Randy Sifka, 2009.127. Courtesy of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York. Photo by Mark Bloch.

It is a good show. A fine show. A fun show. The three most promising aspects of it are: 1) the women artists, here in abundance, 2) assemblage, of which there are many nice examples, especially from California. And finally, 3) the almost Surrealist but certainly Surrealism-influenced works of the Hairy Who-Chicago Imagist continuum, including HC Westermann, Peter Saul and many other inclusions, who, even if they are not from the Midwest or that continuum, look good here.

But pondering collages, Kienholz and the mystical, where is the art of Robert Delford Brown and George Herms for that matter? Where are Rauschenberg’s Combines, a kind of missing link? Jasper Johns flag painting and an Andy Warhol Marilyn were thrown in as afterthoughts according to Ms. Solomon but the direct link to the Combines would be a must for me in any Surrealist or Sixties or Surrealist-Sixties show. By the way, Carolee Schneemann made gorgeous assemblages very much in the spirit of the R.R. Combines but, alas, those also were not included here. Instead a very nice black and white film by her was, which brings us to another idea: that the Sixties were a sexy time and Surrealism was a sexy art form but sadly, this show is not particularly erotic. Carolee’s video is and few of the other works are but generally, not so much.

Kiki Kogelnik’s Gee Baby - I'm Sorry from 1965 is and Christina Ramberg’s Shadow Panel from 1972 is and not just because they are made by women. I dare say that my love of Communication Art also forces me to include Robert Arneson’s Call Me Lover, a glazed ceramic from 1965 with erotic content. Of course, Niki de Saint Phalle is a welcome addition to any show and seeing her hearkens back to the Martha Jackson show that brings us not only to Pop but the similar New Realist movement that emerged simultaneously in Europe. 


Roger Brown, Untitled (Movie house with nude female), 1968 Oil on canvas, 24 3/4 x 24 5/8 x 1 3/4 in. (62.9 x 62.5 x 4.4 cm) John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; gift of the Kohler Foundation, Inc.. Photo by Mark Bloch.

Until I saw Roger Brown’s oil on canvas, Untitled (Movie house with nude female), from 1968, I was surprised by the fact that there were no references to Marcel Duchamp's last work, Étant donnés, revealed upon his death in 1968 in which viewers must peer through two peepholes in a wooden door to see something like what Brown’s work coincidentally and suggestively suggested. Duchamp had constructed it secretly between 1946 and 1966 and then arranged with Bill Copley for the naked female figure lying on a bed of twigs in a painted landscape (by the way, with advice and assistance from Dalì) with a waterfall and a gas lamp to be given a home in the Philadelphia Museum with related sculptural pieces. To be fair, it did not cause its stir in the art world until artists started riffing on it in the early 70s, but once they did,  it never stopped.

Bruce Nauman Mold for a Modernized Slant Step, 1966, Plaster, 18 1/4 x 14 1/2 x 13 1/8 in. (46.4 x 36.8 x 33.3 cm) The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Gerald S. Elliott Collection. Photo by Mark Bloch.

Speaking of artist riffing in the 70s, kudos to the curators for including Bruce Naumann’s, yes, surrealistic take on the Slant Step. A legend like the Slant Step provides the uncanny, other-wordly presence I would have expected here. A Paul Thek piece in a plexiglas box for me was one work that reached Surrealism’s high bar. An S and M contribution by Nancy Grossman and more than a handful of Diane Arbus pop culture-related photos were also surprising in this context and emitted traces of new meaning under the Surrealist gaze. 

Wallace Berman, Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, 1964 Collage, 44 1/2 x 32 1/4 x 2 in. (113 x 81.9 x 5.1 cm) Collection of David Yorkin and Alix Madigan. Photo by Mark Bloch.

Ditto for the many female artists in this show: Nancy Graves, Faith Ringold, Martha Rossler, Judy Chicago, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Semmel, Lee Friedlander, Barbara Hammer, Anita Steckkle, Nancy Spero, Suzanne Jackson, Sue Ellen Rocca, Betty Saar, Jay De Feo, and Martha Edelheight. Of 111 artists in the show, 47 are women. Vija Celmins, Lee Bontecou, Hannah Wilke, and Eva Hess in particular evoked the effects of Surrealism and I presume the previously mentioned Eccentric Abstraction show, which was before my time, but I suspect it tipped things in the sublime direction these women take us.

Roy De Forest, Drifting Down the Mississippi, 1959, Acrylic, enamel, string, and wood on wood, 55 1/2 x 37 1/2 x 5 in. (140.97 x 95.25 x 12.7 cm) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; gift of Kathan Brown. Photo by Mark Bloch.

The previously mentioned writer Mary Ann Caws’ work has always featured overlooked female Surrealists, providing widened vistas of the movement. In her work The Milk Bowl of Feathers, she includes Mina Loy, Alice Rahon, and Kay Sage. I had always been similarly entranced by Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, Meret Oppenheim, and Valentine Hugo, Leonor Fini and even Peggy Guggenheim and Katherine Dreier, not artists but promoters. Also the dada Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. No, I do not think she created M.D.’s Fountain but she was a sublime artist and personality. P.S. Last year Cheri Gaulke’s film about Gloria Feman Orenstein, exploring the world of female Surrealists, called Gloria’s Call caught my attention. It is here. 

Nancy Grossman, Head, 1968, Wood, leather, metal zippers, paint, and metal nails, 16 1/4 × 6 5/8 × 8 15/16 in. (41.3 × 16.8 × 22.7 cm) overall, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Howard and Jean Lipman Foundation, Inc.. Photo by Mark Bloch.

It was normal for the Surrealist movement to cause problems and disturb viewers, to put observers on edge instead of bringing comfort. Surrealism was never supposed to be easy. It blurs lines between the visual and the verbal. Caws welcomed “whatever marvelous object we might come across” in the world. This requires an abandonment of “the already thought” and “the already lived” world of our preconceived notions and experiences and “the shock on the new” as Robert Hughes put it on mainstream TV (the ever-Commie offender and always biased—not—PBS) a few decades ago already. 

Edward Kienholz, John Doe, 1959, Oil, metallic paint, resin, plaster, and graphite on mannequin parts with wood, metal, plastic, paper, rubber, and stroller
39 1/2 × 19 × 31 1/4 in. (100.3 × 48.3 × 79.4 cm) The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo by Mark Bloch.

It was good to see once controversial art not as scandal but as Surrealistic culture. I enjoyed clips of under-screened movies by Ken Jacobs, Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith (with a piece of scotch tape stuck in the gate as a selling point) and Jordan Belson, and more filmmakers could have been incuded. Conversely, it was refreshing to see a Bruce Connors assemblage, not a movie, and Wallace Berman's Papa's got a brand new bag and Karl Wirsum's Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, to remind of us that the Sixties were about music that was delivered in packaging that transformed a wave form to a product to an idea and then back to a feeling. The work of TC Cannon’s and Fritz Scholder, two Native American artists, look powerful in the Surrealist glow. Timothy Washington's (from 1970) and other's Vietnam images bring us down and Peter Saul’s and other's super (an early 70s word that I love-hate, especially when used by Europeans) day glow fiber tip pen on canvas light us up. Franklin Williams’ crocheted thread and yarn on canvas stuffed with cotton batting surprised me and a (Elaine) Sturtevant redo, a 1966 Duchamp image from a Man Ray portrait revisited, confused and obfuscated. Finally, an unexpected Robert Smithson painting took up baffled bandwidth in my very dirty entropy-destined mind. 

Marisol, Women and Dog, 1963-1964, Wood, plaster, synthetic polymer, and taxidermic dog head, 73 9/16 × 76 5/8 × 26 3/4in. (186.8 × 194.6 × 67.9 cm) overall, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo by Mark Bloch.

 How would we know if this show were Surrealist? We’d look for art that presents illogical scenes, unexpected dreamlike juxtapositions of unrelated objects, bizarre distorted perspectives and scale, nightmarish imagery or impossible actions aimed at revealing the unconscious mind, not rational thought.  

Robert Smithson, Green Chimera with Stigmata, 1961 Oil on canvas, 47 3/4 x 57 in. (121.2 x 144.7 cm) Collection of Joe Bradley. Photo by Mark Bloch.

While Surrealism is indeed rooted in the internal and philosophical explorations of the mind's hidden workings, the psychedelic art of the 60s is influenced by altered states of consciousness, often employing overwhelming, bright, saturated, fractal-like designs and swirling patterns, transforming objects and figures that may be elongated or fluid in appearance. The go beyond reality via drug-induced experiences while Surrealism simply saw the unsettling in life as it already was or was in dreams or liminal states. It is a subtle but important distinction at the core. Does it matter. Are the effects different? I'd say yes. Does it make sense to speculate that most psychedelic art is probably surreal, but not all surreal art is psychedelic?


Betye Saar, Ten Mojo Secrets, 1972, From the series Mojo, c. 1970-1974, Leather, fur, yarn, fabric, printed paper, photographs, acrylic paint, plastic bones, poker chips, and chutney tin lid, 40 x 20 x 2 in. (101.6 x 50.8 x 5.08 cm), Collection of Kyle Kepcke. Photo by Mark Bloch. 

An example of the uncanny is provided in Surreal Sixties by the comparison of the effect of three works by HC Westermann, each very different. A humanoid one is fun and appeals to my love of whimsy and Westermann in general but it is The Plush, my least favorite, that I would have to admit is probably the most surreal. It made me stop in my tracks, admiring its almost Minimalist defiance, but also with an inane aura like one of those carpeted towers people buy or build for their cats to scratch up. Its oddness gave me the creeps and so I would call my encounter with it a quirky Surrealist moment while the other two Westermanns—delightful and charming—particularly my favorite, the cartoony, humanoid one—I would not consider strictly Surrealist.


Yayoi Kusama, Accumulation, c. 1963, Sewn and stuffed fabric, wood chair frame, and paint 34 3/8 × 38 3/8 × 36 3/8 in. (87.2 × 98.9 × 92.2 cm) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo by Mark Bloch.

There is a kind of forced Surrealism, always an option, that pushes beyond the uncanny into obviousness, campiness or affectation. If one tries too hard to create a psychological phenomenon using visuals it can quickly look as silly as a VW van covered with flowers and, as we know, the second half of the 60s and the entire decade of the 70s went that way, despite the seriousness, the passion, the earnestness, and much eye-opening intelligence that was in the air. It was a profound time but also fun and cute until it all seemed to backfire which is not only what happened at Altamont and Kent State and a thousand other bad trips but what probably happened with The Exorcist too, as entertaining as it was. And The Fearless Vampire Killers starring Sharon Tate. And Midnight Cowboy and even Bruce Connor’s Rat Bastard Protective Association. And the Iranian hostage crisis soon made Jimmy Carter standing beside the thermostat in a sweater look foolish and brought us Ronald Reagan. And I don’t know what is relevant or what the answers are but I do know that was not Surrealism and this show is not Surrealism but it is worth seeing and and it is worth contemplating what we might do in the Art Worlds at this critical moment. Despite wishful thinking, the 1960s are still not over. A few words beside hippie and psychedelic might still need to be coined. The curators of this show picked good art but they might have tried just a little too hard to make it all fit philosophically. As have I. But the Surrealist warning and the Sixties dream continue.WM

Eva Hesse, C-Clamp Blues, 1965, Paint, metal, found objects, unknown modeling compound, particleboard, and wood, 25 5/8 x 21 5/8 x 1 1/2 in. (65.1 x 54.9 x 3.8 cm.) Collection of Gail and Tony Ganz. Photo by Mark Bloch.