“Sixties Surreal,” a just-opened exhibition at the Whitney Museum, offers some 150 works (paintings, sculptures, photographs, illustrations, films, collages, assemblages, an album cover, a newspaper cover, a fake toilet, an I’m-not-sure-what-you’d-call-it) created by 111 artists in the 1960s. Most of them were not the art stars of the decade, but the show’s curators argue that they more directly reflected the times: “These artists from diverse backgrounds took license from the wildness of the Surrealist imagination to express the psychosexual, fantastical, spiritual, strange,and revolutionary qualities of their time.”

Below, a sampling 

One can argue that this toilet-as-art-work is directly descended from the Surrealist art movement, given Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” a 1917 urinal presented as a readymade sculpture. But that would show an ignorance of art history, because Duchamp was a leader of the Dada art movement, which was a forerunner of Surrealism, which was led in Paris in the 1920s by artists like Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali. (There are no works by Duchamp, Magritte and Dali in “Sixties Surreal,” although there is a photograph by Sturtevant called “Duchamp Man Ray” that wasn’t look to be of either of them.)

“Mechanical and stifled giggling” emanates from the piece.

From the audio guide: “In this sculpture, Jimenez combines a portrait of his then-wife with a television screen, a comment on the way 1960s mass media pushed ideals of feminine beauty into Americans’ homes.”

Marisol
Women and Dog, 1963–64
Wood, plaster, synthetic polymer, and taxidermic dog head

From the audio guide: “The human figures consist of carved heads on blocky rectangular bodies standing on carved legs that suggest both human anatomy and handcrafted furniture…A photograph of the artist is applied directly onto the face of the figure with the pink blouse.:

From the wall label: “Created for the cover of the counterculture newspaper
The East Village Other (1965–72), the flaming, eye-
popping, and tongue-wrenching figure of Burned Out
suggests a character whose internal panic is mirrored by
an alarming physical transformation. Crumb describes
this drawing as “the end of the 1960s” and a visual
representation of a time when the psychedelic drug use
and free love of the decade’s counterculture movement
crashed into the new reality of an increasingly
conservative political environment. As a key figure in the
underground comics movement of the late 1960s,
Crumb’s humorous—and often raunchily stylized—
characters recognized the inscrutability of the world”

From the wall label: “Karl Wirsum used the clean style of commercial
graphics and the abstracted form of a dissected frog to
paint the singer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, who used this
painting as the cover for his album Because Is In Your
Mind (1970). Best known for his 1956 song “I Put a Spell
on You” and his sensational live performances, Hawkins
appears here in full song, raining amoeba-shaped
sweat down on a man wearing “armpit rubber,” like old-
fashioned galoshes, to keep the moisture at bay…”

Harold Stevenson: The New Adam, 1962
The actor Sal Mineo was the model for this painting.
From the wall label: “In this nine-panel, photorealistic painting, The New Adam, Harold Stevenson reimagines Michelangelo’s famous Sistine Chapel fresco of Adam extending his finger toward the hand of God by redirecting the subject’s gesture inward. Stevenson felt that advertising
had reduced the human form to a prop for displaying clothes or selling appliances. He wanted to refocus the eye on the enormous significance of the body and the viewer’s gaze. Through the warm glow that suffuses this image, Stevenson sought to evoke his belief in the human soul within each body.”

Martha Edelheit, Flesh Wall with Table 1965

Edelheit, at 94, is making her debut at the Whitney. Almost half of the artists in the exhibition are women (though most of them are dead.)

From the wall label: “Painted entirely from
the artist’s imagination, this colorful tangle of women’s
bodies seems unselfconscious and unbothered by
the male gaze… Seen from behind in a rectangle of
black and gray, Edelheit appears intent upon painting
herself into this brighter, freer world”

Jae Jarrell
Ebony Family, c. 1968
Velvet dress with velvet collage

From wall label: “Sculptor, painter, and self-taught fashion designer
Jae Jarrell has been creating one-of-a-kind, wearable
works that celebrate Black culture and family life
since the late 1950s. As a co-founder of the Black Arts
Movement’s Chicago-based collective AfriCOBRA
(founded 1968), she worked to promote accessible art
experiences and cultural pride within Black communities.
Drawing upon the group’s signature Coolade colors
(a play on the fruit-flavored drink mix Kool-Aid), using
materials typically associated with “women’s work,”
and taking inspiration from African designs, Jarrell
imagined a revolutionary aesthetic carried on the body
and grounded in joy and family.”

Linda Lomahaftewa
Untitled Woman’s Faces, 1965–71
Oil on canvas

From wall label: “Untitled Woman’s Faces depicts two figures as integral
parts of a geometric landscape. The curved lines that
define one woman’s hair may also be read as a flowing
river, while the stripes running across the other’s face
and chest resemble furrows of freshly seeded soil. Linda
Lomahaftewa sought to honor her Hopi and Choctaw
culture through artmaking, while also developing a personal
visual language that incorporated the psychedelic
aesthetics of California’s Bay Area, where Lomahaftewa
was studying painting at the time.”

Nancy Graves
Camel VI, 1968–69, Camel VII, 1968–69, Camel VIII, 1968–69
Wood, steel, burlap, polyurethane, animal skin, wax, and oil paint

These camels are what first greet you when you first enter the fifth floor of the Whitney, which is the site of “Sixties Surreal”

From the wall label:
“Camels shouldn’t exist,” the artist Nancy Graves once
remarked. “They have flesh on their hooves, four
stomachs, and a dislocated jaw. Yet, with all of the
illogical form, the camel still functions.” Graves first
encountered taxidermic camels at the natural history
museum where her father worked, and she later
traveled to North Africa to study and film its dromedary
herds. Initially exhibited in Graves’s 1969 solo show at
the Whitney Museum of American Art’s former uptown
building, the three camels in this gallery are not true
taxidermy but a patchwork of natural and synthetic
materials. They serve as a reminder that reality is
strange and that even what is real might not be quite what it seems.”