Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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The artists in this gallery looked underneath the slick surfaces of consumer culture and Pop Art to expose the strange, alienating effect of the American Dream. A common object appears enormous, like Alex Hay’s paper bag. The warmth of a movie theater gives way to a sinister showing in Roger Brown’s painting. A body, as in Martha Rosler’s collages, merges with household technologies. The works on display here can be understood in terms of their destabilizing effect on the viewer. They question the reciprocal relationship between consumption and identity: a relationship that was increasingly fraught in the consumerist boom of the post-World War II era. In 1966 curator Gene Swenson organized The Other Tradition, an exhibition in Philadelphia that included many of the artists in this gallery alongside historic Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst. The works presented in The Other Tradition, Swenson proposed, “might be said to objectify experience, to turn feelings into things so thatwe can deal with them.”

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Bright red poster with green, black, and orange shapes evoking a dragon-like human figure with 'Screamin J Hawkins' written above.

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. Wirsum sought to visualize how he and his fellow audience members felt during Hawkins's performances. A member of the Chicago exhibition group the Hairy Who, Wirsum has a distinctive figurative style that combines visual motifs from across cultures in densely layered references.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

An Other Pop

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Karl Wirsum, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, 1968

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