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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Seven women stand in a row wearing vintage swimsuits, smiling and facing forward against a plain background.

Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley juxtapose images of an idealized vision of femininity, pulled from 1960s advertisements, with unfiltered footage of their own domestic lives. This collage approach contrasts with the cool polish of Pop Art, which ignored the messy, insistent physicality of daily existence. The stacking of images in this film is echoed in the title, SCHMEERGUNTZ, which means "sandwich" in a nonsense language invented by Nelson's father. The proto-feminist vision presented here was important to Nelson and Wiley, both mothers married to fellow Northern California artists, who often felt overlooked by the art world and used their art to push against societal expectations.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

An Other Pop

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Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley, SCHMEERGUNTZ, 1965

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