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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A surreal image shows a washing machine with a human body part replacing its front panel.

Martha Rosler made these collages using imagery pulled from print advertisements and men's magazines. By merging images of women's bodies with household goods, she suggests that women's bodies are commodified, sold like appliances, and contorted to fit into the roles expected of them. Her photomontages contributed to the gathering momentum of the feminist movement throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

An Other Pop

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Martha Rosler, from the series Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain, 1966–72

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