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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Jim Nutt used sign painting techniques to apply bold colors and lines to the back of this plexiglass work, creating a crisp, humorous composition that is at odds with the horror of the castration scene. This central image is framed by icons and words that reinforce the work's themes of violence, physical intimacy, and precarity. Nutt, who was part of the Chicago exhibition group the Hairy Who, often used the smooth curves, tightly drawn lines, and clean finishes of commercial art to render what was usually suppressed: fraught sexual encounters and Freudian ideas.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

An Other Pop

2

Jim Nutt, Running Wild, 1969–70

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