Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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Many artists in the 1960s presented everyday American life as being off kilter, uncanny, or unexpected—in other words, surreal. This was particularly true of photographers, who increasingly found that if they looked at the world from a certain angle the disorientation of modern life became evident. The artist and filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek even suggested “the Social Surreal” as the title for a 1967 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, ultimately called New Documents, of young photographers who took this new documentary approach.

Images and videos capturing the strangeness of postwar American life became even more ubiquitous as television sets transmitted this novel visual language directly into American homes. Artists such as Lee Friedlander, Paul Thek, and Luis Jimenez were unnerved by television’s presence—the oddity of bringing this technology into a domestic space, an object that might confront you with images of Count Dracula one moment and the Vietnam War the next.

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In Dufus Mike Henderson explores the malleability of identity by performing a series of stereotypes: a weary janitor, a peace-loving hippie, a sex worker, a beatnik, a "Good-time Charlie" (a fur coat-clad, cigarette-smoking dandy), and a theatrical version of himself, an artist. Henderson shifts between these identities seamlessly but not without some torment, as evidenced by the characters' exaggerated erasure of what came before. This work, more conceptual and experimental than Henderson's "Protest Paintings" of the 1960s, points to the ever-shifting expectations of modern identity.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Social Surreal

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Mike Henderson, Dufus, 1970/73

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