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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This is a working drawing for Ed Ruscha's photograph Surrealism Soaped and Scrubbed (1966), which was on the cover of the September 1966 issue of the magazine Artforum (1962– ). This special issue included essays on Surrealism from historical, architectural, filmic, and personal perspectives, including those by critics Lucy Lippard and William Rubin. Using the pseudonym "Eddie Russia," Ruscha worked as a production designer and art director at the magazine from 1965 to 1969, a time when he was leaning into the use of typography and language in his art. This sudsing of surrealism exemplifies Ruscha's unique blend of Pop Art's lush stylization and Conceptual art's removed austerity, along with his deadpan humor.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Social Surreal

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Ed Ruscha, Surrealism, 1966

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