Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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For the historic Surrealists, working with found objects—often gathered from the streets and flea markets of Paris—was a means of challenging the primacy of reason over emotion and crafting poetic associations intended to invoke the creative power of the subconscious mind. Artists working in the 1960s relied on similar techniques to create their assemblages and collages, but, by this time, these methods had evolved from their Surrealist roots to offer a means of opening up new associations with contemporary social or political conditions. The Bay Area artists associated with Bruce Connor’s Rat Bastard Protective Association (active 1957–60) challenged commercial tendencies with inflammatory work that made use of materials like discarded junk and storefront signage. In Southern California and Texas, the satirical and often vulgar sculptures of Edward Kienholz became widely influential. And in South Central Los Angeles, Noah Purifoy and Judson Powell organized the 1966 exhibition 66 Signs of Neon, which included works made in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, illustrating the importance of assemblage as a means for community self-expression. One participant in the exhibition, John Outterbridge, proclaimed that the foundations of the works’ meaning were “not merely material but the material and essence of the political climate.”

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Melvin Edwards uses assemblage to examine histories of racism and anti-Blackness in the United States. Rather than explicitly visualizing scenes of slavery or forced labor, Edwards's welded sculptures employ abstraction as a means of alluding to these violent practices. Cotton Hangup is one such example—made from repurposed industrial equipment, the work's suspended form evokes the connected histories of lynching, cotton-picking, and sharecropping in the US.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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Melvin Edwards, Cotton Hangup, 1966

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