86. Strange Days: Surrealism and Psychoanalysis in the 1960s

As the Whitney Museum’s major 2025 exhibition Sixties Surreal advanced, the legacy of Surrealism is mounting a major challenge to conventional accounts of the 1960s. This historiographic turn owes much to earlier, psychoanalytic methodologies pioneered by the likes of Rosalind Krauss, in which Surrealism’s emphasis upon the unconscious exposed the 1960s to the logic of a libidinal economy. However, the encyclopaedic catalogue for the Whitney show joins recent publications by Jennifer Sichel and Jo Applin in paying closer attention to the particular dynamics of the ‘60s New York artworld, illustrating how a Surrealist approach to the decade can be grounded in the work of curator-critics like Gene Swenson or Lucy Lippard.

In this panel, we invite submissions that subject both this reconceptualization of the art of the 1960s and its associated methodologies to closer scrutiny. Papers may consider – but are by no means limited by – the following questions:
• Extant literature has been dominated by New York, so what does ‘Sixties Surreal’ look like beyond the American metropolis?
• How are notions of a ‘late Surrealism’ inflected by gender, sexuality and race?
• To what extent can we successfully psychoanalyse the art of the ‘60s, or are new methodologies – or models of the unconscious – needed?
• How can we historicise the Surrealist turn, both within the context of the ‘60s and within the present?
• And ultimately, to what extent is it productive for art history to apply a Surrealist lens to the ‘60s, and to what and whose ends does it pertain?

Themes:  Surrealism, 1960s, Psychoanalysis

Additional format comment: Four 20-minute papers with questions/discussions, as standard.

Lead Convenor: Ed Kettleborough, University of Bristol, UK

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.