The biggest treat comes right at the beginning of “Sixties Surreal,” just now opening at the Whitney. You emerge from the elevator, and right there are the camels.
These are full-sized sculptures by Nancy Graves, and on a first impression you might think they were actual taxidermy camels. They are not.
The beasts get stranger the more you look at them, discovering the seams where they have been Frankenstein-ed together. And your mind starts to second guess whether their gawky proportions are exaggerated or, on the contrary, faithful to a nature whose weirdness you are only seeing for the first time, through art.
After a bit of looking, your first impression of these sculptures as having been merely realistic camels is what comes to feel strange. You start thinking about how your mind smooths over real weirdness when you encounter it, when it comes in a package that looks like something you know, or think you know…