Though still loose in its thematic structure and not always declared as an organizing principle by some of its leading artists, Pop Surrealism has nonetheless become a potent force in contemporary art. A street demonstration that turned into a mass movement. While its expression can be comical, carnal, kitschy, colorful and queer – its intent is plainly serious.

Pop Surrealism seeks to upend the long dry reign of minimalism and conceptual art and overcome abstraction’s denial of the expressive opportunities in figurative work. It wants to get beneath the surface of pop cultural identity and find the meaning and magic, the dark realities and wild enchantments latent in the common lay of the land. It’s a populist insurgency masquerading as a carnivalesque parade of lost souls. From the beginning, the critics begrudged its worth.

Now, twenty years on, the revolution is winning.

Pop Surrealism stems from the low brow art scene that grew up – or maybe never really grew up – in Southern California as America shifted to conservatism in the 1980s. That street art energy was too weirdly playful to be overtly political but it was still sending a message. New voices needed to be heard and a new visual language learned. At first institutional powers dismissed it as adolescent daydreaming. Mere juvenilia.

As the first master of the frat house, Robert Williams recalls, Pop Surrealism `spawned from story illustration, comic book art, science fiction, movie poster art, motion picture production and effects animation, music art and posters, psychedelic and punk rock art, hot rod and biker art, surfer, beach bum and skateboard graphics, graffiti art, tattoo art, pin-up art, pornography and a myriad other commonplace egalitarian art forms. And all [were] simply dismissed and treated with condescension by the formal art authorities.” 

The first curatorial survey of this raucous group was the 1992 exhibition “Helter Skelter” at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. Led by Williams – who, along with R. Crumb, were Zap Comix artists hailed by the underground as grungeforce gurus – the show involved themes such as alienation, dispossession and violence. It was a ribald reckoning for a consumerist credo run amok. Hosted in the shadows of the Hollywood entertainment complex, the exhibition was a scandal. And a success. Robert Hughes – Time magazine’s illustrious critic – dismissed it as “valley girl dada”. Still, 8000 people attended the opening and the line in front of the museum lasted for weeks. The following year, the Laguna Art Museum opened “Kustom Kulture” which revalued the artistry of customized cars – dubbed ‘sensuous lacquered sculptures” – and comic figuration. The media panned it and the crowds poured in. Appropriately the movement started picking up speed.

Having taken part in both shows, Robert Williams made an even more lasting contribution to the incipient lowbrow scene in 1994. Along with several other artists and collectors, he started Juxtapoz magazine dedicated to the alternative art scene. Juxtapoz took away the barriers that fenced off so much of this new art from publicity and critical discussion. All the big-name art publications barely mentioned the Californian scene. Then in 1998 the movement went east, acquiring some fresh talent, a few more established artists, and an officially rebranded identity when the landmark exhibition `Pop Surrealism` opened at the Aldrich Museum in upstate Connecticut. Even the critics took notice.

The exhibition featured works by seventy artists including Cindy Sherman, Gregory Crewdson, Takashi Murakami, Art Spiegelman, and Ashley Bickerton. The collection was wild at heart, pessimistic, rude, weird and wonderful. It showed the thriving potential in figurative work and proved that pop iconography, even kitsch, can have an emotional core. In ArtForum, Steven Henry Madoff wrote: “The mutant sensibility at work in this droll, smartly curated exhibition proposes the marriage of Surrealism’s dream-laden fetish for the body eroticized and grotesque and Pop art’s celebration of the shallower, corrosively bright world given over to the packaged good”. Mark Ryden – soon to be hailed “The god-father of Pop Surrealism” by Interview magazine – was notably absent. No matter; that same year he had his solo debut in Pasadena with “The Meat Show” to salivating crowds. The LA Times said his admirers were more like “disciples”. There is faith in this movement and a conviction among the artists that for all its bizarre charm, their work can bear the weight of art history. 

Why surrealism now? After seeing the 1998 Aldrich exhibition, the Village Voice art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, wrote: 

“I think human spirits are starting to revolt against a society that has been reducing the credit of inner experience toward zero. Economics, politics, science, technology, academe, the law, and, really, everything conspire to humiliate personal truth. Corporate, media and university cultures presume that human beings are managerial, demographic and ideological units whose residue of unpredictability must soon yield to nicer adjustments of the appropriate methodologies.” 

Surrealism breaks free of these constraints and its use of the common language of urban iconography serves to tell a bigger, wilder, often darker story about personal truths.

The manufactured narratives that photographer Dina Goldstein creates appear like fairy tales for the real world. Goldstein is part of the second wave of serious artists finding liberation in Pop Surrealism’s visual language. Her two published fine art collections – Fallen Princesses and In The Dollhouse – present alternative narratives for pop cultural characters. Goldstein’s work has a comic edge and pops of crude bright color but the images are darkly compelling. Hallucinatory dreams pulling you through the looking-glass but in the other direction: from a place of enchantment to a world with serious challenges. 

Goldstein is determined to prove that the plastic arts still have something to show our plastic culture about the truth of what’s really going on (a common sentiment among pop surrealists). Her images feel urgent and alive. Like Ryden, her work draws from the daily grind of her workaday life: Ryden came from commercial illustration, Goldstein from photojournalism. Artistry is favoured by such experience. Goldstein has a sharp eye for detail and the theatrical truth in a face or a pose. 

Goldstein’s photographs have struck a nerve. Before gaining any gallery representation, Goldstein debuted her Fallen Princesses on a photography website and the work quickly went viral. Both series have received widespread social media coverage, been written about for over a hundred international publications and earned academic attention. 

In 2013, the Musée de l’Orangerie included Goldstein’s photograph Haircut in its catalogue for a feature exhibition on Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo proving the vitality – and blessing – of art can reach across generations. And all the better that the conversation between these two female artists is very intimate and personal. Based in Vancouver, Dina Goldstein is currently represented by galleries and dealers in Europe, Asia, Canada and the US. Her latest publication, In The Dollhouse, will be released in Spring 2014.

The lowbrow, NoBrow, New Brow, Neo Pop, Comic Abstraction art that groups together (quite jovially) under the umbrella of Pop Surrealism has cracked open the art world to new means of expressions and a wider audience. By 2009, Juxtapoz had the largest circulation of any art magazine in the U.S. And artists that had once seemed too contrarian – and crazy – for the accepted norms of the artworld establishment have now earned critical favour. 

As for the charge that all of this is merely childish, Mark Ryden counters that “It is only in childhood that contemporary society truly allows for imagination”. The world remains wild around us – fantastic and fabulous and flawed – and the Pop Surrealists feel inspired to make something meaningful from all its odd bits. Vive la revolution. 

• Barry Dumka

© Barry Dumka/BCREATIVE CONSULTING