Century City: Conversations with the Curators - Interview

Nittve: If you look at the architecture and listen to the music of Rio it was all about crystallization and clarity. As Paolo has described it, "Because Rio is so chaotic, it really needs this crystallized Neoconcretism; while in Paris, which has the clarity of thinking of its boulevards and its philosophy, they really needed surrealism." Maybe there is some sense of this kind of compensation. But ultimately that period in Rio was one of celebration, of a cool, crisp, international, and forward-looking city.

Kaplan: You talk about modernism as liberating Brazil?

Venancio Filho: Yes. The 1950s is the moment when we felt ourselves emancipated from the colonial past. We pushed aside the colonial, slavery, and everything that we thought was stopping us from becoming a true modern country. That past can be analyzed and criticized, and can be an inspiration, but it is not uppermost. Architecture, especially in Rio, absorbed tropical elements of the colonial and then reread and translated them in a modernist language. The same with bossa nova. It is the samba, the traditional music of the favelas, the popular music of Rio, but bossa nova musicians were middle class. They heard cool jazz, and Debussy. There was a fusion of all these elements.

Donna De Salvo: The United States in 1968 is such a well-covered period. But New York between 1969 and 1974 is not as well-known. Those are the Nixon years. I like these in-between periods. I think they yield something. You think you know it, but you don't. The show was about looking at cities and how they function. This is a period in which the city itself was pictured by artists. There is a collision of video, performance, the return of a certain kind of content after minimalism. The idea of the body in the city has a particular resonance; it is absolutely fundamental.

For this show I did not look at painting. I made a decision to exclude certain forms purely because of space, not because they were not relevant. That said, I do think performance, sculpture, video--all those things are much more engaged with a kind of public face, whereas painting still remains a much more private enterprise. A lot of what I included speaks to a desire to make work that feels socially relevant, that is not about the market. It feels very romantic as a result. Of course, some of these artists are now mainstream figures, but when they were making this work they were not. They are radical pieces--Vito Acconci's Seedbed (1972); Lynda Benglis's pour pieces, such as Contraband (1969); Gordon Matta-Clark's building fragments--and now they are part of art history. There is a whole generation of artists who could not have made the work they make now without this history. There is a strong presence of art by women. And much of this work is made in response to the cultural and political climate of the time, which was very activist. It is a carry-over from the 1960s.

Reiko Tomii: I picked Tokyo between 1967 and 1973 for two reasons. This is a time when Japanese artists and society as a whole questioned values and ideas about the modem. Also, this was the last time in postwar history when the Japanese people were expressly passionate, honest, and serious. After that, people tended to be more detached from social issues with a highly cynical attitude to the reality of the world. I see this as a time of modernism and countermodernism. It is not quite postmodern yet, but there is a movement against modernism.