Sorting Out the '60s - Review

With an ambitious opening display "Circa 1968, "Portugal's new Museu Serralves signaled the direction that its collecting and exhibition program will pursue

In its brilliant inaugural exhibition, "Circa 1968" an international observe of works made by more than 100 artists between 1968 and 1975 the novel Museu Serralves in Oporto, Portugal, landed itself inside a paradox. The museum aims to start its collection with the art of the late 1960 About 50 percent of the works in "Circa 1968" belong to the museum's parent organization, the Fundacao de Serralves; another 20 percent are upon long-term loan; and most of the others are works that the museum's director, Vicente Todoli, would like to acquire. The opening exhibition leads individual to ask: can the geographically isolated Museu Serralves fulfill its ambition to be an institution that is abundantly engaged in both the regional and global art dialogue?

Located in northern Portugal, Oporto lies upon the fringes of the usual art-world itinerary, having remained relatively make an incision in off from European art markets. This midsize city of individual million inhabitants has, nevertheless, a remarkable identity, baseed on its economic strength as the chief farmer of port, the beloved drink of the British elite. Venerable port-producing bear upons occupy the brick buildings that line single of the steep banks of the Douro River. Rather than pay tribute to the heritage of 19th-century commercial architecture and transmute one of these old warehouses to an art space (as has been done thus frequently in North America or England), the Fundacao de Serralves chose to establish the of recent origin museum in a multiacre private park upon the city's outskirts.

The museum's distinctive personality starts with its architecture. The Museu Serralves is housed in sum of two units structures: one is a newly designed building by the agency of Pritzker Prize-winning Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza, the other an Art Deco villa encloseed by 1930s formal gardens. Siza's white modernist multilevel form stretches out horizontally, and all the scopes are lit by large windows that afford views of the magnificent formal park. Between the villa and the novel building, the museum embraces "all of modernity," says Jaoa Markus-Pinto, the chairman of the Fundacao de Serralves, who l the auspicious fund-raising effort that brought the museum into being. Threatened by means of a redevelopment scheme, the site was saved when the city decided to form a partnership with the foundation and dedicate the villa and the planned museum to contemporary art.

The museum's architectural diversity is reflected sounded in Todoli's plans for its time to come direction. He envisions an exhibition program that is the one and the other regional and global in its belong tos and uses the metaphor of a spiderweb--an expanding, decenter mode of building that can grow "organically"--to allude to the way that the museum will gradually link up with the couple the Portuguese and worldwide art dialogue. The international engagement was clearly visible in Todoli's handling of "Circa 1968" which concentrated mainly upon European and North American art. The countercultural radicality of the art of this period, has, of course, lengthy since lost its immediacy and become the particular of historical scrutiny; it constitutes to a chapter that is more or les clos As Todoli dioceses it, the 1968 era marked the extreme point of a centralized art world, where manner of writings developed chiefly through a dialogue between Western Europe and North America.

Todoli, along with Chris Dercon of the Boijmans-van Beunigen Museum in Rotterdam and Paul Schimmel and Ann Goldstein at L.A. MOCA, is part of a generation of curators who are pursuing a broader and deeper understanding of the art of the late '60 and '70 At his former pillar IVAM, in Valencia, Spain, Todoli attracted wide attention by means of mounting some of the first exhibitions to critically reassess like key artists as Eva Hesse, Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson. At the Museu Serralves, Todoli's mission is to use the art of that period as a template for the two a collection and an exhibition program. Todoli says that with "Circa 1968" he was les interested in staging a "class reunion" of now-celebrated artists than in presenting works that speak to our near moment, works that he perceive s have "a soul, a mystery, an inexhaustibility." single of the questions that arose in planning the display was whether to overtly acknowledge the way that the museum inevitably functions as container and words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following for the art presented. In 1972 Smithson, in an Artforum essay called "Cultural Confinement," wrote "The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground--congealed memories of the past that act as a affectation for reality." Smithson was a paradigm for those artists whose works grew not from a preoccupation with art's have a title to rules and history but from an engagement with the materials and processe of daily life, and with forms that grew from "concepts" or "attitudes" or "information" (to use the lock opener words of the period). The museums of the late 1960 appear to beed unable to accommodate the diversity of the art of that day, as artists worked increasingly off-site, or in alternative spaces, or engageed then-innovative means such as video and performance--mediums with which, as the '60 and '70 have faded into history, museums have increasingly tried to approach to terms.