LAURA HOPTMAN: Do you think that the work in this particular room screams 1963?
SARAH SUZUKI: It's interesting: when you want to date something to a specific year or tie it to events in the world—social, political change that's happening—you want to look for some sort of really concrete reference in the work. And in some of these works, it's in there but it's almost kind of hiding. So you can think of, for example, the Burri plastic work, which looks so much about destruction, about the kind of melting down of the landscape.
We've also talked among the three of us a little bit about the incursion of photography into painting. And I think that’s something that you do see in this gallery. In a way, it makes sense that it would start in a kind of monochrome black-and-white place.
SARAH MEISTER: One other thing that we thought was interesting in terms of the monochrome is knowing what comes next. So when you know that F-111 is in the next gallery, it gave a wonderful sense of counterpoint to us to be able to embrace all of these dark and black works in this room.
LAURA HOPTMAN: And one of the things that's notable about the '60s, in America and also throughout Europe a little bit later is the widespread advent of connective media--television and then subsequently color television. So the transition from black and white to color is also something that I would say would be pertinent to the chronology that we're talking about.
