The Shock of the New
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- | '''''The Shock of the New''''' is an eight-part documentary television series about the development of modern art written and presented in 1980 by [[Robert Hughes (critic)|Robert Hughes]] for the [[BBC]]. | + | '''''The Shock of the New''''' (1980) is an eight-part documentary television series about the development of [[modern art]] written and presented by [[Robert Hughes (critic)|Robert Hughes]] for the [[BBC]]. |
==Overview== | ==Overview== |
Revision as of 09:24, 9 May 2024
"The essential difference between a sculpture like Andre's Equivalent VIII, 1978, and any that had existed before in the past is that Andre's array of bricks depends not just partly, but entirely, on the museum for its context. A Rodin in a parking lot is still a misplaced Rodin; Andre's bricks in the same place can only be a pile of bricks."--The Shock of the New (1980) by Robert Hughes |
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The Shock of the New (1980) is an eight-part documentary television series about the development of modern art written and presented by Robert Hughes for the BBC.
Contents |
Overview
The series took three years to create and Robert Hughes travelled about a quarter of a million miles during the filming to include particular places or people. The series also used archive footage of featured artists.
The series was broadcast by the BBC in 1980 in the United Kingdom and by PBS in 1981 in the United States. It addressed the development of modern art since the Impressionists and was accompanied by a book of the same name; its combination of insight, wit and accessibility are still widely praised. Hughes remembers being directed by Pegram with her saying, "It's a clever argument, Bob dear, but what are we supposed to be looking at?".
In 2004 Hughes created a one-hour update to The Shock of the New titled The NEW Shock of the New.
Series outline
The series consisted of eight episodes each one hour long (58 min approx). It was re-broadcast on PBS in the United States. In the three cases, where PBS changed the titles, they are given in square brackets below. Quotations are spoken by Martin Jarvis.
- Mechanical Paradise – How the development of technology influenced art between 1880 and end of World War I. Cubism and Futurism
- The Powers That Be [Shapes of Dissent] – Examining the relationship between modern art and authority. Dada, Constructivism, Futurism, architecture of power
- World War I and industrialised death, Exile and intellectuals as a class, Lenin, Tzara, Janco, Arp, Ball, Duchamp, Kirchner, Ernst, Höch, Dix, de Chirico, Hausmann, Grosz, Gabo, Tatlin, Moholy-Nagy, Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Marinetti, Prampolini, Speer, Piacentini, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Albany Mall, Picasso's Guernica, Tinguely
- The Landscape of Pleasure – Examining art's relationship with the pleasures of nature, and visions of paradise 1870s to 1950s. Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism
- Fête champêtre, Titian, Giorgione, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Gainsborough, Bourgeoisie, Seurat, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, the vivid colours of the South, Paul Gauguin, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, Braque, Picasso, late Matisse
- Trouble in Utopia – Examining the aspirations and reality of modern architecture. International Style, Art Nouveau, Futurist architecture, urban planning
- The Threshold of Liberty – Examining the surrealists' attempts to make art without restrictions.
- May 1968, Breton, Ernst, de Chirico, Böcklin, Ducasse, child art, madness, Rousseau, Cheval, Miro, Gaudi, Dalí, flea market, Jean, Brauner, Paalen, Oppenheim, Man Ray, Margritte, de Sade, Catholicism and sexual taboo, Bellmer, Cornell, Pollock, Rothko, Gorky, Hofmann, 1945 liberation, Christo, Burden, hippies and self-expression, Vietnam War, cult of youth
- The View from the Edge [Sublime and Anxious Eye] – A look at those who made visual art from the crags and vistas of their internal world. Expressionism
- van Gogh, Munch, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Kirchner, Kokoschka, Soutine, Bacon, de Kooning, photographical evidence of the Holocaust, Marc, Klee, Kandinsky, Brancusi, Rothko, Pollock, Motherwell
- Culture as Nature – Examining the art that referred to the man-made world which fed off culture itself. Pop art and celebrity
- O'Keeffe, Davis, Rauschenberg, Schwitters, Johns, Hamilton, the influence of television, Warhol, Liechtenstein, Rosenquist, Katz, Las Vegas as a single "lousy" artwork, Oldenburg, McLuhan and quantity over quality
- The Future That Was [End of Modernity] – The commercialisation of modern art, the decline of modernism, and art without substance. Land art, performance art, and body art
- Heizer, MoMA and rich patrons, SoHo and urban renewal, Pompidou Centre and the changing uses of art, da Panicale, art as public discourse, the Salon system, the avantgarde and the bourgeoisie, Courbet, Andre, Judd, public and private, Segal, Kienholz, Frankenthaler, Louis, Noland, Stella, Riley, fashion, the art market, Brisley, Samaras, Rainer, Hockney, Beuys, de Maria
2004 update
- The NEW Shock of the New (2004) – How the art world has changed, 25 years later.
- Eiffel tower, World Trade Center, 9/11, Turner, Goya, David, Picasso's Guernica as the last truly political painting, Whitney Biennial, Warhol, fashion as the primary model of art, Koons, Duchamp, Michelangelo, Masaccio, exploding prices of the art market, Rego, Kiefer, information overload, Hockney, the skill of drawing, art as the opposite of mass media, Freud, Gilbert and George, post-modernism, slowness of painting, Mondrian, Rothko, Kelly, Scully, beauty, Eliasson
Book
The book of the series was published in 1980 by the BBC under the title The Shock of the New: Art and the century of change. It was republished in 1991 by Thames and Hudson. The book was included by The Guardian in their list of the top 100 non-fiction books, and was still in print in 2012.
Linking in in 2024
Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Brasília, Civilisation (TV series), Des Moines Art Center, Documentary film, Havana Plan Piloto, Ian Dunlop, Jeff Wassmann, List of television programmes broadcast by the BBC, Lorna Pegram, Peter Howell (musician), Piet Mondrian, Robert Hughes (critic), Roland Penrose, Sandy Nairne, The Shock of the Old, Time Life Television, Tours Aillaud, Ville Contemporaine
Subtitles
Part 1
This series the shock of the new is
about an old subject almost 100 years
old the art of our own Century
modernism the key word of the new
century was
modernity modernity meant believing in
technology and not craft in human
perfectability not original sin and
above all in a ceaseless consumption of
things and the images of things if you
were a Parisian alive in 1890 and you
wanted to show a visitor what modernity
meant you pointed to this structure the
tallest man-made object on earth the
Tower of Babel of the new machine
age
[Music]
since the great exhibition of 1851 in
London the big powers of Europe had
taken are holding world's fairs to show
off their industrial strength Paris
scheduled one for 1889 the 100th
anniversary of the French
[Music]
[Music]
Revolution this was a emblem a huge Act
of propaganda designed not by an
architect but by an engineer Gustave Eiffel the tower was the static totem of
the cult of dynamism a Colossus planted
with spread legs in the middle of Paris
its shape alluded to the human body and
to the colossi of of the
past it was the guardian of the Future
IT summed up What technological progress
meant to the men who ran Europe at the
end of the 19th century the promise of
unlimited control over the world and its
wealth the most visible sign of the
future was the automobile and this is
the first public sculpture ever set up
in its praise it commemorates the Great
Road Race of 1895 from Paris to Bordeaux and back which was won by an engineer
named IM levur in the car that he
designed and built himself the pona
levur 5 it could do about the same speed
as a jumping frog but not very much more
nevertheless leva's victory was of
tremendous social consequence because it
persuaded Europeans both manufacturers
and public alike that the future of Road
Transport lay with the internal
combustion engine and not as many had
thought before with either electricity
or
steam in all Justice there ought to be a
replica of this thing set up in every
oil Port from the Persian G to Houston
but if it looks somewhat ludicrous to us
as sculpture today that's because of
difficulties between sculpture and the
new Convention of the
machine a stone car the idea seems
surrealist to a modern eye it's simply
in congruous stone is immobile mineral
brittle cold cars are fast metallic
plastic warm a human body is warm too
but we don't think of statues as Stone
men because we're used to the
conventions of representing flesh with
stone there were no such conventions for
depicting Machinery it was too
new but the conditions of seeing were
also starting to change and the Eiffel Tower stood for that too what counted
was not so much the view of the Tower
from the
ground it was seeing the ground from the
tower nobody except a few men in
balloons had ever seen this
before there were individual pilots who
saw the sight from their planes but it
was the Eiffel Tower that gave a mass
audience a chance to see what you and I
take for granted every time we
fly the earth on which we live seems
flat as pattern from
above the Eiffel Tower was therefore a
pivot in human consciousness and that
view of the city seen by those hundreds
of thousands of visitors was as
significant in 1889 as the sight of the
Earth from the Moon would be 80 years
later through the medium of Technology
culture was Reinventing itself
everywhere in 1877 Thomas Alber Edison
came up with the most radical extension
of cultural me memory since the printed
book he invented sound
recording the first human utterance ever
retrieved I designed my original tin for
photograph in cylinder form and gave it
to my faithful John cruy to make he made
fun of it I was almost as surprised as
he was when the first model roduced M
how a little L which I shed into it
place was white as snow and every where
that Mary went the lamb was should to
go in 1879 Edison invented the
incandescent filament
bowel the fairy electricity was now led
loose upon the
world thus amazing people who had up to
now depended upon gas and whale oil to
see at
night
in 1895 The Lumiere brothers made the
images of a magic lantern move they
invented the movie camera and the
projector in 1898 Marie C discovered
radium in 191 gulo Marone sent the first
transatlantic radio message along the
Virgin Airwaves from Cornwall to the
east coast of
America in 193 two home inventors Wilbur
and Orville Wright observed the wind put
Wings on a bicycle scrambled into it
started their motor and the stupefaction
of the world took off achieving Man's
first powered flight in a heavier than
air
[Music]
machine in 195 an obscure physicist
named Albert Einstein developed the
special theory of relativity the basis
of the largest change in man's view of
the universe since Isaac Newton he
ushered in the nuclear age with one
Formula E is equal m
c² in which energy is put equal to mass
multiplied with it square of the
velocity of light showed that very small
amount of mass may be converted into a
very large amount of energy very few
people understood it and nobody could
foresee its
implications by 1913 Henry Ford had so
developed the idea of mass production
that the car running on Mr dunlop's
pneumatic tires ceased to be a toy for
the rich and became Every Man's
Chariot the right Brothers had only got
a few yards off the ground but within 6
years a French Aviator named Lou blero
managed to Pilot his ing wooden
dragonfly from one country to another
from France to England across the vast
cultural divide of the English
[Applause]
Channel in 1913 the French writer charl
pege remarked the world has changed less
since the time of Jesus Christ than it
has in the last 30 years he was right
and it was a widespread feeling for the
essence of the early modern experience
was not the specific inventions most
people weren't affected by a prototype
in a lab or an equation on a Blackboard
not yet no the important thing was the
sense of an accelerated rate of change
in all areas of human discourse it
provided the feeling of an approaching
Millennium a new order of things as the
19th century clicked over into the 20th
the end of one kind of history and the
start of
another soon after after blero flew the
channel his little monoplane was carried
in public procession through the streets
of Paris and installed in a church for
all the world like the relic of an
archangel and such was the early
apotheosis of the
machine but to have a cult does not mean
that the images automatically follow the
changes in man's view of himself and the
world between 1880 and 1914 were so far
reaching that they produced as many
problems for artists as they did stimuli
for instance how could you make
paintings that would reflect
the immense shifts in
Consciousness that this changed
technological landscape
implied how could you produce a parallel
dynamism to the Machine Age without
falling into the elementary trap of just
becoming a machine
illustrator and above all how by shoving
around on a canvas sticky stuff like
paint on a static
surface could you produce a convincing
record of process and
transformation
now the first artists to come up with a
sketch for an answer to this were the
cubists since the Rance almost all
painting had obeyed a convention it was
that of one point
perspective perspective was a
geometrical means for producing an
illusion of reality for showing things
in space in their right sizes and
positions nevertheless it was an
abstraction it was a view seen by a
motionless oneeyed person clearly
detached from what he
sees perspective gathers the visual
facts and it stabilizes them it makes a
god of The Spectator who becomes the
person on whom the whole world converges
the unmoved
onlooker cubism argued that reality
includes the painter's efforts to
perceive it both the viewer and the view
are part of the same
field the first artist to explore this
idea and finally to base his work on it
was Paul
seisan the question of why the paintings
that Sean made in his old age were to
have such a vast effect upon the history
of art can't be answered in terms of
style what they proposed was more
radical than style it was a fundamental
argument about the way that we actually
see he wants to show the process of
seeing not just the results and he takes
you through this process you share his
hesitations about the position of a
trunk or a
branch or the final shape of a mountain
and the trees in front of
it the statement this is what I see
becomes replaced by a question is this
what I see relativity is all the idea
that doubt can be heroic if it is locked
into a structure as Grand as the
painting of Sean's old age that is one
of the keys of our century and a
touchstone of modernism itself cubism
would bring it to an
extreme the idea began here at 13 Ru
ravino in Paris in 197 in a Warren of
cheap artist Studios called the batt
lavoir or laundry
boat it was set off by a Spaniard Pablo
Picasso then age 26 Picasso's partner in
inventing cubism was was a slightly
younger and rather more conservative
Frenchman George
bar in the public eye these men didn't
exist the audience for their paintings
might have been a dozen people and this
meant that they were free as researchers
in some very obscure area of science are
free nobody cared enough to
interfere they wanted to paint the fact
that our knowledge of an object is made
up of all possible views of it top sides
front back they wanted to compress this
inspection which takes time into One
Moment One synthesized
view one of their experimental materials
was the art of other cultures Oceanic
and African as despised as they then
were at the time there were no museums
of tribal art like this one to
consult one of the mild ironies of
cubism is the extent to which it was
helped by the French Empire in Africa
Picasso and Brock both owned African
carvings but they had no anthropological
interest in them at all they didn't care
about their ritual uses they knew
nothing about their original tribal
meanings or about the societies out of
which they
came they simply used them forly and in
that regard cubism was like a small
parody of the Imperial model The Masks
were simply raw material from the
darkest Congo like copper or palm oil
and Picasso's use of them was in effect
a kind of cultural plunder but then why
use African art at all
the Cubist were just about the first
artist to even think of doing so 130
years before when Benjamin West admired
the cloths and the clubs and the
carvings that had come back from the
Pacific with Captain Cook no Royal
academ misss then took the queue and
started painting taresian
style when Picasso started to produce
what was in effect white art in
blackface he was saying what no 18th
Century painter would ever have imagined
say himself saying
he was proposing that the tradition of
the human figure which had served
Western Art so well over the preceding
centuries had had last run out and that
in order to renew its Vitality you had
to look elsewhere in effect to look to
those folks in Africa with
rhythm this was not so much a gesture of
homage in the direction of the blacks
though as it was a successful raid on
them by the
whites what Picasso did care about was
the formal Vitality of the carvings the
freedom to
distort and something else they were to
him in the most literal sense emblems of
savagery of violence transferred into
the sphere of
culture but this did produce the
painting whose shock value provoked
cubism and this was LE demoiselle
[Music]
Davon
[Music]
no painting ever looked more convulsive
and none signaled a faster change in the
history of Art and yet it was anchored
in the tradition of the new Picasso
began it the year seison died and its
nearest ancestor was Cesar's
bathers it also descends from Picasso's
Spanish Heritage those unstable twisting
bodies are like elgreco and so is is the
angular harshly lit
space the five nudes are chopped into
planes and arcs as though the brush were
a butcher knife their mass is breaking
up and even today you think of
dismemberment even the melon looks like
a weapon the space is flattened like a
squashed box as solid as the
figures
and in the midst of all this violent
abstraction The
Masks the three on the left are derived
from archaic Spanish
sculpture the two on the right from
African
carvings all of them staring with the
hypnotic fixity that Picasso would
always give to the
eye Picasso never like the title he
called his painting the aenor brothel
because there had been a [ __ ] house on
the carer D
or aor Street in Barcelona when he was a
student his original idea was to paint
an allegory of venial disease called the
wages of sin a man carousing in a
brothel and another man coming in at the
left with what was going to be a scull
that very Spanish reminder of
mortality in the final painting though
only the nudes are left archaic and
aggressive and their cult is the fear of
women no painter ever put his anxiety
about castration more plainly than
Picasso did here and the combination of
form and subject was alarming to the few
people who saw Le
demoiselle George BR was horrified by
its ugliness and
intensity but he painted a relatively
timid and laborious response to it and
from then on Brock and Picasso would be
locked in a partnership of questions and
responses roped together like
Mountaineers as Brock memorably
said Picasso cleared the ground for
cubism but it was George Brock who over
the next two years 198 and 199 did the
most to develop its
vocabulary they say the fox knows many
things but the Hedgehog knows one big
thing now Picasso was the fox he was the
virtuoso Brock was the Hedgehog and the
one big thing that he knew was
Sean with whom he identified to the
point of
obsession he admired Sean as he put it
for sweeping painting clear of the idea
of Mastery he loved his doubt his
doggedness his concentration his lack of
eloquence well Brock wanted to see if
Sean's way of building a painting that
fusing of little tilted facets that
solidity of structure and ambiguity of
reading could be pushed further which he
did with the Landscapes he painted in
two places where Sean himself had worked
first at leak in the south of France in
198 the estar paintings began as almost
straight
saisan this is one view that Brock
looked at that
summer this is what he made of it every
scrap of detail edited out prisms
triangles yet the shading no longer
gives you a feeling of solidity some of
the corners could either be sticking out
of the picture or pointing back into
it in the summer of 199
Brock went painting closer to Paris in a
village in the S Valley called laros
gong the valley is lined with chalk
Cliffs and there's a castle built into
them it belongs to the lashuk cold
family and Brock made it his Motif that
jumble of planes and Gables and spires
stacked up against the
cliff moreover on the top there's a 13th
century Norman
Tower and it was in Ruins when AR sort
as it is today but it gave him another
part of his Motif a big strong cylinder
on top so there was this from his point
of view nice rhyme between the actual
forms of the landscape and the shapes
that he wanted to put in a painting
between those planes ascending the cliff
going in and out pressed forward by the
cliff itself which blocked off the
perspective this was what he painted
[Music]
he then scrambled up the Chalk Bluff to
the side and looked at the castle from
an angle which gave him an even more
complicated geometry of Gables and
turrets coming down into the
[Music]
town
[Music]
so would Brock have invented cubism on
his own probably but it would have
lacked the power that Picasso brought to
it this was his unequal ability to
realize form to make you feel the shape
and the weight and the Silence of things
this is the plastic power of a sculptor
but in paint and distorted as they are
you're made to feel them so strongly
that you can imagine them picked off the
canvas in three
dimensions for the moment Picasso's
portraits like this one of the D VOA
were still recognizable but any reality
was bound to Al once it was thrust into
the shifting abstract space that he and
BR had
invented by 1911 Picasso and Brock were
painting like siamese
twins this painting of a guitarist is by
Brock this one of another guitarist is
by
Picasso they painting of this period are
virtually indistinguishable except for
fine differences of handwriting without
the labels on the gallery wall you could
hardly guess which painting is by which
of the two
paintings all this break up and
shuffling nobody had ever painted more
baffling images nothing is constant
every shape is a report on multiple
meanings it's an attempt to set out the
world as a field of Shifting
relationships that include the onlooker
they were trying to paint
process BR and Picasso were not
mathematicians and certainly they
weren't philosophers but their art was
part of the same great tide of modernist
thought that included
Einstein and the philosopher Alfred
Whitehead the misconception which has
haunted philosophic literature
throughout the centuries is the notion
of independent existence there is no
such mode of existence every entity is
only to be understood in terms of the
way in which it is interwoven with the
rest of the
universe as Gertrude Stein remembered it
the Cubist game of hide and seek with
reality fed back into the world in odd
[Music]
ways the first year of the war Picasso
and myself were walking down the
boulevard
raspay all of a sudden down the Street
came some big cannon first any of us had
seen painted that is
camouflaged Pablo stopped he was
Spellbound
sen he said it is we that have created
that and he was right he
had camouflage was cubism at War and
ever since the cubist's Delight in
ambiguity what is seen and not seen has
had its ominously practical
uses Picasso's Next Step was to stick a
piece of oil cloth to one of his still
lives it was printed with a design of
chair caning and so collage began
collage which simply means gluing was a
way of strengthening the link between
cubism and the real world
it gave Picasso and Brock bigger and
Bolder shapes to play with and these
shapes were real things emblems of the
industrial present newspapers packets
wallpaper and the fake wood graining
that Brock had learned to do when he was
an apprentice house painter in
Normandy they were recoiling from the
abstractness of those pictures of 1911
and in that they were joined by the
third musketeer a more classical artist
than either of them Juan gree in him
cubism found a mind of the coolest
analytical
weight to gree the world of cheap mass
production and reproduction was a sort
of Arcadia a pastoral landscape as it
was to a poire you read hand Bills
cataloges posters that shout out loud
here's this morning's poetry and for
pros you've got the newspapers six SP
detective novels full of cop stories
biographies of big shots a thousand
different titles lettering on Billboard
and walls door plates and posters squark
like
parrots Cubist Paris is receding now but
it's still there the glass and Iron City
of small arcades The Marble City of Cafe
tables the place of zinc bars dominoes
dirty chest boards crumpled
newspaper the brown city of old paint
and pipes and paneling history to us now
but once the landscape of the modernist
[Music]
dream
[Music]
n
[Music]
the
[Music]
the fourth major Cubist was fno LE he
wanted to make a public style of cubism
a popular art images of the Machine age
for the man in the
street he was the son of a Normandy
farmer an instinctive socialist who
became a practicing one in the trenches
of World War
I I found myself on a level with the
whole of the French people my new
companions in the engineer Corp were
miners navis workers in metal and wood
among these I discovered the French
people at the same time I was dazzled by
the breach of a 75 mm gun which was
standing uncovered in the sunlight the
magic of light on white
metal metal or flesh it made no
difference leer painted the body as
though it were made of interchangeable
parts like
Machinery the soldiers Insignia on these
cardplaying robots might as well be
Factory
brands to him society as machine meant
Harmony an end to
loneliness the three women one of the
paintings that best expresses this is
among the great didactic images of
French classicism this philosophical
harim is Leer's vision of Human
Relationships working as smoothly as a
clock with the binding energy of Desire
transformed into rhymes of
shape there were some artists to whom
this mechanical age was much more than a
context and very much more than a
pretext they wanted to explore its
characteristic images of light structure
and dynamism as subjects in their
[Music]
work Rober Delon was crazy about the
Eiffel Tower he thought of it as a new
tower of B La emitting a clamor of
tongues from the first radio system
installed on it in
[Music]
199 he must have painted it 30 times the
first time for his Russian wife and
fellow painter so
light seen through structure it became a
theme his fundamental image of modernity
that great grid rising over Paris with
the sky reeling through
[Music]
it
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
Delon also painted windows landscap
capes of Paris seen as though through a
prism and a poire Illustrated them with
words raise the Blind and see how the
window opens if hands could weave light
this was done by
spiders Beauty palor unfathomable
indigos from the red to the green all
the yellow
dies Paris Vancouver y Manon New York
and the West Indies
the window opens like an
orange the beautiful fruit of
light whereas leier thought the core of
modernism was structure the delones
believed it was light Pure Energy
flooding the world its emblem was the
dis this was the basic unit of Rob's
Grand allegory of nness the the homage
to blero the great Constructor as he
called the
[Music]
[Music]
pilot
[Music]
la
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
one of the effects of today's museums
with their lovely White Walls and their
feeling of a Perpetual presence is to
make art seem newer than it actually is
you have to pinch yourself to remember
that when the paint was fresh on those
cubis picassos and delones people wore
hobble skirts and they wrote around in
machines like this one sitting up front
of the
driver and that feeling of disjuncture
the sense of the oldness of Modern Art
becomes acute when you reflect upon the
only art movement that came out of Italy
in the 20th century futurism was the
invention of filipo Tomaso
marinetti part lyrical
genius part organ grinder and part
fascist demagog and by his own account
the most modern man in his own country
when right-minded people between the
wars thought of modern artists as
subversive buffoons their image was
formed by marinetti he was a genius at
publicity and used every trick to get it
for himself and for the futurist
painters posters leaflets demos meetings
he even invented The Happening Montage
in real time with poems and declamations
paintings and music all on stage at once
he took his Road Show everywhere even to
Russia
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
SP no
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
[Music]
[Applause]
no
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
marinetti called himself the caffeine of
Europe he was the first International
aan provocateur that Modern Art had the
name futurism was a brilliant Choice
challenging but vague but the central
idea that marinetti trumpeted forth in
the first futurist Manifesto in 199 was
that the machine had created a new class
of Visionaries himself and anyone who
cared to join him
for marinetti and his group all the old
ideas about art and artists were about
to be blown off the cultural
map
you needed to come from a
technologically backward country to love
the future as passionately as marinetti
did Machinery was pal it was freedom
from historical
restraint Manifesto of
futurism one we intend to sing the love
of danger the habit of energy and
fearlessness
we affirm that the world's magnificence
has been enriched by a new Beauty the
beauty of speed a racing car whose hood
is adorned with great pipes like
serpents of explosive breath a roaring
car that seems to run on shrapnel is
more beautiful than the victory of
samothrace we want to H the man at the
wheel who hurls the Lance of his Spirit
across the Earth along the circle of its
orbit
but we want no part of it the past we
the young and strong
futurists so let them come the gay
incentuous with charred fingers here
they are here they are come on Set Fire
to the library shelves turn aside the
canals to flood the museums oh the joy
of seeing the Glorious old canvases
bobbing a drift on those Waters
discolored and shredded take up your
pickaxes your axes and Hammers and wreck
wreck wreck the venerable cities
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pitilessly in their art they set out to
find an equivalent for the speed and the
movement that they worshiped in their
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cars
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aah
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they kept issuing manifestos operatic
Love Letters to Industry and hyms to the
beauty of its products the artists who
gathered around marinetti before the
first world war were the core of the
futurist group and some of them would
soon be dead the most gifted of them
Umberto Bon fell off his horse and was
killed in 1916 in the war which he and
marinetti had praised as the hygiene of
civilization but in the meantime he had
produced some extraordinary images none
more so than the city rises his pan of
joy to Industry and heavy construction
with its straining cables and draft
horses and plunging
figures but the problem was how to
represent
movements for that the futurists
resorted to photography especially the
sequential photographs published by the
French Pioneer Ian je
Mar by giving you the successive
positions of a figure on one plate these
photos introduced time into
space the body left its own memory in
the
air 400 years before Leonardo had bought
birds in the Florentine market and let
them go to study the beat of their wings
for a few seconds now the cameras of
maray and Edward mybridge could describe
this world of unseen movement some of
Jakob balor's paintings were almost
transcriptions of their photographs this
one for instance is entitled Swifts
Paths of movement and dynamic
sequences
dynamism of a dog on a leash was a
glimpse of Boulevard life with a
fashionable lady or D her feet trotting
her duxon a low slung modern animal the
sports car of the dog world along the
pavement watching a virtuoso's Le
fingers gave Bal the clue for rhythms of
a
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violinist as well as movement they
wanted to paint noise this painting of
Bon is called the noise of the street
penetrates the house futurism loved any
noise that was dissonant loud or made by
a
machine the most ambitious effort to
paint equivalence for sound and movement
was Gino sein's picture of a cabaret in
Paris where he and the Cubist used to go
the B
tabaran like them seini loved common
popular
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entertainment
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but not every artist had that kind of
straightforward optimism about the
machine there were some that viewed it
with more irony and Detachment more like
V than participants because they
perceived that the thing was more more
than a tool more than simply an
extension of the manufacturing
self having been made by man it had
become a perverse but substantially
accurate
self-portrait such was the implication
of Francis picabia's work and of Marcel
duon the machine as picabia put it in
one of his titles is the daughter born
without a mother a modern counterpart to
the Virgin birth in which Christ the son
was born without a
father Machinery parody both TX and
religion it contained Limitless
possibilities for giving offense which
picabia was born to
do picabia was one of those men almost a
modernist invention in themselves who
was locked in a struggle with the very
idea of art he wanted to laugh the
notion of painting to death he had a
very strong sense of myth and he
couldn't find another outlet for it the
myth was that of the machine as man's
counterpart it obsessed picabia it was
his main Amusement he married rich and
he bought one fast car after another as
though he were trying to turn himself
into a mechanical
centur it was also the theme of his art
the body as
machine in 1914 he painted an enormous
image of a sexual encounter with a
dancer called I see again in memory my
dear
udney the 19th century novelist yoris
whisman foresaw it in a way when he
wrote look at the machine the play of
pistons and the cylinders they are steel
Romeo inside cast iron
juliets the ways of human expression are
in no way different to the back and
forth of our machines this is a law to
which one must pay homage unless one is
either impotent or a
saint picario was neither he had a flare
for the old inout mechanical sex
mechanical self no wonder picabia's
machine portrait still looks so very
sardonic the machine is aoral
its movements are programmed it can only
act and nobody wants to be compared to a
mechanical
slave Marcel duon would push the machine
metaphor even further before giving up
out for chess duon had played with every
existing art movement and predicted a
number of those to
come well when you are 15 and uh paint
like the
Impressionists you experimenting with
yourself so to speak you don't know what
you going to do you don't know even that
you are going to do anything else it
took me 10 years or more to change the
style at least to say where there's
nothing more in the impression is to
find and I tried to find something else
I first went through
fism I went through cubism and it's only
1912 or 13 that I I found more or less
what I wanted to do which would not be
influenced by movements that i' had been
through see the nude descending a
staircase is one of the half dozen most
famous paintings of our Century it's a
transcription of movement based again on
Mah's
photographs as cubism it's quite
academic
when the American Press saw it it was
seized on as a supreme joke but the
cubists themselves back in Paris were
not
amused when I came with my new
descending staircase they didn't see
that it applied to their theory was not
an illustration of their
Theory and in fact it had more than
cubism had as the idea of movement which
the futurists had at the same time so
they thought it was too much either
neither one no futurist nor cubism and
they condemned it but it did open up the
way to dua's most influential work the
large glass which he left unfinished
after 8 years like the nude the glass
treated the body as a mechanical object
why on glass Dua explained because the
trans mainly the transparency of the
glass I wanted to I've had always
noticed that the trouble with oil
painting and easel painting is you never
know how to do the the background you
make a portrait or you make some scene
or some still Al and then comes the
background what are you going to do in
the background you put something in the
background and it always false so at
least very seldom Justified it's just a
filling up canvas with a glass you don't
have to do that the glass is trans
transparent and you put anything behind
you wish and you change it every day if
you wish as
well and that was for me an element of
novelty to convince me I could go on
with it there's also some kind of
literary part to it was
intended to have every item on the glass
every little design on the glass explain
with a lang with the language with
language with words
there was nothing spontaneous about it
which of course is a great objection on
the part of aestheticians they want the
the subconscious to speak by itself I
don't don't
care and it was the opposite in that way
so at the end of 8 years even un not
finished I stopped to I decided to
stop so what is this
thing well it's a machine but we'd be
better off calling it a project for an
unfinished contraption that could never
be built because its use was never clear
because in turn it parodies the language
and the forms of science without the
slightest regard for scientific
probability or cause or effect supposing
that an engineer were to use this thing
as a blueprint he'd be in deep
trouble because the large glass is never
explicit and looked at from the point of
view of Technical Systems it's simply
absurd the notes that Dua left to go
with it are the most scrambled
instruction manual that you can imagine
but they're deliberately scrambled for
instance he talked about the thing
running on a mythical fuel of his own
invention Called Love gasoline which
passed through filters into feeble
cylinders which activated a desire motor
none of which would really have meant
very much to Henry
Ford but this is a meta machine that
takes us away from The Real World of
machinery into that of allegory with the
naked bride up there perpetually dis
robing herself in the top half and down
below the poor little bachelors in their
empty jackets endlessly grinding away
signaling their frustration to the girl
above them in fact this thing is an
allegory of profane love which Marcel
duon would have us believe is the only
sort that is left in the 20th
century its real text was written by
Sigman Freud in the interpretation of
Dreams published in
1900 the imposing mechanism of the male
sexual apparatus said Freud lends itself
to symbolization by every sort of
indescribably complicated
Machinery but the male mechanism of the
large glass is not imposing at all the
Bachelors are Just Uniforms like
marionet according to dua's notes they
try to indicate their desire to the
bride by making the ch chocolate grinder
turn and it grinds out an imaginary
milky stuff like seman which squirts up
through those rings but can't get into
the bride's half of the glass because of
that
bar and so the bride is condemned always
to tease and the bachelor's fate is
endless
masturbation in one sense the brid strip
bear is a glimpse into hell a peculiarly
modernist hell of repetition and
loneliness but you could also see it as
a declaration of freedom if you recall
the crushing taboos against masturbation
that were in force when duon was
young it was the symbol of rebellion
against one's parents and to that extent
the large glass is a free machine or at
least a defiant
machine but it was also a Sad Machine a
testament to indifference that emotion
of which duon was the master when the
large glass was broken in its crate
while being shipped how did he feel
nothing not
much I was well no I was not because I'm
fatalist maybe enough to take anything
as it comes along and fortunately a
little later when I look at the brakes I
love the brakes it happened to be that
two two paints glass paints on top of
one another with paints on it holding a
bit when they break on the vibration of
being transported flat you see on a on a
truck the the brakes take a
similar uh Direction in the two panes so
when you put them on top of one another
they seem to continue the same the same
breakes as though I had it done in done
in purpose dua's finally tuned
indifference is one of the divides
between the late Machine age and the
time in which we live the large glass
was a long way from the optimism and the
sense of possib ability with which
greater painters but less sophisticated
men than duon greeted the machine in
those long lost days before World War
I for Machinery was now turned on its
inventors and their children after 40
Years of continuous peace in Europe the
worst war in history canceled the faith
in good
technology the myth of the future went
into shock and European art moved into
its years of irony disgust and
Part 8
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[Applause]
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one of the myths of Modern Art is is
that it began like a prophet in the
desert the avangard that rejected
Outsider armed with truth today that
myth is lost by the start of the 70s the
idea of an avangard in painting and
sculpture was winding down it's now over
part of a period style and in the
meantime modernism itself has become our
official
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culture
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this is not a building it's a sculpture
not finished yet but one of the largest
of the 20th century and a long way from
the art world this Valley is in the
Nevada desert 5 1 half th000 ft up and 4
hours hard drive over bad roads from Las
Vegas it's also on the edge of the
nuclear Proving Grounds the artist
Michael Heiser is an American and the
piece is called complex one he started
it in
[Music]
1972
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40 m long 33 wide and S High a colossal
task at the most a couple of dozen
strangers see it in a year so it has a
smaller audience than cubism did 70
years ago it can never be moved no
Museum will will ever take it in and
reproduction gives no real idea of
it we are at the end of modernity and
modern arst found its mass audience and
so one of the last acts of modernism was
so to speak to return to the desert and
to retreat from those who wanted to
smother it with love and discover in
physical isolation a kind of parallel
and equivalent to the cultural isolation
that was the fate of the original
avangard sure I invented that idea
Michael
the idea being that there are no values
attached to something like this because
it's not portable and not a malleable
butter exchange
object and that says it you can't you
can't trade this thing you can't put it
in your pocket if you have a war you
can't move it around it's not worth
anything in fact it's an obligation the
theory is is that art and land are the
things that have the greatest value and
here you have both art and land and if
if either is excusable and neither
really worth very
much I think all large sculptures have
been technically difficult for all
people who ever built
them and I I think that I haven't tried
to surpass that scale I've simply tried
to keep Pace with it and it's a
historical
scale I think that it's normal and
natural to build a sculpture of this
measurement at this time
why make such things why spend so long
constructing something so big and so
hard to get to partly to change the
work's relation to the art world as a
system to get it out of the stream of
opinion about art and the stream of
official culture and money
exchange isolation is the essence of
land art remoteness gives all efforts to
see it the character of a Pilgrimage by
going to it you have in a sense said yes
to it before you see it and given more
time to it than most people would ever
give to looking at a sculpture in a
museum but the idea that a museum would
even bother with Advanced art is a
fairly new one and the notion that it
could become the place where modernist
credentials would be sealed and stamped
is even
newer this was largely an American
invention one of the illusions of the
19th century at the start of the museum
age in America was the idea that art
morally improves
now I think I can testify that it does
not nevertheless the idea of social
Improvement throughout struck a
responsive CT in the American Rich who
now began to spend hundreds of millions
of dollars on the setting up the
building and the endowment of museums it
may be that some of them felt on a quite
deep level that this was tantamount to a
religious act but in any case they all
knew it was tax deductible God loveth a
cheerful giver and the donors had every
reason to feel
cheerful
the earlier American robber barons
Morgan Frick carnegi had amassed
monuments to themselves monuments of
past art housed in neor renesance
palaces but the great change came in
1929 when the Museum of Modern Art was
founded in New York today it seems such
a natural title then it seemed very odd
indeed a wasn't the avangard against
museums on principle hadn't the
futurists wanted to burn them
down no European Museum was trying to
collect Modern Art in a systematic way
the idea of doing so was largely the
work of Alfred Bar who persuaded a
growing circle of millionaires centered
on the Rockefeller family to underwrite
a museum that would treat modernism as a
historical fact as the culture of their
time its present senor your curator
William Rubin recalls the policy well I
think Alfred Bar's aims were first to
make a synoptic collection of Modern Art
that is to say to show all schools from
All Nations uh as opposed let us say to
the groups of Modern Art that one found
in European museums which were heavily
weighted toward the nation in which the
museums were located uh to try to
balance these according to what he saw
as their quality and their importance
rather than their Providence uh this
meant also not following any particular
line that is taught abstraction or not
abstraction or whatever nevertheless I
think it would be fair to say that uh
there was a sense of a vanguardism that
lay behind this and that was a
force that led to uh radical painting
being more prized than let us say uh
conservative realistic painting of a
type that the public was more familiar
with by 1950 the mama as New Yorkers
call it with a sort of edle affection
had put together a collection of 20th
century art that no European Museum
could rival it didn't take sides all
rivalries and differences and
ideological splits were recorded on the
museum walls not in a partisan spirit
but as cultural
facts the museum wanted everything and
its opposite it defused the tensions of
all Moments by rendering them
historical from now on modernism as such
would tend to seem Noble and exemplary
rather than tense and
controversial so now the metaphors of
Temple and treasure house once the
property of museums of traditional art
could apply to modernity too scores of
new museums were built in America in the
60s and most of them looked like
fortresses culture Bankers radiating an
image of vast
security this one the hershorn museum in
Washington is in effect the set for The
Guns of neon without the
guns but the climax of the trend
happened more or less just across the
street the National Gallery in
Washington had been built and paid for
by one of America's older mertile
princes Andrew melon in
1941 and several decades later his
descendants and their Foundation laid
out close to $100 million to construct
this new East
Building its main feature was this
enormous Nave here people could stroll
about and enjoy the sensation of being
in the Church of art without actually
being obliged to pray if ever a museum
set up a building whose main function
was to praise its own stature as an
institution this was
it the galleries themselves were
relegated to the
corners the cost of this remarkable
essay in museological splendor was about
a third the price of a nuclear submarine
which puts it in one
perspective on the other hand it was
about twice the gross national product
of some African states which may put it
in
another this may be p by anyone who does
not think modernism is our official
culture the result of such expansions is
to turn the Museum from a sort of
articulated tomb into a low rating Mass
medium and meanwhile the interlock
between new art Capital real estate
education displaced piety and Showbiz
has gathered enough power to transform
whole neighborhoods outside the museum I
in with
the I go where the In Crowd
go I'm in with the in
Crow and I know what the
in any time of the year don't you
hear when I came to New York to live in
1970 I moved into a downtown industrial
district which because it was south of
hon Street was later christened Soho now
in those days there were two art
galleries in SoHo there were two Italian
bars no restaurants no tourists and
quite a lot of peace and
quiet today 9 years later there are
something like 75 Galleries at last
count dozens of restaurants and bars and
on weekends when the peering hordes of
dentists from New Jersey come down here
to take their Gucci loafers for a walk
among the bubble toop buses there is
very little peace and quiet indeed
we got our
[Music]
walk we got
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our any time of the year go to
he spending cash talking track girl I
show you a real good time come on with
me and leave your trou
behind I don't care where you've been
you w be nowhere you
been such are the healing and
transforming powers of Art in the 19th
century artists used to live in Bohemia
which were interesting but not Chic
today they make places Chic by moving
into them at least for a short time
until the landlords raise the rent and
boot them out again so they have to go
somewhere else this process is known as
urban
renewal the Soho recipe of the art
colony as a huge Boutique postmodernism
and designer genes happened to other
places like this part of Paris around
Leal it was bulldozed flat in the 1970s
to make room for a development whose
core was the pompo
center the Center opened in
1977 if the monument at the start of
modernism was the Eiffel Tower this is
the one at its
end a palace of French centralization
across between a panesi prison and a
construction
toy it's a very metaphorical building
and although those pipes and ventilators
stop practically all natural light from
getting in which is quite a trick in a
metal and glass structure they do
suggest industrial process like an oil
refiner
in the 1920s Russian constructivist
Architects designed palaces of culture
which were never
built this Marxist ideal of the museum
as a social condenser was only
translated into fact in capitalist Paris
60 years
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later and for blocks around the quarter
has been gutted and remade in the French
version of the Soho mix full of little
galleries selling little art and neat
studio apartments for young trendy
where the belly of Paris used to be
culture Gulch now
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stands if anyone had suggested 30 years
ago that the Fallout from Modern Art
would produce such mutations nobody
would have believed it this is what
happens when big concentrations of
social interests decide to use modern
art as their aiming point and the irony
is that the institutional Triumph of the
new happens just when the old social
uses of art whose residue gave the idea
of the avangard its meaning have almost
withered
[Music]
away in the 15th century one of these
uses was to inform and to explain
where did you get your information about
the world and its history and how to
live in it well not from magazines or
newspapers because they didn't
exist and not from books either because
in the 15th century the idea of mass
printing was hardly even an idea 500
years ago you and I probably would have
been completely
illiterate this left two other channels
of information one was the spoken word
and that included everything from
Village pump gossip to the high rhetoric
of the alar and the
pulpit and the other one was visual
images painting and
sculpture of these painting was the more
eloquent with its much greater power of
visual illusion and its adaptability to
almost any given
surface this Chapel in the Church of San
Clemente in Rome was painted by an
artist named masolino de
panal now 500 years later we can look at
his work with a tourist's eye or with an
historians but the one thing we cannot
do is see it with the eye of his own
audience because that eye supposed as
our culture no longer does that painting
was one of the primary dominant forms of
public
speech painting explains and
describes and here it describes a
legend the task of painting was to make
it Vivid and tangible and credible to
insert the legend into the life of a
group of people who who gathered here so
that it would strengthen their faith and
alter their beliefs and so compel
Behavior now that as I understand it is
what public art fundamentally has always
been
about but today we have no credible
public art because other media have
taken its old Power
away throughout its history up to the
end of the 19th century art kept this
didactic purpose it showed people what
to worship what to pray to whom to
believe what values to adopt it was the
main generator of social
symbols today the whole issue of the use
of public art is in question but most of
the time our ancestors simply assume
that it was the main purpose of
painting the object could be tiny and
Precious like a religious icon or it
could be as big as D's oath of the heri
which was a political icon meant to
teach Republican virtue to the French
we know that art is about pleasure
too and
fear and tranquil meditation Beyond
politics and a host of other things as
wide as the range of human feeling
itself but up to the end of the 19th
century the importance of art was
usually bound up with its role as public
discourse without that role there would
have been no Avon guard because if art
doesn't embody values then it can't act
as a
conscience and that was what the
avangard set out to be when it made its
deboo in the mid 19th century the
conscience of a class its traditional
enemy and chief Patron the
Bourgeois what made the avangard
possible in France where it was born was
the cellar
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system
instead of a circle of artists trying to
get work from one Prince or Bishop you
had hundreds even thousands of easel
paintings competing for the attention of
thousands of middle class people it was
more like a bizaar than a court and it
gave more room for invention and Scandal
and
Liberty anyone could send a picture in
though there was no guarantee that it
would be
hung the salon was the theater in which
the drama of offending the Bourgeois was
played
out Hilton Kramer art critic of the New
York Times the relationship of the
avangard to the middle class is
enormously complicated because it uh it
like everything else in modern culture
was uh so so
changeable uh the the initial Collision
the initial
challenge always within a single
generation was resolved into to an
Embrace what was established taste for
the Bourgeois in one generation uh was
abandoned in the subsequent generation
for the taste of what had been conceived
to be abong God uh it's a great uh
misunderstanding of of the history both
of 19th century culture and of Our Own
in the 20th century uh to hold on to the
notion of the Aang God as sort of
permanent uh cultural gorillas uh making
their uh foras into uh uh middle class
wealth uh they actually um were more
like family in which there were uh
conflicts of
generations uh and uh in the end uh as
in uh often happens in families when the
wills were rid uh the aonga turned out
to be the beneficiary after
all the first great painters to embody
the ideal of the avangard was Gustav
Corb in the 1850s and 60s in politics a
radical in art a realist in person an
invincible and solid egotist who could
show himself greeting even the sea on
equal
terms he called himself the most
arrogant man in France and when asked
which school he belonged to he replied
I'm a ctist that's all my painting is
the only true one I am the first and
unique artist of this Century the others
are students or
dilers corbo's work can only be
understood in relation to the public
that he was struggling to create this
public he hoped would crystallize out of
the mass audience of the salons around
the idea of realism a public which
accepted that art should be challenging
and problematic in short the public for
Modern Art
itself
he set himself firmly against the
reigning Taste of his day and the
penalty was insult from what fabulous
mating of a slug with a peacock from
what genital antitheses from what fatty
oozings can have been generated this
thing called M Gustav
cor under what Gardener's clush with the
help of what manure as a result of what
mixture of wine beer corrosive mucus and
flatulent swellings can have grown this
sonorous and hairy pumpkin this
aesthetic belly this imbecilic and
impotent incarnation of the
self they don't write art criticism like
that anymore not because of editorial
timidity or the law of liel but because
nobody feels threatened by works of art
the way that Dumar felt threatened by
cor he used the kind of language that
Society used to protect themselves and
to punish offenders and its frenzy as
insult was in its way a kind of
backhanded compliments because it sprang
from an intense belief that it mattered
what art said and that works of art had
real consequences in the real world to
change the language of art the official
visual speech of France was like seizing
the radio station and changing the
programs the new could only shock as
long as it was constantly underwritten
by the old otherwise why get excited by
bits of paint on
canvas from Corb onwards the idea of the
avangard Artist as some kind of
bolshevist or Anarchist was fixed in the
public mind and it contributed a great
deal to the idea that Modern Art owed
nothing to the past and was actually
opposed to all
traditions this was nonsense but it was
durable nonsense I think that the the
principal radical effect that the aong
God has on
society uh and has had on society
doesn't take place directly in in the
realm of politics but takes place in the
realm of style and feeling that is It
prepares the educated segment of a
society to question the values that have
been handed down it it creates a kind of
ferment uh which uh prepares the way for
vast political change its role is to
create a model of
descent today painting and sculpture
scarcely have the power left to create
such a model all that happens is that
now and again usually in England or
Australia people get worked up about
some object because it seemed not worth
the money that a museum paid for it so
it was with Carl Andre's 120
bricks the essential difference between
this kind of sculpture and any that has
existed in the past is that this depends
not just a bit but totally on the
museum a Roda in a parking lot is still
a misplaced Roda but this in a parking
lot is just
bricks in this way the museum becomes a
nearly equal partner with the artist it
helps create the work by providing the
only place where an array of bricks can
be seen as art and fitted into the
context of a minor modern art movement
called
minimalism on the street minimalism
doesn't exist there are only
things this piece by the American
sculptor Donald Jud if you saw it
outside the gallery is just a row of
plywood
boxes what the museum gives it is a slot
in a debate about the nature and limits
of art and that was the content of the
work the nervana of boredom that
minimalism promised was the exact
opposite of the fantasies of action and
involvement that political art held
out but the real field of modernist
experience lies somewhere between dumb
Mass propaganda on one hand and the
silences of a Dying Avon guard on the
other that experience is not collective
in front of a mati you do not hear the
chant of surging Millions you hear one
voice carefully explaining itself to one
person the interested stranger
yourself most of the great voices of
modernity come from neither the left nor
the right of society but from just
outside it and the basic reason why the
avangard had so little influence on
action and such a lot on sensibility is
that it was
solitary William Rubin religious
painting ceases uh the painting of the
uh political leader disappears the
painting of history as such disappears
all the themes that belong to the
collectivity so to say disappear and one
of the ways we can Define Modern Art if
we want to is that it has been an art
that did not engage itself in the old
collectivities but rather in a much more
limited world of the experience of the
artist himself and of the people who uh
loved and were interested in that world
uh this world of the artist has of
course since then been commercialized
and various other things have happened
to it but let us say in its Essence it
was a private world as opposed to the
public World which characterized
premodern
art this recoil from the public stance
didn't only happen in abstract art it
came in depictive art as well there is
an immense gap between the Ambitions of
a Corbet and those of an American
realist sculptor like George Seagle
because his subject is not so much human
sociability as the difficulty of any
kind of communication at
all in fact over the last 25 years years
the art of social commentary has been
the exception and not the
rule one of these exceptions is Ed
keenholtz who makes big Tableau charged
with irony and grotesqueness very much
in the tradition of Berlin D but
starting with the American
[Music]
scene
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a bar and eery in Los Angeles called
Barney's Beanery formed one of these
pieces and keenholtz reconstructed it
and its
clientele
[Music]
most of the avangard style since cubism
were meant as a criticism of life but
the dominant museum style of the 60s
certainly was
not this was the kind of color field
painting that developed out of Jackson Pollock work that atmospheric we of
dripped paint all free gesture and light
touch the artist who seized its implicit
delicacy was Helen Frankenthaler in 1952 she painted
mountains and sea the progenitor of a
whole school of stain
painting her work held a constant thread
of landscape images but other painters
who picked up on her way of dying and
staining the canvas dispensed with that.
Morris Lewis wanted to produce a
decorative impersonal surface from which
everything that's smacked of character
like a directional brushstroke or a
change of texture was
excluded Kenneth Noland reduced the
elements even further color not shape is
the origin of each
painting Noland could give it an ay
energy that offered a pure forceful
Hedonism to the
eye but that was all they did offer and
although more Museum time and space was
devoted to propagating It in America
than any other available style or
movement the resources of Coffield
painting were looking pretty thin by the
end of the
60s it maintained itself as a mandarin
style but the Matissian heart was no
longer in it. At the opposite pole of feeling there were Frank Stella's paintings from the 70s filled with a sort of maniacal decorative punch glitter scribbling congestion big French curves swinging out of the design like the feathers of some tropical bird. The sheer energy of this kind of work belies the idea much talked about recently that abstract painting as such is a dying form.
As in a different way the paintings of Bridget Riley do for abstract art can serve as a model
of clear feeling here it does it is very
exact showing what slips can happen in
the process of seeing and how insecure
the pleasures of the eye may be
I don't think it's a small matter to be
shown this and although some people
think such art has no content one can
take it that this process of seeing and
feeling set forth on the canvas is the
content and not a simple one either
Riley's kind of sharp self-doubting
Talent so finely tuned was particularly
vulnerable to attack it wasn't merely
decorative but the commercial world made
it seem so in the 1960s by chewing her
work up and spitting it out as op art
fashion she's got the in
her this I can't
believe she's going to tell your
heart no no n will she
dece she's got the devil in her
heart she's an
angel the problem wasn't entirely
defined by the fact that fashion had
been taking ideas from artists it had
been doing that for 50
years Art Deco was decorated cubism and
a lot of lolium owes its patterns to
mandrian but now the promotional world
as a system had fused with the art world
as a system and that was
new in a very Insidious way the idea of
cultural confrontation had been replaced
by the idea of styling and that was new
too
too we were heading into a stage of
meaningless tolerance where nothing an
artist could do would be thought really
offensive anymore because there was
always the chance that it might convert
into
Capital there was a flood of instant art
for instant people vasarelli to warhall
all of it getting its 15 minutes of
undivided attention from a new class of
collectors who saw its up-to-dateness as
a way of underwriting their social
careers or buying an up at public
relations image for their
companies the great emblem of the
culture of quick results was not any
given work of art though it was the Art
Market itself which began to boom and
has been going up ever since as money
goes
down I started writing about art 20
years ago now in those far off days you
could spend time in a museum without
ever once thinking about what the art
might cost the price was not relevant
and besides price and value were
completely distinct questions but then
in the early 60s something began to
happen first of all there was a trickle
and then a stream and finally a great
Brown roaring flood of propaganda about
art
investment the price of a work of art
now became part of its function it
redefined the art whose new job was to
sit on the wall and get more expensive
and the result was that whereas before
works of art had been like strangers
with whom one could Converse and whom
one could gradually get to know they now
assumed more and more the character of
film stars with the museum as their
limousine I doubt if anybody nowadays
can look at a Cubist BR or a Rothco or a
Russian constructivist sculpture without
being deeply affected by the fact that
the prices of these things has become
absurdly high and that in some crucial
sense the has removed them from the Run
of ordinary
experience I think high price strikes
people blind I think it displaces the
content of the work and you can't spend
very much time writing about out without
realizing how much criticism and
scholarship whether they want to or not
end up serving that system whereby a
bunch of Brokers with faces like silver
teapots make fortunes flogging modern
masterpieces to another bunch of
chromide investors in Manhattan and
Zurich now you may or may not find this
depressing but it certainly depresses
me David beist of Chris New York well it
scares the hell out of be that frankly
because judet Mania which is the most
dramatic and
historical uh possible parallel with the
situation at
present was rather like uh the south sea
bubble you get uh a perfectly
straightforward Market a good strong
Market an inter ational market like the
Art Market and suddenly for whatever
reason it becomes the flavor of the
month art is the thing to put your money
into and all sorts of people who have no
interest in art just as
artist something which you should love
and like and be interested in suddenly
you decide you told you ought to be
investing in art so millions of people
pour their money into works of art they
expect it to perform in some way like uh
some magic stock I have £3,000 bit for
it for
£3,000
£3,000 200 500 800 4,000 at
£4,000
4,000 £4,000 anymore
£4,000 £4,000 £4,000
anymore the basic law of the Art Market
is that art has no intrinsic value no
value as
material its price reflects only two
things desire and
scarcity its scarcity can be controlled
to some extent and nothing is more
manipulable than
desire high price isolates the star
painting it makes it a curiosity a
celebrity and like other celebrities
both famous and only partly visible
eight you can't walk into a museum and
look at a picture which you know has
been Ram down your throat in the
newspapers only a month or year ago that
this picture's just fetched two three in
the case of the vasus in the
Metropolitan Museum fetched $55 million
you can't look at that picture and
totally put that out of your mind You
Must Be Wondering good happens is that
really worth $5.5
million and however marvelous the work
of art is this element must Cloud your
thinking quite heavily and in fact it
must dominate your thinking um it's
rather like a pretty girl you look at a
pretty girl that's lovely then you're
suddenly told she's a
gillionaire now this can I'm sure it
shouldn't but there no question in some
way it affects your thinking it may
affect
it advantageously or disadvantageously I
mean I'm sure if you're a gentleman man
if you're a gentleman you should totally
ignore it but it's
impossible um and it's the same sort of
thing it does cloud your thinking For
Better or For Worse and I'm sure in many
cas es pretty all cases of were worse
and works of art now have become rather
like gold ingots people just look at
them and say
gosh so one reaction among artist in the
70s was to stop making objects
altogether to make art which in theory
couldn't be so art that was simply an
event leaving behind just its tracers on
film or tape performance art which most
people still will have trouble seeing as
art at
all it's a kind of high-intensity
theater and because its basic material
is the artist body some performance
pieces carry risk and pressure to an
extreme like this one by the Englishman
Stuart grizzley where he pushes himself
almost to drowning in a
tank I am interested in placing the body
in certain
circumstances whereby a certain strain
occur occurs um where a certain tension
occurs for example being
underwater and in this case I was
dealing with the problem of people who
almost drop out of the bottom of the
social system and become tramps or down
and outs or what have you and um so that
one has this kind of mute character and
um that was one of the major elements in
in in the piece that I that I wanted to
express
you can see what tradition such work
belongs to it's
expressionism but today expressionism
has collapsed inwards leaving only one
theme the portrait the artist himself
his own body seen both as subject and as
object if if you wanted to find the
crossing points between the earlier
Romanticism of American art and the
narcissism of the 70s this would
certainly be one of them this is the
mirror room designed by the artist Lucas
samaris in
1966 now despite photography and all the
other ways that we have of capturing an
image the mirror is still the main way
that we have of inspecting our own
bodies and for samaris the image in the
mirror was both himself and somebody
else an audience
reacting to what he
did so the mirror is a kind of magical
split in the world of Human
Relationships but to see yourself
multiplied forever inside a glass cube
that is a tremendous feat of
narcissism even the table and the chair
throw back little facets of oneself and
their own shape gets quite lost in this
Maze of
Reflections meanwhile the reflections
are in it and they make up this huge
crystalline Panorama like the night sky
like outer space something very much
bigger than the self but artificial at
the same
time when camera or videotape replace
the mirror you have body art its
ancestry lies 50 years back when Marcel
duon had a star shaved on the back of
his head and pretended to be old Nick
the Devil with the help of shaving
cream probably its most interesting
practitioner today lives in Vienna
appropriately since Vienna was the city
of Freud the Cradle of psychoanalysis
and its culture was permeated by the
expressionist desire to inspect and
question the neurotic
self today the artist arnor frina draws
inspiration from photos of catatonic
poses and grimaces in the mad house and
acts out his own developments of them
before a camera then he Alters them by
drawing
like all artists I'm in a tradition of
self-portraiture and there is probably a
special relationship to Vanos and Shea
self-portraits in so far as they are
done in a very manneristic heightened
and exalted
form
Perhaps it is important in general that
I experience strong identity between the
expression of my body my pose and my
psychological
State and then it's important that I'm
coordinated that my whole body
amalgamates into a
Unity for instance between the toe and
the pupil there becomes a strong
connection
and then there are special
criteria but that depends on my state of
mind excitement or
aggressiveness or gliding or the will to
exaggerate or presumptuous
lying then very soft
tones then threatening
ones although in general an inner
uneasiness
prevails but there is a general feeling
today that the traditions of modernist
imagery are
closing thus the domain of Ideal
sociable pleasure of the world's
Delights unimpeded by irony whose
representatives were Bona and matis and
Picasso scarcely appears in painting
anymore it survives in the context of
gay imagery and David 's work and if it
no longer has its mozarts at least
hotney is its cold porter which is no
mean thing to
[Applause]
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be
meanwhile the hope of the D the
surrealists and the constructivists that
art could influence politics is gone
perhaps the last major artist to think
otherwise is a German Joseph boy a
former Luft buffer pilot whose
happenings and manifestos and general
celebrity as a Pied Piper of Youth
politics have turned him into a
strangely anomalous figure a protester
against the German establishment whose
work is invested in by half the bankers
and financiers in West
Germany but with the end of modern art
art starts for me you know with the end
of modern art art is not dying art uh
comes to birth that is my idea but then
it is a realiz understanding of art it
is an anthropological understanding of
art everybody is an artist
then boy's answer to the political
decline of the aesthetic avangard was to
Define art as any kind of being or doing
rather than specifically making and then
to designate the whole social fabric
politics included as what he called a
social
sculpture I think it is a it is a basic
metaphor for all social freedoms but it
shouldn't be only a metaphor it should
be in the in the daily life a real means
to go in and to transforms a fields of
the
Society of course it's one thing to wish
that art had influence over events and
quite another to show that it actually
does boy's own work did not escape the
Machinery of the 70s in which the
meaning of all Avon guards socially
directed or not was effectively gutted
by the
market but the work is often amazingly
powerful boys took glass cases and
filled them with grimy momentos of the
German past a dried rat in a pale of
straw a hot plate with two blocks of fat
sitting on the burners chipped Crockery
mummified sausages Sinister bits of
metal and wire and an old picture of a
concentration camp this piece is known
as the Ashwi itz
box its intensity is such that one can
hardly imagine a school of boys the work
is too personal for that too haunted by
memory
[Music]
this may be the most expensive sculpture
ever made costing over a million dollars
to
build this is the tip of a work of art
or rather of one 400th of a work of art
which stands in the New Mexico desert a
couple of 100 miles from
Albuquerque 400 stainless steel rods
their tips forming a level plane of
spikes 1 km wide and a mile long the
whole thing laid out correct to 1/16th
of an
inch installation began on it in 1977
and it substantially finished now or
rather insubstantially finished because
despite its enormous spread the
lightning field as it's called isn't
really a mass at all and you don't think
of it in terms of body and substance but
rather delicacy and
transparency landscape
time and above all weather and
[Music]
Light
[Music]
the artist who conceived this work is
Walter de
Maria the place the specific site the
fact that it's in New Mexico and not in
California or in another place uh takes
on a tremendous importance and um one
feels the par
uh uh spirit of this
place this site was chosen because it
was remote and
isolated uh more so than other
places um there's a heavy uh incidence
of lightning here uh during the summer
months the pointed tip uh serves as the
direction which sends the invisible
electric charge into the
atmosphere to complete the circuit
between uh nature itself and the
[Music]
work the uh part of the content of the
work is the ratio of people to space so
if we think of four to six people in one
day walking through the field uh they
have a very private experience
[Music]
unfortunately one can't often get a
private enough experience in the
museum though the museum has its
function the museum has its own
architecture its own Traditions which
don't fit
here
[Music]
clearly the museum can't handle all art
you can't fit a whole landscape with 400
tax deductible spikes into it and it's
not a good place for small fleeting
gestures because gestures don't sit well
in a permanent collection nor is it a
good place for getting shot at in or
half drowned in or getting covered in
Goat guts or experiencing any one of the
other various things that body artists
over the years have chosen to do to
their bodies every institution has its
limits though it may try not to observe
them you have to think of museums as
broadcasting on a given frequency and
not all the signals coming out of the
culture can get on that one wavelength
this is not the Museum's fault a museum
can no more contain all culture than a
zoo can hold all
nature
[Applause]
[Music]
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[Music]
[Music]
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[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
you
[Music]
we
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if the avangard has lost its functions
is modern art just a historical
issue Thomas Messer director of the
gugenheim museum I don't think that um
art owes us anything I think that art is
uh its own motor its own
result uh we uh exaggerate what art can
do at least in a direct way uh I think
that we are having expectancies about
this which when they are not
fulfilled or not fulfilled in that way
we turn around and blame it so I am
perfectly content to leave art go its
own way and furthermore I have
absolutely no fears about the fate of
art I do worry about art institutions
which is a different matter but as long
as there is life on this planet there
will be art whether we recognize it as
such whether we see it for what it is or
whether we look in wrong directions and
presume that something is art that isn't
is another matter but art is
safe as to whether modernism is over I
think it's probably a little too early
to say I don't think that it's out of
the realm of possibility that a handful
of great Geniuses great painters could
emerge within the next 10 years and
Revitalize this tradition and that's all
it takes two or three men uh at the same
time they will Revitalize it I think in
a way that
will make it not certainly resemble very
closely what existed before and I would
have to admit in the face of those who
argue that modernism is over that there
is a lot of evidence to suggest that a
period it is
ending we finished where modernism began
at the foot of the Eiffel Tower and
perhaps the etiquette now demands that I
should try and prognosticate about what
is coming next well I won't because I
don't
know history teaches us one certain
thing that critics when they fish out
the crystal ball and start trying to
guess what the future will be are almost
invariably wrong
I don't think there's ever been such a
rush towards insignificance in the name
of the historical future as we've seen
in the last 15 years the famous
radicalism of 60s and 70s art turns out
to have been a kind of dumb show a
sherad of toughness a way of avoiding
feeling and I don't think we are ever
again obliged to look at a plywood box
or a row of bricks on the floor or a
vide type of some twit from the
University of Central paranoia sticking
pins in himself and think this is the
real thing this is the necessary art of
our time this needs respect because it
isn't and it doesn't and nobody
cares the fact is that anyone except a
child can make such things because
children have the kind of direct
sensuous and complex relationship with
the world around them that modernism in
its declining years was trying to
deny that relationship is the Lost
Paradise that art wants to give back to
us not as children but as adults it's
also what the modern and the old have in
common Pollock with Turner matis with
Rubin or BR with pan and the basic
project of art is always to make the
world whole and comprehensible to
restore it to us in all its glory and
its occasional nastiness not through
argument but through
feeling and then to close the gap
between you and everything that is not
you and in this way to pass from feeling
to meaning
it's not something that committees can
do it's not a task achieved by groups or
by
movements it's done by individuals each
person mediating in some way between a
sense of history and an experience of
the
world this task is literally endless and
so although we don't have an AV on guard
anymore we're always going to have
See also