The Shock of the New

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"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, Robert Hughes.

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Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

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 for the BBC.

1 Overview
2 Series outline
3 2004 update
4 Book
5 Subtitles
- 5.1 Part 1
- 5.2 Part 8
6 See also

[edit]

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.

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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
- Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, Gris, Leger, Delaunay, Marinetti, Boccioni, Balla, Severini, Picabia, Duchamp
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
- Johnson, Boullée, Garnier, Chiattone, Sant'Elia, Melnikov, Rodchenko, Leonidov, Sullivan, Labrouste, Berg, Mies, Le Corbusier, Chandigarh, Werkbund exhibition 1927, Bauhaus, Gropius, Behrens, De Stijl, Rietveld, van Duesberg, Mondrian, La Defense, Pruitt–Igoe, Costa, Niemeyer, Brasilia
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

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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

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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.

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Subtitles

[edit]

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]

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

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

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

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]

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]

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]

pilot

[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]

[Applause]

[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

[Music]

pitilessly in their art they set out to

find an equivalent for the speed and the

movement that they worshiped in their

[Music]

cars

[Music]

aah

[Music]

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

[Music]

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

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

[Music]

entertainment

[Music]

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

[edit]

Part 8

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

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

[Music]

culture

[Music]

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

[Music]

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

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

[Music]

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

[Music]

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

[Music]

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

[Music]

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

[Music]

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 matisan heart was no

longer in

it at the opposite pole of feeling there

were Frank Stellar's paintings from the

70s filled with a sort of monarchal

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 bridgid 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]

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

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]

[Applause]

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

you

[Music]

[Applause]

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

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

[edit]

The Shock of the New

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Current revision

Contents

Overview

Series outline

2004 update

Book

Subtitles

Part 1

Part 8

See also

Views

Personal tools

Search

Metas

Navigation

-{{Template}}''[[The Shock of the New]]'' is a book and a television series by [[Robert Hughes]].
+{| class="toccolours" style="float: left; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 2em; font-size: 85%; background:#c6dbf7; color:black; width:30em; max-width: 40%;" cellspacing="5"
+| style="text-align: left;" |
+"The essential difference between a sculpture like [[Carl Andre|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 [[Auguste Rodin|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]]'', [[Robert Hughes]].
+|}
+{{Template}}
-In 1980 the [[BBC]] broadcast  Hughes's [[Television program|television series]] on the development of [[modern art]] since the [[Impressionism|Impressionists]]. It was accompanied by a book of the same name. Its combination of insight, wit and accessibility are still widely praised.
+'''''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]].
-=== On Carl Andre ===
-<small>Companion book to Hughes' TV documentary series of the same name.  Thames and Hudson ISBN 0-500-27582-3</small>
-* The essential difference between a sculpture like [[Carl Andre|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 [[Auguste Rodin|Rodin]] in a parking lot is still a misplaced Rodin; Andre's bricks in the same place can only be a pile of bricks.
+==Overview==
-** Page 393
+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 [[Public Broadcasting Service|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 (actor)|Martin Jarvis]].
+#''Mechanical Paradise'' –  How the development of technology influenced art between 1880 and end of World War I. [[Cubism]] and [[Futurism]]
+#*[[Paul Cézanne|Cézanne]], [[Pablo Picasso|Picasso]], [[Georges Braque|Braque]], [[Juan Gris|Gris]], [[Fernand Léger|Leger]], [[Robert Delaunay|Delaunay]], [[Filippo Tommaso Marinetti|Marinetti]], [[Umberto Boccioni|Boccioni]], [[Giacomo Balla|Balla]], [[Gino Severini|Severini]], [[Francis Picabia|Picabia]], [[Marcel Duchamp|Duchamp]]
+#''The Powers That Be'' [''Shapes of Dissent''] –  Examining the relationship between modern art and authority. [[Dada]], [[Constructivism (art)|Constructivism]], [[Futurism]], architecture of power
+#*[[World War I]] and industrialised death, [[Exile]] and [[intellectual]]s as a class, [[Vladimir Lenin|Lenin]], [[Tristan Tzara|Tzara]], [[Marcel Janco|Janco]], [[Jean Arp|Arp]], [[Hugo Ball|Ball]], [[Marcel Duchamp|Duchamp]], [[Ernst Ludwig Kirchner|Kirchner]], [[Max Ernst|Ernst]], [[Hannah Höch|Höch]], [[Otto Dix|Dix]], [[Giorgio de Chirico|de Chirico]], [[Raoul Hausmann|Hausmann]], [[George Grosz|Grosz]], [[Naum Gabo|Gabo]], [[Vladimir Tatlin|Tatlin]], [[László Moholy-Nagy|Moholy-Nagy]], [[El Lissitzky|Lissitzky]], [[Alexander Rodchenko|Rodchenko]], [[Filippo Tommaso Marinetti|Marinetti]], [[Enrico Prampolini|Prampolini]], [[Albert Speer|Speer]], [[Marcello Piacentini|Piacentini]], [[Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts|Lincoln Center]], [[John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts|Kennedy Center]], [[Empire State Plaza|Albany Mall]], [[Pablo Picasso|Picasso]]'s [[Guernica (Picasso)|''Guernica'']], [[Jean Tinguely|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]], [[Thomas Gainsborough|Gainsborough]], [[Bourgeoisie]], [[Georges Seurat|Seurat]], [[Claude Monet]], [[Paul Cézanne]], the vivid colours of [[Provence#Painters|the South]], [[Paul Gauguin]], [[André Derain]], [[Maurice de Vlaminck]], [[Henri Matisse]], [[Pierre Bonnard]], [[Georges Braque|Braque]], [[Pablo Picasso|Picasso]], [[Henri Matisse#Final years|late Matisse]]
+#''Trouble in Utopia'' – Examining the aspirations and reality of [[modern architecture]]. [[International Style (architecture)|International Style]], [[Art Nouveau]], [[Futurist architecture]], [[urban planning]]
+#*[[Philip Johnson|Johnson]], [[Étienne-Louis Boullée|Boullée]], [[Charles Garnier (architect)|Garnier]], [[Mario Chiattone|Chiattone]], [[Antonio Sant'Elia|Sant'Elia]], [[Konstantin Melnikov|Melnikov]], [[Alexander Rodchenko|Rodchenko]], [[Ivan Leonidov|Leonidov]], [[Louis Sullivan|Sullivan]], [[Henri Labrouste|Labrouste]], [[Max Berg|Berg]], [[Ludwig Mies van der Rohe|Mies]], [[Le Corbusier]], [[Chandigarh]], [[Weissenhof Estate|Werkbund exhibition 1927]], [[Bauhaus]], [[Walter Gropius|Gropius]], [[Peter Behrens|Behrens]], [[De Stijl]], [[Gerrit Rietveld|Rietveld]], [[Theo van Doesburg|van Duesberg]], [[Piet Mondrian|Mondrian]], [[La Défense|La Defense]], [[Pruitt–Igoe]], [[Lúcio Costa|Costa]], [[Oscar Niemeyer|Niemeyer]], [[Brasília|Brasilia]]
+#''The Threshold of Liberty'' – Examining the [[Surrealism|surrealists]]' attempts to make art without restrictions.
+#*[[May 1968 events in France|May 1968]], [[André Breton|Breton]], [[Max Ernst|Ernst]], [[Giorgio de Chirico|de Chirico]], [[Arnold Böcklin|Böcklin]], [[Comte de Lautréamont|Ducasse]], [[child art]], [[Insanity|madness]], [[Henri Rousseau|Rousseau]], [[Ferdinand Cheval|Cheval]], [[Joan Miró|Miro]], [[Antoni Gaudí|Gaudi]], [[Salvador Dalí|Dalí]], [[flea market]], [[Marcel Jean|Jean]], [[Victor Brauner|Brauner]], [[Wolfgang Paalen|Paalen]], [[Méret Oppenheim|Oppenheim]], [[Man Ray]], [[René Magritte|Margritte]], [[Marquis de Sade|de Sade]], [[Catholicism]] and [[Taboo|sexual taboo]], [[Hans Bellmer|Bellmer]], [[Joseph Cornell|Cornell]], [[Jackson Pollock|Pollock]], [[Mark Rothko|Rothko]], [[Arshile Gorky|Gorky]], [[Hans Hofmann|Hofmann]], [[End of World War II in Europe|1945 liberation]], [[Christo and Jeanne-Claude|Christo]], [[Chris Burden|Burden]], [[hippie]]s and [[Self#Culture|self-expression]], [[Vietnam War]], [[Youth|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]]
+#*[[Vincent van Gogh|van Gogh]], [[Edvard Munch|Munch]], [[Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec|Toulouse-Lautrec]], [[Paul Gauguin|Gauguin]], [[Ernst Ludwig Kirchner|Kirchner]], [[Oskar Kokoschka|Kokoschka]], [[Chaïm Soutine|Soutine]], [[Francis Bacon (artist)|Bacon]], [[Willem de Kooning|de Kooning]], photographical evidence of [[the Holocaust]], [[Franz Marc|Marc]], [[Paul Klee|Klee]], [[Wassily Kandinsky|Kandinsky]], [[Constantin Brâncuși|Brancusi]], [[Mark Rothko|Rothko]], [[Jackson Pollock|Pollock]], [[Robert Motherwell|Motherwell]]
+#''Culture as Nature'' – Examining the art that referred to the man-made world which fed off culture itself. [[Pop art]] and [[celebrity]]
+#*[[Georgia O'Keeffe|O'Keeffe]], [[Stuart Davis (painter)|Davis]], [[Robert Rauschenberg|Rauschenberg]], [[Kurt Schwitters|Schwitters]], [[Jasper Johns|Johns]], [[Richard Hamilton (artist)|Hamilton]], the influence of [[television]], [[Andy Warhol|Warhol]], [[Roy Lichtenstein|Liechtenstein]], [[James Rosenquist|Rosenquist]], [[Alex Katz|Katz]], [[Las Vegas Valley|Las Vegas]] as a single "lousy" artwork, [[Claes Oldenburg|Oldenburg]], [[Marshall McLuhan|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]]
+#*[[Michael Heizer|Heizer]], [[Museum of Modern Art|MoMA]] and rich patrons, [[SoHo, Manhattan|SoHo]] and [[Gentrification|urban renewal]], [[Centre Georges Pompidou|Pompidou Centre]] and the changing uses of art, [[Masolino da Panicale|da Panicale]], art as public discourse, the [[Salon (Paris)|Salon system]], the [[Avant-garde|avantgarde]] and the [[bourgeoisie]], [[Gustave Courbet|Courbet]], [[Carl Andre|Andre]], [[Donald Judd|Judd]], public and private, [[George Segal (artist)|Segal]], [[Edward Kienholz|Kienholz]], [[Helen Frankenthaler|Frankenthaler]], [[Morris Louis|Louis]], [[Kenneth Noland|Noland]], [[Frank Stella|Stella]], [[Bridget Riley|Riley]], [[Fashion design|fashion]], the [[Art valuation|art market]], [[Stuart Brisley|Brisley]], [[Lucas Samaras|Samaras]], [[Arnulf Rainer|Rainer]], [[David Hockney|Hockney]], [[Joseph Beuys|Beuys]], [[Walter De Maria|de Maria]]
+== 2004 update ==
+* The NEW Shock of the New (2004) – How the art world has changed, 25 years later.
+** [[Eiffel Tower|Eiffel tower]], [[World Trade Center (1973–2001)|World Trade Center]], [[September 11 attacks|9/11]], [[J. M. W. Turner|Turner]], [[Francisco Goya|Goya]], [[Jacques-Louis David|David]], [[Pablo Picasso|Picasso]]'s ''[[Guernica (Picasso)|Guernica]]'' as the last truly political painting, [[Whitney Biennial]], [[Andy Warhol|Warhol]], [[fashion]] as the primary model of art, [[Jeff Koons|Koons]], [[Marcel Duchamp|Duchamp]], [[Michelangelo]], [[Masaccio]], exploding prices of the [[Art valuation|art market]], [[Paula Rego|Rego]], [[Anselm Kiefer|Kiefer]], [[information overload]], [[David Hockney|Hockney]], the skill of [[drawing]], art as the opposite of [[mass media]], [[Lucian Freud|Freud]], [[Gilbert & George|Gilbert and George]], [[Postmodernism|post-modernism]], slowness of painting, [[Piet Mondrian|Mondrian]], [[Mark Rothko|Rothko]], [[Ellsworth Kelly|Kelly]], [[Sean Scully|Scully]], [[beauty]], [[Olafur Eliasson|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.
+== 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
+th 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
+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]
+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
+[Music]
+pitilessly in their art they set out to
+find an equivalent for the speed and the
+movement that they worshiped in their
+[Music]
+cars
+[Music]
+[Music]
+aah
+[Music]
+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
+[Music]
+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
+[Music]
+entertainment
+[Music]
+[Music]
+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
+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
+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===
+[Music]
+[Applause]
+[Music]
+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
+[Music]
+culture
+[Music]
+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]
+[Music]
+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
+th 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
+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
+s 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
+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
+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
+[Music]
+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
+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
+years
+[Music]
+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
+[Music]
+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
+[Music]
+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
+[Music]
+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
+s it maintained itself as a mandarin
+style but the matisan heart was no
+longer in
+it at the opposite pole of feeling there
+were Frank Stellar's paintings from the
+s filled with a sort of monarchal
+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 bridgid 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
+,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
+s 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
+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]
+[Applause]
+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]
+[Applause]
+[Music]
+[Music]
+[Applause]
+[Music]
+[Applause]
+[Music]
+you
+[Music]
+we
+[Applause]
+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==
+* ''[[Civilisation (TV series)|Civilisation]]''
+* ''[[The Ascent of Man]]''
 {{GFDL}}