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HORNS BEEP AND ENGINES ROAR

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Unlike our grandparents, we live in a world that we made.

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Until about 50 years ago,

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images of nature were the keys to feeling in art.

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Today, for most people, nature has been replaced

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by the culture of congestion, cities and mass media.

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We are crammed like battery hens with stimuli

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and overload has changed our art.

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Capitalism plus electronics gave us a new habitat, our forest of media.

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The problem for art was how to survive there, how to adapt to it

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because otherwise, it was feared, art would go under.

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# Well it's Saturday night and I just got paid

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# Fool about money Don't try to save

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# My heart says "Go, go, have a time"

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# Cos it's Saturday night and baby I'm feelin' fine
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# Going to rip it up

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# Going to rock it up

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# Going to shake it up

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# Gonna ball it up

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# Going to rock it up

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# And ball tonight

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# Got me a date Now don't be late

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# Pick her up in my 88

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# Shag it on down to the Union Hall

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# When the juke starts jumping I'll have a ball

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# Going to rip it up

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# Going to rock it up

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# Going to shake it up

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# Going to ball it up

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# Going to rock it up

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# And ball tonight

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# Ready, set go, man, go

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# I've got a girl that I love so

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# And I'm ready

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# Ready to rip it up, I'm ready

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# Ready to rip it up, I'm ready... #

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The present has more distraction than the past.

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Works of art once had less competition from their surroundings.

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GREGORIAN CHANT

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The background to the organised sound of Gregorian chant

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wasn't random noise.

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Silence was one of the dominant facts of medieval life.

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You listened to one thing at a time.

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GREGORIAN CHANT CONTINUES

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In a pre-technological world, you also looked at one thing at a time.

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Things could not be reproduced -

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no print, no film, no cathode ray tubes.

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Each object, singular.

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Each act of singing, transitive.

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Not today.

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Today, the object splits into a swarm of images of itself,

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clones, copies.

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The more famous an object is,

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the more cultural meaning it has and the more unique people say it is,

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but the more it breeds.

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Mass production strips the image of its complexity

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so that it resembles a sign.

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A sign is a command.

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It's something you take in all at once.
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It means one thing only. It isn't any better for being handmade.

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Pictures are different. They are more complicated.

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They mean a lot of things.

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You scan them and their meaning adds up and unfolds.

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You don't get it all at once.

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Pictures educate.

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Signs discipline.

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Mass language always tends to speak in the imperative voice.

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The idea of sitting down and painting this landscape like an Impressionist

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was obviously absurd.

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But how could art defend itself against a torrent of signs

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which were more vivid than its own images?

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By assimilating.

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By grafting the vitality of media

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onto what had become a wilting language.
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That, at any rate, was the hope.

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In the 19th century, the world of the Industrial Revolution

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appeared in landscape painting slowly pushing its way

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into a fixed aesthetic category like an intruder in paradise.

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Manufacture invading nature.

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The sign found its way into art a little bit later.

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The gap between the formal speech of painting and the lingo of signs

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began somewhere after 1900 when a few artists and poets

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realised that print was all around them and that it made up a visual language

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which art, up till then, had barely even scratched.

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The prophet of this was the Polish-French writer,

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Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet of Cubism.

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You read handbills, catalogues, posters that shout out loud -

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here's this morning's poetry and for prose you've got the newspapers.

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Six-penny detective novels full of cop stories,

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biographies of big shots, a thousand different titles.

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Lettering on billboards and walls,

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door plates and posters squawk like parrots.

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But the home of the quick message was America, especially New York.

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Its shapes were already a subject for American artists by 1920.

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To Joseph Stella, an Italian migrant artist,

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the Brooklyn Bridge was a cathedral of the new.

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It was the shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilisation -

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America.

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The eloquent meeting point of all the forces arising

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in a superb assertion of their powers, an apotheosis.

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The vision of the new city as sublime, as a temple of progress,

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almost a new Jerusalem, was felt by other artists.

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Here by Georgia O'Keeffe.

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But in the late '20s and early '30s,

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none of them were interested in the street lingo,

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the flashing ads in lights

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which astounded every out-of-towner in New York.

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That was too vulgar.

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It stood for the commercialism that American painters wanted to repudiate.

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The heroism of work - that was an acceptable subject,

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but the signs that sold the products of work, no.

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There was one exception, an American painter

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who loved what he called the New York visual dialect - Stuart Davis.

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Davis belonged to the same generation as Hemingway,

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and like him, he went to Paris and was deeply changed by contact with the French
avant-garde.

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Cubism formed his style.

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Before he got to France in the early 1920s, Davis was doing Cubist-type paintings

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but the brand names and words and signs
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dominated them as they had never been allowed to dominate a Picasso.

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This painting was the precursor of all American pop art.

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The brand name itself was a kind of icon to Davis.

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It was fast, it delivered its meaning in quick bursts,

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and in painting it was a found object, a visitor from another medium.

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The word gave Davis's painting its rhythm,

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the choppy rhythm of American life as he felt it.

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The clue to that rhythm was jazz.

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Davis believed jazz was the first real American modernism.

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The brilliant colours on gasoline stations, chain store fronts, and taxicabs,

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synthetic chemistry, fast travel by train, auto, and aeroplane,

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which brought new and multiple prospectives.

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Electric signs, five and ten-cent kitchen utensils, movies and radio.

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Earl Hines' hot piano and Negro jazz music in general.

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In one way or another, the quality of these things

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plays a role in determining the character of my paintings.

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Paris school, abstraction, escapism...nope.

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Just colour-space composition celebrating the revolution of stresses

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set up by some aspects of the American scene.

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But in their time, the '40s and '50s,

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Davis's images of mass culture were on their own.

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No major American painters were ready to go so far into the badlands of other media

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or to do it with that mixture of cool and brashness.

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Then, around 1955, some others did enter them,

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but from another direction.

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If you buy a half pound of bacon in a supermarket,

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you end up with an ounce and a half of plastic and cardboard wrapping around it.

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If your electric iron goes on the fritz, you simply chuck it away.

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One of the peculiarities of a place like the city dump

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is that it makes you realise that New York throws away in the course of a week

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probably more manufactured goods than were produced in 18th-century France in the
course of a year.

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The motto was replacement, not maintenance, disposability and not durability,

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and there was a subject in this landscape of waste and the secret language of junk

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because during the '50s, some American artists realised

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what the Dadaists in Europe had known about 30 years before,

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namely that societies reveal themselves in what they threw away.

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Street junk was to these men what the flea market had been to the Surrealists,

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and among them there was one budding master,

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a man in his 20s from Texas named Robert Rauschenberg.

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I actually had a kind of a house rule.

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If I walked completely around the block

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and I didn't find enough to work with,

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I could pick one other block in any direction to walk around, but that was it.

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The works had to, whatever I did,
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had to look at least as interesting as anything that was going on outside in the
window.

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The result was his combines, large collages of refuse - things found and
resurrected.

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He got to New York in the early 1950s

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and since then, Rauschenberg has opened up more room for anti-formalist art

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than anyone else in America.

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Every artist after 1960 who believed that all of life ought to be open to art

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was in his debt one way or another.

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We now take it for granted that art can be anything.

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It can be for any purpose from pleasure to threat to systematic boredom.

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Some is meant for museums, some to be thrown away,

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and some to be performed as in this piece

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danced by Rauschenberg in 1966 - Pelican.

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This plurality at the end of the '70s is largely due

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to what Rauschenberg did in the '50s and '60s.
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Its roots are in Dada

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and especially in the collages that Kurt Schwitters made in Germany in the '20s and
'30s.

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Merz pictures he called them,

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modern city life describing itself in its own waste.

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Junk, torn posters, old photos, tickets.

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Rauschenberg applied this to the even brasher life of the American city.

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The New York streets gave him his palette of objects.

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In the studio he sorted them out and glued them down.

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I tended to work in things that were either so abstract...

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..that er, no one knew what this object was or it had been so mangled

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that you couldn't recognise it any more,

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or something so obvious that you didn't think about it.

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He punctuated them with slathers of paint.

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These painted links are what Rauschenberg got from abstract expressionism

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and they remind us that the things in his combines

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are meant to hang together as paintings and not just sit there as objects.

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But the combines were meant to look a bit random.

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Each one was a rendezvous where the common objects of the day could gather.

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Monogram was the most notorious of all the combines.

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Why the goat?

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Partly I guess because he had one as a pet when he was a kid in Texas.

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He was bereaved by its death and he wanted to resurrect it.

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Animals have one main use in Rauschenberg's art.

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They're innocent witnesses,

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survivors of nature in a flood of culture.

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Why the title?

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Because monograms lace through one another as the goat does through the tyre.

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But if you ask why it has lasted,

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why monogram keeps its shock value despite 20 years of reproduction in the history
books,
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the reason is probably sexual.

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The goat and the tyre is one of the wittiest images of sexual penetration ever made
by an artist.

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Jasper Johns was always bracketed with Rauschenberg in the 1950s.

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Actually the two of them were utterly unlike one another.

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Where Rauschenberg's work was garrulous, Johns' was terse.

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Rauschenberg breathed out, but Johns breathed in.

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His work was about difficulty.

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It was extremely subtle and didactic, and like Marcel Duchamp, his mentor,

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Johns was interested in the ready-made image.

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He wanted to use things that were so simple, so familiar,

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that, as he put it, they left him free to work on other levels.

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New York painting had been full of inventions of displays of character.

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Johns would show what could be done with things that were not invented,

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things that were so well-known that they weren't well seen.

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Very early on, Johns gave a clear outline of his theme,

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which was the difference between science and art,

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which helps you understand the way in which art operates.

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He did this at first by painting targets.

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Now everybody knows what you do with a target.

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You pick up a gun and you shoot at it.

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But this means that you're looking at the target in a particular way

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because all your attention is fixed on the bull.

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You're not concentrating on the outer circles.

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In official language, one would call this

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an extreme example of hierarchical perception and selective looking.

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The target is a test, and Johns took it with a sort of deadpan irony

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to test what you would expect a work of art to do.

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The painting denies the use of a real target.

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The fact that it is painted with all those dense touches of encaustic

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so lovingly like the skin of one of Cezanne's apples

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means that you're not meant to look at it the way a marksman does.

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The centre is not more important than the rings.

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Every bit of the surface is equally important.

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You look at the whole of the picture.

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And so a sign, a target, has been turned into a painting

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fit for the museum stair which must be scanned.

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Two contradictory ways of looking. A paradox.

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On top of his painted target he adds plaster casts

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and there's another paradox with them.

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One wants to see them as images, perhaps elements of a portrait,

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but they're more like fossils, specimens,

247
00:17:23,840 --> 00:17:26,440
visual words that stand for classes of things.

248
00:17:26,440 --> 00:17:29,600
Ear, hand, penis.

249
00:17:29,600 --> 00:17:31,760
The image turns into a sign
250
00:17:31,760 --> 00:17:34,480
and thus inside one painting, you have two ways of seeing.

251
00:17:34,480 --> 00:17:38,760
The sign becoming a painting and sculpture becoming a sign.

252
00:17:40,440 --> 00:17:44,640
No country has a more elaborate cult of its flag than America.

253
00:17:44,640 --> 00:17:47,440
It's the best-known sign in the whole culture.

254
00:17:47,440 --> 00:17:51,280
The eye recognises it in a flash and passes on.

255
00:17:51,280 --> 00:17:55,680
But the art of painting is to delay the eye. This is not a flag.

256
00:17:55,680 --> 00:18:00,240
Its motto comes from Magritte - this is not a pipe. Why?

257
00:18:00,240 --> 00:18:03,120
Because it's a painting.

258
00:18:03,120 --> 00:18:05,080
This is a painting too.

259
00:18:05,080 --> 00:18:09,920
It has stars and stripes and it's made of cloth but it's not a flag.

260
00:18:09,920 --> 00:18:12,240
Paint can make almost anything abstract,

261
00:18:12,240 --> 00:18:16,680
even a subject as highly charged as the American flag.

262
00:18:16,680 --> 00:18:20,320
We see the painting first, that pale perfect skin,

263
00:18:20,320 --> 00:18:24,840
but the flag beneath it, the sign, has lost its power to command.

264
00:18:24,840 --> 00:18:29,120
It's real but it's also completely abstract.
265
00:18:29,120 --> 00:18:33,040
Flags are only as flat as this in the ideal space of art.

266
00:18:37,600 --> 00:18:40,640
He did the same thing with numbers. He wasn't a great colourist,

267
00:18:40,640 --> 00:18:44,880
but as a tonal painter Johns had no American rivals.

268
00:18:44,880 --> 00:18:49,360
So one ends up thinking of pictures like this, so beautifully made,

269
00:18:49,360 --> 00:18:52,560
not in the context of sums or computer displays,

270
00:18:52,560 --> 00:18:57,080
but as the end of a tradition of still life that begins with Chardin.

271
00:18:59,320 --> 00:19:04,120
These aren't beer cans. They're made out of bronze and then painted.

272
00:19:04,120 --> 00:19:07,680
So they are sculpture pretending to be junk, pretending to be art.

273
00:19:09,280 --> 00:19:13,480
The brushes aren't real either, neither is the coffee can.

274
00:19:13,480 --> 00:19:16,160
They are bronze too, and painted.

275
00:19:16,160 --> 00:19:19,720
Johns' work was seldom what it seemed to be.

276
00:19:19,720 --> 00:19:23,480
It was always about something else, about irony, manipulation,

277
00:19:23,480 --> 00:19:28,760
tradition, and the defensive painting in the face of a mass culture environment.

278
00:19:28,760 --> 00:19:32,600
You'd suppose the stage was set for pop in the '50s in America,

279
00:19:32,600 --> 00:19:35,840
and certainly the materials were there.

280
00:19:35,840 --> 00:19:38,760
But the culture from which pop sprang wasn't at all respectable

281
00:19:38,760 --> 00:19:41,760
as far as American artists in the '50s were concerned.

282
00:19:41,760 --> 00:19:45,120
Giant plaster doughnuts were what they had to defend their art against.

283
00:19:45,120 --> 00:19:50,040
After all, they had to live with this, and there was nothing remotely exotic or
pleasing about it.

284
00:19:50,040 --> 00:19:53,080
To them it was the nightmare from which they couldn't wake,

285
00:19:53,080 --> 00:19:57,080
the erosive splurge of mass cult, of vulgarity.

286
00:19:57,080 --> 00:19:59,200
But the English didn't have to live with it

287
00:19:59,200 --> 00:20:03,800
and so in the '50s there were some English artists who saw the gross sign language
of American cities

288
00:20:03,800 --> 00:20:07,680
with the kind of distant longing that Gogin felt for Tahiti.

289
00:20:07,680 --> 00:20:12,680
They'd grown up with austerity and rationing and national health teeth, but
Hollywood?

290
00:20:12,680 --> 00:20:14,600
Hollywood had shaped their dreams.

291
00:20:14,600 --> 00:20:18,120
Forever young, forever sexy and forever swollen with abundance.

292
00:20:18,120 --> 00:20:20,720
MUSIC: "Be-Bop-A-Lula" by John Lennon

293
00:20:20,720 --> 00:20:25,520
# Well... Be-bop-a-lula she's my baby

294
00:20:25,520 --> 00:20:29,320
# Be-bop-a-lula, don't mean maybe

295
00:20:29,320 --> 00:20:33,120
# Be-bop-a-lula she's my baby

296
00:20:33,120 --> 00:20:36,160
# Be-bop-a-lula don't mean maybe

297
00:20:36,160 --> 00:20:38,600
# Be-bop-a-lula she's...

298
00:20:38,600 --> 00:20:42,880
# My baby love, my baby love My baby love

299
00:20:42,880 --> 00:20:47,000
# Well she's the girl in the red blue jeans

300
00:20:47,000 --> 00:20:50,360
# She's the queen of all the teens

301
00:20:50,360 --> 00:20:54,320
# She's the one that I know

302
00:20:54,320 --> 00:20:58,040
# She's the one that loves me so

303
00:20:58,040 --> 00:21:02,320
# Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby

304
00:21:02,320 --> 00:21:05,760
# Be-bop-a-lula, don't mean maybe

305
00:21:05,760 --> 00:21:12,000
# Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby love My baby love, my baby love... #

306
00:21:36,440 --> 00:21:39,760
One of the inventors of pop back in the early '50s

307
00:21:39,760 --> 00:21:43,440
was an Englishman, Richard Hamilton.

308
00:21:43,440 --> 00:21:46,520
Everybody seemed to go to the same kind of sources.

309
00:21:46,520 --> 00:21:50,880
Everybody that was doing interesting work at that time and wanted to be figurative

310
00:21:50,880 --> 00:21:53,040
tended to go to second-hand material.

311
00:21:53,040 --> 00:21:55,480
They went to the mass media,

312
00:21:55,480 --> 00:21:59,920
something that had already been converted from real-life

313
00:21:59,920 --> 00:22:05,640
into processed pulp, processed television,

314
00:22:05,640 --> 00:22:10,120
processed cinema or newspapers or whatever.

315
00:22:11,280 --> 00:22:15,960
And the visual world became a new landscape

316
00:22:15,960 --> 00:22:19,640
of secondary filtered material.

317
00:22:19,640 --> 00:22:25,000
# The cleanest clean under the sun

318
00:22:25,000 --> 00:22:29,840
# Is Tide Clean, new Tide Clean. #

319
00:22:33,560 --> 00:22:37,000
Clean and bright as the sun on the sand.

320
00:22:37,000 --> 00:22:40,840
The kind of clean you like best next to those you love.

321
00:22:43,720 --> 00:22:49,240
That's because new Tide has extra cleaning power.

322
00:22:49,240 --> 00:22:53,600
With Tide, things always come out clean and fresh as a sea breeze.
323
00:22:53,600 --> 00:22:58,280
More than white, more than bright, really clean.

324
00:22:58,280 --> 00:23:01,880
Clean! The cleanest clean under the sun.

325
00:23:04,480 --> 00:23:07,480
In one of Hamilton's collages from 1956,

326
00:23:07,480 --> 00:23:14,160
the word "pop" appears in art for the first time, linked to a sort of Beverly Hills
dream world.

327
00:23:14,160 --> 00:23:18,280
My own interests were certainly very specialised

328
00:23:18,280 --> 00:23:26,200
in that it seemed to me that the advertisers were manipulating the public

329
00:23:26,200 --> 00:23:33,000
in a very skilful and interesting and amusing way.

330
00:23:33,000 --> 00:23:40,320
The difference between pop art and popular art is the fact that pop art is
sophisticated.

331
00:23:40,320 --> 00:23:42,120
It's not done by the masses

332
00:23:42,120 --> 00:23:47,560
but it's done by highly professionally trained experts for a mass audience.

333
00:23:50,440 --> 00:23:54,040
For the connoisseur who has everything.

334
00:23:56,360 --> 00:24:00,240
At last, a work of art to match the style of modern life.

335
00:24:04,360 --> 00:24:06,600
The Critic Laughs.

336
00:24:06,600 --> 00:24:10,600
A perfect marriage of form and function, design and delight,

337
00:24:10,600 --> 00:24:14,200
created for you and yours by Europe's most caring craftsmen

338
00:24:14,200 --> 00:24:17,840
in an exclusive edition of only 60 examples.

339
00:24:27,640 --> 00:24:32,360
The Critic Laughs, thrill to the sensation of emotion.

340
00:24:34,440 --> 00:24:37,880
Hamilton is proud to present its new multiple.

341
00:24:39,520 --> 00:24:41,720
The Critic Laughs, by Hamilton.

342
00:24:46,160 --> 00:24:52,880
It's the other possibility, the other extreme of the hotdog.

343
00:24:52,880 --> 00:24:56,600
But it's still to some extent a pop object.

344
00:24:56,600 --> 00:25:00,720
We had to tool up for the whole venture,

345
00:25:00,720 --> 00:25:05,320
using the same materials in the same factories even,

346
00:25:05,320 --> 00:25:09,720
that Brown used for the production of their case.

347
00:25:09,720 --> 00:25:12,560
Made an instruction book and a guarantee card

348
00:25:12,560 --> 00:25:18,120
and tried to repeat the whole process of consumer product presentation.

349
00:25:18,120 --> 00:25:25,600
Of course, it sold not in supermarkets or in chemist shops or department stores,

350
00:25:25,600 --> 00:25:30,480
but in rather smart galleries throughout the world,

351
00:25:30,480 --> 00:25:35,080
or presented in exhibitions in elegant museums.
352
00:25:35,080 --> 00:25:40,800
I've also made posters of this kind of subject and all the other ephemeral material

353
00:25:40,800 --> 00:25:46,240
and the idea of making a commercial seems to me to be the realisation of a dream

354
00:25:46,240 --> 00:25:50,400
when you can go through the whole analogy of producing the object

355
00:25:50,400 --> 00:25:55,640
and making all the literature and then come to the great finale,

356
00:25:55,640 --> 00:26:00,680
which is to make the film and present it on TV in the form of a commercial.

357
00:26:00,680 --> 00:26:05,400
And that whole process is the work of art, to my mind.

358
00:26:05,400 --> 00:26:08,400
That is the work rather than the single object.

359
00:26:08,400 --> 00:26:14,960
The analogy is what's to propose to the industrial and advertising process

360
00:26:14,960 --> 00:26:20,880
is much more important than the object as a sculptural form.

361
00:26:24,680 --> 00:26:29,880
More than 40 years ago, a great Marxist critic, Walter Benjamin, said that it was
going to be hard

362
00:26:29,880 --> 00:26:34,160
and maybe impossible for any child raised in the howling blizzard of signals

363
00:26:34,160 --> 00:26:38,720
to find his way back into the exacting silence of a book.

364
00:26:38,720 --> 00:26:44,600
Benjamin died in 1940, but what he feared from radio and cinema and advertising

365
00:26:44,600 --> 00:26:48,800
came a thousand times truer with mass television.

366
00:26:48,800 --> 00:26:54,280
The box you're watching has done more to alter the direct discursive relationship

367
00:26:54,280 --> 00:26:58,040
of images to the real world, on which painting used to depend,

368
00:26:58,040 --> 00:26:59,960
than any other invention this century.

369
00:26:59,960 --> 00:27:03,240
This isn't really a matter of good or bad programming,

370
00:27:03,240 --> 00:27:07,040
everybody knows the box is a cornucopia of dung most of the time,

371
00:27:07,040 --> 00:27:11,480
but the effects I mean don't depend on the quality of programmes,

372
00:27:11,480 --> 00:27:14,680
they flow from the nature of television itself.

373
00:27:14,680 --> 00:27:17,240
You only have two choices when watching a movie in a cinema -

374
00:27:17,240 --> 00:27:19,520
you can go, or you can stay.

375
00:27:19,520 --> 00:27:22,320
With television there's a third - you can change the channel.

376
00:27:22,320 --> 00:27:25,360
SNATCHES OF SOUND

377
00:27:52,880 --> 00:27:54,960
And so, in a chaotic way,

378
00:27:54,960 --> 00:27:57,760
the dream of the Russian Constructivist film-makers

379
00:27:57,760 --> 00:27:59,360
and of the German Dadaists

380
00:27:59,360 --> 00:28:02,760
has come true with television, because whole societies

381
00:28:02,760 --> 00:28:06,840
have learned to see in terms of montage and juxtaposition.

382
00:28:06,840 --> 00:28:10,160
Ours is the cult of the electronic fragment.

383
00:28:10,160 --> 00:28:12,640
Because it's so intimate and casual,

384
00:28:12,640 --> 00:28:15,520
the box worked on us in other ways too.

385
00:28:15,520 --> 00:28:19,120
Its images had a weird contradictory tone.

386
00:28:19,120 --> 00:28:22,160
They were real. Present in the room.

387
00:28:22,160 --> 00:28:24,840
But at the same time they were artificial, illus...

388
00:28:24,840 --> 00:28:27,000
wouldn't hold, they kept creeping up the screen,

389
00:28:27,000 --> 00:28:29,160
or breaking off into dots and lines and jabber.

390
00:28:29,160 --> 00:28:31,360
Not like film in a cinema.

391
00:28:31,360 --> 00:28:34,400
Their reality was provisional.

392
00:28:34,400 --> 00:28:38,480
Their reality was provisional, but the colour was ultra-vivid.

393
00:28:38,480 --> 00:28:39,960
Electron colour.

394
00:28:39,960 --> 00:28:43,440
Not the colour of ink, or nature, or paint.

395
00:28:46,000 --> 00:28:48,960
Television messages get to you in small packets.
396
00:28:48,960 --> 00:28:51,240
You don't scan a screen as you scan a painting,

397
00:28:51,240 --> 00:28:55,440
and you don't inspect it the way you might inspect a Chinese vase.

398
00:28:55,440 --> 00:28:59,720
The fate of these messages, these images, is to get equalised.

399
00:28:59,720 --> 00:29:03,040
Catastrophe, love, war, soap -

400
00:29:03,040 --> 00:29:06,080
they all pour forth in an overwhelming glut.

401
00:29:06,080 --> 00:29:10,120
And like radiation, which in fact they are, they are everywhere.

402
00:29:10,120 --> 00:29:12,240
And they have affected art.

403
00:29:15,840 --> 00:29:19,800
One of the artists they most affected in the '60s was Rauschenberg.

404
00:29:19,800 --> 00:29:21,800
He lives a long way from New York now,

405
00:29:21,800 --> 00:29:24,280
on an island off the Florida coast.

406
00:29:24,280 --> 00:29:26,040
No junk here,

407
00:29:26,040 --> 00:29:29,600
but his work is still saturated with images from the media.

408
00:29:34,600 --> 00:29:40,440
One's 'bombasted' by magazines, TV sets -

409
00:29:40,440 --> 00:29:45,160
I didn't have a TV then, but... TV sets, the refusal,

410
00:29:45,160 --> 00:29:48,720
the excess of the rest of the world,
411
00:29:48,720 --> 00:29:50,640
even though you don't know them.

412
00:29:56,480 --> 00:30:01,360
We can't move again until... If I forget...

413
00:30:03,280 --> 00:30:05,040
..where anything is.

414
00:30:06,040 --> 00:30:09,600
If I could paint or make an honest work,

415
00:30:09,600 --> 00:30:14,720
it somehow should incorporate all of these elements.

416
00:30:15,800 --> 00:30:19,520
Which were and are a reality.

417
00:30:23,720 --> 00:30:28,160
Collage is a way of getting an additional piece of information,

418
00:30:28,160 --> 00:30:29,680
that's impersonal.

419
00:30:37,920 --> 00:30:40,160
I've always tried to work impersonal.

420
00:30:41,240 --> 00:30:42,360
In the early '60s,

421
00:30:42,360 --> 00:30:46,640
printed images began to replace objects in Rauschenberg's work.

422
00:30:46,640 --> 00:30:49,880
The bank of images included everything from 15th century

423
00:30:49,880 --> 00:30:53,440
reproductions to diagrams from the Scientific American,

424
00:30:53,440 --> 00:30:55,360
to yesterday's front page.

425
00:30:58,080 --> 00:31:00,840
As the images in his work in the '60s piled up,

426
00:31:00,840 --> 00:31:03,640
the paintings took on a heightened documentary flavour.

427
00:31:03,640 --> 00:31:05,200
He wanted to give canvas

428
00:31:05,200 --> 00:31:08,600
the accumulative flicker of a colour television set.

429
00:31:08,600 --> 00:31:10,800
The subject was glut.

430
00:31:10,800 --> 00:31:12,560
SNATCHES OF TV SOUND

431
00:31:29,160 --> 00:31:33,880
His view of the media was both affectionate and ironic.

432
00:31:33,880 --> 00:31:36,880
He liked excavating whole histories within an image.

433
00:31:36,880 --> 00:31:39,800
Histories of the media themselves.

434
00:31:39,800 --> 00:31:41,920
Consider this red patch.

435
00:31:41,920 --> 00:31:46,280
It's a silk screen enlargement of a photo that he found in Life magazine.

436
00:31:46,280 --> 00:31:49,320
Which was in turn a parody of this famous painting -

437
00:31:49,320 --> 00:31:51,800
Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase.

438
00:31:53,000 --> 00:31:56,480
The painting was based on an early sequential photo by Marey.

439
00:31:57,760 --> 00:32:02,160
So the image bridges 70 years of technological time, right there.

440
00:32:02,160 --> 00:32:06,360
It goes from photography to painting to photography,

441
00:32:06,360 --> 00:32:07,920
back to painting.

442
00:32:07,920 --> 00:32:10,360
But the irony is that it ends up looking like

443
00:32:10,360 --> 00:32:13,360
the figures of Adam and Eve expelled from Eden

444
00:32:13,360 --> 00:32:15,720
in Masaccio's fresco in Florence.

445
00:32:15,720 --> 00:32:19,280
Which turns the image of Kennedy, who was dead by then,

446
00:32:19,280 --> 00:32:21,840
into a sort of vengeful god with a pointing finger,

447
00:32:21,840 --> 00:32:27,720
thus fulfilling the prophecy of the 19th century French diarist Edmond de Goncourt.

448
00:32:27,720 --> 00:32:31,360
"The day will come when all the modern nations will adore

449
00:32:31,360 --> 00:32:34,880
"a sort of American god, about whom much will have been written

450
00:32:34,880 --> 00:32:36,160
"in the popular press,

451
00:32:36,160 --> 00:32:39,800
"and images of this god will be set up in the churches,

452
00:32:39,800 --> 00:32:44,080
"not as the imagination of each individual painter may fancy him,

453
00:32:44,080 --> 00:32:48,120
"but established, fixed, once and for all, by photography.

454
00:32:48,120 --> 00:32:52,600
"On that day, civilisation will have reached its peak,
455
00:32:52,600 --> 00:32:55,960
"and there will be steam-propelled gondolas in Venice."

456
00:32:55,960 --> 00:32:58,440
From television, film and photography

457
00:32:58,440 --> 00:33:01,040
we receive a stream of images every day.

458
00:33:01,040 --> 00:33:05,040
There is no way of paying equal attention to all that surplus,

459
00:33:05,040 --> 00:33:07,000
so we skim.

460
00:33:07,000 --> 00:33:11,080
The image we remember is the one that most resembles a sign.

461
00:33:11,080 --> 00:33:14,760
Simple, clear, repetitious.

462
00:33:14,760 --> 00:33:18,000
We absorb, rather than inspect.

463
00:33:18,000 --> 00:33:21,640
Indifference becomes our second skin.

464
00:33:21,640 --> 00:33:24,680
Everything the camera gives us is slightly interesting.

465
00:33:24,680 --> 00:33:27,440
Not for long, just for now.

466
00:33:28,480 --> 00:33:32,800
The human extension of the glut of images is celebrity.

467
00:33:32,800 --> 00:33:36,680
Which replaces the Renaissance idea of fame.

468
00:33:37,760 --> 00:33:39,800
The artist who understood this best,

469
00:33:39,800 --> 00:33:43,640
and became best-known for understanding it, was Andy Warhol.
470
00:33:46,160 --> 00:33:48,760
Warhol is nearly as famous as Picasso,

471
00:33:48,760 --> 00:33:51,480
at least on the level of chit-chat and gossip.

472
00:33:51,480 --> 00:33:54,880
But Picasso was famous for his energy and masculinity,

473
00:33:54,880 --> 00:33:58,760
Warhol for his passivity and sexlessness.

474
00:33:58,760 --> 00:34:01,080
He became a famous artist by silently proclaiming

475
00:34:01,080 --> 00:34:02,640
that art can't change life,

476
00:34:02,640 --> 00:34:06,680
whereas others once did by loudly giving the impression that it could.

477
00:34:07,960 --> 00:34:12,760
And...no, I don't think I am a revolutionary artist.

478
00:34:14,040 --> 00:34:17,160
He got started in the '50s as Andy Warhola,

479
00:34:17,160 --> 00:34:18,720
a Polish kid from Pittsburgh

480
00:34:18,720 --> 00:34:21,720
who made it to New York as a commercial artist.

481
00:34:21,720 --> 00:34:25,760
By the end of the '70s, he'd relapsed into being another

482
00:34:25,760 --> 00:34:28,560
kind of commercial artist - doing Nescafe society portraits.

483
00:34:28,560 --> 00:34:30,760
A painter without a subject.

484
00:34:30,760 --> 00:34:35,600
His career as a man with something to say, lies in-between.

485
00:34:35,600 --> 00:34:38,640
'Art is short for artist.

486
00:34:38,640 --> 00:34:43,440
'I thought words are just always made shorter,

487
00:34:43,440 --> 00:34:47,440
'so art was just cut from the word artist, and made shorter.'

488
00:34:47,440 --> 00:34:51,000
What he extracted from mass culture was repetition.

489
00:34:51,000 --> 00:34:54,280
"I want to be a machine", he announced.

490
00:34:54,280 --> 00:34:55,920
Warhol loved the sameness.

491
00:34:55,920 --> 00:34:59,120
An infinite series of perfectly standardised products.

492
00:35:00,720 --> 00:35:04,000
When Monet painted in series, he did it to glorify the eye.

493
00:35:04,000 --> 00:35:06,680
To show how it could discern tiny differences.

494
00:35:07,960 --> 00:35:11,920
Discrimination within abundance was the essence of such painting.

495
00:35:14,520 --> 00:35:20,560
Today we have sameness within glut. And that was what Warhol painted.

496
00:35:20,560 --> 00:35:24,080
His work in the early '60s was a baleful mimicry of advertising

497
00:35:24,080 --> 00:35:25,320
without the gloss.

498
00:35:26,560 --> 00:35:29,560
It was about the way that advertising promises

499
00:35:29,560 --> 00:35:32,400
that the same pap with different labels

500
00:35:32,400 --> 00:35:36,080
will give you special unrepeatable experiences.

501
00:35:36,080 --> 00:35:40,560
Advertising flatters people that they're a bit like artists -

502
00:35:40,560 --> 00:35:43,360
the consumer is rare, discriminating.

503
00:35:43,360 --> 00:35:45,000
A connoisseur of experience.

504
00:35:46,720 --> 00:35:49,360
If Warhol was once subversive -

505
00:35:49,360 --> 00:35:53,600
and in the early '60s he was - it's because he turned that round.

506
00:35:53,600 --> 00:35:57,760
A famous artist who loved nothing but banality and sameness.

507
00:35:57,760 --> 00:36:00,480
I want to be a machine, to print, to repeat

508
00:36:00,480 --> 00:36:03,840
which was the most cunning sort of dandyism.

509
00:36:07,280 --> 00:36:09,800
He began by doing straight advertisements,

510
00:36:09,800 --> 00:36:11,960
than he ran ironic commentary on them.

511
00:36:11,960 --> 00:36:14,480
But by the '70s, advertisers were copying him.

512
00:36:14,480 --> 00:36:15,960
Like this.

513
00:36:20,560 --> 00:36:25,240
Warhol's autistic stare was the same for heroes and heroines.
514
00:36:25,240 --> 00:36:28,240
All you learn is that celebrity breeds clones,

515
00:36:28,240 --> 00:36:32,600
thousands of signs for itself, a series without a limit.

516
00:36:32,600 --> 00:36:34,680
The image is less painted than registered.

517
00:36:34,680 --> 00:36:38,600
No nuances, just slips in the silk screen.

518
00:36:38,600 --> 00:36:40,200
It looked coarse, grainy, quick.

519
00:36:40,200 --> 00:36:42,840
It wants you to glance at it, like a television screen,

520
00:36:42,840 --> 00:36:45,200
rather than scan it like a painting.

521
00:36:46,680 --> 00:36:50,400
And, like American TV in the '60s, it's also haunted by death.

522
00:36:51,680 --> 00:36:54,680
And, as with TV, the violence Warhol enjoyed

523
00:36:54,680 --> 00:36:57,600
got filtered through a cool, indifferent medium -

524
00:36:57,600 --> 00:36:59,320
photography and silk screen.

525
00:37:01,520 --> 00:37:04,680
These Disaster paintings have one subject in common.

526
00:37:04,680 --> 00:37:10,640
Not just death, rather the state of being an uninvolved spectator.

527
00:37:11,640 --> 00:37:13,160
The eye passes them,

528
00:37:13,160 --> 00:37:16,280
like that man passing in the background.
529
00:37:17,960 --> 00:37:20,840
What this added up to was one piercing insight

530
00:37:20,840 --> 00:37:23,080
about the nature of media.

531
00:37:23,080 --> 00:37:24,320
But that was it.

532
00:37:24,320 --> 00:37:27,800
It could be done over and over again but not developed further as art.

533
00:37:28,880 --> 00:37:32,160
The idea had a half-life, like a radioactive isotope.

534
00:37:32,160 --> 00:37:35,080
It sent out a lot of radiation in the '60s,

535
00:37:35,080 --> 00:37:36,560
and then it became feeble.

536
00:37:36,560 --> 00:37:38,160
And then dead.

537
00:37:38,160 --> 00:37:40,800
Boredom finally became boring.

538
00:37:46,080 --> 00:37:51,040
But the nature of mass imagery fascinated other artists in the '60s as well.

539
00:37:51,040 --> 00:37:53,880
If Warhol and Rauschenberg were into television,

540
00:37:53,880 --> 00:37:56,120
Roy Lichtenstein was about print.

541
00:37:57,400 --> 00:38:00,480
His best-known source was American comic strips of the '40s and '50s.

542
00:38:00,480 --> 00:38:03,040
The stuff that artists of his generation,

543
00:38:03,040 --> 00:38:05,440
who made the Pop Movement, grew up on.

544
00:38:06,960 --> 00:38:11,360
To its detractors it looked about as challenging as bubblegum.

545
00:38:11,360 --> 00:38:14,960
Take a comic and blow it up. But there was more to it than that.

546
00:38:14,960 --> 00:38:19,120
MUSIC: "Venus in Blue Jeans"

547
00:38:23,280 --> 00:38:26,640
# She's Venus in blue jeans

548
00:38:26,640 --> 00:38:31,400
# Mona Lisa with a ponytail

549
00:38:31,400 --> 00:38:35,280
# She's a walkin' talkin' work of art

550
00:38:35,280 --> 00:38:38,520
# She's the girl who stole my heart

551
00:38:38,520 --> 00:38:43,120
# My Venus in blue jeans

552
00:38:43,120 --> 00:38:46,880
# Is the Cinderella I adore

553
00:38:46,880 --> 00:38:51,600
# She's my very special angel too

554
00:38:51,600 --> 00:38:54,320
# A fairy tale come true... #

555
00:38:58,960 --> 00:39:00,600
I don't think that's...

556
00:39:00,600 --> 00:39:02,600
It's dealing with the images

557
00:39:02,600 --> 00:39:06,840
that have come about in the commercial world, and using that.

558
00:39:06,840 --> 00:39:11,560
Because there are certain things about it which are impressive, or...

559
00:39:11,560 --> 00:39:13,400
bold, or something.

560
00:39:13,400 --> 00:39:16,000
And it's that quality of the images

561
00:39:16,000 --> 00:39:17,840
that I am interested in.

562
00:39:17,840 --> 00:39:19,920
The texture that the dots make

563
00:39:19,920 --> 00:39:21,840
and various things

564
00:39:21,840 --> 00:39:24,960
that are usable to me, in my art,

565
00:39:24,960 --> 00:39:27,000
for expressing...um...

566
00:39:28,720 --> 00:39:30,160
..that feeling.

567
00:39:30,160 --> 00:39:33,560
But it's not saying that commercial art is terrible,

568
00:39:33,560 --> 00:39:35,480
or, "Look what we've come to."

569
00:39:36,680 --> 00:39:40,760
That may be a sociological fact, but that's not what this art is about.

570
00:39:40,760 --> 00:39:44,960
Printers' dots were the basis of Lichtenstein's style.

571
00:39:44,960 --> 00:39:48,560
A code that ended up looking very cool and abstract.

572
00:39:48,560 --> 00:39:51,680
It was a way of distancing the image, making it both big
573
00:39:51,680 --> 00:39:53,440
and remote.

574
00:39:53,440 --> 00:39:56,800
And, like Johns, Lichtenstein was intrigued by the difference

575
00:39:56,800 --> 00:39:59,400
between scanning and looking.

576
00:39:59,400 --> 00:40:02,280
You scan a frame in a comic strip, then flick on,

577
00:40:02,280 --> 00:40:05,240
because comics exist to tell a story.

578
00:40:05,240 --> 00:40:07,560
But a painting is meant to detain you.

579
00:40:07,560 --> 00:40:13,480
Make a museum-scale comic and you have another paradox about the way that we see
art.

580
00:40:16,080 --> 00:40:20,720
Probably Lichtenstein's work has been around too long for its shock value to last,

581
00:40:20,720 --> 00:40:25,000
but in the '60s when it was new, its ironies really worked.

582
00:40:32,800 --> 00:40:36,480
Another source for art in mass culture was the American billboard.

583
00:40:36,480 --> 00:40:39,160
James Rosenquist used to paint them for a living.

584
00:40:41,560 --> 00:40:44,160
In my billboard painting experience,

585
00:40:44,160 --> 00:40:49,120
I've painted...hundreds of square feet of Franco-American spaghetti.

586
00:40:49,120 --> 00:40:54,680
And I painted a... large beer glass 60 feet long.

587
00:40:54,680 --> 00:40:58,120
And some...huge pieces of bacon.

588
00:40:58,120 --> 00:41:00,920
And salesmen would come along and they'd say,

589
00:41:00,920 --> 00:41:05,440
"That beer hasn't got enough hops in it. You have to make it a little bit lighter."

590
00:41:05,440 --> 00:41:11,440
Or, "The bacon is dirty." Or, "That Franco-American spaghetti orange is dirty."

591
00:41:11,440 --> 00:41:13,880
So I'd go home at night saying, "Oh, no!"

592
00:41:13,880 --> 00:41:17,800
There's a kid of buck-eyed surrealism in big American advertisements

593
00:41:17,800 --> 00:41:22,120
with their weird meetings of image and their overlaps and sudden cut-offs and giant
size.

594
00:41:22,120 --> 00:41:24,640
And that went into Rosenquist's paintings.

595
00:41:24,640 --> 00:41:31,360
They had a casual narrative style, but were enormous, the scale of 19th-century
history painting.

596
00:41:31,360 --> 00:41:34,840
Like billboards, they were about paradise,

597
00:41:34,840 --> 00:41:40,000
but a paradise of consumers fatally compromised.

598
00:41:40,000 --> 00:41:44,560
Rosenquist summed up his ambition to be a painter of American history

599
00:41:44,560 --> 00:41:50,400
in the one major painting that the Vietnam war provoked, the F-111.

600
00:41:51,400 --> 00:41:55,120
The title comes for a bomber the Americans were using against the Vietnamese.

601
00:41:55,120 --> 00:41:57,120
Rosenquist distilled a sour irony
602
00:41:57,120 --> 00:42:02,440
from the contrast between that killing machine and those emblems of the good life,

603
00:42:02,440 --> 00:42:09,600
the life that so many Americans believed was being defended outside Saigon in 1965.

604
00:42:12,000 --> 00:42:16,160
Pop was big and brash, it had learnt that from other media.

605
00:42:16,160 --> 00:42:19,600
But there was no chance it could survive outside the museum.

606
00:42:23,920 --> 00:42:27,080
On the street, real mass culture would have simply crushed it.

607
00:42:30,800 --> 00:42:33,440
This gap between art and life was not closed.

608
00:42:33,440 --> 00:42:38,520
Now and again an artist would try putting a big picture among the billboards.

609
00:42:38,520 --> 00:42:41,800
This one is by Alex Katz.

610
00:42:41,800 --> 00:42:46,520
A set of pretty upper-bourgeois American profiles with one black face thrown in

611
00:42:46,520 --> 00:42:49,840
can do nothing against 42nd Street.

612
00:43:01,000 --> 00:43:03,120
In a culture of mass communications,

613
00:43:03,120 --> 00:43:09,720
art has to survive either by stealth or by living in those game parks we call
museums.

614
00:43:09,720 --> 00:43:12,560
And no country in the world makes that clearer than America,

615
00:43:12,560 --> 00:43:15,520
the home of the most enlightened patronage

616
00:43:15,520 --> 00:43:21,720
and the most profound indifference to the visual environment that our century has
known.

617
00:43:21,720 --> 00:43:24,240
The city that put up the stiffest resistance

618
00:43:24,240 --> 00:43:28,000
to the idea of culture with a capital C was this one, Las Vegas.

619
00:43:28,000 --> 00:43:30,880
You can't imagine an art museum in a place like this

620
00:43:30,880 --> 00:43:35,320
and, in fact, the idea of art simply evaporates because there's nothing to do,

621
00:43:35,320 --> 00:43:38,760
it flies off in the face of the illusions of which this place is composed,

622
00:43:38,760 --> 00:43:42,960
sudden wealth, endless orgasm, Dean Martin.

623
00:43:42,960 --> 00:43:45,240
This is the Disney World of terminal greed.

624
00:43:45,240 --> 00:43:48,960
And no wonder it had such an enormous appeal to the pop sensibility,

625
00:43:48,960 --> 00:43:52,200
because here you have an infinite variety of signs

626
00:43:52,200 --> 00:43:55,760
which are all plugging exactly the same product, luck.

627
00:43:55,760 --> 00:43:58,920
Now the product's abstract and only the signs are real.

628
00:43:58,920 --> 00:44:04,400
And so Vegas sums up American giganticism, not because it's big but because it
pretends to be.

629
00:44:04,400 --> 00:44:07,560
Its monuments, the city lights are conceived on a scale

630
00:44:07,560 --> 00:44:11,080
much beyond anything that most artists ever get to work on.

631
00:44:11,080 --> 00:44:15,520
And so, really, the town is a work of art, lousy art, but art all the same.

632
00:44:15,520 --> 00:44:21,640
And no wonder that this festive junk food for the eyes had such an appeal to
artists and critics.

633
00:44:21,640 --> 00:44:24,320
MUSIC: "The Sound of Silence" by The Bachelors

634
00:44:25,880 --> 00:44:29,240
# I've come to talk with you again

635
00:44:29,240 --> 00:44:33,960
# Because a vision softly creeping

636
00:44:33,960 --> 00:44:38,440
# Left its seeds while I was sleeping

637
00:44:38,440 --> 00:44:46,440
# And the vision that was planted in my brain still remains

638
00:44:47,720 --> 00:44:52,840
# Within the sound of silence

639
00:44:52,840 --> 00:44:56,720
# In restless dreams I walked alone

640
00:44:57,920 --> 00:45:01,920
# Narrow streets of cobbled stone

641
00:45:01,920 --> 00:45:06,280
# Beneath the halo of a street lamp

642
00:45:06,280 --> 00:45:10,040
# I turned my collar to the cold and damp

643
00:45:10,040 --> 00:45:16,240
# When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light

644
00:45:16,240 --> 00:45:19,280
# That split the night
645
00:45:19,280 --> 00:45:24,240
# And touched the sound of silence

646
00:45:24,240 --> 00:45:28,160
# And in the naked light I saw

647
00:45:28,160 --> 00:45:32,880
# Ten thousand people maybe more

648
00:45:32,880 --> 00:45:37,080
# People talking without speaking

649
00:45:37,080 --> 00:45:42,720
# People hearing without listening... #

650
00:45:42,720 --> 00:45:49,080
There is no way that museum art can rival the commercial extravaganzas of the real
world.

651
00:45:49,080 --> 00:45:53,680
The artists who worked with neon and lights in the 1960s certainly couldn't.

652
00:45:53,680 --> 00:45:57,800
Their efforts were as pointless as building a souvenir that rivalled the Eiffel
Tower.

653
00:45:57,800 --> 00:46:05,240
# Fools, said I, you do not know Silence like a cancer grows

654
00:46:06,240 --> 00:46:09,840
# Hear my words that I might teach you

655
00:46:09,840 --> 00:46:13,840
# Take my arms that I might reach you

656
00:46:13,840 --> 00:46:20,840
# But my words like silent raindrops fell

657
00:46:23,320 --> 00:46:28,960
# And echoed in the wells of silence

658
00:46:28,960 --> 00:46:32,880
# And the people bowed and prayed

659
00:46:32,880 --> 00:46:35,560
# To the neon god they made... #

660
00:46:37,440 --> 00:46:42,640
In fact, there was only one artist who took on the full weight of the American
commonplace,

661
00:46:42,640 --> 00:46:45,520
its giganticism, its power of spectacle.

662
00:46:45,520 --> 00:46:51,760
But he did it by irony and his work went far beyond any limits one could assign to
the pop sensibility.

663
00:46:51,760 --> 00:46:55,640
He was Claes Oldenburg, the thinking person's Walt Disney.

664
00:46:55,640 --> 00:46:58,080
CHEERING

665
00:46:58,080 --> 00:47:03,320
DRUMMING

666
00:47:03,320 --> 00:47:08,800
I always try to attend the Thanksgiving Day parade, which is held in New York.

667
00:47:08,800 --> 00:47:12,800
Sometimes if I'm in Europe I make a special point of coming back so I can attend
it.

668
00:47:12,800 --> 00:47:15,840
I guess it all started when I was small.

669
00:47:15,840 --> 00:47:21,040
I was always taken to the parade and it's figured in my imagination,

670
00:47:21,040 --> 00:47:26,000
the excitement of seeing those huge balloons in the air moving about.

671
00:47:26,000 --> 00:47:30,160
But my interest in the parade is not so much an interest in the circus aspect of
it,

672
00:47:30,160 --> 00:47:36,960
in the clowns or the floats, I'm really specifically interested in these balloons
on that scale
673
00:47:36,960 --> 00:47:39,000
and what they do in the air.

674
00:47:39,000 --> 00:47:44,800
And the whole engineering aspect of getting these balloons down through these
streets

675
00:47:44,800 --> 00:47:49,680
and the whole process of filling the balloons with gas which goes on a whole 12
hours before the parade.

676
00:47:49,680 --> 00:47:53,840
All these parts of the parade are very interesting to me.

677
00:47:53,840 --> 00:47:56,360
And it's the balloons that I come to see

678
00:47:56,360 --> 00:47:58,720
rather than anything else.

679
00:47:58,720 --> 00:48:04,200
Born in Sweden, raised in Chicago, Oldenburg grew up fascinated by the size of
things American.

680
00:48:19,360 --> 00:48:22,000
From the beginning his art was literally about appetite,

681
00:48:22,000 --> 00:48:25,480
the desire to touch, squash, stroke,

682
00:48:25,480 --> 00:48:30,040
absorb, digest and become what he saw.

683
00:48:30,040 --> 00:48:32,640
Probably I do two things that are contrary,

684
00:48:32,640 --> 00:48:36,440
I try to make the art look like it's part of the world around it,

685
00:48:36,440 --> 00:48:41,920
at the same time I take great pains to show that it doesn't function as part of the
world around it.

686
00:48:41,920 --> 00:48:49,640
He took ordinary things, small ones got huge, soft ones hard, hard ones went soft.

687
00:48:49,640 --> 00:48:54,760
This is a ladder. This is a saw.

688
00:48:54,760 --> 00:48:59,360
The logic of use has gone. Things take on multiple meanings

689
00:48:59,360 --> 00:49:03,080
and they keep alluding back to the human body.

690
00:49:03,080 --> 00:49:09,080
A Chicago fireplug becomes a torso with breast and nipples, a monumental nude.

691
00:49:09,080 --> 00:49:10,600
This is the original fireplug.

692
00:49:10,600 --> 00:49:13,960
Because this fireplug was directly outside of my house

693
00:49:13,960 --> 00:49:16,040
and this was the fireplug I saw every day.

694
00:49:16,040 --> 00:49:21,480
And it's more or less the one that my fireplug fantasies are based on.

695
00:49:24,680 --> 00:49:30,000
This is the one that was done in 1968 as a souvenir of the Democratic convention.

696
00:49:30,000 --> 00:49:35,280
This way it's breasts, and if you turn it upside-down it becomes the bottom half of
the torso.

697
00:49:37,400 --> 00:49:39,800
These being legs.

698
00:49:39,800 --> 00:49:44,320
I like to take an object and deprive it of its function completely.

699
00:49:44,320 --> 00:49:50,920
Take an ordinary object, change its scale, its material, and suddenly it is a
stranger to the world,

700
00:49:50,920 --> 00:49:52,320
weird and complicated.
701
00:49:52,320 --> 00:49:55,640
I have a condition I want to express about form,

702
00:49:55,640 --> 00:49:59,760
and then an object sort of fits into that condition.

703
00:49:59,760 --> 00:50:03,520
And then I take the object without thinking too much about the object.

704
00:50:03,520 --> 00:50:06,920
That is this could just as well been a bank vault,

705
00:50:06,920 --> 00:50:10,000
except that I like the lights that are very simple

706
00:50:10,000 --> 00:50:13,520
and very straightforward, and symmetrical form,

707
00:50:13,520 --> 00:50:15,200
which is what I was looking for.

708
00:50:15,200 --> 00:50:19,360
Something geometric and uncomplicated.

709
00:50:26,920 --> 00:50:31,400
I suppose the best examples of this recomplication of an ordinary thing back into
an image

710
00:50:31,400 --> 00:50:35,640
lie in Oldenburg's sculptural projects, his big ones, the monuments.

711
00:50:35,640 --> 00:50:38,320
Not very many of them have actually been built,

712
00:50:38,320 --> 00:50:43,600
but in Philadelphia this one was, and what could be more ordinary than a clothes
pin?

713
00:50:43,600 --> 00:50:46,720
But on the other hand, you'd have to go some way

714
00:50:46,720 --> 00:50:52,200
to find anything more dreamlike and grotesque than a clothes pin 40 feet high.
715
00:50:52,200 --> 00:50:53,600
Like a monster in a movie,

716
00:50:53,600 --> 00:50:58,120
it suggests that the real world has somehow contrived to rise against its owners.

717
00:50:58,120 --> 00:51:03,480
But it's also partly human, a fact which underscores its monstrosity.

718
00:51:03,480 --> 00:51:09,760
The clothes pin has two legs and one is encouraged therefore to read it as a man.

719
00:51:12,840 --> 00:51:17,880
The spring clip on the thing's torso suggests compression, force, inhibition.

720
00:51:17,880 --> 00:51:20,920
The angles are all sharp and there's nothing flabby.

721
00:51:20,920 --> 00:51:23,120
The thing is in fact a giant authority figure,

722
00:51:23,120 --> 00:51:25,160
a sort of parody of the hero in sculpture,

723
00:51:25,160 --> 00:51:28,120
a modern Colossus of Rhodes.

724
00:51:29,720 --> 00:51:31,480
BIRDSONG

725
00:51:31,480 --> 00:51:35,760
Oldenburg's range goes all the way from that to the pastoral...

726
00:51:35,760 --> 00:51:38,600
like this giant trowel.

727
00:51:46,200 --> 00:51:51,960
In his power of invention and his drive to impose his whole self on the world,
fears and all,

728
00:51:51,960 --> 00:51:56,040
he is the nearest equivalent to Picasso that America has yet produced.

729
00:51:57,880 --> 00:52:02,920
But for every artist of Oldenburg's seriousness, there were a hundred
bandwaggoners.

730
00:52:02,920 --> 00:52:07,440
By the end of the '60s, the pop sensibility was like a mechanised carnival.

731
00:52:07,440 --> 00:52:10,680
The avant-garde takes over the electronic village

732
00:52:10,680 --> 00:52:15,280
and the prophet of this idea, a Canadian professor named Marshall McLuhan,

733
00:52:15,280 --> 00:52:19,840
was one of the last thinkers in the world to believe that artists were still ahead
of the game.

734
00:52:19,840 --> 00:52:22,040
The artist is the enemy, but in our time

735
00:52:22,040 --> 00:52:28,040
the artist has become the very basis of any scientific power of perception

736
00:52:28,040 --> 00:52:30,160
or making contact with reality.

737
00:52:30,160 --> 00:52:32,680
It now seems that McLuhan was wrong,

738
00:52:32,680 --> 00:52:35,440
the game had finally got ahead of the artist.

739
00:52:35,440 --> 00:52:40,920
One of the catch words of the late '60s in art as in gossip was "information".

740
00:52:40,920 --> 00:52:46,560
And since the medium was the message, the quality of information was not held to
matter very much,

741
00:52:46,560 --> 00:52:50,080
the sheer amount of it was so glamorous.

742
00:52:50,080 --> 00:52:52,640
When you surround people with electric information,

743
00:52:52,640 --> 00:52:56,800
the overload of information becomes fantastic.

744
00:52:56,800 --> 00:53:00,320
The amount of information in the environment under electric conditions

745
00:53:00,320 --> 00:53:04,160
is many times greater than that of the normal human environment pre-electric.

746
00:53:04,160 --> 00:53:10,440
And there's only one natural response to such overload and that is pattern
recognition.

747
00:53:10,440 --> 00:53:14,880
American educators are so serious that they exude parody all the time.

748
00:53:14,880 --> 00:53:18,720
And this place is a parody of the McLuhanist state of mind.

749
00:53:18,720 --> 00:53:22,400
It's called The Living History Center and it's in Philadelphia.

750
00:53:22,400 --> 00:53:24,320
'We like this country very much.'

751
00:53:25,840 --> 00:53:27,880
Here the kiddies can have what is called

752
00:53:27,880 --> 00:53:31,880
a "non-elitist, multi-dimensional, environmental learning experience."

753
00:53:31,880 --> 00:53:34,880
Translation - compulsory fun.

754
00:53:34,880 --> 00:53:40,120
They can listen to bits of The Declaration of Independence on the phone.

755
00:53:40,120 --> 00:53:44,520
They can look at period photos and bus tickets on the big index wheels.

756
00:53:44,520 --> 00:53:46,080
And they learn nothing.

757
00:53:46,080 --> 00:53:51,400
The medium is the message here and it turns the brain to cornflakes.
758
00:53:51,400 --> 00:53:54,640
'We hold these truths to be self-evident.

759
00:53:54,640 --> 00:53:57,480
'That all men are created equal.'

760
00:53:57,480 --> 00:54:01,440
OVERLAPPING ELECTRONIC VOICES

761
00:54:29,680 --> 00:54:34,040
The good side of the Pop sensibility was its openness to life,

762
00:54:34,040 --> 00:54:37,160
its readiness to let art react to mass culture.

763
00:54:41,920 --> 00:54:47,560
The bad side was the manipulation and promotional garbage that flooded the art
world in the '60s.

764
00:54:47,560 --> 00:54:49,560
Instant this, instant that.

765
00:54:49,560 --> 00:54:52,360
Probably you couldn't have one without the other.

766
00:55:00,960 --> 00:55:03,200
We were told over and over again

767
00:55:03,200 --> 00:55:08,240
that art based on mass media was more democratic than art that wasn't.

768
00:55:08,240 --> 00:55:14,440
It could survive in the big, wide world, but generally that turned out not to be
true.

769
00:55:14,440 --> 00:55:18,320
Whether it was difficult, exacting stuff like Jasper Johns

770
00:55:18,320 --> 00:55:24,280
or just entertainment like most pop art, it needed the museum more than ever.

771
00:55:24,280 --> 00:55:25,720
That way or the other way?

772
00:55:25,720 --> 00:55:29,240
We can turn it round if we don't like it.

773
00:55:29,240 --> 00:55:31,400
HE LAUGHS

774
00:55:32,680 --> 00:55:38,640
For all the talk, art based on the media turned out to be just as fragile as any
other kind.

775
00:55:54,640 --> 00:56:01,320
The trouble is that in any showdown between painting and the big media, painting
cannot possibly win.

776
00:56:01,320 --> 00:56:06,280
People believe what they see on the screen, in photos or even on the box,

777
00:56:06,280 --> 00:56:10,720
but nobody extracts the essential information for the conduct of their lives

778
00:56:10,720 --> 00:56:12,720
from looking at paintings any more.

779
00:56:12,720 --> 00:56:16,280
The thing is that compared to the media, art's a small thing,

780
00:56:16,280 --> 00:56:18,120
it's just a vibration in a museum, really.

781
00:56:18,120 --> 00:56:20,880
And it deals with what hasn't already been said.

782
00:56:20,880 --> 00:56:28,080
It isn't even a very good religion, but once it gives up its claims to seriousness,
it's shot.

783
00:56:28,080 --> 00:56:31,920
The Pop sensibility and its ironies nearly took these claims away,

784
00:56:31,920 --> 00:56:34,560
dissolved them in the doctrine that the medium is the message,

785
00:56:34,560 --> 00:56:36,280
but then it became apparent

786
00:56:36,280 --> 00:56:41,080
that all this doctrine boiled down to was the idea that it doesn't matter what art
says.

787
00:56:41,080 --> 00:56:47,480
Now, perhaps Andy Warhol was right for his moment when he said that Pop Art was
about liking things.

788
00:56:47,480 --> 00:56:50,640
But even so it's not enough, man is an animal who judges,

789
00:56:50,640 --> 00:56:55,880
and even in a culture which has split as disastrously and in as many ways as ours
has,

790
00:56:55,880 --> 00:57:01,880
the problems of choice and taste and moral responsibility for images still remain.

791
00:57:01,880 --> 00:57:06,320
In fact, they get harder, but the rock upon which the avant-garde sank

792
00:57:06,320 --> 00:57:10,720
was that art could no longer control that responsibility.

793
00:57:36,160 --> 00:57:39,280
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