- 7 weeks ago
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00I
01:05Introducing the American way of life on the threshold of the golden 60s, color, style, comfort, utility, and convenience, recreation,
01:19fun. These are the ultimate desires of today, tomorrow, and the years ahead of us.
02:30The energy, the faith, the devotion, which we bring to this endeavor, will light our country and all who serve
02:40it. And the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
02:49But then this world of promise began to unravel.
04:11By 1968, Vietnam was a national obsession and had split the country apart in the most divisive and culturally ruinous
04:19conflict since the Civil War a century earlier.
04:23In the end, 58,000 young Americans and uncounted Vietnamese were killed in a war that America lost.
04:36The consensus that had held America together for 100 years was shattered and the results are still with us today
04:42in mistrust of government, in the collapse of the great society programs, in the so-called culture wars, and in
04:50America's disillusionment with its power to fulfill its own idealist promises.
04:57The cowboys were no longer the good guys. The Indians were no longer the savages. The nightmare of Vietnam cast
05:09America into an age of anxiety from which it has not yet emerged. And did some of its art reflect
05:15this? How could it not?
05:27God bless America, land that I love, stand beside her, and guide her.
05:41In 1968, Ed Keenholtz finished his portable war memorial.
05:52On the left, the patriotic singer Kate Smith, a trash can on legs, continuously emits the unofficial national anthem, Irving
06:01Berlin's God Bless America.
06:07Next to her, a parody of the Iwo Jima Monument in Arlington National Cemetery, the Second World War G.I
06:15.s hoisting the flag.
06:16But in Keenholtz's version, they're faceless, and they're planting the symbol of victory on a delicatessen table.
06:29Behind them, the famous World War I recruiting poster, Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam.
06:37But in the right half, a couple eat their hot dogs at a fast food counter beside a Coke machine.
06:43Their dogs are killer, but they don't even notice the G.I.s.
06:51Heenholtz is saying that America is so tied into a war mentality, a defence economy, that it seems quite ordinary
06:59by 1968, the 20th year of the Cold War, with Vietnam raging.
07:04It's just business as usual, taken for granted.
07:11I have a reputation mostly for controversial art. Critics, for instance, have a lot of trouble putting in context and
07:20naming.
07:22It's hard for the average writer to put me in a convenient box that defines me.
07:36People often tried to put Keenholtz together with the American pop artists.
07:40But his work had an angry earnestness that threw out everything pop art saw as benign in mass culture.
07:47Did he exaggerate? Yes.
07:50But that's what large-hearted moralists do.
07:53They don't want their art to be fair.
07:55Some truths only speak from the well of exaggeration.
08:04Keenholtz once worked in a California madhouse, and when you look through the barred door of his tableau, The State
08:10Hospital, you see a charnel house of the soul,
08:13where the locked-up patient on the lower bunk can only dream of the identical misery of the patient above.
08:25Until his death in 1994, Ed Keenholtz worked in partnership with his wife, Nancy Reddin Keenholtz.
08:33Between them, they made objects that ranged across the whole canon of American public imagery, turning it upside down to
08:40find the anxieties below.
08:47In Shine on Shine, their version of Chester Daniel French's monument to Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, the throne becomes
08:55a shoeshine chair,
08:56and his shoes are still, a century later, being buffed by a pair of black hands.
09:11I'm saved. I'm washed in the blood. I'm saved by the blood of Jesus. I'm saved. I'm baptized in the
09:20Holy Ghost.
09:20Jesus Christ is my Lord, my Savior, and my Master. I am blessed. That is the greatest blessing.
09:28One of their favorite targets was the descendants of Elmer Gantry, the TV evangelists, the Jimmy Swaggarts, the Tammy and
09:35Jim Bakers,
09:36in all their kitsch piety and the sexual excitement of the hot gospel.
09:49For 30 years, Ed Keenholtz defined a whole side of American culture, and he left instructions to make his own
09:56funeral into his last tableau.
10:02He was buried on top of a mountain in Idaho in a big old packard, which Nancy steered into the
10:08grave like an Egyptian funeral barge.
10:11In his pocket was a deck of cards, and on the seat beside him was a bottle of 1931 Chianti.
10:17He was set for the afterlife.
10:25For all of the mistakes that I've made as a human being, as a man, I would hope that the
10:29world were better for my living here rather than worse for my living here.
10:32I hope that I contributed rather than took.
10:49I got to America in 1970, and I stayed because I had a job. I was going to be the
10:53art critic of Time magazine.
10:55I wasn't exactly a boy from the bush then, but you didn't need to be one to feel scared and
10:59excited at the idea of living in Manhattan.
11:02Crossing the East River was like crossing the Rubicon. No way back.
11:0725 years later, I can still feel my heart jump a little when I see the New York skyline, the
11:11skyscrapers defining territory, competition, having and holding, and signifying accumulated cultural power.
11:19Today, New York is still a world cultural capital, but it's not the imperial center. No place is.
11:25But in 1970 it was, and its house style, so to speak, was minimalism, the last of the big isms
11:32of American art.
11:39Marfa, Texas. 200 miles south of El Paso. Population, 2,500. Main industry, cattle ranching.
11:52Marfa is about as far from the New York art world as you can get, except that the doyen of
11:57American minimalism, Donald Judd, came here to work in 1972.
12:09This is the place to see his output. The works are housed in some 40 restored buildings, like these artillery
12:16sheds left over from the Second World War, which contain a hundred gleaming aluminium boxes, their silver surfaces reflecting one
12:24another, the big sky and the flat landscape outside.
12:28It's a temple of aesthetic fanaticism.
12:55It's a temple of aesthetic fanaticism.
13:11Minimal art completely rejected imagery. It avoided nature, although sometimes it could play very well against a landscape. Its materials
13:19were inorganic. Steel, concrete, plastic, polished metal. It was impersonal, machined and assembled, not hand wrought.
13:27It denied the human body. It denied touch. It existed for the eye alone. And yet its denial of the
13:35sensuous was deeply American. You thought of the purity of shaker furniture, of the spareness of Puritan meeting houses, boxes
13:43with God's word in them.
13:44The end of the day.
13:51Judd's work was hard to like because the purity he sought was of a kind that most people don't want
13:57in sculpture. No figure, no parts, no relationships, no movement, no metaphors, no secrets. Just the thing in itself, and
14:07a completely inexpressive thing at that.
14:09None of which excluded the fact that it could be beautiful in an anxious utopian way. It's in the world,
14:16but it tells us nothing about the world.
14:24Everyone respected Judd's Puritanism, but they didn't want to be so exclusive about it. And yet, they too could be
14:31just as extreme.
14:39One such artist was Richard Serra, who wanted to find a way past the purity of minimalism by invoking the
14:46human body and its anxieties in weight, mass, and hard work with heavy materials.
14:52I thought that, with my own hands, that I could involve myself in a process of making that could confront
14:58minimalism and open up the field.
15:00And so basically, I started very simply writing down a verb list and enacting physical processes in relation to the
15:07material I had at hand.
15:08To split, to cut, to sever, to drop, to remove, to simplify, to differ, to disarrange, to open, to mix,
15:15to splash, to not, to spill, to droop, to flow.
15:18High minimalism could be ordered from a factory by phone, not Serra's.
15:23He was a manual worker, intimately involved with the process of making and the logic of materials.
15:29He lifted sheets of rubber. He made big rolls of lead. He dumped arrays of metal on the floor.
15:37He propped steel plates together. He spattered molten lead into corners.
15:44In the late 60s, you were throwing molten lead into a corner.
15:47I would have thought clearly the act of throwing liquid metal as some relation to Pollock's throwing of skeins of
15:54liquid paint on a canvas.
15:55Pollock was very important to you, wasn't he?
15:57It was very important in terms of the process and the final product being one in the same.
16:03And I think that, for me, broke more ground than the minimalist had.
16:09Basically, what I was trying to do was use the juncture of the wall and the floor, the architectural device,
16:14to make a sculpture.
16:15And then I would do that and then I would uncrank it, turn it over and pull it back.
16:18The fact that it was done by flinging the lead stylistically looks like Pollock.
16:22But when I was building those pieces, I certainly didn't have Pollock in mind.
16:28What he did have in mind was the weight of sculpture, its presence in the world, something to set against
16:34the abstraction of ideas.
16:36I'm excited right now.
16:41Richard Serra's massive sculptures are anxious monuments. You skirt them with respect.
16:47Nothing except gravity holds the tons of steel plate together.
16:50No welds, no bolts, no brackets.
16:54If it fell on you, it would squash you like a bug.
17:15In the 1970s, the ambitions of American artists were large and space in Soho, in downtown New York, was cheap.
17:24The two came together when the sculptor Walter de Maria got the dear Center for the Arts to buy a
17:29second floor loft on Worcester Street.
17:32One of the hopes of minimalists and conceptual artists was to make works of art that could somehow transcend the
17:38art market,
17:39while demanding more and more space from museums and galleries.
17:44Here, de Maria did both.
17:46He turned the loft into a low-key pilgrimage center by filling it with 125 tons of deep, rich, chocolate
17:53-colored soil,
17:54covering 3,600 square feet of prime real estate in perpetuity to a depth of 22 inches.
18:03It's hard to imagine all that earth going under the hammer at Sotheby's,
18:07and all offers from indoor marijuana growers have so far been refused.
18:19A gallery full of earth.
18:22In the 1970s, some artists wanted to inscribe their designs on the earth itself.
18:29A classic of land art was created by Robert Smithson on the edge of the Great Salt Lake in Utah
18:36in 1970.
18:49He moved 10,000 tons of rock, dumping it into the red water to make what he called the Spiral
18:56Jetty.
19:03He met his jetty as a tribute to prehistoric works of earth art.
19:08From the air, it resembled a spiral nebula in outer space.
19:17Smithson knew it would sink back into the lake.
19:20He was fascinated by entropy, the way that systems run down and fall apart.
19:37If the land could be the surface of art, so could the body.
19:42In his film piece, Art Makeup, Bruce Naumann smeared himself with paint, but not for pleasure.
19:50With his installations, body pieces, and jokey games in neon, pleasure is Naumann's enemy.
19:58This piece is called Hanged Man.
20:10In terms of his effects on younger artists over the last 15 or 20 years,
20:14Bruce Naumann has some claim to be called the most influential artist in America,
20:18even though you seldom get anybody claiming to actually enjoy his work.
20:23It explores whatever could turn you off.
20:26Agro, torpor, bad jokes, paranoia, and boredom.
20:31Especially boredom.
20:33The artist as hero may have vanished from American life,
20:36but Naumann has carved himself out a different kind of niche.
20:39The artist as nuisance.
20:44This piece, Carousel, is grossly disagreeable.
20:48It gives you a glimpse of hell with moulds of deer and wolves,
20:52the plastic moulds used by taxidermists,
20:55going slowly round to the amplified scraping noise they make while dragging on the floor.
21:17I'll talk. They'll listen.
21:21I'll talk. They'll listen.
21:24I'll talk. They'll listen.
21:24You'll talk. They'll listen.
21:26In a recent video piece, Naumann explores the way we communicate with each other
21:30or don't.
21:31I'll talk to you. They'll listen to me.
21:35Go.
21:36Bernard, take two.
21:38You'll talk to me.
21:40You'll talk to them. They'll listen to you.
21:42Naumann is something of an old-fashioned moralist,
21:45and this comes out in a certain bossiness.
21:48His work sends messages about behaviour and how it's controlled by others.
21:52It can get quite sinister.
21:56Put your hands on your lap, your hat on your head.
22:03Sit on your hat, your hands on your head.
22:06The image of a mime obeys the orders of a calm disembodied voice, the outer parent.
22:11The orders get more and more confusing, more and more humiliating.
22:17Shit in your hat.
22:26Show me your hat.
22:32Put your hat on your head.
22:36Do you feel the anxiety in your work mirrors a more general kind of anxiety in America itself?
22:42Probably.
22:43I know that Ed Keenholz once said to me,
22:45don't you think it's just a great time to be an artist because you can just do anything,
22:48and people will accept it?
22:50And I think that kind of open possibility, it's confusing,
22:56because you don't know exactly what you're supposed to do then.
22:58And I think the whole culture's become a little open like that,
23:05and so people are very anxious because they don't know what the rules are anymore.
23:10You're stuck with the same anxiety as everybody else.
23:19But as body art, video, conceptual art and process took over the 70s,
23:24what had become of abstract painting once the glory of the New York School?
23:30Great claims had been made for colour field painting
23:33as the inevitable successor to abstract expressionism,
23:37the soul bearer of high seriousness.
23:39Huge lyrical canvases, stains and soaks of transparent colour
23:44by artists like Helen Frankenthaler.
23:48These watercolours writ large were often very beautiful
23:51when they weren't just being intelligently pretty.
23:54They offered nothing but disinterested pleasure,
23:57and they became for a time the official art, the salon art of America.
24:04But to me, the best abstract painter of the time wasn't in New York at all.
24:13It used to be simply assumed that the mainstream of American art
24:16ran through the canyons of Manhattan.
24:18But it wasn't true, and in the 70s and 80s there was no better proof of that
24:22than the work of Richard Diebenkorn.
24:24Diebenkorn worked in Southern California,
24:27a classical abstract painter whose work had evolved from landscape and the figure.
24:31And the landscape to which his best-known series of paintings was tied was Ocean Park,
24:37the beachside suburb of Los Angeles where he lived.
24:40And the
25:10of coast, sea and sky in his Ocean Park paintings,
25:14abstractions which don't reject the world but contain it in a concentrated form.
25:23Richard Diebenkorn was a mediator between abstraction and natural vision.
25:28He painted some of the most intelligent responses to Matisse that any American had done.
25:35Blue Pacific air, slices of gable, white posts by the sea,
25:41an enveloping light like no other in American painting.
25:59But different artists see different Americans.
26:06It was supposed to be a non-violent demonstration today.
26:12The politically violent America of the late 60s and 70s,
26:16the America of the war, the protests, the furies unleashed at the 1968 Democratic Convention
26:22radically changed the work of the highly respected abstract painter Philip Guston.
26:27And he changed the direction of American painting after 1970.
26:33As an abstract artist, Guston was known for his refined veils of paint.
26:40He'd begun as a figure painter in the 1930s, and many of his early works are images of social evil,
26:46like The Conspirators from 1932, a painting now lost, with its Ku Klux Klansmen holding a whip.
26:56There had always been a storyteller inside the abstract artist, and now, in middle age, Guston let him out.
27:04I think my father experienced a crisis in his development as an artist.
27:10He was widely quoted for saying, I wanted to tell stories.
27:14I got sick and tired of all that purity, by which he meant, of course, the purity and perhaps minimalism
27:23by that point of abstract art.
27:24He said, how can I go into my studio and adjust a red to a blue when all of this
27:31is happening in the world?
27:32He felt that he had to respond to the world outside.
27:37I began drawing a subject which I dealt with many years ago of hooded figures.
27:49They're obviously based on Ku Klux Klan figures, but I didn't mean to make a story about the Ku Klux
27:58Klan.
27:58I'm just using them as a, I suppose you'd call it a symbol.
28:05Guston's Klansmen are both ludicrous and menacing.
28:08Red of neck and white of sheet, they ride around in jalopies, up to no good, with blood on their
28:13robes.
28:15They drink and smoke a lot.
28:20They even paint pictures, just like abstract expressionists or Guston himself.
28:30They are characters in the Commedia dell'arte of an America deep in a social and political crisis.
28:38But Guston's Klansmen were obsolete characters.
28:41By 1970, the Ku Klux Klan was insignificant compared to real events.
28:47You are ordered to disperse.
28:50The Klan paintings were forced into existence by a political environment they didn't actually show.
28:58I shall resign for the presidency of the fact that is known tomorrow.
29:03These klutzy images seemed a breach of etiquette, a treason to the artist's own serious past.
29:09The critic of the New York Times called him a Mandarin posing as a stumble bum.
29:13But from there until his death, Guston's work only gathered intensity.
29:23Younger postmodernists pillaged his work for its grunge and irony.
29:27But Guston wasn't in any sense a postmodernist.
29:30He was a tragic painter with a deeply felt relation to history.
29:37This painting, The Street, is based on Paolo Uccello, with boots instead of horses' hooves and trash can lids for
29:44shields.
29:48And there was nothing feigned about his despair.
29:51This painting, with its pathetic boots and the fires on the stony horizon, is called simply Pit.
30:10Out of the slang of comic strips, Philip Guston brought an immense sadness about human fate.
30:19Out of his pessimism about America, a lumpish beauty.
30:24He died in 1980, completely out of sync, as always, with the sunny fantasy of America that was coming.
30:40I've always believed that this land was placed here between the two great oceans by some divine plan.
30:46It was placed here to be found by a special kind of people.
30:50People who had a special love for freedom and who had the courage to come to what in the beginning
30:55was the most undeveloped wilderness possible.
31:00Ronald Reagan's immense appeal to Americans lay in offering them the rebirth of an America that had been lost in
31:06the conflicts and humiliations of the 60s and 70s.
31:10Victorious, leading the world, buoyant with the virtues of the mythic West.
31:16For 200 years, we've lived in the future, believing that tomorrow would be better than today and today would be
31:23better than yesterday.
31:24I still believe that.
31:26We can meet our destiny and that destiny to build a land here that will be for all mankind a
31:34shining city on a hill.
31:40This is not the Oval Office of the White House in Washington.
31:44It is in the Simi Valley, north of Los Angeles, in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library,
31:49a movie-set replica of the real stage on which the former actor worked in real life.
31:55Ronald Reagan, like most American presidents, including John Kennedy, had no particular interest in the visual arts, beyond film, of
32:01course.
32:02Yet his presidency had large indirect effects upon the American art world, more, perhaps, than anyone's since Franklin Roosevelt's.
32:09Why? Because, in the course of quadrupling America's national deficit to about a trillion dollars,
32:15and filling the country with oceans of borrowed money, his economic policies created the art boom of the 1980s.
32:22This bubble had a blinding iridescence while it lasted, and every new investor was aware that if he bought new
32:29art,
32:29he'd come up smelling like Lorenzo de' Medici's aftershave.
32:37The art dealers, of course, were high in hog heaven, floating on clouds of sanctimony.
32:43Maria?
32:44I know most of the people who are collecting in the art world, whether they buy from me or not,
32:48and I probably will know something about you.
32:50And then I'll have to make a judgment.
32:52Will I take a chance on affiliating you to the gallery by letting you have one of these paintings?
32:59Now, that sounds terribly arrogant, but it really, it's true.
33:02Anybody who gets one of these paintings is receiving a prize.
33:07A booby prize, sometimes, like a Julian Schnabel.
33:14His congested paintings, with their broken plates and earnest, incompetent drawing,
33:19made him a great favourite among those who yearned for the hot and the heavy.
33:25Schnabel was a monument of self-esteem who once compared himself to Giotto and Van Gogh.
33:33In the 70s, it was movie stars.
33:36In the 90s, it would be supermodels.
33:39But in the 80s, for a time, it was young post-modernist artists,
33:43and only a culture as sodden with hype as America's could have swallowed their pretensions.
33:52The patron saint of this inflation was Andy Warhol.
33:56It was Andy who demystified the art world by calling it by its real name,
34:01a business, a promotional system swept by tides of fashion and snobbery.
34:09After his death in 1987, there was a giant auction of his things.
34:15Andy must have been smiling down from heaven when his flea market cookie jars came on the block
34:20and the relic hunters went crazy.
34:22At 18, 19,000 dollars, 20,000 dollars on the right.
34:30At 20,000, 21,000.
34:35At 21,000, fair warning.
34:3821,000 dollars.
34:50If cheap cookie jars could become treasures in the 1980s,
34:54then how much more the work of the very egregious Jeff Koons,
34:58a former bond trader whose ambitions took him right through Kitsch
35:02and out the other side into a vulgarity so syrupy, gross and numbing
35:07that collectors felt challenged by it.
35:15Sometimes his work was at least memorable, like this inflatable toy rabbit cast in stainless steel
35:21and turned into a parody of Brancusi's birds.
35:33He didn't make his own stuff, of course.
35:36No doubt Koons couldn't carve his name on a tree.
35:38He had European souvenir factories do that, creating delicious porcelain treasures to his design, like Michael Jackson with bubbles.
35:48And Leonardo's St John.
35:50And Leonardo's St John.
36:01This little piggy went to market in a big way, for Koons sees himself as a spiritual artist.
36:08Accusing him of hype is like rebuking a fish for being wet.
36:13Hi, Jeff.
36:14A kitten in a giant sock.
36:17Tell me about it.
36:18This is one of my newer works that I'm creating.
36:23And I think that it's a piece that's working in kind of a very classical tradition of a crucifixion.
36:30And this is very open. It's more fun-loving in a way.
36:34And also deal with a spiritual theme.
36:36Well, I don't see much spirituality there yet.
36:38I see a very large and playful pussycat in a sock.
36:42But how are you going to inject spirituality into this image?
36:45I'm going to give the cat a little more Bambi-like eyelashes.
36:49Ah, very spiritual Bambi, yeah.
36:51And I think that the flowers are really quite beautiful.
36:54They're very, very baroque.
36:55I try to make works, pardon me, that are very generous.
36:58I try to be as generous as I can be with myself.
37:01What do you mean by generous?
37:02I mean, how is this more generous, say, than some other kind of sculpture?
37:07What's generous about it?
37:09Well, I think that it's communicating love.
37:11It's communicating happiness.
37:14And it doesn't alienate anyone.
37:16I think that a young child could come in here, a five-year-old child,
37:19could look and find some pleasure and some enjoyment.
37:22And I hope that it's something positive for humankind.
37:25Have you ever actually done any carving or modelling?
37:27No.
37:28When I was a child, I did some modelling.
37:32What, with plasticine or modelling clay?
37:34But now we're working here in my New York studio,
37:36and I have a staff of artists that I work with,
37:39which are really quite phenomenal.
37:42So you think the stuff up, but you don't make it?
37:45That's correct.
37:45I have to oversee everything here, and I have to make every decision,
37:48otherwise I'd have no relation to it at all.
37:58The 1980s may have been a low, dishonest time for much American art.
38:02But they were still serious artists around.
38:05And some of them continued to draw inspiration from the natural
38:09rather than the media environment.
38:14Susan Rothenberg lives on a horse ranch outside Santa Fe in New Mexico.
38:19Dotted around are the remains of ancient Indian pueblos.
38:24What's affecting me here very much is the colour of this earth,
38:28the colour of the fragments, which tend to be red, black and white.
38:32And I've got a lot more red in my palette than I ever had.
38:40And what's new here, and I don't know where I learned to believe this,
38:43but that yellow is the colour of death.
38:46And a lot of yellow is coming into my work.
38:53What I do think about is how tiny I feel out here.
38:55New Mexico makes you feel really teeny.
38:58Just a little fragment of humanity.
39:00Just a little fragment of humanity.
39:09Rothenberg came of age as an artist in the early 70s
39:12when minimalism still reigned.
39:13But she wanted a recognisable image
39:16and found it, rather unexpectedly, in horses.
39:33In the 70s, when you found yourself thinking about painting a horse,
39:37did the idea take you by surprise?
39:40Yes, it did, because I had an idea
39:42that I wanted to make a painting with figure and ground the same colour,
39:45but I didn't know what image I would be using.
39:48And it couldn't be a human figure
39:50because people just didn't do such a thing in the early 70s,
39:53so I needed something big and powerful to hook into.
39:58It was a vehicle for emotion and paint.
40:04In later paintings, the image of the horse is decomposed.
40:08It fragments.
40:10Then it gives way to abrupt signs for human figures and faces,
40:14bluntly pathetic,
40:15that result not so much of an idea as of a lump in the mind.
40:20They're signs for stress.
40:27Rothenberg tries to strip feeling, anxiety most of all,
40:31down to basic signs,
40:32and yet her images have a dignity that comes from distance and restraint.
40:37They're not just emotional splurge.
40:42I was thinking about how Americans are known to want something new,
40:46and whether it's really true that we do,
40:48and whether my work is American.
40:51And I think in that I don't want to ever continue painting the way I did yesterday is American.
40:57I'm a thrill-seeker, like Americans.
41:00But I tell you that in a period like now when painting isn't particularly active or exciting,
41:05it enervates me.
41:06It makes me feel bad, too.
41:08I'm enough a part of my culture to want painting to be hot,
41:13to feel competitive in it, active in it,
41:15and to know that there's an appetite for it.
41:18I mean, I never truly lose faith.
41:19It wouldn't do me any good to do that anyway.
41:22I just wait and say,
41:23Well, they'll come round.
41:24They'll come round.
41:42The suburban landscape of America
41:44stretches from Long Island to Anaheim.
41:47It's familiar territory from TV, sitcoms, and the movies.
41:51And in the 1980s,
41:52its inhabitants got their very own painter laureate, Eric Fischel.
42:01In the beginning, I think my paintings were generated from a lot of anger,
42:06focused on the place that I came from, and I did come from the suburbs.
42:13In the environment in which I grew up in, there was not an ability to acknowledge what the reality was.
42:22Everything tried to be held into a set of acceptable images,
42:29and they didn't often conform to what really was taking place.
42:47Poorly trained at art school, Fischel is a clumsy, uneven draftsman of the figure.
42:51But he finds images that seem to trail a whole narrative behind them.
43:01Memories of Edward Hopper's paintings of the 1930s underlie his work.
43:09He paints the middle classes not as lonely, but as positively deranged.
43:18His suburbs smell of hot vinyl, sperm, and barbecue fluid.
43:23It's the failed Eden noted by 10 out of 10 sociologists,
43:28unreachable kids, grotesque parents, small convulsions of voyeurism.
43:51Eric Fischel opens a peephole into a life that might just have been yours.
44:15The big source of America's cultural anxiety today is identity.
44:20You can't live here without getting a gutful of identity.
44:23If not your own, then other people's.
44:27America is in the business of inventing identities
44:30based on narrow conceptions of gender, race, and the rest.
44:35These have made for narrow, preachy, single-issue art
44:39in which victim credentials count for more than aesthetic achievement.
44:44You get irritable agitprop, like this poster painting by Barbara Kruger
44:48telling us that it's a small world, but not if you have to clean it.
44:54Or this neon piece rebuking the American government
44:57for not doing enough in AIDS research.
45:03All true, no doubt.
45:05But the fact that an artwork's about injustice
45:07no more gives it aesthetic status
45:09than the fact that it's about mermaids.
45:13This piece by Janine Anthony is about bulimia.
45:17She took a big lump of chocolate and gnawed at it like a beaver going at a tree.
45:21But so what?
45:28Identity art has yielded some images of real intensity though,
45:31like Kiki Smith's sculptures of the suffering or menstruating body.
45:43But the mother of American identity art
45:46is a French-born sculptor who came to the United States 50 years ago,
45:50Louise Bourgeois.
46:02This is very empty here.
46:06And the emptiness here and the cleanliness is indispensable.
46:13It is the very opposite.
46:15It is the very opposite of the cluttered labyrinth that we have inside.
46:32And also then the idea is that we are serious people and we are on the level.
46:42We are not indulging in any foolishness.
46:48Bourgeois sculpture is meant to make you uncomfortable.
46:51Like this one, fillette, which means little girl,
46:54but is actually a shrouded penis with outrageous testicles.
47:00The works summon up experiences that come from deep within the body.
47:04The female body.
47:06Exposure, protection, weak aggression.
47:09The body as totem, as cave, as lair.
47:15The source of Bourgeois pain doesn't show, but it propels the images.
47:25Do you find that the act of making sculpture is a way of mastering the fears which...
47:31Yes, absolutely.
47:32The act of making a sculpture is to put order in discord.
47:37Right.
47:38At any kind of level.
47:40Otherwise, the anxiety comes in.
47:47The chaos.
47:48The fear of chaos.
47:49That's it.
47:51The anxiety has everything to do with the body, doesn't it?
47:54With the possibility that the body will be dismembered, that it will be left alone.
47:57Absolutely. Destroyed.
47:59Yes.
48:01You see, the human condition for me is the relation of man to woman.
48:05And I was brought up in a family where the violence was present.
48:09And one of the things that my mother did, when the anxiety of my father crept up,
48:15she knew that before every meal, so she put a little pile of saucers next to his plate.
48:21When anxiety came, you see, and that noise?
48:28For him, it cleared the air.
48:30It cleared the air. He felt better.
48:33Right?
48:33How did you feel?
48:34I felt relieved because I stopped being afraid of what was going to happen.
48:38It had happened. Right?
48:40Right.
48:52From the cluttered maze of her studio, Bourgeois puts together the contents of what she calls her cells.
48:59Small rooms full of bottles, bodies, writings, stuffed dresses, environments filled with the traces of memory.
49:15Living in America has clearly given your work opportunities that it might not have had in Europe.
49:21I grant you that. That's true. That's true. That's true.
49:25What were those opportunities and do they make you feel like an American rather than a European artist?
49:30That in this country, anything goes. It is a great freedom.
49:36You can be as crazy as you want and this is freedom.
49:40And in Europe, you are absolutely the prisoner of an establishment.
49:45So I'm very grateful for that.
49:47Nobody is going to tell me what to do in the first place,
49:49and nobody is going to tell me that it is good, bad or indifferent.
49:56And indeed the artist, especially the well-known artist, is free in America.
50:00He or she gets total latitude, often at great expense.
50:07This pavilion in a Los Angeles garden is a piece by James Turrell.
50:11It contains nothing but air, and from it you watch the sky.
50:19The work is called Second Meeting.
50:21As the sun sets, the contrast between the artificial light inside
50:26and the natural light outside makes that perfectly cut square become almost palpable.
50:43I put you in a situation where you feel the physicality of light.
50:47This is an art that people try to touch and yet there's nothing to touch.
50:51There is, first of all, no object.
50:55And there is no image, nor any place of focus.
50:59What are you then looking at?
51:00Well, I'm hoping that you then have the self-reflexive act of looking at your looking,
51:05so that you're actually seeing yourself see to some degree,
51:08and it does reveal something about your seeing,
51:11as opposed to being a journal of my seeing.
51:17Turrell's art doesn't happen in front of your eyes.
51:20It happens behind them.
51:37Since the late 70s, Turrell's big project has been to turn a whole crater on the edge of the painted
51:43desert in Arizona into a work of art.
51:51How did you come upon the rodent crater?
51:54Through flight.
51:55A lot of how I come about this look at space and light inhabiting it is through flight.
52:09I flew the western states to look at a site where I could make a series of spaces that literally
52:14did engage the visual world above as you engage it in flight.
52:21Generally, I would fly for about three or four days and sleep under the plane at night.
52:25Basically, that was the life I had for about seven months.
52:27I literally was looking for this bowl-shaped space held up in the air.
52:31But then at the end of the seven months, you came on the rodent crater and that was it?
52:35I liked the color of it. I liked its position.
52:38Of course, I wanted to find one that was privately owned and for sale.
52:42In the end, I had to buy a ranch to get a volcano.
52:44This is a great event now.
52:45This is the end of the seven months.
52:46The End of the Town
52:48The End of the Town
53:14Inside this great volcanic hill, Terrell plans tunnels, viewing chambers and pools acting
53:20as lenses of water that will enable the visitor to experience the light of the sun, the moon
53:25and the stars in isolated, concentrated ways.
53:33It's an American vision on an epic scale, not just painting the western landscape but
53:38subtly transforming it.
53:43I've selected the crater, first of all an environment that is exposed geology.
53:48And in this stage set of geologic time, I then wish to make spaces that engage celestial
53:53events in light, so as to play the music of the spheres in light, simply.
54:02Very simple, yes.
54:04Well, I must say, in looking at the plans, it doesn't seem so simple.
54:08And perhaps it isn't in that respect, but when you greet my work with your perception,
54:14it is quite a simple act.
54:23Tell me something, when you got here, was the crater rim like this, or did you have to
54:29do a lot of bulldozing?
54:30Oh no, it's been shaped.
54:32It still looks like a volcano, but it's now trued up a bit, as I'd say.
54:36What, you had caterpillars up there slicing off the top, huh?
54:39Yes.
54:41Basically, the whole shaping was done so as to shape the sky.
54:44It took about 220,000 cubic yards of moving before that began to happen.
54:53Okay, well, one of the things I'd like to have you do is to lie down and see the horizon
54:57from
54:57that position.
54:58Where do we do it?
55:00See, right here is a good place.
55:01Right here.
55:01I'll shade you.
55:02All right.
55:07Just right back, huh?
55:09Yes.
55:10Wow.
55:14Framed in the arc of the rim, you see the sky as a huge blue dome, all embracing, transparent,
55:20but somehow solid, an eyeball.
55:23So, thank you very much.
56:19This is almost where we came in.
56:21The vision of America as a sublime wilderness far in the West.
56:25But the God-given blank slate that Europeans thought they had
56:28has been written over again and again for the last 400 years.
56:32So much so that we've now got post-modernists saying that
56:35nature is just another cultural construct and that art doesn't need it.
56:39Well, you can tell that one to the coyotes.
56:41None of us is outside of nature.
56:43We are all a part of nature.
56:45A bad, ungrateful part sometimes, but part of it all the same.
56:49And an art that doesn't take that into account
56:51isn't going to satisfy us or delight us for very long.
56:55The world is so various, so interconnected,
56:58that it still remains the best ground of invention.
57:01That inventiveness, that sense of possibility,
57:04is flagging badly in America now, as it is in the rest of the world.
57:08American art seems to be losing the two qualities that once made it special,
57:11its plain empirical speech and its spiritual hopes.
57:15All cultures decay, and the culture of American modernism,
57:19once so vital, so open and so confident,
57:22may be no exception to that as we move towards the year 2000.
57:27I think of the words of W.B. Yeats,
57:29the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
57:34But then again, in the equally durable words of Scarlett O'Hara,
57:38tomorrow is another day.
57:41W.B. Yeats, the best lack all conviction,
58:13discover the story of immigrants from Ulster
58:16who played a critical role in America's break from Britain
58:19on the road to independence and the road to democracy.
58:23Watch Declaration on BBC iPlayer.
58:37Watch Declaration on BBC iPlayer.
58:43Watch Declaration on BBC iPlayer.