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01:05Introducing the American way of life on the threshold of the golden 60s.
01:11Color, style, comfort, utility, and convenience.
01:18Recreation, fun.
01:21These are the ultimate desires of today, tomorrow, and the years ahead of us.
01:43America went into the 1960s as a great and secure nation, reasonably certain, despite the paranoia of the Cold War,
01:50that its culture and its political framework were the envy of the world.
01:53Its wealth was immense, its destiny virtuous, and even its internal problems of inequality and racism could soon be fixed
02:01by good men writing new laws.
02:08Nothing could resist American know-how and American can-do.
02:12This was, as the phrase went, the new frontier upon which a great society would grow.
02:20I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation.
02:29The energy, the energy, the faith, the devotion, which we bring to this endeavor, will light our country and all
02:40who serve it.
02:40And the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
02:49But then this world of promise began to unravel.
03:15Well, come on, all of you big strong men.
03:43America's troubles lay in a tiny, remote Asian country called Vietnam.
03:47Vietnam, a former colony of France in which Americans had never had the smallest strategic, economic, or cultural interest.
03:57In 1965, nine out of ten Americans couldn't have spelt its name or found it on a map.
04:10By 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.
04:35The consensus that had held America together for a hundred years was shattered and the results are still with us
04:42today in mistrust of government,
04:44in the collapse of the great society programs, in the so-called culture wars, and in America's disillusionment with its
04:52power to fulfill its own idealist promises.
04:57The cowboys were no longer the good guys.
05:00The Indians were no longer the savages.
05:06The nightmare of Vietnam cast America into an age of anxiety from which it has not yet emerged.
05:13And did some of its art reflect this?
05:16How could it not?
05:41In 1968, Ed Keenholtz finished his portable war memorial.
05:46From the mountain, to the prairie, to the old...
05:53On 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 GIs hoisting
06:16the flag.
06:17But 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.
06:42Their dogs are killer, but they don't even notice the GIs.
06:51Keenholtz 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.
07:12I 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.
07:35People 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. But that's what large-hearted moralists do.
07:53They don't want their art to be fair. Some 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,
08:11you see a charnel house of the soul, where the locked-up patient on the lower bunk can only dream
08:16of the identical misery of the patient above.
08:25Until his death in 1994, Ed Keenholtz worked in partnership with his wife, Nancy Reddin Keenholtz.
08:32Between 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,
08:54the throne becomes a shoeshine chair, and his shoes are still, a century later, being buffed by a pair of
09:01black 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.
09:21Jesus 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.
10:48I 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.
11:0625 years later, I can still feel my heart jump a little when I see the New York skyline,
11:11the skyscrapers 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,
11:58Donald Judd, came here to work in 1972.
12:09This is the place to see his output.
12:12The works are housed in some 40 restored buildings, like these artillery sheds left over from the Second World War,
12:19which contain a hundred gleaming aluminium boxes, their silver surfaces reflecting one another,
12:25the big sky and the flat landscape outside. It's a temple of aesthetic fanaticism.
12:58So, let's go, let's go.
13:11Minimal art completely rejected imagery.
13:13It avoided nature, although sometimes it could play very well against a landscape.
13:18Its materials were inorganic, steel, concrete, plastic, polished metal.
13:23It was impersonal, machined and assembled, not hand-wrought.
13:27It denied the human body.
13:29It denied touch.
13:31It existed for the eye alone.
13:33And yet its denial of the sensuous was deeply American.
13:37You thought of the purity of shaker furniture,
13:40of the spareness of Puritan meeting houses,
13:42boxes with God's word in them.
13:51Judd's work was hard to like because the purity he sought
13:55was of a kind that most people don't want in sculpture.
13:57No figure, no parts, no relationships, no movement, no metaphors, no secrets.
14:05Just the thing in itself, and a completely inexpressive thing at that.
14:09None of which excluded the fact that it could be beautiful in an anxious utopian way.
14:24Everyone respected Judd's puritanism, but they didn't want to be so exclusive about it.
14:39One such artist was Richard Serra, who wanted to find a way past the purity of minimalism
14:44by invoking the human 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
14:57that could confront minimalism and open up the field.
15:00And so basically I started very simply writing down a verb list
15:03and enacting physical processes in relation to the material I had at hand.
15:08To split, to cut, to sever, to drop, to remove, to simplify, to differ, to disarrange, to open,
15:15to mix, to 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.
15:31He made big rolls of lead.
15:34He dumped arrays of metal on the floor.
15:37He propped steel plates together.
15:40He 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
15:51as some relation to Pollock's throwing of skeins of liquid 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
16:02being 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 on the floor,
16:12the architectural device, to 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,
16:33something to set against the abstraction of ideas.
16:36I'm excited right now.
16:41Richard Serra's massive sculptures are anxious monuments.
16:45You 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,
17:19and space in Soho, in downtown New York, was cheap.
17:24The two came together when the sculptor Walter de Maria
17:27got the dear Centre for the Arts to buy a second-floor loft on Worcester Street.
17:32One of the hopes of minimalists and conceptual artists
17:35was to make works of art that could somehow transcend the art 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 centre
17:49by filling it with 125 tonnes of deep, rich, chocolate-coloured soil,
17:54covering 3,600 square feet of prime real estate
17:58in 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
18:33on the edge of the Great Salt Lake in Utah in 1970.
18:49He moved 10,000 tonnes of rock,
18:52dumping it into the red water
18:54to make what he called the Spiral Jetty.
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,
19:22the way that systems run down and fall apart.
19:37If the land could be the surface of art,
19:40so could the body.
19:42In his film piece, Art Make-Up,
19:45Bruce Naumann smeared himself with paint,
19:47but not for pleasure.
19:50With his installations, body pieces,
19:53and jokey games in neon,
19:55pleasure is Naumann's enemy.
19:58This piece is called Hanged Man.
20:10In terms of his effects on younger artists
20:12over the last 15 or 20 years,
20:14Bruce Naumann has some claim
20:16to be called the most influential artist in America,
20:18even though you seldom get anybody
20:20claiming to actually enjoy his work.
20:23It explores whatever could turn you off.
20:26Aggro, torpor, bad jokes, paranoia,
20:30and boredom, especially 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.
20:45This piece, Carousel,
20:46is grossly disagreeable.
20:48It gives you a glimpse of hell
20:50with moulds of deer and wolves,
20:52the plastic moulds used by taxidermists,
20:55going slowly round to the amplified scraping noise
20:58they make while dragging on the floor.
21:16I'll talk.
21:19They'll listen.
21:21I'll talk.
21:22They'll listen.
21:24I'll listen.
21:24You'll talk.
21:25They'll listen.
21:26In a recent video piece,
21:27Naumann explores the way we communicate with each other,
21:30or don't.
21:31I'll talk to you.
21:32They'll listen to me.
21:35Go.
21:36Bernard, take two.
21:38You'll talk to me.
21:39You'll talk to them.
21:41They'll listen to you.
21:42Naumann is something of an old-fashioned moralist,
21:45and this comes out in a certain bossiness.
21:47His work sends messages about behaviour
21:50and how it's controlled by others.
21:52It can get quite sinister.
21:56Put your hands on your lap,
21:58your hat on your head.
22:03Sit on your hat,
22:04your hands on your head.
22:06The image of a mime obeys the orders
22:08of a calm, disembodied voice,
22:11the outer parent.
22:12The orders get more and more confusing,
22:15more and more humiliating.
22:17Put shit in your hat.
22:26Show me your hat.
22:32Put your hat on your head.
22:36Do you feel the anxiety in your work
22:38mirrors a more general kind of anxiety
22:40in 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
22:46to be an artist because you can just do anything
22:48and people will accept it?
22:50And I think that kind of open possibility,
22:54it's confusing because you don't know exactly
22:57what you're supposed to do then.
22:59And I think the whole culture's become
23:03a little open like that.
23:05And so people are very anxious
23:07because they don't know what the rules are anymore.
23:10You're stuck with the same anxieties as everybody else.
23:19But as body art, video, conceptual art
23:22and process took over the 70s,
23:24what had become of abstract painting
23:26once 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,
23:36the soul-bearer of high seriousness,
23:40huge lyrical canvases,
23:42stains and soaks of transparent colour
23:44by artists like Helen Frankenthaler.
23:48These watercolours writ large
23:50were 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
23:58the official art, the salon art of America.
24:04But to me, the best abstract painter of the time
24:07wasn't in New York at all.
24:13It used to be simply assumed
24:14that the mainstream of American art
24:16ran through the canyons of Manhattan.
24:18But it wasn't true
24:19and in the 70s and 80s
24:20there was no better proof of that
24:22than the work of Richard Diebenkorn.
24:24Diebenkorn worked in Southern California,
24:27a classical abstract painter
24:28whose work had evolved from landscape and the figure.
24:32And the landscape to which
24:33his best-known series of paintings was tied
24:35was Ocean Park,
24:37the beachside suburb of Los Angeles
24:39where he lived.
25:03Preserving the high light and the diagonal cuts
25:05and the tonal balance,
25:06Diebenkorn's work moved towards
25:08the grandly ordered images of coast, sea and sky
25:11in his Ocean Park paintings,
25:14abstractions which don't reject the world
25:16but contain it in a concentrated form.
25:23Richard Diebenkorn was a mediator
25:25between abstraction and natural vision.
25:28He painted some of the most intelligent responses
25:31to Matisse that any American had done.
25:35Blue Pacific air, slices of gable,
25:39white posts by the sea,
25:41an enveloping light like no other in American painting.
26:06It was supposed to be a non-violent demonstration today.
26:11The politically violent America of the late 60s and 70s, the America of the war, the protests,
26:18the furies unleashed at the 1968 Democratic Convention, radically changed the work of
26:24the highly respected abstract painter Philip Guston, and he changed the direction of American
26:29painting after 1970. As 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
26:46evil, like The Conspirators from 1932, a painting now lost, with its Ku Klux Klansman holding
26:52a whip. There had always been a storyteller inside the abstract artist, and now, in middle
27:01age, Guston let him out.
27:04I think my father experienced a crisis in his development as an artist. He was widely
27:11quoted for saying, I wanted to tell stories. I got sick and tired of all that purity, by
27:18which he meant, of course, the purity and perhaps minimalism by that point of abstract art. He
27:25said, how can I go into my studio and adjust a red to a blue, when all of this is
27:31happening
27:32in the world? He 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. They're obviously
27:50based on Ku Klux Klan figures, but I didn't mean to make a story about the Ku Klux Klan. I'm
27:58just using them as a, I suppose you'd call it a symbol.
28:05Guston's Klansmen are both ludicrous and menacing. Red of neck and white of sheet, they ride around
28:10in jalopies, up to no good, with blood on their robes. They drink and smoke a lot. They even
28:21paint pictures, just like abstract expressionists or Guston himself. They are characters in the
28:31Commedia dell'arte of an America deep in a social and political crisis. But Guston's
28:39Klansmen were obsolete characters. By 1970, the Ku Klux Klan was insignificant compared to
28:46real events. The Klan paintings were forced into existence by a political environment they
28:55didn't actually show.
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. But from
29:14there until his death, Guston's work only gathered intensity.
29:23Younger postmodernists pillaged his work for its grunge and irony. But Guston wasn't in
29:29any sense a postmodernist. He 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,
29:43and trash can lids for shields.
29:48And there was nothing feigned about his despair. This painting, with its pathetic boots and the
29:54fires 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.
30:18Out of his pessimism about America, a lumpish beauty. He died in 1980, completely out of sync, as all the
30:28ways, 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
30:46plan. It was placed here to be found by a special kind of people. People who had a special love
30:51for freedom, and who had the courage to come to what in the beginning was the most undeveloped
30:57wilderness possible.
31:00Ronald Reagan's immense appeal to Americans lay in offering them the rebirth of an America
31:05that had been lost in the conflicts and humiliations of the 60s and 70s. Victorious, leading the world,
31:12buoyant 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
31:22today would be better than yesterday. I still believe that. We can meet our destiny, and that
31:29destiny to build a land here that will be, for all mankind, a shining city on a hill.
31:40This is not the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. It is in the Simi Valley, north
31:45of Los Angeles, in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, a movie-set replica of the real stage
31:51on which the former actor worked in real life. Ronald Reagan, like most American presidents,
31:57including John Kennedy, had no particular interest in the visual arts, beyond film, of course. Yet his
32:03presidency had large indirect effects upon the American art world, more, perhaps, than anyone's
32:08since Franklin Roosevelt's. Why? Because in the course of quadrupling America's national deficit
32:13to about a trillion dollars, and filling the country with oceans of borrowed money, his economic
32:18policies created the art boom of the 1980s. This bubble had a blinding iridescence while it lasted, and
32:26every new investor was aware that if he bought new art, he'd come up smelling like Lorenzo de Medici's
32:32aftershave.
32:37The art dealers, of course, were high in hog heaven, floating on clouds of sanctimony.
32:43Maria? I know most of the people who are collecting in the art world, whether they buy from me or
32:47not,
32:48and I probably will know something about you. And then I'll have to make a judgment. Will I take a
32:53chance
32:54on affiliating you to the gallery by letting you have one of these paintings? Now, that sounds terribly arrogant,
33:00but it really, it's true. Anybody who gets one of these paintings is receiving a prize.
33:06A booby prize, sometimes, like a Julian Schnabel.
33:14His congested paintings, with their broken plates and earnest, incompetent drawing, made him a great favourite
33:20among 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.
33:34In the 70s, it was movie stars. In the 90s, it would be supermodels. But in the 80s, for a
33:41time,
33:41it was young post-modernist artists, and only a culture as sodden with hype as America's
33:46could have swallowed their pretensions.
33:52The patron saint of this inflation was Andy Warhol. It was Andy who demystified the art world
33:59by calling it by its real name, a 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 $18,000, $19,000, $20,000 on the right. At $20,000, $21,000. At $21,000, fair warning,
34:38$21,000.
34:50If cheap cookie jars could become treasures in the 1980s, then how much more the work
35:08of others 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. No doubt Coons couldn't carve his name on a tree.
35:38He had European souvenir factories do that, creating delicious porcelain treasures to his design,
35:44like Michael Jackson with bubbles.
35:47And Leonardo's St John.
36:01This little piggy went to market in a big way, for Coons sees himself as a spiritual artist.
36:08Accusing him of hype is like rebuking a fish for being wet.
36:13Hi, Jeff. A kitten in a giant sock. Tell 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, and 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? I mean, you know, how is this more generous, say, than some other kind
37:07of sculpture?
37:07What's generous about it?
37:09Well, I think that it's communicating love, it's communicating happiness, and it doesn't alienate anyone.
37:16I think that a young child could come in here, a five-year-old child, could look and find some
37:21pleasure 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.
37:28No.
37:28When I was a child, I did some modelling.
37:32What, with plasticine or modelling claim?
37:34With plasticine.
37:34But now, we're working here in my New York studio, and I have a staff of artists that I work
37:39with, which are really quite phenomenal.
37:42So you think the stuff up, but you don't make it?
37:45That's correct. I have to oversee everything here, and I have to make every decision, otherwise I'd have no relation
37:50to it at all.
37:57The 1980s may have been a low, dishonest time for much American art, but they were still serious artists around.
38:05And some of them continued to draw inspiration from the natural rather 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, the colour of the fragments, which tend to
38:30be 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, but that yellow is the colour
38:44of 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.
38:56New Mexico makes you feel really teeny.
38:58Just a little fragment of humanity.
39:00Just a little fragment of humanity.
39:02Just a little fragment of humanity.
39:09Rothenberg came of age as an artist in the early 70s when minimalism still reigned.
39:13But she wanted a recognisable image and found it, rather unexpectedly, in horses.
39:33In the 70s, when you found yourself thinking about painting a horse, did the idea take you by surprise?
39:40Yes, it did, because I had an idea that I wanted to make a painting with figure and ground the
39:44same colour.
39:45But I didn't know what image I would be using.
39:48And it couldn't be a human figure because 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, bluntly pathetic, that result not so much of
40:17an idea as of a lump in the mind.
40:20They're signs for stress.
40:27Rothenberg tries to strip feeling, anxiety most of all, down to basic signs, and yet her images have a dignity
40:34that 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, it enervates me.
41:06It makes me feel bad, too.
41:08I'm enough a part of my culture to want painting to be hot, to feel competitive in it, active in
41:15it, and 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.
41:22I just wait and say, well, they'll come round.
41:24They'll come round.
41:42The suburban landscape of America stretches from Long Island to Anaheim.
41:47It's familiar territory from TV, sitcoms, and the movies.
41:51And in the 1980s, its inhabitants got their very own painter laureate, Eric Fischel.
42:01In the beginning, I think my paintings were generated from a lot of anger, focused on the place that I
42:08came from.
42:09And 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, and they didn't often conform to what really was
42:35taking place.
42:47Poorly trained at art school, Fischel is a clumsy, uneven draftsman of the figure.
42:52But 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 gut full of identity.
44:23If not your own, then other people's.
44:27America is in the business of inventing identities based on narrow conceptions of gender, race, and the rest.
44:35These are made for narrow, preachy, single issue art, in which victim credentials count for more than aesthetic achievement.
44:44You get irritable agitprop, like this poster painting by Barbara Kruger telling us that it's a small world, but not
44:51if you have to clean it.
44:54Or this neon piece rebuking the American government for not doing enough in AIDS research.
45:03All true, no doubt, but the fact that an artwork's about injustice no more gives it aesthetic status than the
45:10fact that it's about mermaids.
45:13This piece by Janine Antony 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, like Kiki Smith's sculptures of the suffering or menstruating body.
45:43But the mother of American identity art is a French-born sculptor who came to the United States 50 years
45:50ago, Louise Bourgeois.
46:02This is very empty here, and the emptiness here and the cleanliness is indispensable.
46:13It is the very opposite of the cluttered labyrinths 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, like this one, fillette, which means little girl, but is actually a
46:55shrouded penis with outrageous testicles.
47:00The works summon up experiences that come from deep within the body, the female body, exposure, protection, weak aggression, the
47:09body 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?
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, the fear of chaos, that'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.
47:59Destroyed.
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, she knew that
48:16before every meal,
48:17so she put a little pile of saucers next to his plate.
48:20When anxiety came, you see, and that noise, for him it cleared the air.
48:30It cleared the air.
48:31He 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.
48:39Right?
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. You can be as crazy as you want and
49:38this is freedom.
49:40And in Europe, you are absolutely the prisoner of an establishment.
49:45So I'm very grateful for that. Nobody 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.
50:06This 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.
50:18The work is called Second Meeting. As 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, and there is no image, nor any place of focus.
50:58There is, what are you then looking at? Well, I'm hoping that you then have the self-reflexive act
51:04of looking at your looking, so that you're actually seeing yourself see to some degree.
51:08And it does reveal something about your seeing, as opposed to being a journal of my seeing.
51:17Turrell's art doesn't happen in front of your eyes. It 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. A 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. I literally was looking for this bowl-shaped space
52:30held up in the air.
52:31But then at the end of the seven months, you came on the rodent crater and that was it?
52:35That was it. I liked the color of it. I liked its position.
52:38Of course, I wanted to find one that was privately owned and for sale.
52:42And in the end, I had to buy a ranch to get a volcano.
52:49The End
52:49The End
52:49The End
52:49Through the End
52:49The End
53:13Inside this great volcanic hill,
53:15Tyrell plans tunnels, viewing chambers and pools acting as lenses of water
53:21that will enable the visitor to experience the light of the sun, the moon and the stars in isolated, concentrated
53:28ways.
53:32It's an American vision on an epic scale, not just painting the Western landscape, but subtly 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 events in light.
53:57So 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, and perhaps it isn't in that
54:10respect.
54:10But when you greet my work with your perception, it is quite a simple act.
54:23Tell me something, when you got here, was the crater rim like this, or did you have to do a
54:29lot 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?
54:40Yes.
54:41Basically, the whole shaping was done so as to shape the sky.
54:43It 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 that position.
54:58Where should I, where do we do it?
55:00See, right here is a good place, right here. I'll shade you.
55:02All right.
55:07Just right back, huh?
55:09Yes.
55:10Wow.
55:13Framed in the arc of the rim, you see the sky as a huge blue dome, all embracing, transparent, but
55:21somehow solid, an eyeball.
55:41I'll see you next time.
55:42I'll see you next time.
55:42Bye.
55:44Bye.
55:49Bye.
55:52Bye.
55:55Bye.
56:19This is almost where we came in. The vision of America as a sublime wilderness far in the west.
56:25But the God-given blank slate that Europeans thought they had has been written over again and again for the
56:31last 400 years.
56:32So much so that we've now got postmodernists saying that nature is just another cultural construct and that art doesn't
56:38need 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 isn't going to satisfy us or delight us for very long.
56:55The world is so various, so interconnected, that it still remains the best ground of invention.
57:01That inventiveness, that sense of possibility is flagging badly in America now, as it is in the rest of the
57:07world.
57:08American art seems to be losing the two qualities that once made it special, its plain empirical speech and its
57:14spiritual hopes.
57:15All cultures decay and the culture of American modernism, once so vital, so open and so confident, may be no
57:23exception to that as we move towards the year 2000.
57:26I think of the words of W.B. Yeats, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of
57:32passionate intensity.
57:34But then again, in the equally durable words of Scarlett O'Hara, tomorrow is another day.
57:39W.B. Yeats, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
57:44W.B. Yeats, the best lack all conviction.
57:51W.B. Yeats, the best lack all conviction.
57:54W.B. Yeats, the best lack all conviction.
58:13W.B. Yeats, the best lack all conviction.
58:14Discover the story of immigrants from Ulster who played a critical role in America's break from Britain,
58:20on the road to independence and the road to democracy.
58:24Watch Declaration on BBC iPlayer.