Mechanical Paradise The Shock of the New

This series, The Shock Of The New, is about an old subject,

almost 100 years old, the art of our own century, Modernism.

Now in cultures, centuries don't start neatly on cue.

Ours didn't, it began round about 1880 and it's finishing up its run now,

leaving behind it, in my view, some of the most challenging, beautiful and intelligent works of art

that have ever been made, along with a great mass of superfluity and rubbish.

Now I don't want to do a history of modern art.

Instead I want to evoke its spirit by showing how it's acted upon society and vice versa.

How it stilts, for instance, with the idea of pleasure.

How it has strived to confirm or reject the political status quo.

How it's tried to construct utopias and so on.

Not a history, then, and not a tour of the monument, although we do get around.

But eight essays on eight separate themes,

trying to look at ourselves and our century through the lens of its art.

Through paintings, sculpture, architecture, photography to some extent,

and cinema not at all because that's another subject.

We're at the end of the modern era,

and art no longer acts on us in the same way that it did on our grandfathers.

I want to see why.

So what can one put in eight programmes?

Well, quite a lot, but not everything.

You may not see all your favourite artists.

This is television and not an encyclopaedia.

And above all, I don't offer it as a substitute

for the real experience of art, which can only take place one on one,

face to face, you and the work without me or my talking shadow.

The key word of the new century was modernity.

Modernity meant believing in technology and not craft,

in human perfectibility, not original sin,

and above all, in a ceaseless consumption of things and the images of things.

If you were a Parisian alive in 1890,

and you wanted to show a visitor what modernity meant,

you pointed to this structure,

the tallest man-made object on earth,

the Tower of Babel of the new machine age.

Since the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London,

the powers of Europe had taken to holding world fairs

to show off their industrial strength.

Paris scheduled one for 1889,

the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution.

This was its emblem, a huge act of propaganda,

designed not by an architect but by an engineer, Gustave Eiffel.

The tower was the static totem of the cult of dynamism,

a colossus planted with spread legs in the middle of Paris.

Its shape alluded to the human body, and to the colossi of the past.

It was the guardian of the future.

It summed up what technological progress meant

to the men who ran Europe at the end of the 19th century -

the promise of unlimited control over the world and its wealth.

It was praised by one of the key figures in the French avant-garde,

the cosmopolitan poet, once a Catholic, Guillaume Apollinaire.

At last you are tired of this old world.

Oh, shepherd Eifel Tower, the flock of bridges bleats this morning.

You are through with living in Greek and Roman antiquity.

Here even the automobiles seem to be ancient.

Only religion has stayed brand new.

Religion has remained simple, as simple as the airport hangers.

It's God who dies Friday and rises again on Sunday.

It's Christ who climbs into the sky better than any aviator.

He holds the world's altitude record, pupil Christ of the eye.

20th pupil of the centuries, he knows what he's about.

And the century, become a bird, climbs skyward like Jesus.

To these capitalist romantics, the machine was good.

They saw it as a giant slave, an untiring steel negro,

obedient, mindless, controlled by reason, in a world of unlimited resources.

Only very unusual sights like a rocket launch can give us the emotion

with which people in 1889 contemplated heavy machinery.

The machine also meant the conquest of horizontal space.

The railroad stations were the true cathedrals of the late 19th century.

The machine on wheels began to change people's experience of place.

More of the world became available in less time,

at first to a little elite of inventers, crackpots, and the adventurous rich.

Because it promised to telescope more experience into the conventional frame of travel,

and finally to burst the frame altogether,

the avant-garde of engineering had something in common with the avant-garde of art.

The most visible sign of the future was the automobile,

and this is the first public sculpture ever set up in its praise.

It commemorates the great road race of 1895 from Paris to Bordeaux and back,

which was won by an engineer named Emile Levassor

in the car that he designed and built himself, the Panhard-Levassor 5.

It could do about the same speed as a jumping frog, but not very much more.

Nevertheless, Levassor's victory was of tremendous social consequence

because it persuaded Europeans, both manufacturers and public alike,

that the future of road transport lay with the internal combustion engine

and not, as many had thought before, with either electricity or steam.

In all justice there ought to be a replica of this thing

set up in every oil port from the Persian Gulf to Houston,

but if it looks somewhat ludicrous to us as sculpture today,

that's because of difficulties between sculpture and the new convention of the machine.

A stone car,

the idea seems surrealist to a modern eye, it's simply incongruous.

Stone is immobile, mineral, brittle, cold.

Cars are fast, metallic, elastic, warm.

The human body is warm too, but we don't think of statues as stone men

because we're used to the conventions of representing flesh with stone.

There were no such conventions for depicting machinery, it was too new.

But the conditions of seeing were also starting to change,

and the Eiffel Tower stood for that too.

What counted was not so much the view of the tower from the ground,

it was seeing the ground from the tower.

Nobody except a few men in balloons had ever seen this before.

There were individual pilots who saw the sight from their planes,

but it was the Eiffel Tower that gave a mass audience a chance

to see what you and I take for granted every time we fly -

the earth on which we live seen flat as pattern from above.

The Eiffel Tower was therefore a pivot in human consciousness,

and that view of the city as seen by those hundreds of thousands of visitors

was as significant in 1889,

as the sight of the earth from the moon would be 80 years later.

Through the medium of technology, culture was reinventing itself everywhere.

In 1877 Thomas Alva Edison came up with the most radical extension of cultural memory

since the printed book. He invented sound recording,

the first human utterance ever retrieved.

I designed my original tinfoil phonograph in cylinder form,

and gave it to my faithful chum Kruesi to make.

He made fun of it.

I was almost as surprised as he was

when the first model produced "Mary had a little lamb", which I'd shouted into it.

'Its fleece was white as snow.

'And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.'

In 1879, Edison invented the incandescent filament bulb.

The fairy electricity was now let loose upon the world...

..thus amazing people who had, up to now, depended upon gas and whale oil to see at night.

In 1895, the Lumiere brothers made the images of a magic lantern move.

They invented the movie camera and the projector.

In 1898, Marie Curie discovered radium.

In 1901, Guglielmo Marconi sent the first transatlantic radio message

along the virgin airwaves from Cornwall to the east coast of America.

In 1903, two home inventors, Wilbur and Orville Wright, observed the wind,

put wings on a bicycle, scrambled into it, started their motor,

and to the stupefaction of the world took off,

achieving man's first powered flight in a heavier-than-air machine.

In 1905, an obscure physicist named Albert Einstein developed the special theory of relatively,

the basis of the largest change in man's view of the universe since Isaac Newton.

He ushered in the nuclear age with one formula.

E is equal to MC square,

in which energy is put equal to mass,

multiply it with the square of the velocity of light,

showed that very small amount of mass

may be converted into a very large amount of energy.

Very few people understood it, and nobody could foresee its implications.

By 1913, Henry Ford had so developed the idea of mass production that the car,

running on Mr Dunlop's pneumatic tyres,

ceased to be a toy for the rich, and became every man's chariot.

The Wright Brothers had only got a few yards off the ground,

but within six years, a French aviator named Louis Bleriot

managed to pilot his buzzing wooden dragonfly

from one country to another, from France to England,

across the vast cultural divide of the English Channel.

In 1913, the French writer Charles Peguy remarked...

"The world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last 30 years."

He was right, and it was a widespread feeling,

for the essence of the early modernist experience

was not the specific inventions - most people weren't affected by

a prototype in a lab or an equation on a blackboard, not yet.

No, the important thing was the sense

of an accelerated rate of change in all areas of human discourse.

It provided the feeling of an approaching millennium, a new order of things,

as the 19th century clicked over into the 20th,

the end of one kind of history, and the start of another.

Soon after Bleriot flew the Channel,

his monoplane was carried in procession through the streets of Paris

and installed in a church, for all the world like the relic of an Archangel,

and such was the early apotheosis of the machine.

But to have a cult does not mean that the images automatically follow.

The changes in man's view of himself and the world between 1880 and 1914

was so far reaching that they produced as many problems for artists as they did stimuli.

For instance, how could you make paintings that would reflect the immense shifts in consciousness

that this changed, technological landscape implied?

How could you produce a parallel dynamism to the machine age

without falling into the elementary trap of just becoming a machine illustrator?

And above all how, by shoving around on a canvas,

sticky stuff like paint on a static surface,

could you produce a convincing record of process and transformation?

Now the first artists to come up with a sketch for an answer to this were the cubists.

Since the Renaissance, almost all painting had obeyed a convention.

It was that of one-point perspective.

Perspective was a geometrical means for producing an illusion of reality,

for showing things in space in their right sizes and positions.

Nevertheless, it was an abstraction.

It was a view seen by a motionless, one-eyed person

clearly detached from what he sees.

Perspective gathers the visual facts, and it stabilises them.

It makes a god of the spectator,

who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges,

the unmoved onlooker.

Cubism argued that reality includes the painter's efforts to perceive it.

Both the viewer and the view are part of the same field.

The first artist to explore this idea, and finally to base his work on it, was Paul Cezanne.

The question of why the paintings that Cezanne made in his old age

were to have such a vast effect upon the history of art can't be answered in terms of style.

What they proposed was more radical than style,

it was a fundamental argument about the way that we actually see.

He wanted to show the process of seeing, not just the results, and he takes you through this process.

You share his hesitations about the position of a trunk or a branch.

Or the final shape of a mountain and the trees in front of it.

The statement "this is what I see"

becomes replaced by a question "is this what I see?"

Relatively is all.

The idea that doubt can be heroic if it is locked into a structure

as grand as the paintings of Cezanne's old age,

that is one of the keys of our century and a touchstone of modernism itself.

Cubism would bring it to an extreme.

The idea began here at 13 Rue Ravignon in Paris in 1907,

in a warren of cheap artists' studios called the Bateau Lavoir or laundry boat.

It was set off by a Spaniard, Pablo Picasso, then aged 26.

Picasso's partner in inventing cubism was a slightly younger

and rather more conservative Frenchman, Georges Braque.

In the public eye these men didn't exist.

The audience for their paintings might have been a dozen people,

and this meant they were free, as researchers in some very obscure area of science are free.

Nobody cared enough to interfere.

They wanted to paint the fact that our knowledge of an object

is made up of all possible views of it - top, sides, front, back.

They wanted to compress this inspection, which takes time,

into one moment, one synthesised view.

One of their experimental materials was the art of other cultures,

Oceanic and African, as despised as they then were.

At the time, there were no museums of tribal art, like this one, to consult.

One of the mild ironies of cubism is the extent to which it was helped by the French empire in Africa.

Picasso and Braque both owned African carvings, but they have no anthropological interest in them.

They didn't care about their ritual uses, they knew nothing about their original tribal meanings,

or about the societies out of which they came.

They simply used them formally, and in that regard cubism was like a small parody of the imperial model,

the masks were simply raw material from the darkest Congo, like copper or palm oil,

and Picasso's use of them was in effect a kind of cultural plunder.

But then why use African art at all?

The cubists were just about the first artists to even think of doing so.

130 years before, when Benjamin West admired the cloths, the clubs and the carvings

that had come back from the Pacific with Captain Cook,

no Royal Academicians then took the cue and started painting Tahitian style.

When Picasso started to produce what was in effect white art in black face,

he was saying what no 18th-century painter would ever have imagined himself saying.

He was proposing that the tradition of the human figure,

which had served Western art so well over the preceding centuries, had at last run out,

and that in order to renew its vitality you had to look elsewhere,

in effect to look to those folks in Africa with rhythm.

This was not so much a gesture of homage in the direction of the blacks though,

as it was a successful raid on them by the whites.

What Picasso did care about was the formal vitality of the carvings,

the freedom to distort.

And something else, they were to him in the most literal sense

emblems of savagery,

of violence transferred into the sphere of culture.

But this did produce the painting whose shock value provoked cubism,

and this was Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

No painting ever looked more convulsive, and none signalled a faster change in the history of art,

and yet it was anchored in the tradition of the new.

Picasso began it the year Cezanne died,

and its nearest ancestor was Cezanne's Bathers.

It also descends from Picasso's Spanish heritage.

Those unstable twisting bodies are like El Greco,

and so is the angular, harshly lit space.

The five nudes are chopped into planes and arks, as though the brush were a butcher knife.

Their mass is breaking up, and even today you'd think of dismemberment.

Even the melon looks like a weapon.

The space is flattened like a squashed box,

as solid as the figures.

And in the midst of all this violent abstraction, the masks.

The three on the left are derived from archaic Spanish sculpture.

The two on the right from African carvings.

All of them staring with the hypnotic fixity

that Picasso would always give to the eye.

Picasso never liked the title.

He called his painting The Avignon Brothel because there had been a whorehouse on the Carrer d'Avinyo,

or Avignon Street, in Barcelona when he was a student.

His original idea was to paint an allegory of venereal disease called The Wages Of Sin,

a man carousing in a brothel, and another man coming in at the left

with what was going to be a skull, that very Spanish reminder of mortality.

In the final painting though, only the nudes are left,

archaic and aggressive, and their cult is the fear of women.

No painter ever put his anxiety about castration more plainly than Picasso did here,

and the combination of form and subject was alarming to the few people who saw Les Demoiselles.

Georges Braque was horrified by its ugliness and intensity,

but he painted a relatively timid and laborious response to it,

and from then on Braque and Picasso would be locked in a partnership of questions and responses,

"roped together like mountaineers" as Braque memorably said.

Picasso cleared the ground for cubism,

but it was George Braque who, over the next two years, 1908 and 1909,

did the most to develop its vocabulary.

They say the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Now Picasso was the fox, he was the virtuoso.

Braque was the hedgehog, and the one big thing that he knew was Cezanne,

with whom he identified to the point of obsession.

He admired Cezanne, as he put it, for sweeping painting clear of the idea of mastery.

He loved his doubt, his doggedness, his concentration, his lack of eloquence.

Well, Braque wanted to see if Cezanne's way of building a painting -

that fusing of little tilted facets, that solidity of structure

and ambiguity of reading - could be pushed further,

which he did with the landscapes he painted in two places where Cezanne himself had worked.

First at L'Estaque in the South of France in 1908.

The Estaque paintings began as almost straight Cezanne.

This is one view that Braque looked at that summer.

This is what he made of it.

Every scrap of detail edited out - prisms, triangles.

Yet the shading no longer gives you a feeling of solidity.

Some of the corners could either be sticking out of the picture, or pointing back into it.

In the summer of 1909, Braque went painting closer to Paris

in a village in the Seine valley called La Roche-Guyon.

The valley is lined with chalk cliffs, and there's a castle built into them.

It belongs to the La Rochefoucauld family, and Braque made it his motif,

that jumble of plains and gables and spires stacked up against the cliff.

Moreover, on the top, there's a 13th-century Norman tower,

and it was in ruins when Braque saw it, as it is today,

but it gave him another part of his motif, a big strong cylinder on top.

So there was this, from his point of view, nice rhyme

between the actual forms of the landscape and the shapes that he wanted to put in a painting,

between those plains ascending the cliff going in and out,

pressed forward by the cliff itself which blocked off the perspective.

This was what he painted.

He then scrambled up the chalk bluff to the side,

and looked at the castle from an angle which gave him

an even more complicated geometry of gables and turrets coming down into the town.

So would Braque have invented cubism on his own?

Probably, but it would have lacked the power that Picasso brought to it.

This was his unequalled ability to realise form,

to make you feel the shape and the weight and the silence of things.

This is the plastic power of a sculptor, but in paint,

and distorted as they are, you're made to feel them so strongly

that you can imagine them picked off the canvas in three dimensions.

For the moment, Picasso's portraits, like this one of the dealer Vollard,

was still recognisable,

but any reality was bound to alter

once it was thrust into the shifting abstract space

that he and Braque had invented.

By 1911, Picasso and Braque were painting like Siamese twins.

This painting of a guitarist is by Braque.

This one, of another guitarist, is by Picasso.

Their paintings of this period are virtually indistinguishable except for fine differences of handwriting.

Without the labels on the gallery wall, you could hardly guess

which painting is by which of the two painters.

All this break up and shuffling - nobody had ever painted more baffling images.

Nothing is constant, every shape is a report on multiple meanings.

It's an attempt to set out the world as a field of shifting relationships that include the onlooker.

They were trying to paint process.

Braque and Picasso were not mathematicians,

and certainly they weren't philosophers.

But their art was part of the same great tide of modernist thought

that included Einstein and the philosopher Alfred Whitehead.

The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries

is the notion of independent existence.

There is no such mode of existence.

Every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way in which

it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.

As Gertrude Stein remembered it,

the cubist game of hide and seek with reality

fed back into the world in odd ways.

The first year of the war, Picasso and myself were walking down the Boulevard Raspail.

All of a sudden, down the street came some big cannon,

the first any of us had seen painted, that is camouflaged.

Pablo stopped, he was spellbound.

"C'est nous qui avons fait ca," he said,

It is we that have created that.

And he was right, he had.

Camouflage was cubism at war, and ever since the cubists' delight in ambiguity,

what is seen and not seen, has had its ominously practical uses.

Picasso's next step was to stick a piece of oilcloth to one of his still lives.

It was printed with a design of chair cane, and so collage began.

Collage, which simply means gluing, was a way of strengthening the link between cubism and the real world.

It gave Picasso and Braque bigger and bolder shapes to play with,

and these shapes were real things, emblems of the industrial present -

newspapers, packets, wallpaper and the fake woodgraining

that Braque learned as an apprentice house painter in Normandy.

They were recoiling from the abstractness of those pictures of 1911,

and in that they were joined by the third musketeer,

a more classical artist than either of them, Juan Gris.

In him, cubism found a mind of the coolest analytical weight.

To Gris, the world of cheap mass production and reproduction

was a sort of arcadia, a pastoral landscape, as it was to Apollinaire.

You read hand bills, catalogues, posters that shout out loud,

"Here's this morning's poetry."

And for prose you've got the newspapers,

sixpenny detective novels full of cop stories, biographies of big shots,

a thousand different titles.

Lettering on bill boards and walls,

door plates and posters squawk like parrots.

Cubist Paris is receding now.

But it's still there, the glass and iron city of small arcades,

the marble city of cafe tables,

the place of zinc bars, dominoes, dirty chess boards,

crumpled newspaper, the brown city of old paint and pipes and panelling,

history to us now, but once the landscape of the modernist dream.

The fourth major cubist was Fernand Leger.

He wanted to make a public style of cubism,

a popular art, images of the machine age for the man in the streets.

He was the son of a Normandy farmer, an instinctive socialist

who became a practising one in the trenches of World War I.

I found myself on a level with the whole of the French people.

My new companions in the Engineer Corps were miners, navvies, workers in metal and wood.

Among these I discovered the French people.

At the same time, I was dazzled by the breach of a 75mm gun

which was standing uncovered in the sunlight,

the magic of light on white metal.

Metal or flesh, it made no difference.

Leger painted the body as though it were made of interchangeable parts, like machinery.

The soldiers' insignia on these card playing robots might as well be factory brands.

To him, society as machine meant harmony, an end to loneliness.

The Three Women, one of the paintings that best expresses this,

is among the great didactic images of French classicism.

This philosophical harem is Leger's vision of human relationships

working as smoothly as a clock with the binding energy of desire transformed into rhymes of shape.

There were some artists to whom this mechanical age was much more than a context,

and very much more than a pretext.

They wanted to explore its characteristic images

of light, structure and dynamism as subjects in their work.

Robert Delaunay was crazy about the Eiffel Tower.

He thought of it as a new tower of Babel

emitting a clamour of tongues from the first radio system installed on it in 1909.

He must have painted it 30 times, the first time for his Russian wife and fellow painter, Sonya.

Light seen through structure.

It became a theme... his fundamental image of modernity,

that great grid rising over Paris with the sky reeling through it.

Delaunay also painted windows... landscapes of Paris seen as though through a prism.

And Apollinaire illustrated them with words.

Raise the blind and see how the window opens.

If hands could weave light this was done by spiders.

Beauty, pallor, unfathomable indigos.

From the red to the green, all the yellow dies.

Paris, Vancouver, Hyeres, Maintenon, New York and the West Indies.

The window opens like an orange,

the beautiful fruit of light.

Whereas Leger thought the core of modernism was structure,

the Delaunays believed it was light, pure energy, flooding the world.

Its emblem was the disk.

This was the basic unit of Robert's grand allegory of newness,

the homage to Bleriot, the "great constructor", as he called the pilot.

One of the effects of today's museums, with their white walls and feeling of perpetual presence,

is to make art seem newer than it actually is.

You have to pinch yourself to remember that when the paint was fresh

on those cubist Picassos and Delaunays, people wore hobble skirts

and they rode around in machines line this one, sitting up front of the driver.

And that feeling of disjuncture, the sense of the oldness of the modern art,

becomes acute when you reflect upon the only art movement that came out of Italy in the 20th century.

Futurism was the invention of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,

part lyrical genius,

part organ-grinder and part fascist demagogue

and, by his own accounts, the most modern man in his own country.

When right-minded people between the wars thought of modern artists

as subversive buffoons, their image was formed by Marinetti.

He was a genius of publicity and he used every trick

to get it for himself and for the futurist painters.

Posters, leaflets, demos, meetings, he even invented the happening,

montage in real time, with poems and declamations, paintings and music,

all on stage at once.

He took his road show everywhere, even to Russia.

Erster Akt.

THEY CHANT IN GERMAN

Zweiter Akt.

THEY MUMBLE

RAIN FALLS

Dritter Akt.

THEY CHANT IN GERMAN

DISCORDANT NOTES ON PIANO

Marinetti called himself "the caffeine of Europe".

He was the first international agent provocateur that modern art had.

The name futurism was a brilliant choice - challenging, but vague.

But the central idea that Marinetti trumpeted forth in the first futurist manifesto in 1909

was that the machine had created a new class of visionaries, himself and anyone who cared to join him.

BIRDSONG

ENGINE STARTS

For Marinetti and his group, all the old ideas about art and artists

were about to be blown off the cultural map.

ENGINE REVS

You needed to come from a technologically backward country

to love the future as passionately as Marinetti did.

HORN PEEPS

Machinery was power.

It was freedom from historical restraints.

Manifesto Of Futurism.

One, we intend to sing the love of danger,

the habit of energy and fearlessness.

We affirm that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty,

the beauty of speed.

A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath.

A roaring car that seems to run on shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

We want to hymn the man at the wheel

who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth along the circle of its orbit.

We want to no part of it, the past.

We, the young and strong futurists.

So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers,

here they are, here they are, come on!

Set fire to the library shelves, turn aside the canals to flood the museums.

Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discoloured and shredded.

Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers,

and retch, retch, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly.

In their art, they set out to find an equivalent for the speed

and the movement that they worshipped in their cars.

TYPEWRITER CLATTERS

They kept issuing manifestos,

operatic love letters to industry and hymns to the beauty of its products.

Engineers live in high-tension chambers

where 100,000 volts flicker through great bays of glass.

They sit at control panels with meters, switches, radio stats and commutators

to right and left, and everywhere the rich gleam of polished levers.

These men enjoy, in short, a life of power between walls of iron and crystal.

Nothing is more beautiful than a great, humming power station, holding back the hydraulic pressures

of a whole mountain range and the electric power for a whole landscape, synthesised in control panels,

bristling with levers, gleaming commutators.

The artists who gathered round Marinetti before the First World War

were the core of the futurist group and some of them would soon be dead.

The most gifted of them, Umberto Boccioni, fell off his horse and was killed in 1916

in the war which he and Marinetti had praised as the hygiene of civilisation.

But in the meantime, he had produced some extraordinary images,

none more so than The City Rises, his peon of joy to industry and heavy construction,

with its straining cables and draft horses and plunging figures.

But the problem was how to represent movement.

For that, the futurist resorted to photography,

especially the sequential photographs published by the French pioneer, Etienne-Jules Marey.

By giving you the successive positions of a figure on one plate,

these photos introduce time into space.

The body left its own memory in the air.

400 years before, Leonardo had bought birds in the Florentine market

and let them go to study the beat of their wings for a few seconds.

Now the cameras of Marey and Edward Muybridge could describe this world of unseen movement.

Some of Giacomo Balla's paintings were almost transcriptions of their photographs.

This one, for instance, is entitled Swift Paths Of Movement And Dynamic Sequences.

Dynamism Of A Dog On A Leash was a glimpse of boulevard life

with a fashionable lady, or, at any rate, her feet, trotting her dachshund,

a low-slung, modern animal, that sports car of the dog world, along the pavement.

FOOTSTEPS

DOG BARKS

Watching a virtuoso's rapid fingers, gave Balla the clue for Rhythms Of A Violinist.

As well as movement, they wanted to paint noise.

This painting of Boccioni's is called The Noise Of The Street Penetrates The House.

Futurism loved any noise that was dissonant, loud or made by a machine.

The most ambitious effort to paint equivalents for sound and movement

was Gino Severini's picture of a cabaret in Paris,

where he and the cubists used to go, the Bal Tabarin.

Like them, Severini loved common, popular entertainment.

But not every artist had that kind of straightforward optimism about the machine.

There were some that viewed it with more irony and detachment...

more like voyeurs than participants,

because they perceived that the thing was more than a tool...

more than simply an extension of the manufacturing self.

Having been made by man, it had become a perverse but substantially accurate self-portrait.

Such was the implication of Francis Picabia's work, and of Marcel Duchamp's.

The machine, as Picabia put it in one of his titles, is the daughter born without a mother,

a modern counterpart to the Virgin birth in which Christ, the son, was born without a father.

Machinery parodied both sex and religion.

It contained limitless possibilities for giving offence, which Picabia was born to do.

Picabia was one of those men, almost a modernist invention in themselves,

who was locked in a struggle with the very idea of art.

He wanted to laugh, the notion of painting to death.

He had a strong sense of myth, and he couldn't find another outlet for it.

The myth was that of the machine as man's counterpart.

It obsessed Picabia. It was his main amusement.

He married rich and he bought one fast car after another,

as though he were trying to turn himself into a mechanical centaur.

It was also the theme of his art, the body as machine.

In 1914, he painted an enormous image of a sexual encounter with a dancer,

called I See Again In Memory My Dear Udnie.

The 19th-century novelist, Joris Huysmans foresaw it, in a way, when he wrote...

Look at the machine, the play of pistons and the cylinders.

They are steel Romeos inside cast-iron Juliets.

The ways of human expression are in no way different to the back and forth of our machines.

This is a law to which one must pay homage unless one is either impotent or a saint.

Picabia was neither.

He had a flare for the old in, out.

Mechanical sex, mechanical self.

No wonder Picabia's machine portrait still looks so very sardonic.

The machine is amoral.

Its movements are programmed.

It can only act, and nobody wants to be compared to a mechanical slave.

Marcel Duchamp would push the machine metaphor even further before giving up art for chess.

Duchamp had played with every existing art movement and predicted a number of those to come.

Well, when you are 15 and paint like the impressionists,

you are experimenting with yourself, with people,

you know what you're going to do, you don't know even if you are going to do anything else.

It took me ten years or more to change the style, or at least to say,

"Well, there's nothing more in the impressionist to find,"

and I tried to find something else.

I first went through fauvism,

I went through cubism, and then, only 1912, or '13,

I found, more or less, what I wanted to do,

which would not be influenced by movements that I had been through, you see.

The Nude Descending A Staircase is one of the half dozen most famous paintings of our century.

It's a transcription of movement based, again, on Marey's photographs.

As cubism, it's quite academic.

When the American press saw it, it was seized on as a supreme joke

but the cubists themselves, back in Paris, were not amused.

When I came with my Nude Descending The Staircase,

they didn't see that it applied to their theory.

In other words, not an illustration of THEIR theory and, in fact,

it had more...

and cubism had the idea of movement,

which the futurists had at the same time,

so they thought it was too much, neither one,

nor futurist, nor cubism and they condemned it.

But it did open up the way to Duchamp's most influential work,

The Large Glass, which he left unfinished after eight years.

Like the Nude, the Glass treated the body as a mechanical object. Why on glass? Duchamp explained.

Because of, mainly, the transparency of the glass.

I wanted to... I had always noticed that the trouble with an oil painting,

an easel painting, is, you never know how to do the background.

You make a portrait or you make some scene, some still life,

and then comes the background. What are you going to do in the background?

You put something in the background and it's always false,

or at least, very seldom justified.

It's just filling up the canvas.

With the glass, you don't have to do that.

The glass is just transparent and you put anything behind you wish,

and you change it every day, if you wish, as well.

And that was, for me, an element of novelty,

to convince me I could go on.

There's also some kind of literary part to it,

how it was intended to have every item on the glass,

every design on the glass,

explained with a language... with language, with words.

It was nothing spontaneous about it,

which of course is a great objection on the part of aestheticians.

They want the subconscious to speak by itself.

I don't. Don't care.

And it was the opposite in that way.

So at the end of eight years, even not finished, I stopped.

I decided to stop.

So, what is this thing?

Well, it's a machine,

but we'd be better off calling it a project for an unfinished contraption

that could never be built because its use was never clear,

because, in turn, it parodies the language and forms of science

without the slightest regard for scientific probability or cause or effect.

Supposing that an engineer were to use this thing as a blueprint.

He'd be in deep trouble

because The Large Glass is never explicit,

and looked at from the point of view of technical systems, it's simply absurd.

The notes that Duchamp left to go with it

are the most scrambled instruction manual that you can imagine, but they're deliberately scrambled.

For instance, he talked about the thing running on a mythical fuel of his own invention

called "love gasoline", which passed through filters into feeble cylinders

which activated a desire motor, none of which would really have meant very much to Henry Ford.

But this was a meta-machine that takes us away from the real world of machinery into that of allegory,

with the naked bride up there perpetually disrobing herself in the top half,

and down below, the poor little bachelors in their empty jackets,

endlessly grinding away, signalling their frustration to the girl above them.

In fact, this thing is an allegory of profane love,

which, Marcel Duchamp would have us believe, is the only sort that is left in the 20th century.

Its real text was written by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation Of Dreams, published in 1900.

"The imposing mechanism of the male sexual apparatus,"

said Freud, "lends itself to symbolisation

"by every sort of indescribably complicated machinery."

But the male mechanism of The Large Glass is not imposing at all.

The bachelors are just uniforms, like marionettes.

According to Duchamp's notes, they try to indicate their desire to the bride

by making the chocolate-grinder turn, and it grinds out an imaginary milky stuff like semen,

which squirts out through those rings

but can't get into the bride's half of the glass because of that bar,

and so the bride is condemned always to tease,

and the bachelor's fate is endless masturbation.

In one sense, the bride stripped bare is a glimpse into Hell,

a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness.

But you could also see it as a declaration of freedom,

if you recall the crushing taboos against masturbation that were in force when Duchamp was young.

It was the symbol of rebellion against parents

and, to that extent, The Large Glass is a free machine,

or at least a defiant machine,

but it was also a sad machine, a testament to indifference,

that emotion of which Duchamp was the master.

When The Large Glass was broken in its crate while being shipped, how did he feel?

Nothing. Not much.

I was...

Well, no, I was not.

Because I'm fatalist, maybe.

Enough to take anything else that can go wrong.

Unfortunately, a little later, when I look at the breaks,

I love the breaks.

It happened to be that two panes, the glass panes on top of one another,

with paint on it, holding a bit,

when they break on the vibration of being transported flat, you see,

on a...on a truck,

the breaks take a similar direction in the two panes,

so when you put them on top of one another,

they seem to continue the same breaks as though I had done it on purpose.

Duchamp's finely tuned indifference is one of the divides

between the late machine age and the time in which we live.

The Large Glass was a long way from the optimism and the sense of possibility

with which greater painters but less sophisticated men than Duchamp

greeted the machine in those long, lost days before World War I.

The machinery was now turned on its inventors and their children.

After 40 years of continuous peace in Europe, the worst war in history

cancelled the playful good technology.

The myth of the future went into shock

and European art moved into its years of irony, disgust and protest.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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