0:00:42 > 0:00:45HORNS BEEP AND ENGINES ROAR
0:00:52 > 0:00:55Unlike our grandparents, we live in a world that we made.
0:00:57 > 0:00:59Until about 50 years ago,
0:00:59 > 0:01:02images of nature were the keys to feeling in art.
0:01:02 > 0:01:05Today, for most people, nature has been replaced
0:01:05 > 0:01:08by the culture of congestion, cities and mass media.
0:01:10 > 0:01:12We are crammed like battery hens with stimuli
0:01:12 > 0:01:16and overload has changed our art.
0:01:16 > 0:01:21Capitalism plus electronics gave us a new habitat, our forest of media.
0:01:26 > 0:01:30The problem for art was how to survive there, how to adapt to it
0:01:30 > 0:01:34because otherwise, it was feared, art would go under.
0:01:36 > 0:01:39# Well it's Saturday night and I just got paid
0:01:39 > 0:01:41# Fool about money Don't try to save
0:01:41 > 0:01:43# My heart says "Go, go, have a time"
0:01:43 > 0:01:46# Cos it's Saturday night and baby I'm feelin' fine
0:01:46 > 0:01:48# Going to rip it up
0:01:48 > 0:01:51# Going to rock it up
0:01:51 > 0:01:53# Going to shake it up
0:01:53 > 0:01:55# Gonna ball it up
0:01:55 > 0:01:57# Going to rock it up
0:01:57 > 0:01:59# And ball tonight
0:02:00 > 0:02:03# Got me a date Now don't be late
0:02:03 > 0:02:05# Pick her up in my 88
0:02:05 > 0:02:07# Shag it on down to the Union Hall
0:02:07 > 0:02:10# When the juke starts jumping I'll have a ball
0:02:10 > 0:02:12# Going to rip it up
0:02:12 > 0:02:14# Going to rock it up
0:02:14 > 0:02:17# Going to shake it up
0:02:17 > 0:02:19# Going to ball it up
0:02:19 > 0:02:21# Going to rock it up
0:02:21 > 0:02:23# And ball tonight
0:02:38 > 0:02:40# Ready, set go, man, go
0:02:40 > 0:02:42# I've got a girl that I love so
0:02:42 > 0:02:45# And I'm ready
0:02:45 > 0:02:47# Ready to rip it up, I'm ready
0:02:47 > 0:02:50# Ready to rip it up, I'm ready... #
0:02:50 > 0:02:53The present has more distraction than the past.
0:02:53 > 0:02:57Works of art once had less competition from their surroundings.
0:02:57 > 0:03:01GREGORIAN CHANT
0:03:01 > 0:03:05The background to the organised sound of Gregorian chant
0:03:05 > 0:03:07wasn't random noise.
0:03:07 > 0:03:10Silence was one of the dominant facts of medieval life.
0:03:10 > 0:03:13You listened to one thing at a time.
0:03:13 > 0:03:16GREGORIAN CHANT CONTINUES
0:03:19 > 0:03:23In a pre-technological world, you also looked at one thing at a time.
0:03:23 > 0:03:26Things could not be reproduced -
0:03:26 > 0:03:29no print, no film, no cathode ray tubes.
0:03:29 > 0:03:31Each object, singular.
0:03:31 > 0:03:33Each act of singing, transitive.
0:03:34 > 0:03:36Not today.
0:03:36 > 0:03:40Today, the object splits into a swarm of images of itself,
0:03:40 > 0:03:42clones, copies.
0:03:43 > 0:03:45The more famous an object is,
0:03:45 > 0:03:50the more cultural meaning it has and the more unique people say it is,
0:03:50 > 0:03:52but the more it breeds.
0:03:52 > 0:03:55Mass production strips the image of its complexity
0:03:55 > 0:03:57so that it resembles a sign.
0:04:01 > 0:04:03A sign is a command.
0:04:03 > 0:04:06It's something you take in all at once.
0:04:06 > 0:04:10It means one thing only. It isn't any better for being handmade.
0:04:12 > 0:04:15Pictures are different. They are more complicated.
0:04:15 > 0:04:17They mean a lot of things.
0:04:17 > 0:04:20You scan them and their meaning adds up and unfolds.
0:04:22 > 0:04:24You don't get it all at once.
0:04:26 > 0:04:28Pictures educate.
0:04:28 > 0:04:30Signs discipline.
0:04:30 > 0:04:35Mass language always tends to speak in the imperative voice.
0:04:35 > 0:04:39The idea of sitting down and painting this landscape like an Impressionist
0:04:39 > 0:04:41was obviously absurd.
0:04:41 > 0:04:45But how could art defend itself against a torrent of signs
0:04:45 > 0:04:47which were more vivid than its own images?
0:04:48 > 0:04:49By assimilating.
0:04:49 > 0:04:52By grafting the vitality of media
0:04:52 > 0:04:55onto what had become a wilting language.
0:04:55 > 0:04:56That, at any rate, was the hope.
0:04:58 > 0:05:01In the 19th century, the world of the Industrial Revolution
0:05:01 > 0:05:04appeared in landscape painting slowly pushing its way
0:05:04 > 0:05:08into a fixed aesthetic category like an intruder in paradise.
0:05:08 > 0:05:11Manufacture invading nature.
0:05:12 > 0:05:16The sign found its way into art a little bit later.
0:05:16 > 0:05:20The gap between the formal speech of painting and the lingo of signs
0:05:20 > 0:05:24began somewhere after 1900 when a few artists and poets
0:05:24 > 0:05:28realised that print was all around them and that it made up a visual language
0:05:28 > 0:05:31which art, up till then, had barely even scratched.
0:05:31 > 0:05:35The prophet of this was the Polish-French writer,
0:05:35 > 0:05:38Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet of Cubism.
0:05:38 > 0:05:42You read handbills, catalogues, posters that shout out loud -
0:05:42 > 0:05:47here's this morning's poetry and for prose you've got the newspapers.
0:05:47 > 0:05:50Six-penny detective novels full of cop stories,
0:05:50 > 0:05:53biographies of big shots, a thousand different titles.
0:05:53 > 0:05:55Lettering on billboards and walls,
0:05:55 > 0:06:00door plates and posters squawk like parrots.
0:06:04 > 0:06:08But the home of the quick message was America, especially New York.
0:06:08 > 0:06:13Its shapes were already a subject for American artists by 1920.
0:06:13 > 0:06:16To Joseph Stella, an Italian migrant artist,
0:06:16 > 0:06:19the Brooklyn Bridge was a cathedral of the new.
0:06:19 > 0:06:24It was the shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilisation -
0:06:24 > 0:06:25America.
0:06:25 > 0:06:29The eloquent meeting point of all the forces arising
0:06:29 > 0:06:32in a superb assertion of their powers, an apotheosis.
0:06:47 > 0:06:51The vision of the new city as sublime, as a temple of progress,
0:06:51 > 0:06:55almost a new Jerusalem, was felt by other artists.
0:06:56 > 0:06:58Here by Georgia O'Keeffe.
0:07:12 > 0:07:14But in the late '20s and early '30s,
0:07:14 > 0:07:17none of them were interested in the street lingo,
0:07:17 > 0:07:18the flashing ads in lights
0:07:18 > 0:07:21which astounded every out-of-towner in New York.
0:07:21 > 0:07:23That was too vulgar.
0:07:23 > 0:07:27It stood for the commercialism that American painters wanted to repudiate.
0:07:27 > 0:07:31The heroism of work - that was an acceptable subject,
0:07:31 > 0:07:35but the signs that sold the products of work, no.
0:07:37 > 0:07:39There was one exception, an American painter
0:07:39 > 0:07:44who loved what he called the New York visual dialect - Stuart Davis.
0:07:44 > 0:07:48Davis belonged to the same generation as Hemingway,
0:07:48 > 0:07:53and like him, he went to Paris and was deeply changed by contact with the French avant-garde.
0:07:53 > 0:07:55Cubism formed his style.
0:07:56 > 0:08:01Before he got to France in the early 1920s, Davis was doing Cubist-type paintings
0:08:01 > 0:08:04but the brand names and words and signs
0:08:04 > 0:08:09dominated them as they had never been allowed to dominate a Picasso.
0:08:09 > 0:08:14This painting was the precursor of all American pop art.
0:08:14 > 0:08:18The brand name itself was a kind of icon to Davis.
0:08:18 > 0:08:21It was fast, it delivered its meaning in quick bursts,
0:08:21 > 0:08:25and in painting it was a found object, a visitor from another medium.
0:08:25 > 0:08:28The word gave Davis's painting its rhythm,
0:08:28 > 0:08:32the choppy rhythm of American life as he felt it.
0:08:35 > 0:08:38The clue to that rhythm was jazz.
0:08:38 > 0:08:43Davis believed jazz was the first real American modernism.
0:08:47 > 0:08:53The brilliant colours on gasoline stations, chain store fronts, and taxicabs,
0:08:53 > 0:08:57synthetic chemistry, fast travel by train, auto, and aeroplane,
0:08:57 > 0:09:00which brought new and multiple prospectives.
0:09:00 > 0:09:04Electric signs, five and ten-cent kitchen utensils, movies and radio.
0:09:04 > 0:09:08Earl Hines' hot piano and Negro jazz music in general.
0:09:08 > 0:09:10In one way or another, the quality of these things
0:09:10 > 0:09:14plays a role in determining the character of my paintings.
0:09:14 > 0:09:19Paris school, abstraction, escapism...nope.
0:09:19 > 0:09:23Just colour-space composition celebrating the revolution of stresses
0:09:23 > 0:09:26set up by some aspects of the American scene.
0:09:26 > 0:09:29But in their time, the '40s and '50s,
0:09:29 > 0:09:32Davis's images of mass culture were on their own.
0:09:32 > 0:09:36No major American painters were ready to go so far into the badlands of other media
0:09:36 > 0:09:40or to do it with that mixture of cool and brashness.
0:09:41 > 0:09:44Then, around 1955, some others did enter them,
0:09:44 > 0:09:47but from another direction.
0:10:08 > 0:10:12If you buy a half pound of bacon in a supermarket,
0:10:12 > 0:10:16you end up with an ounce and a half of plastic and cardboard wrapping around it.
0:10:16 > 0:10:19If your electric iron goes on the fritz, you simply chuck it away.
0:10:25 > 0:10:28One of the peculiarities of a place like the city dump
0:10:28 > 0:10:33is that it makes you realise that New York throws away in the course of a week
0:10:33 > 0:10:39probably more manufactured goods than were produced in 18th-century France in the course of a year.
0:10:45 > 0:10:50The motto was replacement, not maintenance, disposability and not durability,
0:10:50 > 0:10:54and there was a subject in this landscape of waste and the secret language of junk
0:10:54 > 0:10:58because during the '50s, some American artists realised
0:10:58 > 0:11:01what the Dadaists in Europe had known about 30 years before,
0:11:01 > 0:11:05namely that societies reveal themselves in what they threw away.
0:11:05 > 0:11:11Street junk was to these men what the flea market had been to the Surrealists,
0:11:11 > 0:11:13and among them there was one budding master,
0:11:13 > 0:11:17a man in his 20s from Texas named Robert Rauschenberg.
0:11:19 > 0:11:22I actually had a kind of a house rule.
0:11:22 > 0:11:25If I walked completely around the block
0:11:25 > 0:11:29and I didn't find enough to work with,
0:11:29 > 0:11:36I could pick one other block in any direction to walk around, but that was it.
0:11:36 > 0:11:40The works had to, whatever I did,
0:11:40 > 0:11:46had to look at least as interesting as anything that was going on outside in the window.
0:11:51 > 0:11:57The result was his combines, large collages of refuse - things found and resurrected.
0:11:59 > 0:12:02He got to New York in the early 1950s
0:12:02 > 0:12:06and since then, Rauschenberg has opened up more room for anti-formalist art
0:12:06 > 0:12:09than anyone else in America.
0:12:09 > 0:12:13Every artist after 1960 who believed that all of life ought to be open to art
0:12:13 > 0:12:16was in his debt one way or another.
0:12:16 > 0:12:20We now take it for granted that art can be anything.
0:12:20 > 0:12:25It can be for any purpose from pleasure to threat to systematic boredom.
0:12:26 > 0:12:29Some is meant for museums, some to be thrown away,
0:12:29 > 0:12:31and some to be performed as in this piece
0:12:31 > 0:12:35danced by Rauschenberg in 1966 - Pelican.
0:12:45 > 0:12:48This plurality at the end of the '70s is largely due
0:12:48 > 0:12:52to what Rauschenberg did in the '50s and '60s.
0:12:52 > 0:12:54Its roots are in Dada
0:12:54 > 0:12:59and especially in the collages that Kurt Schwitters made in Germany in the '20s and '30s.
0:12:59 > 0:13:01Merz pictures he called them,
0:13:01 > 0:13:04modern city life describing itself in its own waste.
0:13:04 > 0:13:08Junk, torn posters, old photos, tickets.
0:13:08 > 0:13:13Rauschenberg applied this to the even brasher life of the American city.
0:13:13 > 0:13:16The New York streets gave him his palette of objects.
0:13:16 > 0:13:20In the studio he sorted them out and glued them down.
0:13:20 > 0:13:25I tended to work in things that were either so abstract...
0:13:27 > 0:13:34..that er, no one knew what this object was or it had been so mangled
0:13:34 > 0:13:38that you couldn't recognise it any more,
0:13:38 > 0:13:42or something so obvious that you didn't think about it.
0:13:43 > 0:13:46He punctuated them with slathers of paint.
0:13:46 > 0:13:50These painted links are what Rauschenberg got from abstract expressionism
0:13:50 > 0:13:52and they remind us that the things in his combines
0:13:52 > 0:13:57are meant to hang together as paintings and not just sit there as objects.
0:13:57 > 0:14:00But the combines were meant to look a bit random.
0:14:00 > 0:14:04Each one was a rendezvous where the common objects of the day could gather.
0:14:08 > 0:14:11Monogram was the most notorious of all the combines.
0:14:13 > 0:14:14Why the goat?
0:14:14 > 0:14:19Partly I guess because he had one as a pet when he was a kid in Texas.
0:14:19 > 0:14:22He was bereaved by its death and he wanted to resurrect it.
0:14:22 > 0:14:26Animals have one main use in Rauschenberg's art.
0:14:26 > 0:14:27They're innocent witnesses,
0:14:27 > 0:14:31survivors of nature in a flood of culture.
0:14:31 > 0:14:32Why the title?
0:14:32 > 0:14:37Because monograms lace through one another as the goat does through the tyre.
0:14:37 > 0:14:39But if you ask why it has lasted,
0:14:39 > 0:14:43why monogram keeps its shock value despite 20 years of reproduction in the history books,
0:14:43 > 0:14:46the reason is probably sexual.
0:14:46 > 0:14:52The goat and the tyre is one of the wittiest images of sexual penetration ever made by an artist.
0:14:53 > 0:14:58Jasper Johns was always bracketed with Rauschenberg in the 1950s.
0:14:58 > 0:15:00Actually the two of them were utterly unlike one another.
0:15:00 > 0:15:04Where Rauschenberg's work was garrulous, Johns' was terse.
0:15:04 > 0:15:08Rauschenberg breathed out, but Johns breathed in.
0:15:08 > 0:15:10His work was about difficulty.
0:15:10 > 0:15:15It was extremely subtle and didactic, and like Marcel Duchamp, his mentor,
0:15:15 > 0:15:18Johns was interested in the ready-made image.
0:15:18 > 0:15:22He wanted to use things that were so simple, so familiar,
0:15:22 > 0:15:27that, as he put it, they left him free to work on other levels.
0:15:27 > 0:15:30New York painting had been full of inventions of displays of character.
0:15:30 > 0:15:34Johns would show what could be done with things that were not invented,
0:15:34 > 0:15:38things that were so well-known that they weren't well seen.
0:15:38 > 0:15:41Very early on, Johns gave a clear outline of his theme,
0:15:41 > 0:15:44which was the difference between science and art,
0:15:44 > 0:15:48which helps you understand the way in which art operates.
0:15:48 > 0:15:50He did this at first by painting targets.
0:15:50 > 0:15:53Now everybody knows what you do with a target.
0:15:53 > 0:15:56You pick up a gun and you shoot at it.
0:16:00 > 0:16:03But this means that you're looking at the target in a particular way
0:16:03 > 0:16:06because all your attention is fixed on the bull.
0:16:06 > 0:16:09You're not concentrating on the outer circles.
0:16:12 > 0:16:14In official language, one would call this
0:16:14 > 0:16:18an extreme example of hierarchical perception and selective looking.
0:16:27 > 0:16:31The target is a test, and Johns took it with a sort of deadpan irony
0:16:31 > 0:16:35to test what you would expect a work of art to do.
0:16:35 > 0:16:38The painting denies the use of a real target.
0:16:38 > 0:16:42The fact that it is painted with all those dense touches of encaustic
0:16:42 > 0:16:45so lovingly like the skin of one of Cezanne's apples
0:16:45 > 0:16:50means that you're not meant to look at it the way a marksman does.
0:16:50 > 0:16:53The centre is not more important than the rings.
0:16:53 > 0:16:56Every bit of the surface is equally important.
0:16:56 > 0:16:58You look at the whole of the picture.
0:16:58 > 0:17:02And so a sign, a target, has been turned into a painting
0:17:02 > 0:17:05fit for the museum stair which must be scanned.
0:17:06 > 0:17:10Two contradictory ways of looking. A paradox.
0:17:10 > 0:17:14On top of his painted target he adds plaster casts
0:17:14 > 0:17:16and there's another paradox with them.
0:17:16 > 0:17:20One wants to see them as images, perhaps elements of a portrait,
0:17:20 > 0:17:23but they're more like fossils, specimens,
0:17:23 > 0:17:26visual words that stand for classes of things.
0:17:26 > 0:17:29Ear, hand, penis.
0:17:29 > 0:17:31The image turns into a sign
0:17:31 > 0:17:34and thus inside one painting, you have two ways of seeing.
0:17:34 > 0:17:38The sign becoming a painting and sculpture becoming a sign.
0:17:40 > 0:17:44No country has a more elaborate cult of its flag than America.
0:17:44 > 0:17:47It's the best-known sign in the whole culture.
0:17:47 > 0:17:51The eye recognises it in a flash and passes on.
0:17:51 > 0:17:55But the art of painting is to delay the eye. This is not a flag.
0:17:55 > 0:18:00Its motto comes from Magritte - this is not a pipe. Why?
0:18:00 > 0:18:03Because it's a painting.
0:18:03 > 0:18:05This is a painting too.
0:18:05 > 0:18:09It has stars and stripes and it's made of cloth but it's not a flag.
0:18:09 > 0:18:12Paint can make almost anything abstract,
0:18:12 > 0:18:16even a subject as highly charged as the American flag.
0:18:16 > 0:18:20We see the painting first, that pale perfect skin,
0:18:20 > 0:18:24but the flag beneath it, the sign, has lost its power to command.
0:18:24 > 0:18:29It's real but it's also completely abstract.
0:18:29 > 0:18:33Flags are only as flat as this in the ideal space of art.
0:18:37 > 0:18:40He did the same thing with numbers. He wasn't a great colourist,
0:18:40 > 0:18:44but as a tonal painter Johns had no American rivals.
0:18:44 > 0:18:49So one ends up thinking of pictures like this, so beautifully made,
0:18:49 > 0:18:52not in the context of sums or computer displays,
0:18:52 > 0:18:57but as the end of a tradition of still life that begins with Chardin.
0:18:59 > 0:19:04These aren't beer cans. They're made out of bronze and then painted.
0:19:04 > 0:19:07So they are sculpture pretending to be junk, pretending to be art.
0:19:09 > 0:19:13The brushes aren't real either, neither is the coffee can.
0:19:13 > 0:19:16They are bronze too, and painted.
0:19:16 > 0:19:19Johns' work was seldom what it seemed to be.
0:19:19 > 0:19:23It was always about something else, about irony, manipulation,
0:19:23 > 0:19:28tradition, and the defensive painting in the face of a mass culture environment.
0:19:28 > 0:19:32You'd suppose the stage was set for pop in the '50s in America,
0:19:32 > 0:19:35and certainly the materials were there.
0:19:35 > 0:19:38But the culture from which pop sprang wasn't at all respectable
0:19:38 > 0:19:41as far as American artists in the '50s were concerned.
0:19:41 > 0:19:45Giant plaster doughnuts were what they had to defend their art against.
0:19:45 > 0:19:50After all, they had to live with this, and there was nothing remotely exotic or pleasing about it.
0:19:50 > 0:19:53To them it was the nightmare from which they couldn't wake,
0:19:53 > 0:19:57the erosive splurge of mass cult, of vulgarity.
0:19:57 > 0:19:59But the English didn't have to live with it
0:19:59 > 0:20:03and so in the '50s there were some English artists who saw the gross sign language of American cities
0:20:03 > 0:20:07with the kind of distant longing that Gogin felt for Tahiti.
0:20:07 > 0:20:12They'd grown up with austerity and rationing and national health teeth, but Hollywood?
0:20:12 > 0:20:14Hollywood had shaped their dreams.
0:20:14 > 0:20:18Forever young, forever sexy and forever swollen with abundance.
0:20:18 > 0:20:20MUSIC: "Be-Bop-A-Lula" by John Lennon
0:20:20 > 0:20:25# Well... Be-bop-a-lula she's my baby
0:20:25 > 0:20:29# Be-bop-a-lula, don't mean maybe
0:20:29 > 0:20:33# Be-bop-a-lula she's my baby
0:20:33 > 0:20:36# Be-bop-a-lula don't mean maybe
0:20:36 > 0:20:38# Be-bop-a-lula she's...
0:20:38 > 0:20:42# My baby love, my baby love My baby love
0:20:42 > 0:20:47# Well she's the girl in the red blue jeans
0:20:47 > 0:20:50# She's the queen of all the teens
0:20:50 > 0:20:54# She's the one that I know
0:20:54 > 0:20:58# She's the one that loves me so
0:20:58 > 0:21:02# Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby
0:21:02 > 0:21:05# Be-bop-a-lula, don't mean maybe
0:21:05 > 0:21:12# Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby love My baby love, my baby love... #
0:21:36 > 0:21:39One of the inventors of pop back in the early '50s
0:21:39 > 0:21:43was an Englishman, Richard Hamilton.
0:21:43 > 0:21:46Everybody seemed to go to the same kind of sources.
0:21:46 > 0:21:50Everybody that was doing interesting work at that time and wanted to be figurative
0:21:50 > 0:21:53tended to go to second-hand material.
0:21:53 > 0:21:55They went to the mass media,
0:21:55 > 0:21:59something that had already been converted from real-life
0:21:59 > 0:22:05into processed pulp, processed television,
0:22:05 > 0:22:10processed cinema or newspapers or whatever.
0:22:11 > 0:22:15And the visual world became a new landscape
0:22:15 > 0:22:19of secondary filtered material.
0:22:19 > 0:22:25# The cleanest clean under the sun
0:22:25 > 0:22:29# Is Tide Clean, new Tide Clean. #
0:22:33 > 0:22:37Clean and bright as the sun on the sand.
0:22:37 > 0:22:40The kind of clean you like best next to those you love.
0:22:43 > 0:22:49That's because new Tide has extra cleaning power.
0:22:49 > 0:22:53With Tide, things always come out clean and fresh as a sea breeze.
0:22:53 > 0:22:58More than white, more than bright, really clean.
0:22:58 > 0:23:01Clean! The cleanest clean under the sun.
0:23:04 > 0:23:07In one of Hamilton's collages from 1956,
0:23:07 > 0:23:14the word "pop" appears in art for the first time, linked to a sort of Beverly Hills dream world.
0:23:14 > 0:23:18My own interests were certainly very specialised
0:23:18 > 0:23:26in that it seemed to me that the advertisers were manipulating the public
0:23:26 > 0:23:33in a very skilful and interesting and amusing way.
0:23:33 > 0:23:40The difference between pop art and popular art is the fact that pop art is sophisticated.
0:23:40 > 0:23:42It's not done by the masses
0:23:42 > 0:23:47but it's done by highly professionally trained experts for a mass audience.
0:23:50 > 0:23:54For the connoisseur who has everything.
0:23:56 > 0:24:00At last, a work of art to match the style of modern life.
0:24:04 > 0:24:06The Critic Laughs.
0:24:06 > 0:24:10A perfect marriage of form and function, design and delight,
0:24:10 > 0:24:14created for you and yours by Europe's most caring craftsmen
0:24:14 > 0:24:17in an exclusive edition of only 60 examples.
0:24:27 > 0:24:32The Critic Laughs, thrill to the sensation of emotion.
0:24:34 > 0:24:37Hamilton is proud to present its new multiple.
0:24:39 > 0:24:41The Critic Laughs, by Hamilton.
0:24:46 > 0:24:52It's the other possibility, the other extreme of the hotdog.
0:24:52 > 0:24:56But it's still to some extent a pop object.
0:24:56 > 0:25:00We had to tool up for the whole venture,
0:25:00 > 0:25:05using the same materials in the same factories even,
0:25:05 > 0:25:09that Brown used for the production of their case.
0:25:09 > 0:25:12Made an instruction book and a guarantee card
0:25:12 > 0:25:18and tried to repeat the whole process of consumer product presentation.
0:25:18 > 0:25:25Of course, it sold not in supermarkets or in chemist shops or department stores,
0:25:25 > 0:25:30but in rather smart galleries throughout the world,
0:25:30 > 0:25:35or presented in exhibitions in elegant museums.
0:25:35 > 0:25:40I've also made posters of this kind of subject and all the other ephemeral material
0:25:40 > 0:25:46and the idea of making a commercial seems to me to be the realisation of a dream
0:25:46 > 0:25:50when you can go through the whole analogy of producing the object
0:25:50 > 0:25:55and making all the literature and then come to the great finale,
0:25:55 > 0:26:00which is to make the film and present it on TV in the form of a commercial.
0:26:00 > 0:26:05And that whole process is the work of art, to my mind.
0:26:05 > 0:26:08That is the work rather than the single object.
0:26:08 > 0:26:14The analogy is what's to propose to the industrial and advertising process
0:26:14 > 0:26:20is much more important than the object as a sculptural form.
0:26:24 > 0:26:29More than 40 years ago, a great Marxist critic, Walter Benjamin, said that it was going to be hard
0:26:29 > 0:26:34and maybe impossible for any child raised in the howling blizzard of signals
0:26:34 > 0:26:38to find his way back into the exacting silence of a book.
0:26:38 > 0:26:44Benjamin died in 1940, but what he feared from radio and cinema and advertising
0:26:44 > 0:26:48came a thousand times truer with mass television.
0:26:48 > 0:26:54The box you're watching has done more to alter the direct discursive relationship
0:26:54 > 0:26:58of images to the real world, on which painting used to depend,
0:26:58 > 0:26:59than any other invention this century.
0:26:59 > 0:27:03This isn't really a matter of good or bad programming,
0:27:03 > 0:27:07everybody knows the box is a cornucopia of dung most of the time,
0:27:07 > 0:27:11but the effects I mean don't depend on the quality of programmes,
0:27:11 > 0:27:14they flow from the nature of television itself.
0:27:14 > 0:27:17You only have two choices when watching a movie in a cinema -
0:27:17 > 0:27:19you can go, or you can stay.
0:27:19 > 0:27:22With television there's a third - you can change the channel.
0:27:22 > 0:27:25SNATCHES OF SOUND
0:27:52 > 0:27:54And so, in a chaotic way,
0:27:54 > 0:27:57the dream of the Russian Constructivist film-makers
0:27:57 > 0:27:59and of the German Dadaists
0:27:59 > 0:28:02has come true with television, because whole societies
0:28:02 > 0:28:06have learned to see in terms of montage and juxtaposition.
0:28:06 > 0:28:10Ours is the cult of the electronic fragment.
0:28:10 > 0:28:12Because it's so intimate and casual,
0:28:12 > 0:28:15the box worked on us in other ways too.
0:28:15 > 0:28:19Its images had a weird contradictory tone.
0:28:19 > 0:28:22They were real. Present in the room.
0:28:22 > 0:28:24But at the same time they were artificial, illus...
0:28:24 > 0:28:27wouldn't hold, they kept creeping up the screen,
0:28:27 > 0:28:29or breaking off into dots and lines and jabber.
0:28:29 > 0:28:31Not like film in a cinema.
0:28:31 > 0:28:34Their reality was provisional.
0:28:34 > 0:28:38Their reality was provisional, but the colour was ultra-vivid.
0:28:38 > 0:28:39Electron colour.
0:28:39 > 0:28:43Not the colour of ink, or nature, or paint.
0:28:46 > 0:28:48Television messages get to you in small packets.
0:28:48 > 0:28:51You don't scan a screen as you scan a painting,
0:28:51 > 0:28:55and you don't inspect it the way you might inspect a Chinese vase.
0:28:55 > 0:28:59The fate of these messages, these images, is to get equalised.
0:28:59 > 0:29:03Catastrophe, love, war, soap -
0:29:03 > 0:29:06they all pour forth in an overwhelming glut.
0:29:06 > 0:29:10And like radiation, which in fact they are, they are everywhere.
0:29:10 > 0:29:12And they have affected art.
0:29:15 > 0:29:19One of the artists they most affected in the '60s was Rauschenberg.
0:29:19 > 0:29:21He lives a long way from New York now,
0:29:21 > 0:29:24on an island off the Florida coast.
0:29:24 > 0:29:26No junk here,
0:29:26 > 0:29:29but his work is still saturated with images from the media.
0:29:34 > 0:29:40One's 'bombasted' by magazines, TV sets -
0:29:40 > 0:29:45I didn't have a TV then, but... TV sets, the refusal,
0:29:45 > 0:29:48the excess of the rest of the world,
0:29:48 > 0:29:50even though you don't know them.
0:29:56 > 0:30:01We can't move again until... If I forget...
0:30:03 > 0:30:05..where anything is.
0:30:06 > 0:30:09If I could paint or make an honest work,
0:30:09 > 0:30:14it somehow should incorporate all of these elements.
0:30:15 > 0:30:19Which were and are a reality.
0:30:23 > 0:30:28Collage is a way of getting an additional piece of information,
0:30:28 > 0:30:29that's impersonal.
0:30:37 > 0:30:40I've always tried to work impersonal.
0:30:41 > 0:30:42In the early '60s,
0:30:42 > 0:30:46printed images began to replace objects in Rauschenberg's work.
0:30:46 > 0:30:49The bank of images included everything from 15th century
0:30:49 > 0:30:53reproductions to diagrams from the Scientific American,
0:30:53 > 0:30:55to yesterday's front page.
0:30:58 > 0:31:00As the images in his work in the '60s piled up,
0:31:00 > 0:31:03the paintings took on a heightened documentary flavour.
0:31:03 > 0:31:05He wanted to give canvas
0:31:05 > 0:31:08the accumulative flicker of a colour television set.
0:31:08 > 0:31:10The subject was glut.
0:31:10 > 0:31:12SNATCHES OF TV SOUND
0:31:29 > 0:31:33His view of the media was both affectionate and ironic.
0:31:33 > 0:31:36He liked excavating whole histories within an image.
0:31:36 > 0:31:39Histories of the media themselves.
0:31:39 > 0:31:41Consider this red patch.
0:31:41 > 0:31:46It's a silk screen enlargement of a photo that he found in Life magazine.
0:31:46 > 0:31:49Which was in turn a parody of this famous painting -
0:31:49 > 0:31:51Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase.
0:31:53 > 0:31:56The painting was based on an early sequential photo by Marey.
0:31:57 > 0:32:02So the image bridges 70 years of technological time, right there.
0:32:02 > 0:32:06It goes from photography to painting to photography,
0:32:06 > 0:32:07back to painting.
0:32:07 > 0:32:10But the irony is that it ends up looking like
0:32:10 > 0:32:13the figures of Adam and Eve expelled from Eden
0:32:13 > 0:32:15in Masaccio's fresco in Florence.
0:32:15 > 0:32:19Which turns the image of Kennedy, who was dead by then,
0:32:19 > 0:32:21into a sort of vengeful god with a pointing finger,
0:32:21 > 0:32:27thus fulfilling the prophecy of the 19th century French diarist Edmond de Goncourt.
0:32:27 > 0:32:31"The day will come when all the modern nations will adore
0:32:31 > 0:32:34"a sort of American god, about whom much will have been written
0:32:34 > 0:32:36"in the popular press,
0:32:36 > 0:32:39"and images of this god will be set up in the churches,
0:32:39 > 0:32:44"not as the imagination of each individual painter may fancy him,
0:32:44 > 0:32:48"but established, fixed, once and for all, by photography.
0:32:48 > 0:32:52"On that day, civilisation will have reached its peak,
0:32:52 > 0:32:55"and there will be steam-propelled gondolas in Venice."
0:32:55 > 0:32:58From television, film and photography
0:32:58 > 0:33:01we receive a stream of images every day.
0:33:01 > 0:33:05There is no way of paying equal attention to all that surplus,
0:33:05 > 0:33:07so we skim.
0:33:07 > 0:33:11The image we remember is the one that most resembles a sign.
0:33:11 > 0:33:14Simple, clear, repetitious.
0:33:14 > 0:33:18We absorb, rather than inspect.
0:33:18 > 0:33:21Indifference becomes our second skin.
0:33:21 > 0:33:24Everything the camera gives us is slightly interesting.
0:33:24 > 0:33:27Not for long, just for now.
0:33:28 > 0:33:32The human extension of the glut of images is celebrity.
0:33:32 > 0:33:36Which replaces the Renaissance idea of fame.
0:33:37 > 0:33:39The artist who understood this best,
0:33:39 > 0:33:43and became best-known for understanding it, was Andy Warhol.
0:33:46 > 0:33:48Warhol is nearly as famous as Picasso,
0:33:48 > 0:33:51at least on the level of chit-chat and gossip.
0:33:51 > 0:33:54But Picasso was famous for his energy and masculinity,
0:33:54 > 0:33:58Warhol for his passivity and sexlessness.
0:33:58 > 0:34:01He became a famous artist by silently proclaiming
0:34:01 > 0:34:02that art can't change life,
0:34:02 > 0:34:06whereas others once did by loudly giving the impression that it could.
0:34:07 > 0:34:12And...no, I don't think I am a revolutionary artist.
0:34:14 > 0:34:17He got started in the '50s as Andy Warhola,
0:34:17 > 0:34:18a Polish kid from Pittsburgh
0:34:18 > 0:34:21who made it to New York as a commercial artist.
0:34:21 > 0:34:25By the end of the '70s, he'd relapsed into being another
0:34:25 > 0:34:28kind of commercial artist - doing Nescafe society portraits.
0:34:28 > 0:34:30A painter without a subject.
0:34:30 > 0:34:35His career as a man with something to say, lies in-between.
0:34:35 > 0:34:38'Art is short for artist.
0:34:38 > 0:34:43'I thought words are just always made shorter,
0:34:43 > 0:34:47'so art was just cut from the word artist, and made shorter.'
0:34:47 > 0:34:51What he extracted from mass culture was repetition.
0:34:51 > 0:34:54"I want to be a machine", he announced.
0:34:54 > 0:34:55Warhol loved the sameness.
0:34:55 > 0:34:59An infinite series of perfectly standardised products.
0:35:00 > 0:35:04When Monet painted in series, he did it to glorify the eye.
0:35:04 > 0:35:06To show how it could discern tiny differences.
0:35:07 > 0:35:11Discrimination within abundance was the essence of such painting.
0:35:14 > 0:35:20Today we have sameness within glut. And that was what Warhol painted.
0:35:20 > 0:35:24His work in the early '60s was a baleful mimicry of advertising
0:35:24 > 0:35:25without the gloss.
0:35:26 > 0:35:29It was about the way that advertising promises
0:35:29 > 0:35:32that the same pap with different labels
0:35:32 > 0:35:36will give you special unrepeatable experiences.
0:35:36 > 0:35:40Advertising flatters people that they're a bit like artists -
0:35:40 > 0:35:43the consumer is rare, discriminating.
0:35:43 > 0:35:45A connoisseur of experience.
0:35:46 > 0:35:49If Warhol was once subversive -
0:35:49 > 0:35:53and in the early '60s he was - it's because he turned that round.
0:35:53 > 0:35:57A famous artist who loved nothing but banality and sameness.
0:35:57 > 0:36:00I want to be a machine, to print, to repeat
0:36:00 > 0:36:03which was the most cunning sort of dandyism.
0:36:07 > 0:36:09He began by doing straight advertisements,
0:36:09 > 0:36:11than he ran ironic commentary on them.
0:36:11 > 0:36:14But by the '70s, advertisers were copying him.
0:36:14 > 0:36:15Like this.
0:36:20 > 0:36:25Warhol's autistic stare was the same for heroes and heroines.
0:36:25 > 0:36:28All you learn is that celebrity breeds clones,
0:36:28 > 0:36:32thousands of signs for itself, a series without a limit.
0:36:32 > 0:36:34The image is less painted than registered.
0:36:34 > 0:36:38No nuances, just slips in the silk screen.
0:36:38 > 0:36:40It looked coarse, grainy, quick.
0:36:40 > 0:36:42It wants you to glance at it, like a television screen,
0:36:42 > 0:36:45rather than scan it like a painting.
0:36:46 > 0:36:50And, like American TV in the '60s, it's also haunted by death.
0:36:51 > 0:36:54And, as with TV, the violence Warhol enjoyed
0:36:54 > 0:36:57got filtered through a cool, indifferent medium -
0:36:57 > 0:36:59photography and silk screen.
0:37:01 > 0:37:04These Disaster paintings have one subject in common.
0:37:04 > 0:37:10Not just death, rather the state of being an uninvolved spectator.
0:37:11 > 0:37:13The eye passes them,
0:37:13 > 0:37:16like that man passing in the background.
0:37:17 > 0:37:20What this added up to was one piercing insight
0:37:20 > 0:37:23about the nature of media.
0:37:23 > 0:37:24But that was it.
0:37:24 > 0:37:27It could be done over and over again but not developed further as art.
0:37:28 > 0:37:32The idea had a half-life, like a radioactive isotope.
0:37:32 > 0:37:35It sent out a lot of radiation in the '60s,
0:37:35 > 0:37:36and then it became feeble.
0:37:36 > 0:37:38And then dead.
0:37:38 > 0:37:40Boredom finally became boring.
0:37:46 > 0:37:51But the nature of mass imagery fascinated other artists in the '60s as well.
0:37:51 > 0:37:53If Warhol and Rauschenberg were into television,
0:37:53 > 0:37:56Roy Lichtenstein was about print.
0:37:57 > 0:38:00His best-known source was American comic strips of the '40s and '50s.
0:38:00 > 0:38:03The stuff that artists of his generation,
0:38:03 > 0:38:05who made the Pop Movement, grew up on.
0:38:06 > 0:38:11To its detractors it looked about as challenging as bubblegum.
0:38:11 > 0:38:14Take a comic and blow it up. But there was more to it than that.
0:38:14 > 0:38:19MUSIC: "Venus in Blue Jeans"
0:38:23 > 0:38:26# She's Venus in blue jeans
0:38:26 > 0:38:31# Mona Lisa with a ponytail
0:38:31 > 0:38:35# She's a walkin' talkin' work of art
0:38:35 > 0:38:38# She's the girl who stole my heart
0:38:38 > 0:38:43# My Venus in blue jeans
0:38:43 > 0:38:46# Is the Cinderella I adore
0:38:46 > 0:38:51# She's my very special angel too
0:38:51 > 0:38:54# A fairy tale come true... #
0:38:58 > 0:39:00I don't think that's...
0:39:00 > 0:39:02It's dealing with the images
0:39:02 > 0:39:06that have come about in the commercial world, and using that.
0:39:06 > 0:39:11Because there are certain things about it which are impressive, or...
0:39:11 > 0:39:13bold, or something.
0:39:13 > 0:39:16And it's that quality of the images
0:39:16 > 0:39:17that I am interested in.
0:39:17 > 0:39:19The texture that the dots make
0:39:19 > 0:39:21and various things
0:39:21 > 0:39:24that are usable to me, in my art,
0:39:24 > 0:39:27for expressing...um...
0:39:28 > 0:39:30..that feeling.
0:39:30 > 0:39:33But it's not saying that commercial art is terrible,
0:39:33 > 0:39:35or, "Look what we've come to."
0:39:36 > 0:39:40That may be a sociological fact, but that's not what this art is about.
0:39:40 > 0:39:44Printers' dots were the basis of Lichtenstein's style.
0:39:44 > 0:39:48A code that ended up looking very cool and abstract.
0:39:48 > 0:39:51It was a way of distancing the image, making it both big
0:39:51 > 0:39:53and remote.
0:39:53 > 0:39:56And, like Johns, Lichtenstein was intrigued by the difference
0:39:56 > 0:39:59between scanning and looking.
0:39:59 > 0:40:02You scan a frame in a comic strip, then flick on,
0:40:02 > 0:40:05because comics exist to tell a story.
0:40:05 > 0:40:07But a painting is meant to detain you.
0:40:07 > 0:40:13Make a museum-scale comic and you have another paradox about the way that we see art.
0:40:16 > 0:40:20Probably Lichtenstein's work has been around too long for its shock value to last,
0:40:20 > 0:40:25but in the '60s when it was new, its ironies really worked.
0:40:32 > 0:40:36Another source for art in mass culture was the American billboard.
0:40:36 > 0:40:39James Rosenquist used to paint them for a living.
0:40:41 > 0:40:44In my billboard painting experience,
0:40:44 > 0:40:49I've painted...hundreds of square feet of Franco-American spaghetti.
0:40:49 > 0:40:54And I painted a... large beer glass 60 feet long.
0:40:54 > 0:40:58And some...huge pieces of bacon.
0:40:58 > 0:41:00And salesmen would come along and they'd say,
0:41:00 > 0:41:05"That beer hasn't got enough hops in it. You have to make it a little bit lighter."
0:41:05 > 0:41:11Or, "The bacon is dirty." Or, "That Franco-American spaghetti orange is dirty."
0:41:11 > 0:41:13So I'd go home at night saying, "Oh, no!"
0:41:13 > 0:41:17There's a kid of buck-eyed surrealism in big American advertisements
0:41:17 > 0:41:22with their weird meetings of image and their overlaps and sudden cut-offs and giant size.
0:41:22 > 0:41:24And that went into Rosenquist's paintings.
0:41:24 > 0:41:31They had a casual narrative style, but were enormous, the scale of 19th-century history painting.
0:41:31 > 0:41:34Like billboards, they were about paradise,
0:41:34 > 0:41:40but a paradise of consumers fatally compromised.
0:41:40 > 0:41:44Rosenquist summed up his ambition to be a painter of American history
0:41:44 > 0:41:50in the one major painting that the Vietnam war provoked, the F-111.
0:41:51 > 0:41:55The title comes for a bomber the Americans were using against the Vietnamese.
0:41:55 > 0:41:57Rosenquist distilled a sour irony
0:41:57 > 0:42:02from the contrast between that killing machine and those emblems of the good life,
0:42:02 > 0:42:09the life that so many Americans believed was being defended outside Saigon in 1965.
0:42:12 > 0:42:16Pop was big and brash, it had learnt that from other media.
0:42:16 > 0:42:19But there was no chance it could survive outside the museum.
0:42:23 > 0:42:27On the street, real mass culture would have simply crushed it.
0:42:30 > 0:42:33This gap between art and life was not closed.
0:42:33 > 0:42:38Now and again an artist would try putting a big picture among the billboards.
0:42:38 > 0:42:41This one is by Alex Katz.
0:42:41 > 0:42:46A set of pretty upper-bourgeois American profiles with one black face thrown in
0:42:46 > 0:42:49can do nothing against 42nd Street.
0:43:01 > 0:43:03In a culture of mass communications,
0:43:03 > 0:43:09art has to survive either by stealth or by living in those game parks we call museums.
0:43:09 > 0:43:12And no country in the world makes that clearer than America,
0:43:12 > 0:43:15the home of the most enlightened patronage
0:43:15 > 0:43:21and the most profound indifference to the visual environment that our century has known.
0:43:21 > 0:43:24The city that put up the stiffest resistance
0:43:24 > 0:43:28to the idea of culture with a capital C was this one, Las Vegas.
0:43:28 > 0:43:30You can't imagine an art museum in a place like this
0:43:30 > 0:43:35and, in fact, the idea of art simply evaporates because there's nothing to do,
0:43:35 > 0:43:38it flies off in the face of the illusions of which this place is composed,
0:43:38 > 0:43:42sudden wealth, endless orgasm, Dean Martin.
0:43:42 > 0:43:45This is the Disney World of terminal greed.
0:43:45 > 0:43:48And no wonder it had such an enormous appeal to the pop sensibility,
0:43:48 > 0:43:52because here you have an infinite variety of signs
0:43:52 > 0:43:55which are all plugging exactly the same product, luck.
0:43:55 > 0:43:58Now the product's abstract and only the signs are real.
0:43:58 > 0:44:04And so Vegas sums up American giganticism, not because it's big but because it pretends to be.
0:44:04 > 0:44:07Its monuments, the city lights are conceived on a scale
0:44:07 > 0:44:11much beyond anything that most artists ever get to work on.
0:44:11 > 0:44:15And so, really, the town is a work of art, lousy art, but art all the same.
0:44:15 > 0:44:21And no wonder that this festive junk food for the eyes had such an appeal to artists and critics.
0:44:21 > 0:44:24MUSIC: "The Sound of Silence" by The Bachelors
0:44:25 > 0:44:29# I've come to talk with you again
0:44:29 > 0:44:33# Because a vision softly creeping
0:44:33 > 0:44:38# Left its seeds while I was sleeping
0:44:38 > 0:44:46# And the vision that was planted in my brain still remains
0:44:47 > 0:44:52# Within the sound of silence
0:44:52 > 0:44:56# In restless dreams I walked alone
0:44:57 > 0:45:01# Narrow streets of cobbled stone
0:45:01 > 0:45:06# Beneath the halo of a street lamp
0:45:06 > 0:45:10# I turned my collar to the cold and damp
0:45:10 > 0:45:16# When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
0:45:16 > 0:45:19# That split the night
0:45:19 > 0:45:24# And touched the sound of silence
0:45:24 > 0:45:28# And in the naked light I saw
0:45:28 > 0:45:32# Ten thousand people maybe more
0:45:32 > 0:45:37# People talking without speaking
0:45:37 > 0:45:42# People hearing without listening... #
0:45:42 > 0:45:49There is no way that museum art can rival the commercial extravaganzas of the real world.
0:45:49 > 0:45:53The artists who worked with neon and lights in the 1960s certainly couldn't.
0:45:53 > 0:45:57Their efforts were as pointless as building a souvenir that rivalled the Eiffel Tower.
0:45:57 > 0:46:05# Fools, said I, you do not know Silence like a cancer grows
0:46:06 > 0:46:09# Hear my words that I might teach you
0:46:09 > 0:46:13# Take my arms that I might reach you
0:46:13 > 0:46:20# But my words like silent raindrops fell
0:46:23 > 0:46:28# And echoed in the wells of silence
0:46:28 > 0:46:32# And the people bowed and prayed
0:46:32 > 0:46:35# To the neon god they made... #
0:46:37 > 0:46:42In fact, there was only one artist who took on the full weight of the American commonplace,
0:46:42 > 0:46:45its giganticism, its power of spectacle.
0:46:45 > 0:46:51But he did it by irony and his work went far beyond any limits one could assign to the pop sensibility.
0:46:51 > 0:46:55He was Claes Oldenburg, the thinking person's Walt Disney.
0:46:55 > 0:46:58CHEERING
0:46:58 > 0:47:03DRUMMING
0:47:03 > 0:47:08I always try to attend the Thanksgiving Day parade, which is held in New York.
0:47:08 > 0:47:12Sometimes if I'm in Europe I make a special point of coming back so I can attend it.
0:47:12 > 0:47:15I guess it all started when I was small.
0:47:15 > 0:47:21I was always taken to the parade and it's figured in my imagination,
0:47:21 > 0:47:26the excitement of seeing those huge balloons in the air moving about.
0:47:26 > 0:47:30But my interest in the parade is not so much an interest in the circus aspect of it,
0:47:30 > 0:47:36in the clowns or the floats, I'm really specifically interested in these balloons on that scale
0:47:36 > 0:47:39and what they do in the air.
0:47:39 > 0:47:44And the whole engineering aspect of getting these balloons down through these streets
0:47:44 > 0:47:49and the whole process of filling the balloons with gas which goes on a whole 12 hours before the parade.
0:47:49 > 0:47:53All these parts of the parade are very interesting to me.
0:47:53 > 0:47:56And it's the balloons that I come to see
0:47:56 > 0:47:58rather than anything else.
0:47:58 > 0:48:04Born in Sweden, raised in Chicago, Oldenburg grew up fascinated by the size of things American.
0:48:19 > 0:48:22From the beginning his art was literally about appetite,
0:48:22 > 0:48:25the desire to touch, squash, stroke,
0:48:25 > 0:48:30absorb, digest and become what he saw.
0:48:30 > 0:48:32Probably I do two things that are contrary,
0:48:32 > 0:48:36I try to make the art look like it's part of the world around it,
0:48:36 > 0:48:41at the same time I take great pains to show that it doesn't function as part of the world around it.
0:48:41 > 0:48:49He took ordinary things, small ones got huge, soft ones hard, hard ones went soft.
0:48:49 > 0:48:54This is a ladder. This is a saw.
0:48:54 > 0:48:59The logic of use has gone. Things take on multiple meanings
0:48:59 > 0:49:03and they keep alluding back to the human body.
0:49:03 > 0:49:09A Chicago fireplug becomes a torso with breast and nipples, a monumental nude.
0:49:09 > 0:49:10This is the original fireplug.
0:49:10 > 0:49:13Because this fireplug was directly outside of my house
0:49:13 > 0:49:16and this was the fireplug I saw every day.
0:49:16 > 0:49:21And it's more or less the one that my fireplug fantasies are based on.
0:49:24 > 0:49:30This is the one that was done in 1968 as a souvenir of the Democratic convention.
0:49:30 > 0:49:35This way it's breasts, and if you turn it upside-down it becomes the bottom half of the torso.
0:49:37 > 0:49:39These being legs.
0:49:39 > 0:49:44I like to take an object and deprive it of its function completely.
0:49:44 > 0:49:50Take an ordinary object, change its scale, its material, and suddenly it is a stranger to the world,
0:49:50 > 0:49:52weird and complicated.
0:49:52 > 0:49:55I have a condition I want to express about form,
0:49:55 > 0:49:59and then an object sort of fits into that condition.
0:49:59 > 0:50:03And then I take the object without thinking too much about the object.
0:50:03 > 0:50:06That is this could just as well been a bank vault,
0:50:06 > 0:50:10except that I like the lights that are very simple
0:50:10 > 0:50:13and very straightforward, and symmetrical form,
0:50:13 > 0:50:15which is what I was looking for.
0:50:15 > 0:50:19Something geometric and uncomplicated.
0:50:26 > 0:50:31I suppose the best examples of this recomplication of an ordinary thing back into an image
0:50:31 > 0:50:35lie in Oldenburg's sculptural projects, his big ones, the monuments.
0:50:35 > 0:50:38Not very many of them have actually been built,
0:50:38 > 0:50:43but in Philadelphia this one was, and what could be more ordinary than a clothes pin?
0:50:43 > 0:50:46But on the other hand, you'd have to go some way
0:50:46 > 0:50:52to find anything more dreamlike and grotesque than a clothes pin 40 feet high.
0:50:52 > 0:50:53Like a monster in a movie,
0:50:53 > 0:50:58it suggests that the real world has somehow contrived to rise against its owners.
0:50:58 > 0:51:03But it's also partly human, a fact which underscores its monstrosity.
0:51:03 > 0:51:09The clothes pin has two legs and one is encouraged therefore to read it as a man.
0:51:12 > 0:51:17The spring clip on the thing's torso suggests compression, force, inhibition.
0:51:17 > 0:51:20The angles are all sharp and there's nothing flabby.
0:51:20 > 0:51:23The thing is in fact a giant authority figure,
0:51:23 > 0:51:25a sort of parody of the hero in sculpture,
0:51:25 > 0:51:28a modern Colossus of Rhodes.
0:51:29 > 0:51:31BIRDSONG
0:51:31 > 0:51:35Oldenburg's range goes all the way from that to the pastoral...
0:51:35 > 0:51:38like this giant trowel.
0:51:46 > 0:51:51In his power of invention and his drive to impose his whole self on the world, fears and all,
0:51:51 > 0:51:56he is the nearest equivalent to Picasso that America has yet produced.
0:51:57 > 0:52:02But for every artist of Oldenburg's seriousness, there were a hundred bandwaggoners.
0:52:02 > 0:52:07By the end of the '60s, the pop sensibility was like a mechanised carnival.
0:52:07 > 0:52:10The avant-garde takes over the electronic village
0:52:10 > 0:52:15and the prophet of this idea, a Canadian professor named Marshall McLuhan,
0:52:15 > 0:52:19was one of the last thinkers in the world to believe that artists were still ahead of the game.
0:52:19 > 0:52:22The artist is the enemy, but in our time
0:52:22 > 0:52:28the artist has become the very basis of any scientific power of perception
0:52:28 > 0:52:30or making contact with reality.
0:52:30 > 0:52:32It now seems that McLuhan was wrong,
0:52:32 > 0:52:35the game had finally got ahead of the artist.
0:52:35 > 0:52:40One of the catch words of the late '60s in art as in gossip was "information".
0:52:40 > 0:52:46And since the medium was the message, the quality of information was not held to matter very much,
0:52:46 > 0:52:50the sheer amount of it was so glamorous.
0:52:50 > 0:52:52When you surround people with electric information,
0:52:52 > 0:52:56the overload of information becomes fantastic.
0:52:56 > 0:53:00The amount of information in the environment under electric conditions
0:53:00 > 0:53:04is many times greater than that of the normal human environment pre-electric.
0:53:04 > 0:53:10And there's only one natural response to such overload and that is pattern recognition.
0:53:10 > 0:53:14American educators are so serious that they exude parody all the time.
0:53:14 > 0:53:18And this place is a parody of the McLuhanist state of mind.
0:53:18 > 0:53:22It's called The Living History Center and it's in Philadelphia.
0:53:22 > 0:53:24'We like this country very much.'
0:53:25 > 0:53:27Here the kiddies can have what is called
0:53:27 > 0:53:31a "non-elitist, multi-dimensional, environmental learning experience."
0:53:31 > 0:53:34Translation - compulsory fun.
0:53:34 > 0:53:40They can listen to bits of The Declaration of Independence on the phone.
0:53:40 > 0:53:44They can look at period photos and bus tickets on the big index wheels.
0:53:44 > 0:53:46And they learn nothing.
0:53:46 > 0:53:51The medium is the message here and it turns the brain to cornflakes.
0:53:51 > 0:53:54'We hold these truths to be self-evident.
0:53:54 > 0:53:57'That all men are created equal.'
0:53:57 > 0:54:01OVERLAPPING ELECTRONIC VOICES
0:54:29 > 0:54:34The good side of the Pop sensibility was its openness to life,
0:54:34 > 0:54:37its readiness to let art react to mass culture.
0:54:41 > 0:54:47The bad side was the manipulation and promotional garbage that flooded the art world in the '60s.
0:54:47 > 0:54:49Instant this, instant that.
0:54:49 > 0:54:52Probably you couldn't have one without the other.
0:55:00 > 0:55:03We were told over and over again
0:55:03 > 0:55:08that art based on mass media was more democratic than art that wasn't.
0:55:08 > 0:55:14It could survive in the big, wide world, but generally that turned out not to be true.
0:55:14 > 0:55:18Whether it was difficult, exacting stuff like Jasper Johns
0:55:18 > 0:55:24or just entertainment like most pop art, it needed the museum more than ever.
0:55:24 > 0:55:25That way or the other way?
0:55:25 > 0:55:29We can turn it round if we don't like it.
0:55:29 > 0:55:31HE LAUGHS
0:55:32 > 0:55:38For all the talk, art based on the media turned out to be just as fragile as any other kind.
0:55:54 > 0:56:01The trouble is that in any showdown between painting and the big media, painting cannot possibly win.
0:56:01 > 0:56:06People believe what they see on the screen, in photos or even on the box,
0:56:06 > 0:56:10but nobody extracts the essential information for the conduct of their lives
0:56:10 > 0:56:12from looking at paintings any more.
0:56:12 > 0:56:16The thing is that compared to the media, art's a small thing,
0:56:16 > 0:56:18it's just a vibration in a museum, really.
0:56:18 > 0:56:20And it deals with what hasn't already been said.
0:56:20 > 0:56:28It isn't even a very good religion, but once it gives up its claims to seriousness, it's shot.
0:56:28 > 0:56:31The Pop sensibility and its ironies nearly took these claims away,
0:56:31 > 0:56:34dissolved them in the doctrine that the medium is the message,
0:56:34 > 0:56:36but then it became apparent
0:56:36 > 0:56:41that all this doctrine boiled down to was the idea that it doesn't matter what art says.
0:56:41 > 0:56:47Now, perhaps Andy Warhol was right for his moment when he said that Pop Art was about liking things.
0:56:47 > 0:56:50But even so it's not enough, man is an animal who judges,
0:56:50 > 0:56:55and even in a culture which has split as disastrously and in as many ways as ours has,
0:56:55 > 0:57:01the problems of choice and taste and moral responsibility for images still remain.
0:57:01 > 0:57:06In fact, they get harder, but the rock upon which the avant-garde sank
0:57:06 > 0:57:10was that art could no longer control that responsibility.
0:57:36 > 0:57:39Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd